This paper investigates the relationships between the Early Metal Age cultures of the Inner Mongolia and Gansu-Qinghai area with the Erlitou culture of the Central Plains region, and addresses the issue whether specific metal objects characteristic of these cultures may have their source of inspiration in areas as remote as southern Siberia and present-day Afghanistan and southern Turkmenistan. The proposal that China at the very beginning of its Bronze Age may have been affected by long-distance cultural transmissions depends upon recent reevaluations of the early history of the Eurasian steppe, in particular the advent of nomadic pastoralism and horse riding, and upon newly recalibrated carbon dates ascertained for specific Siberian sites and for the Bactrian-Margiana complex.

The mortuary data from the Longshan culture provide crucial information for understanding the process of socio-political change from non-stratified to stratified societies in late Neolithic China. This article identifies the variables in Longshan burials that can be correlated with social rank, and then studies four Longshan burial sites (Taosi, Chengzi, Yinjiacheng, and Zhufeng) in two steps. The first step is to classify the evidence for determining burial rank; the second step is to analyze intra-cemetery spatial patterns through time, including the location of graves within a site, the distribution of differently ranked graves and spatial relationships between graves and associated features (houses and pits), the diachronic changes observed in a site, and the depositional practices relating to ritual activities. The results of these analyses suggest that kinship-based Longshan communities were internally and externally stratified in their social structure; that this social stratification was ideologically legitimized by ritual activities that emphasized ancestor worship; and that their society was politically reinforced by an elite exchange network of high status goods at both regional and interregional levels. These social, political, and religious relationships formed the foundation for the development of civilization in prehistoric North China.

A preoccupation with cosmology and the correlation of celestial events with terrestrial activity dates back to the very beginnings of Chinese civilization. The existence of such a mindset is shown by archeo-logical discoveries from the Neolithic as well as the early Bronze Age. The belief in heaven-dwelling high gods like Shang Di and Tian also had antecedents in the pre-Shang period. In addition, analysis of scientifically verifiable accounts of planetary massings from the second millennium B.C. suggests that important cosmological and astrological notions took shape much earlier than previously thought. On the basis of this evidence it now appears likely that such conceptions are intimately connected both with influential later beliefs about a Mandate of Heaven, which asserted heavenly intervention as the cause of change in temporal governance, and with later Five Elements speculative schemes, which claimed to discern a preordained phenomenological pattern in the dynastic succession. The cosmicization of experience in the archaic period to which the evidence points and the vehement reassertion of Heaven's Mandate by the Zhou dynasty founders together confirm the epoch-making historical role of the Shang-Zhou transition in decisively reaffirming “patterning oneself in Heaven's image” (xiang tian 象天) as the fundamental metaphor in Chinese political legitimation.

By exploring the shift of ancestral worship centers in ancient China and its impact on art, the author argues that the genealogical/political structure of the Three Dynasties found its religious form in temple worship; however, following the decline of this system during the Eastern Zhou and the Qin, the tomb of an individual increased in importance. This process culminated during the Eastern Han: Problems in dynastic succession forced the Eastern Han rulers to abandon temple ceremonies and transfer them to graveyards. But this new system was again renounced by the following Wei dynasty, and many funerary structures were destroyed in an “iconoclastic” movement. The author contends that this complex development in religion strongly influenced and even governed the course of ancient Chinese art: Corresponding to the shift in religious center, the tomb assumed new symbolic imagery, and pictorial funerary art replaced ritual vessels to become the dominant artistic genre of early imperial China.

This article places the recent literature on archaeological manifestations of the Xia in context, describes and analyzes the published data for the Erlitou typesite in some detail, and examines broader issues implicit in the debate on this contentious topic. The positivism that animates so much recent literature is linked to the Anyang excavations and the promise of scientific archaeology more generally. Particular attention is given to certain of the data from the Erlitou site—its layout, architectural features, burials, and prestige craft products (ritual bronze vessels and jades)—because these have figured prominently in most discussion of the nature and identity of the site and its eponymous culture. Broader issues are addressed, albeit more briefly, as a series of nested concepts: culture and subculture, periodization, cultural succession, developmental stage, ethnicity, and dynasty. Until the formal report of the Erlitou typesite reaches print, this article proposes a “minimal” definition of the current archaeological data, one that does not assume the historicity of the Xia.

