The Chinese Deathscape

In the past decade alone, more than ten million corpses have been exhumed and reburied across the Chinese landscape. The campaign has transformed China's graveyards into sites of acute personal, social, political, and economic contestation.

The Chinese Deathscape features three historians of China — Jeffrey Snyder-Reinke, Christian Henriot, and Thomas S. Mullaney — charting the history of China's rapidly shifting deathscape, with each essay grappling with a different dimension of grave relocation and burial reform over the past three centuries: from the phenomenon of "baby towers" in the Lower Yangzi region of late imperial China, to the histories of death in the city of Shanghai, to the history of grave relocation during the contemporary period, when both its scale and tempo increased dramatically.

This is an open-access digital publication, freely available to read online.