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The Bamboo Annals revisited: problems of method in using the Chronicle as a source for the chronology of early Zhou, Part I

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 February 2009

David W. Pankenier
David W. Pankenier
Affiliation:
Lehigh University, Bethlehem, Penn.
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Extract

The challenge of establishing the chronology of the early Zhou dynasty, especially the date of the Zhou Conquest of Shang, periodically arouses the intense interest of scholars. Down the centuries interest in the general problem has revived whenever advances in calendrical, astronomical, or textual knowledge seemed to offer the promise of a breakthrough. Extraordinary efforts have repeatedly been brought to bear, but until quite recently little progress was achieved in verifying benchmarks prior to 841 B.C., a date already regarded as secure in the time of Sima Qian toward the end of the second century B.C.

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Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies , Volume 55 , Issue 2 , June 1992 , pp. 272 - 297
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Copyright © School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London 1992

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References

1 Early China 7 (1981–82), 2–37.

2 These reservations have proved justified, as is shown by the analysis of the lunar phase problem in my ‘ Reflections of the lunar aspect on Western Zhou chronology ‘ (T'oung Pao [1992]).Briefly, this article, which expands upon a study of the problem in Li, Changhao(ed.). Zhonguo tianwen xue shi (Beijing: 1981)Google Scholar, shows that the terms chuji jishengpo Jiwang , and jisipo could not be the names of four lunar phases. Chuji , strictly speaking, does not denote a lunar phase at all, but is a calendrical term referring to the first ten-day week of the month during which each of the ‘heavenly stems’ tiangan makes its initial appearance. The remaining three terms refer to the waxing fortnight, the day or days of full moon, and the waning fortnight, respectively. In addition, the article demonstrates that the dated records in Han shu quoted from the ‘Wu cheng’ chapter of Shang shu show unmistakable evidence of manipulation as a result of attempts to establish the calendar of the Conquest year by the Yin calendar school of chronology in the fourth century B.C.

3 This is all the more desirable in the case of the Bamboo Annals since some chronological data it contains have already been proven to be more reliable than those contained in Shiji ; see Maspero, Henri, ‘La chronologie des rois de Ts'i au IVc siècle avant notre ère’. T'oung Pao, 25, 1928, 367–86CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 Rouse, Irving, Migrations in prehistory: inferring population movement from cultural remains (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), 13Google Scholar.

5 Nivison, David S., ‘The dates of Western Chou’, Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, 43.2, 1983, 484Google Scholar; Fa-kao, Chou, ‘Xi Zhou niandai xin kao ’ Dalu zazhi 68.5, 1984, 1Google Scholar.

6 Nivison, , ‘The dates of Western Chou’, 492, also 487, 491Google Scholar.

7 Sunjoo, Pang ‘Xi Zhou niandaixue shang de ji ge wenti’ Dalu zazhi 51.1 (1977), 15Google Scholar; Pankenier, David W., ‘Stephenson, F. R. and Houlden, M. A., Alias of historical eclipse maps: East Asia 1500 B.C.–A.D. 1900Google Scholar: a review article, BSOAS, LI, 3, 1988, 523–4; Pang, Kevin et al. , ‘Computer analysis of some ancient Chinese sunrise eclipse records to determine the earth's past rotation rate’, Vistas in Astronomy, 31, 1988, 842CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8 Chou Fa-kao, ‘Xi Zhou niandai xin kao’, basing himself on the same corpus of bronze inscriptions containing complete dating formulas, and using virtually the same definitions for the lunar phase terms as David Nivison, arrived at dates for the bronzes which agree completely with Nivison's (i.e., both as to reign and date) in only 9% of cases, or five inscriptions out of fifty-three. In an additional ten cases where the two agree about the assignment of an inscription to the reign of a particular king, they disagree as to the year because their reconstructions of the dates and lengths of reign of the eight kings Cheng through Yi differ considerably:

The difference in regard to Wu Wang's reign is merely one of definition. For Nivison's, alternative date of 1040 for the Conquest, see his, ‘1040 as the date of the Chou Conquest’, Earl China, 8, 1982–1983, 76–8CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9 ‘Strong inference’, Science, 146.3642, 1964, 350, 352.

