The Tanghao on Taiwan’s Tombstones

The Statal Recuperation of Tactics for the Creation of a National Space

Abstract

As observed by Michel de Certeau in his L’invention du quotidian , ideological questions between state and social agents are fought over on the ground of popular practice. Recent research in anthropology has shown how in this battle, the state recuperates popular practices, arranges them in new value systems and re-injects the modified practices into daily life to serve its political agenda. This article will focus on a funeral practice, the inscription of tango 堂號  on tombstones in Taiwan and Penghu. Tanghao  is a set of place-names that two thousand years ago identified regions on the lower reaches of the Yellow River as the place of origin of Chinese surnames. Since the Song, the state has traded the association of tango  and surnames through the reading primer The Hundred Family Names  (Baijiaxing 百家姓 ). Also, in and outside China, ancestral halls of Han Chinese were for centuries supposed to be adorned with the calligraphy of a tango . In contrast, the use of a tanghao on tombstones became a popular practice only in Penghu and Taiwan. This happened during the Japanese colonial period, between 1895 and 1945. On Penghu, the tango  replaced expressions of loyalty to the Qing Dynasty. On Taiwan, the tango  replaced the jiguan 籍貫 , the place in Fujian and Guangdong, where a family would have been registered before migrating to Taiwan. During the Chinese Cultural Renaissance Movement, launched in 1966 by Chiang Kai-shek, the provincial government of the ROC recuperated tanghao, rearranged them into new lists and distributed the lists widely. At the same time, new types of dependent funerary professionals were established with the regulation and reforms of mortuary practices, and these officials actively promoted the tanghao . Using an archive of 45,000 digitized tombstones, plus digitized official documents, we attempt to follow the stratal recuperation and re-injection of the tanghao , using as a trace, a non-traditional character-variant of the most common tanghao  “Yingchuan” 潁川 .