Wallace S. Johnson Memorial Lecture: Bones, Babies, and the Politics of Burial in Late Imperial China

In the nineteenth century, foreign observers of China wrote prolifically about so-called baby towers that reportedly populated the late imperial Chinese landscape. These buildings were constructed as depositories for the bodies of dead infants, whose corpses rarely received formal burials but were rather interred in shallow graves or left in the open to be consumed by wild animals. Due to their association with infants, baby towers became intimately connected to other issues such as childbirth, infanticide, and the perceived mistreatment of children in Qing China. In the minds of many foreigners, baby towers came to embody both a peculiar rendering of Chinese death practices, as well as a growing animus toward certain aspects of Chinese social life.