10 For Nivison's argument see ‘The dates of Western Chou’, 528 ff. For a dispassionate studythat addresses the methodological shortcomings of various attempts to reconstruct Western Zhou chronology, including those of David Nivison, Chou Fa-kao, Shirakawa Shizuka , Ma Chengyuan , Liu Qiyi and He Youqi , see Tatsuro, Asahara, ‘Western Zhou bronze inscriptions and calendars’, Tōhō gakuhō 58, 1986, 71–120Google Scholar. Among other things, Asahara concludes (pp. 75, 100) that the significance of the inscriptional lunar terms is still not understood, and he states flatly (p. 75) that the explanatory value of the four-phase interpretation of the lunar terms in unproven.

11 On this point, see for example Peiyu, Zhang, ‘Early China Forum’, Early China, 15, 1990, 142Google Scholar.

12 Pankenier, ‘Astronomical Dates’; David W. Pankenier, ‘Early Chinese Astronomy and Cosmology: The ‘Mandate of Heaven’ as Epiphany’, Stanford University Ph.D. dissertation, 1983; Pankenier, David W., ‘Mozi and the dates of Xia, Shang, and Zhou: a research note’, Early-China, 9–10, 1983–1985, 175–83Google Scholar; Pankenier, David W. (Astronomical observation in the Three Dynasties period and the origin of five phases correlative theory), in Yinxu bowuyuan yuankan , 1, 1989, 183–8Google Scholar.(Data in tables 1–4 after Pankenier, ‘Early Chinese astronomy and cosmology’, 1983).

13 Pankenier, , ‘Astronomical dates’ 5; Zhongguo tianwenxue shi, 21Google Scholar. Note that the date of this eclipse in mid-March, and the designation of that month as zheng in the text demonstrates unequivocally that the convention then in use identified the first month of the year as the second lunation after the month containing the winter solstice. This fact is often overlooked in speculative accounts of what the Shang and Zhou calendars must have been like in the pre-Conquest period.

14 It is worth noting here that the ‘Feng bao’ chapter of Yi zhou shu also contains the following passage: ‘In was in the 23rd year gengzi (day 37), new moon; the Lords of the Nine Regions all came to Zhou. The King was at Feng. In the morning twilight, the King stood in the Lesser Hall. The King announced to Dan, Duke of Zhou, “Wuhu! The various Lords have all come to felicitate us. [They have] suffered bitterly in service to Shang. How shall I preserve and keep [their loyalty]? How shall I employ them and send them off?”’ As I have pointed out earlier the text presently reads ‘23rd ritual cycle’, but this is certainly an error; see Pankenier, ‘Early Chinese astronomy and cosmology’, 334, n. 49. If the text originally read ‘13th year’ instead of ‘23rd year’, a common enough transcription error, day gengzi can immediately be identified as the new moon day of the Zhou 4th month in the year of the Conquest (April 26, 1046 B.C.; JD 133 9847), precisely at the time when the sources agree that the various lords gathered in Zhou to be reinvested by the new king. Because of the error placing this event in a ‘23rd’ year the passage became separated at an early date from the remainder of the account of the Conquest year which is now contained in the ‘Shi fu’ chapter of Yi Zhou shu. As a benchmark calendrical date in the Conquest year 1046 this record confirms that dating hypothesis; see Youzeng, Zhu, Yi Zhou shu jixin jiaoshi (Changsha: Shangwu yinshu guan, 1940)Google Scholar, 3.27.

15 Although Edward Shaughnessy repeatedly emphasizes the presence of just such a four-year error in the chronology, he fails to recognize its true character as a general systematic error; see his ‘The “Current” Bamboo Annals and the date of the Zhou conquest of Shang’, Early China, 11–12, 1985–87, 48–50Google Scholar, 52. Shaughnessy overlooks the fact that the four-year error in the dates he discusses is implicitly accounted for in the chronological analysis found in Pankenier, ‘Astronomical dates’ 8, 22, table 1, p. 23; table 2, p. 33.

