Designing one’s afterlife was at the heart of discourse in many cultural spheres in the highly interconnected ancient world. The course introduces students to East Asian tombs through the richness of their contents and the complexity of their architecture and interior design. We will examine the strategically-curated contents of various mortuary contexts and their broader religious, cosmological and socio-political implications. The course focuses on the pre-imperial and imperial periods in China, Japan and Korea, but also looks at broader transmissions of funerary design concepts across the Silk Roads, Indian Ocean trade networks and the Eurasian steppe route. As such, funerary art and design strategies will not be studied in a vacuum but rather viewed within the broader geopolitical parameters of Afro-Eurasia from the first millennium BCE to the last years of the Silk Roads era in the 16th century. What economic and cultural factors contributed to the disparate treatment of female and male burials in early China? How might we explain the occurrence of imported luxury objects, such as Hellenistic mirrors, Roman glass, Persian silver, across medieval Chinese funerary sites? How does one account for “Other-ness” and “Other-ing” as one studies a nobleman’s final resting place? How did merchants, monks and princes commission their tombs? These are just some of the various questions we will address in this course, driven by inquiries about receptivity, entanglement and global exchange. Open to: All university graduate degree students.