Texts from the Zhou and Han periods regularly use the term quan “to weigh” when describing or prescribing human action. This essay seeks to determine precisely which concrete acts of weighing underlie the metaphoric application of the term to human action. A survey of the available textual and archaeological evidence shows that even before the Eastern Han, when steelyards became the most common weighing device, the act of weighing might have been executed and conceptualized in multiple ways. A similar conclusion is drawn from a survey of pictorial and literary references to metaphoric weighing in non-Chinese traditions. More precisely, I suggest three distinct possibilities: matching the object to be weighed with a known standard, determining which of two objects weighs heaviest, and, lastly, seeking the point at which the balance beam will gain or recover balance.

Early Chinese texts provide examples of all three (quan A, B, and C). Quan B became prominent especially during the 3rd century B.C.E., when persuaders discussed how every choice had negative as well as positive consequences. Quan A and C are attested in texts usually dated to the 4th century B.C.E. or before. In this essay I argue that it is quan C that became the dominant metaphor in moral-political discourse, and that it had two competing interpretations: it could refer either to the multiple ways in which a sage adapts his actions to the circumstances, or to a temporary lifting of moral standards during an emergency. Whereas scholars in the Han and Qing dynasties generally accepted that moral rules were not absolute, Song scholars were scandalized by the notion that deviations from the rule were part and parcel of moral action.

This article reports the discovery in the Bamboo Annals of verifiable accounts of the general conjunctions of planets witnessed by Shang and Zhou dynasty observers, which occurred in 1576 and 1059 B.C. Besides exploring the connections between the planetary phenomena and mythologized accounts of the same events in Zhou and Han texts, the significance of these astronomical dates is discussed in reference to the events surrounding the Zhou Conquest of Shang and the founding of the Shang dynasty. The investigation proposes that the Shang and Zhou astrologers were astute observers of the motions of the planets and that there are a number of Zhou traditions, such as those concerning visitations of the Phoenix, which are intimately associated with certain planetary periods. In addition, it is suggested that the concept of the Mandate of Heaven as a physical manifestation of Heaven's will and that of its transfer to virtuous rulers at 500 year intervals both derive from the period of the so-called Triple Conjunctions accurately recorded in the Bamboo Annals.

The 1970's was a decade of extraordinary discoveries of texts that transformed scholarly understanding of late Warring States, Qin, and early Han philosophy, society, and culture. This article is devoted to the least well-known of these finds, made in 1972 at Yinqueshan, Linyi, Shandong. Specifically, it provides for the first time in a Western language an introduction to the Yin-Yang texts recovered from this Western Han tomb, probably dated to the early years of the reign of Han Wudi (r. 140-87 B.C.). Based on the only transcription yet published (in 1985 by Wu Jiulong), the article provides a transcription, reorganization, and full translation of three of the texts, and fragments of a fourth, together with supplementary notes on the approximately seventeen other essays and a discussion of their significance within the context of late pre-imperial and early imperial thought. The essays are found to be of immense importance in understanding the various dimensions of Yin-Yang theorizing prior to Dong Zhongshu's development of new text Confucianism. Of special interest is the author's conclusion that the texts throw considerable light on those of the Mawangdui silk manuscripts that have been categorized by most scholars as belonging to the Huang-Lao school, the so-called Huangdi sijing (Four Classics of the Yellow Emperor). The author concludes, on the basis of his analysis of the form, language, and philosophical content of the Yinqueshan Yin-Yang texts, that many of the Mawangdui silk manuscripts are products of Yin-Yang specialists and may well not belong to the Huang-Lao tradition.

This paper was first prepared as a documentary appendix to “The Late Shang State: When, Where, and What?” (to be published in the conference volume, The Origins of Chinese Civilization), which, by analyzing a series of thirty-nine “state criteria” under the general headings of Sovereignty, Territoriality, Religion and Kinship, Alliance and Warfare, and Exchange, attempted to classify the state in developmental terms. The present paper presents the documentary evidence in more detail by translating and discussing characteristic Inscriptions (generally from period I, the reign of Wu Ting) within each of the thirty-nine criteria. In so far as possible, the discussion focuses on the case of the Chou as a Shang state member. The evidence is particularly valuable because of the insights it gives Into the daily activities of the Shang theocrat.