16 The following analysis is reproduced with some revision of presentation from ch. iv, pt 2: ‘History of the Bamboo Annals chronology’ in Pankenier, ‘Early Chinese astronomy andcosmology (1983). Readers may observe a congruence between certain of my arguments and conclusions and those published in 1985 by Edward Shaughnessy in ‘The “Current” Bamboo Annals and the date of the Zhou conquest of Shang’. It should be noted that the relevant details of my method of analysis and specific conclusions have remained unchanged since 1983.

17 Pankenier, , ‘Mozi and the dates of Xia, Shang, and Zhou’, 175; Taiping yulan (Tainan: Ping ping chubanshe, 1975), 84: 5bGoogle Scholar.

18 Pankenier, ‘Early Chinese astronomy and cosmology’, 230; Taiping yulan, 329:5a.

19 Pankenier, , ‘Early Chinese astronomy and cosmology’, 245–6Google Scholar. While the conclusion seems inescapable that the Chinese observed and preserved accounts of an impressive planetary conjunction in February 1953 B.C. (Pankenier,‘Mozi and the dates of Xia, Shang, and Zhou’, 177 ff.), the argument by Nivison, David and Pang, Kevin (‘Astronomical evidence for the Bamboo Annals’ chronicle of Early Xia’, Early China, 15, [1990], 87–95)CrossRefGoogle Scholar that a late quotation describing such a phenomenon using the Han period cliché ‘the sun and moon matched up like jade bi, and the five planets were like strung pearls’ constitutes an authentic report of the same conjunction disregards the obvious anachronisms in the text. Furthermore, the cliché refers not merely to a simple clustering of the planets along the ecliptic as Nivison and Pang believe but to a theoretical ‘stacking’ of all five plus the sun and moon one atop the other at precisely the same degree of longitude, a hypothetical feature of Han mathematical astronomy dictated by the necessity of calculating from a single starting point; see my contribution to ‘Early China Forum’, Early China, 15, 1990, 117–23.

20 Loewe, Michael, ‘Water, Earth and Fire-the symbols of the Han Dynasty’, Nachrichten derGesellschafl für Nalur- und Völkerkunde Ostasiens/Hamburg, 125, 1979, 63–8Google Scholar.

21 Han shu, 21B. 1011 (all references to the standard histories will be to the modern editions published by Zhonghua shuju); cf. Jack L. Dull, ‘A historical introduction to the apocryphal (ch'anwei) texts of the Han Dynasty,’ Ph.D. dissertation, University of Washington, 1966, 124 ff.

22 Needham, Tr. Joseph, Science and civilisation in China, Vol. 2: History of scientific thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1956), 248–9Google Scholar.

23 As late as the mid third century B.C. the association of Zhou with Fire and the colour scarletwas still firmly in place. Lūshi chungiu (Sibu beiyao ed., 13:4a), for example, says: ‘King Wen declared, “The fire aura has overcome! The fire aura has overcome!” Therefore, thecolour honored [by the Zhou] was scarlet and their affairs were modelled on Fire’.

24 Jack Dull, ‘Apocryphal texts’, 481.

25 All in MaGuohan ; Yuhan shanfang ji yishu (Taipei: Wen hai chubanshe, n.d. [Guoxue jiyao waibian photolithograph of Jinan xylographic ed. of 18711), vol. 4, 2113.

26 As Leopold de Saussure demonstrated, this is evident from the manipulations Liu Xin was obliged to perform on the reign lengths of the kings who ruled Zhou before 841 B.C. in order to push the date of the Conquest back as far as 1122; see ‘La chronologie chinoise et l'avènement des Tcheou’, T'oung Pao, 23, 1924, 299–329Google Scholar.

27 Whether or not the Guoyu is correct is irrelevant. What matters is that the passage was unquestionably believed to be accurate in the third century. The passage in question from the ‘Discourses of Zhou’ is revisited in Part 2 under ‘Once again: the Guoyu Record’.

28 Pankenier, ‘Astronomical dates’, 7–8.

29 Lüshi chunqiu (Sibu beiyao ed.), 14:8a.

30 Mencius 2A/1 gives King Wen's age at death as 100 years. This inflated figure is based on amisreading of the passage in Shang shu, ‘Wu yi’ chapter: ‘When King Wen received theMandate he was in mid-life; his rule of the kingdom lasted 50 years’. Mencius has taken ‘received the Mandate’ to refer to Wen's appointment to succeed his father, making him 50 years of age at his accession in Zhou. Adding another 50 years of rule would make him 100 years old at his death. ‘Received the Mandate’ must, however, refer to the events of 1059–58, making King Wen actually only about 58 years old when he died.

