The Epitaph for Lady Li (793–842), Widow of the Eunuch Official Liu Honggui (775–826): A Translation with Introduction

Abstract:The engraved stone epitaph of Lady Li 李 (793–842), a member of the Tang royal family and the widow of the high-ranking eunuch official Liu Honggui 劉弘規 (775–826), was recently discovered in her tomb in Xi’an. Their five adopted sons were eunuch-officials, of whom Liu Xingshen 劉行深 (b. ca. 790–d. after 877) was the most powerful. The long and florid epitaph text, written by the court litterateur Wang Qi 王起 (760–847), extols her chastity in widowhood and her promotion of the memory of her late husband, as well as her guidance to her sons on filiality and family love. This article offers a translation of the epitaph, which presents Lady Li as a paragon of the Confucian ideal of the “thrice-dependent” woman. In the Introduction, I offer my theory of how Lady Li used the framework of the “thrice-dependent” woman to assert her own agency. Her epitaph shows, in my analysis, that she maintained a powerful role by continuing the same political posture of loyalty to the throne that was modeled by her father, exhibiting utter devotion to the memory of her husband, and controlling the actions of her sons through her commands to filial behavior toward their father’s portrait.