Through close analysis of the traditional hermeneutics of the Zhou li sections on the Si 丽(Manager of the Spirit Mediums), Nanwu (Male Spirit Mediums), and Nüzou (Female Spirit Mediums), this article attempts to reconstruct the classical image of spirit mediums during the Zhou dynasty. It shows that spirit mediums, though grouped under the “bureaucratic” hierarchy of the Zhou li, have traditionally been assumed to be distinct in function and activities from the officials with whom they interacted duringceremonies. As specialized religious virtuousi capable of communicating with the supernatural forces, they apparently continued to play a distinguished role in political ritual — possibly derived from Shang court shamanism, and undoubtedly ancestral to the function of mediums in late traditional popular religion.

This paper reexamines the famous painting from Mawangdui Tomb number 1. Instead of approaching it as an independent “work” and matching its images with fragmentary textual references, I explore its relationship with other buried objects, the tomb's structure and symbolism, and the ritual process during which the tomb was constructed. Based on ancient ritual canons, I reject the popular opinion that the painting served to summon the departed soul or to guide the soul to Heaven. Rather, the painting formed part of the jiu-group (“the body in its long home”) at the center of the burial, and enclosed by the guan-coffins decorated with images of protection and immortality, and again by the guo-casket, a replica of the deceased's household (zhai). The painting's meaning and function must be comprehended within this architectural-ritual context. Moreover, neither the painting nor the whole tomb represents a coherent conception of the afterlife. This feature separates this tomb from those constructed earlier and later, and represents a transitional period in the history of early Chinese art and religion.

Modern scholarship has repeatedly maintained that the separation of the hun and po souls at death was a popular Han belief, but a re-examination of the received literature suggests that hunpo dualism was at best only a scholastic model. Sources ranging from the Zuo zhuan to Han medical texts depict the hunpo as an inherent part of the properly functioning body complex, and any deficiency in the hunpo did not necessarily result in death but in distress and disease. Grave stele texts, which also never distinguish between a hun and a po suggest a different dualism—that between the hun or po with its corporeal associations on the one hand and the more rarefied shen on the other. This dualism may have found a practical expression in ancestral worship because the hunpo and body were generally confined to the cemetery but the mobile shen enjoyed its sacrifices at the lineage shrine.

Chinese and Western archaeologists (especially those of the anthropologically-oriented tradition) often seem to be talking past each other, not only because they are publishing in different languages, but also because of differences in theory and method. While most of the major theoretical works in Western languages are by now available in Chinese translations, hardly any English-language publications exist that explain Chinese approaches to archaeological method and theory. This article helps to bridge the gap by introducing the history of debates on archaeological method in China to a Western audience, focusing particularly on issues of typology and classification. Discussing in detail the merits—and issues—of approaches suggested by four of the most influential Chinese archaeologists (Li Chi, Xia Nai, Su Bingqi, and K. C. Chang), this article provides a deeper understanding of the preconditions of archaeological research in China. It also suggests future directions for archaeological work by local and foreign archaeologists, including but also going beyond the classification of the rich body of artifacts coming to light in Chinese excavations.

During the Warring States, Ch'in, and Han periods the influence of the arts of disputation and rhetoric increased. Disputation affected the form and content of philosophical arguments and, mainly during the Han dynasty, contributed to the process of ideological synthesis. Furthermore, debate and argumentation came to play a central role in resolving social difficulties and determining government policy. Along with rhetoric, as represented by the Chan-kuo-ts'e, disputation also helped define the style and nature of a wide variety of literary genres, espeically the Fu and historiographical works of the Han period.

In this paper, the “program” for disputation attributed to Tsou Yen in the Shih chi is presented and its influence on other philosophical schools traced. Then the tradition of debate, both court debates from their Warring States origins on into the Han, and the rise of legal disputes within society as a whole are examined. Finally, the role of the Tsung Heng school in creating, preserving, and transmitting a tradition of rhetoric Is described. Analysis of the rhetorical devices of this school suggests the close connection of debaters, persuaders, logicians, and authors of Fu.

In conclusion, the author seeks to identify some of the social and economic causes for the increasing influence of disputation, such as the emergence of private property and the concept of “individualism,” the development of a scholar class and patrons, and the increase of cultural and intellectual pluralism and diversity.

