Divorce Practice in Late Medieval Dunhuang: Reading “Documents on Setting the Wife Free”

Abstract

Although Tang laws required a husband to prepare a divorce document when repudiating his wife, few such documents have survived. This being the case, the eleven divorce documents preserved at Dunhuang – commissioned by and written for commoners during the ninth and tenth centuries – present us with a rare opportunity to examine how divorce was understood and practiced in late medieval Chinese society. The purpose of this paper is to introduce this small corpus of texts, first discussing the nature of the Dunhuang divorce documents, and then examining the structure and language of these documents, to determine what they may tell us about marital relations and divorce practices in late medieval China.