Representations of intense emotions are rare in the Chinese visual tradition in comparison with their counterpart in literary convention. While the reasons for this deserve an in-depth interdisciplinary study, such general reservation contrastingly highlights a distinct visual phenomenon that emerged and flourished during the middle period (9th-14th centuries). This time period witnessed a growing number of visual representations of grieving figures in funerary and religious (mainly Buddhist) contexts. By articulating various representational modes of mourning images, this essay discusses a significant development in the emotional lives of middle-period Chinese. Occupying seemingly disparate ritual spaces (the Buddhist pagoda crypt and the tomb) the images of sorrowful mourners conspicuously emerged as an appealing motif for adorning the burial spaces of their deceased. These two sites of intense affect reveal that era's desire for placing the virtual mourner in the space designed for the dead as a visual agency conveying the emotive surrounding the death of the beloved, be they local monks or family members, who often lacked literary means to express their feelings. Recognizing this affective mode helps us to better understand the complex interplay between the emotions, the social and cultural sanctions in expressing them, and the visual codes created thereof, in post-medieval China.

In this article, I advance a recent epigraphic approach to historical study by foregrounding steles as a medium that functions both to communicate information and project authority publicly. Scholars taking this approach have explored distinctive genres of steles to transform our understanding of north China under Mongol rule. Through a case study, I show how a set of steles installed in the fifteenth-century rural world of north China transmitted authority and power not just through the content of their inscriptions but also through other written and unwritten information they stored. I give particular attention to the ways in which the inscriptions were materialized and visualized. In doing so, I argue that emphasizing the public communication function of steles challenges us to think beyond primary sources strictly in terms of their textual value to reflect more broadly on modes of transmission and the power dynamics contained within them.