Jessica Rawson published her new book 'Life and Afterlife in Ancient China'

Throughout Ancient China, as in China today, the ancestors are ever present alongside the living. In terms of sheer scale, sophistication and a long history down to the nineteenth century, their tombs easily rival their equivalents in the rest of the world. And while the Egyptians built upwards, the Chinese dug downwards, honouring the dead by hosting lavish banquets and building richly furnished subterranean palaces – in one instance famously guarded by an army of terracotta warriors.

 In Life and Afterlife in Ancient China (Allen Lane 2023), Jessica Rawson ex-plores eleven grand tombs and a major sacrificial deposit from across China – each from a specific historical mo-ment and place – showing what they and their contents reveal about the wider political and cultural develop-ments of this continental power that demands our deep attention and understanding. The three millennia cov-ered here cemented many of the distinctive elements of Chinese civilisation still in place today: formidable infra-structure and a manufacturing power that outperforms almost all others, a society based on strict generational hierarchy and a widely shared written script of charac-ters, an enduring, active relationship with the steppe and Central Asia, a material culture of ceramics, bronze, silk and jade, and a unique concept of the universe, its ethical principles fostered over millennia with the prima-cy of the family. Records of these early achievements, and their diverse and unexpected long-term outcomes, often lie not in written history, but in how people assem-bled their personal possessions in the tombs that creat-ed their afterlives.