The 1980 discovery at Chou-yüan (site of an important Western Chou palace complex) of two small human heads with Caucasoid features sculpted from mollusk shell raises questions concerning East-West contact during the early Chou period (roughly eighth century B.C.E.). A similar head from Anyang dating to about half a millennium earlier suggests that the contact was of long standing and that it centered in the Shang and Chou courts. On top of one of the Chou heads is engraved the oracle bone form of the graph for wu, namely , identifying the figure as a ritual specialist. Normally wu is translated as “shaman,” but it is here proposed that “mage” be adopted as a more accurate equivalent. Various types of evidence are adduced in support of this proposal, including the Old Sinitic reconstruction of wu, i.e., *mᵞag, which indicates a direct linkage with Old Persian maguš, the original source of Magianism.

The Warring States and Ch'in-Han periods witnessed not only an efflorescence of cosmological speculation but along with it the growth of intricate systems of divination, astrology, geomancy, and magic. The internal structure of the cosmos, elaborated in terms of Yin-Yang and Five Phase theories, was treated as something which could be manipulated to the advantage of a person who was initiated into the secret operations of the universe. Thus the Yin-Yang and Five Phase cycles, the trigrams of the Book of Changes, the sexagenary cycle of Celestial Stems and Earthly Branches, as well as various calendrical and astronomical observations, all served as the raw material for a diverse array of esoteric arts.

Scholars have often treated the concept of xiao as an unchanging notion with a transparent meaning. In the West, the translation “filial piety” has reinforced this tendency. By endeavoring to ascertain the precise meaning of the term in pre-Qin texts, this paper shows that xiao had multiple meanings and was constantly being reinterpreted to suit new social and political circumstances. In the Western Zhou, it was inti¬mately related to the cult of the dead and its recipients extended well beyond one's parents or grandparents. The ru of the Warring States emphasized that it meant obedience and displaying respect, and made parents the sole recipients of xiao. By the late Warring States, ru recast xiao not only as obedience to one's parents, but also as obedience to one's lord. Filial sons were reinvented as loyal retainers to meet the needs of the newly emerging bureaucratic state.

Focused on a detailed philological analysis of the sacrificial hymn “Chu ci” in the Shijing, the present study aims to reconstruct the dramatic multi-vocal structure of an exemplary early Chinese performance text. Examining the interrelation between performance and commemoration from anthropological, art historical, and linguistic perspectives, the study in its first part outlines major characteristics of early Chinese ritual culture in terms of ritual self-reference, aesthetic expression, cultural memory, and the performative act of constituting ritual reality. After these historical and theoretical considerations, a fully annotated translation of “Chu ci” is offered, with the text presented in its multi-vocal structure. This structure of multiple voices and changing perspectives is then discussed through a close analysis of linguistic features such as rhyme shifts, the distribution of pronouns and formal designations for the ritual participants, and the use of formulaic prayer sequences. It is argued that these features are directly interrelated and, if seen together, allow us to reconstruct “Chu ci” as an actual performance text that can be related to specific practices and situations of early Chinese ritual culture. It is concluded that only such a reconstruction renders the text fully intelligible, integrating all its otherwise unruly linguistic elements into a coherent reading. In view of the evidence from “Chu ci,” it is suggested that its multi-vocal structure is not a singular phenomenon but reflects a principle of composition that might also apply to other early Chinese ritual texts.

This paper calls into question a consensus belief that the term “ti”帝 (and the term “shang-ti” 上帝), as used in the Shang oracle texts, denoted a supreme deity. Such an interpretation of the term is entirely satisfactory for textual sources postdating the first century of Chou rule, but the evidence of Shang texts suggests that term ti was employed therein as a corporate term denoting deities collectively, as a generic term referring to members of the Shang pantheon individually but not by name, or as an honorific term for the father of the Shang ruler. By exploring the semantics of the term ti through Shang usage and cognate words, a speculative root meaning of “father” is proposed, the graph being a representation of the ancestral altar or of altar figures. If this theory is valid, it calls into question the extent to which proto-bureaucratic features can be ascribed to the Shang pantheon. It also suggests that the concept of supreme divinity in China was either derived from the pre-conquest religion of the Chou, centered upon the deity T'ien, or through a post-conquest universalization of the Chou religion.