Lecture | China Seminar
The Scholar Who Robbed the Sages
- Date
- Wednesday 14 May 2025
- Time
- Serie
- LIAS China Seminar
- Address
-
University Library
Witte Singel 27
2311 BG Leiden - Room
- Heinsius Room
Abstract
The excavation of the late Northern Song cemetery of the Lü family in Lantian, Shaanxi, which proceeded in stages from 2006 to 2012, revealed a funerary archive of unprecedented depth and specificity. The nature and disposition of the objects buried in the cemetery offer new perspectives on the consumption of luxury goods and negotiation of social status, the production of gendered space, the history of childhood, the relationship between ritual and emotional regimes of mourning, and a host of other themes of perennial interest to scholars of premodern China. The cemetery also preserves poignant traces of the precarity that an official’s career brought into lives of their spouses, children, siblings, and other family members. But perhaps the most significant of all the grave goods to the emerge from the deep tombs of the Lü family were the “antiquarian” objects—a series of stone and ceramic implements that recall, in various ways, the bronze vessels and other ritual implements (liqi) of ancient China. These were buried alongside actual ancient bronzes that the family had collected, inscribed with new elegies and laments, and then re-interred with their deceased kin. In this talk, I situate these archaic and archaistic implements in dialogue with the antiquarian scholarship of the Neo-Confucian philosopher Lü Dalin (1040–1093) and his brothers, who were members of the third and most prominent of the five generations buried in the cemetery. In the process, I endeavor to show how the production, use, and reuse of these implements constituted a coherent and consistent effort on the part of the family to “make antiquity” in the materiality of their present. I also explain how the objects constitute an answer, of a sort, to the question that is raised but unanswered by the surviving textual corpus associated with the Lü family: How did the family justify, in ethical terms, the collecting of objects that they knew had been plundered from the tombs of the illustrious cultural ancestors they claimed to honor?
Biography
Jeffrey Moser is Associate Professor of the History of Art and Architecture at Brown University. A specialist in the arts of 8th to 14th-century China, his recent publications include Nominal Things: Bronzes in the Making of Medieval China (2023) and the co-edited volume Countless Sands: Buddhists and their Environments in Medieval Asia (2025).
This talk is sponsored by The Hulsewé-Wazniewski Foundation.