Life and Afterlife in Ancient China

The three millennia up to the establishment of the first imperial Qin dynasty in 221 BC cemented many of the distinctive elements of Chinese civilisation still in place today: formidable infrastructure, a society based on the strict hierarchy of the family, a shared written script, a cuisine founded on rice and millet, an extraordinarily challenging geography and environment, a material culture of ceramics and jade, and a unique concept of the universe, in which ancestors continue to exist alongside the living. Yet the primary record of these early achievements lies not in written history, but in how people marked the end of their lives: their dwellings for the afterlife.

Tombs, and their treasures within, are almost the only artefacts to survive from Ancient China, and their scale and sophistication compares with their equivalents in Ancient Egypt. Jessica Rawson, one of the most eminent Western scholars of the period, takes us to visit twelve of them - each from a specific historical moment and place - and expertly reveals how they relate to wider political and cultural developments, culminating in the lavish ambition of the First Emperor’s terracotta warriors. Together, the twelve tombs - most completely unknown to us - form a mosaic of one of the oldest civilisations in the world and illuminate a constellation of beliefs about life and death very different to our own.