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It's a sure sign of middle age, they say, if when you pick up the newspaper you turn first to the obituaries.

But middle-aged or not, most of us, I suspect, would love to know what people will actually

say about us when we die. The privileged people that I'm focusing on this week were all,

one way or another, eager to fix posterity. But nowhere was it so deftly done as in Tang China around 700

AD where powerful figures didn't just wonder what would be said about to them when they

died, they simply wrote or commissioned

their own obituaries, so that the ancestors and the gods would know precisely how important

and how admirable they were. They tested people in poetry,

in essay

they tested people in poetry

in essay writing, in these literary lyrical genres because the

most successful officials would be people who would write the words of the Emperor.

A history of the world in a hundred objects. Chinese Tang tomb figures. Earth and Tang Tomb Figures. Earthen Ware sculpture from around 728. I'm in the Asia Gallery at the back of the British Museum.

Behind me stand two statues of the judges of the Chinese underworld recording the good

and the bad deeds of those who died and these judges are exactly the people that

the Tang elite wanted to impress.

In front of me, I'm looking at a gloriously lively troop of ceramic figures.

They're all between two and three feet high, and there are 12 of them,

human, animal, and somewhere in between. They're from the tomb of one of the

great figures of Tang China, Liu Ting Shun, General of the Jean-Wu Army, Lieutenant of

Henan and Hunan District, Imperial Privy Councillor who died at the

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