31 Shiming, Fang and Xiuling, Wang, Guben zhushu jinian jizheng (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1981), 231Google Scholar

32 See Pankenier, ‘Astronomical dates’, 14–15.

33 Sima Qian's ambiguity with regard to the Conquest chronology in ‘Basic Annals of Zhou’ is only apparent, however. A passage that settles the matter is contained in his account of the northern barbarians (Shiji, 110.2881). There Sima Qian states that from Zhou Tai Wang's . settling at Qixia in the Wei River valley to Zhou Wen Wang's attack on the Quan yi barbarians (theyear following King Wen's receipt of the Mandate according to the ‘Basic Annals of Zhou’)was ‘a little more than 100 years’. Then the historian says that from this to King Wu's attack onShang was ‘a little more than 10 years’; from this to King Mu's attack on the Quan rong littie more than [one] hundred years’ (the text actually says ‘200’ years, but this is an obvious copyist's error); and from this to King You's assassination (in 771 B.C.) was ‘a little more than 200 years’. From these statements we can draw several important conclusions. First, the Bamboo Annals is probably close to the mark in assigning Tai Wang's settling at Qixia in the first year of Shang king Wu yi to the year 1159, since the date of Wen Wang's attack on the Quan yi was in fact 1055 (actually the 4th year of the Mandate, as stated in Shangshu dazhuan, not the 1st as in ‘Basic Annals of Zhou’). Thus the Mandate conjunction of 1059 occurred close to the centennial of Tai Wang's settling at Zhouyuan. Second, since Sima Qian here unambiguouslyasserts that ‘a little more than 10 years’ separated King Wen's attack on the Quan yi (immediatelyafter receiving the Mandate in Sima's view) from the Coquest, and since the ‘Basic Annals ofZhou’ suggests that King Wen died six years after that Quan yi conflict, Sima Qian obviouslythought that the Conquest occurred after King Wen's son, King Wu, had reigned for at most only five or six years (i.e. 6 plus another 5 or 6 years equals ‘a little more than ten’). This means thatwhere Sima Qian's ‘Basic Annals’ version of events dates the Conquest campaign to an ambiguous ‘11th year, 12th month’ (Shiji, 4.121), or alternatively, to the ‘11th year, 1st month’ (Shiji, 32.1480), the historian could not possibly have taken these to be years in King Wu's personal reign, as Nivison has argued, but must have understood them to refer to the reckoning that began with King Wen's receipt of the Mandate. There is also a possibility that the original dates in the ‘Basic Annals’ were subsequently altered, since Xu Guang (352–25) is quoted in Shiji jijie (Shiji, 4.121, n. 2) as saying that earlier Qiao Zhou (201–270) had said that ‘in Shiji, King Wu went east to inspect the troops in the 11 th year, and in the 13th year defeated [Shang] Zhou ,’ which I argue is the correct solution.

34 See Pankenier, ‘Early Chinese astronomy and cosmology’, 237 ff., where the conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn of 364 B.C. is implicated as the starting point for the Yinli extrapolation that settled on 1084 as the date of the Zhou Mandate. Zhu Wenxin earlier proposed 370 B.C. as the approximate date of the construction of the Yinli and Zhuanxu calendars; cf. Zhongguo tianwenxue shi, 74. David Nivison (‘1040 as the Date of the Chou Conquest’, 77) is mistaken in supposing the Yinli calculations post-date Sima Qian. It is noteworthy that William Hung too, basing himself on evidence from Zuo zhuan, dated the beginning of retrospective chronological calculation using the Jupiter cycle to about 364 B.C.; see his preface to Harvard- Yenching Institute Sinological Index Series, Supplement No. 11, Combined concordances to Ch'un-ch'iu, Kung-yang, Ku-liang and Tso-chuan (1937), lxxxiv.

