Hangzhou fell to the Taiping rebels in 1861 he lost some eighteen of his relatives, including his mother.

in every case suggesting the failure of o cially sanctioned structures to requite loss, restore order, address human feeling, and commemorate the dead.

He de ed the absolute moral clarity of o cial narratives, absorbing the rhetoric of virtue into an account that privileged loss and emotion

Zhang Guanglie situates his e orts to locate and ritually honor the dead in relation to family cult and state honors—themselves important symbols of restoration.

ctionate description of physical detail and emotional connection—cleft by a moment of extreme violence.Zhang provides snapshot views of a woman whose loss occasioned profound personal pain—an image composed of intimate moments that reveal her a ection for her children, her personal habits, and those idiosyncrasies that capture her humanity

uthenticity of his grief through references to tears, physical pain, wailing, and other uncontrolled responses, which contrast neatly with hierarchical and orderly commemorative arrangements within established ritual settings.

Zhang Guanglie presents himself as the embodiment of his own bereavement.

shrine for the Loyal and Righteous in Hangzhou, an essay by one of Zhang’s acquaintances narrating the family’s tragedy, the table of contents of a collection of poems by Zhang about his deceased mother, and a record of a garden that he built as a monument to her

omposed the preface to A Record of 1861 (Xinyou ji), a compilation of materials honoring his mother, Zhang Yao shi, whose murder at the hands of a Taiping soldier he had witnessed as a child of eight sui nearly two decades earlier