THE WIVES OF THE HAN RECLUSES

TAN SOON CHENG

ABSTRACT

Records of Chinese Recluses appeared as early as the pre-Han period. However,
it was Fan Ye (398-445) who first gave them a collective identity in the ‘Yimin
liezhuan’ of his work, the Hou Hanshu. It was Fan Ye, too, who drew attention to
the wives themselves, - as neither the Shiji nor the Hanshu, before him, had doneby
including them in the biographies of their reclusive husbands. Scholars have
usually focused on the Recluses themselves such as the nature of their lives, their
beliefs and writings. This paper, however, proposes to examine the Han Recluses
from a different angle, from that of their wives and the important role they played
in shaping what came to be known as a reclusive life.