35 This implies, of course, a date of 1063 for the Mandate portent in the pre-Han Bamboo Annals chronology as indicated in table 1.

36 The reasons for abandoning the campaign in 1048 are explored in Pankenier, ‘Astronomical dates’, 14–16; see also n. 57, Part 2 of this paper.

37 Shaughnessy, Edward L., ‘On the authenticity of the Bamboo Annals’, Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, 46.1, 1986, 149–80CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

38 ibid, 166–7.

39 From this it follows that the record in ‘Jin teng’ chapter of Shang shu, which implies that King Wu died two years after having defeated Shang, should be understood inclusively, i.e., as referring to the year following the Conquest, and not to the second year following the battle as argued by Shaughnessy, ‘Authenticity of the Bamboo Annals’, 156, 167. Han-period texts on which Shaughnessy relies which suggest otherwise do so on the basis of the misconception that theConquest occurred in a 12th year, rather than the 13th, in combination with the implication deriving from the Yi Zhou shu ‘Zuo luo’, ‘Da kuang’ and ‘Wen zheng’ chapters that King Wu died in a 14th year; see ‘Authenticity of the Bamboo Annals’, 158–9. Shaughnessy cites approvingly the three passages from Yi Zhou shu which identify as a 13th year in the Mandate reckoning the year in which King Wu, said to be at Guan, appointed his viceroys in the former Shang territory. ‘Zuo luo’ goes on to say that King Wu died the following year in the 12th month, which Shaughnessy (p. 159) correctly points out would be the 14th year. This is confirmed (p. 167) by the analysis of the misplaced strip which shows that King Wu's death in the unreconstructed Bamboo Annals actually was recorded in a 14th year. Then, Shaughnessy (p. 173), commenting further on Bamboo Annals, remarks that ‘in the entry for King Wu's 12th year, the “Current” Bamboo Annals records that in the fourth month King Wu returned to Feng, performed a sacrifice in the great temple, arranged for the supervision of the former Shang territory, and “then hunted in Guan ”’. Because of his commitment to the Han period ‘12th year Conquest’ hypothesis, Shaughnessy overlooks the obvious contradiction here between the reconstructed Bamboo Annals and the pre-Qin passages from Yi Zhou shu which he has just cited, in which this immediately post-Conquest activity takes place in a ‘13th year’ not a ‘12th year’. If, as Shaughnessy argues (p. 158), Shiji is correct in making the Conquest take place in a ‘Mandate 12th year’, how can pre-Qin Yi Zhou shu which he also quotes approvingly date the same events to the Mandate ‘13th’ year? The explanation for this contradiction between Yi Zhou shu and reconstructed Bamboo Annals (following Shiji) is that it is the result of the same confusion, to which I have repeatedly referred, between the original Mandate calendar and the years of King Wu's reign (which actually only lasted three years beyond the twenty-five months of mourning for his father). Again it is pre-Qin Yi Zhou shu that has proved correct in dating King Wu's death to the year after the Conquest.

40 ‘Basic Annals of Zhou’, Shiji, 4.120; see also n. 33 above.

41 Shangshu dazhuan (Sibu congkan ed.), 4:5a, 2:16b.

42 ibid., 4:5a, 2:16b; Shiji, 4.118.

43 This point received special emphasis in my ‘Early Chinese astronomy and cosmology’, 280–84, where it was also called a ‘crucial finding’ (pp. 319–20). Two years later Edward Shaughnessy (‘The “Current” Bamboo Annals’, 49) also drew attention to three of these dates but overlooked the fourth, documenting King Wen's activity in Di Xin's 36th year, the 8th year of the Mandate, which corresponds to 1051; see table 4. As I made clear already in 1983, there is a necessary connexion between the survival of these four accurately dated events in Di Xin's reign and my accompanying reconstruction of the entire pre-Conquest chronology. Their significance as solid confirmation of the chronology I had previously proposed evidently escaped Shaughnessy's attention.

44 See ode 242 ‘Ling tai’ in the decade of ‘Wang, Wen’ in the Book of Odes, tr. Bernhard, Karlgren (Stockholm: Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities, 1950), 196–7Google Scholar; Hanfeizi (Sibu beiyao ed.), 7:6a.