The Tang Dynasty was considered to be a dynasty in which women's life was open, but the women who could have official biographies handed down were mostly empresses, concubines, princesses in the court, and those who were virtuous and considered worthy of biographies. However, the life course of ordinary women is rarely fully documented. With the discovery of a large number of epitaphs in the Tang Dynasty, many female epitaphs have shown their lives to the world, and at the same time, it has enriched the research on the biographies of women in the Tang Dynasty. In addition, it can also be used to study their families and even related historical events.
Since the epitaphs are intended to praise the dead, many women in the Tang Dynasty had similar lives in the epitaphs. Most of them were filial daughters at home, virtuous women when they married, and eventually became good mothers. These epitaphs reflect the perfect female life idealized by the people of the Tang Dynasty, and such epitaphs were not uncommon in the early Tang Dynasty. However, with the evolution of the times, people in the Tang Dynasty paid more attention to the authenticity of the content of epitaphs, so the proportion of relatives writing epitaphs increased, and there were many epitaphs with both literary and sentimental qualities.
This study examines how the author shaped the life of the deceased through the reading and analysis of the existing epitaphs of women in the Tang Dynasty. And by sorting out the deeds of the deceased, the author and their relatives, we can understand the living conditions and situations of women at that time.