(Translator's Note: This article originally appeared in Kaogu Xuebao 1981.3: 269-284, and is translated with the author's permission.)

I. The appearance of metal is a very important event in human history, marking the start of an age. From the patriarchal clan communes of the late Neolithic period to the slave society of the Bronze Age, there was a great change in the relationship between social development and production. As a result, the origin and development of metal-working is one of the important issues in archaeological research (p. 269).

Early in the Shang dynasty, China had already advanced into slave society, and its brilliant bronze culture is an outstanding phenomenon in the history of the ancient world. Shang civilization evolved from Longshan foundations, and there is ample archaeological proof of the close relationship between the two. But from what origins did Shang bronze arise? Before the Shang, was there an aeneolithic period in which copper was used? These questions have not yet been satisfactorily answered. Since 1949 the new discoveries of copper objects and of bronze objects belonging to an early period have contributed important clues to the solution of these problems.

This article examines two views of the ethics and efficacy of deception. The Sunzi is famous for its praise of deception and indirect strategy in warfare. This explicit praise of deception distinguishes it from other Militarist texts, which either reject deception or advocate it only as a practical and important strategic tool. The Xunzi rejects deception and indirection in both civil and military contexts. The Sunzi and Xunzi's attitudes toward deception and indirection thus represent opposite poles within Chinese philosophical thought.

The discovery of neolithic remains in 1936 at a place called Liangzhu near Hangzhou was the first evidence of a culture which in recent decades has revolutionized the prehistory of the lower Yangzi region. The great antiquity of sites in this region was established in the late 1960s by radiocarbon dating, which overthrew the prevailing theory that the agricultural way of life originated at a single center of innovation in the Yellow River valley and diffused to the east coast only in historic times. Subsequent archaeological work not only established the local sequence of neolithic cultures but also, at a series of major Liangzhu sites, revealed extravagantly furnished burials whose wealth raises puzzling question about the structure of Liangzhu society. Chief among the furnishings of these graves are large numbers of jades — objects remarkable for their strange shapes and designs and even more remarkable for their superlative workmanship. The first section of this essay reviews the history of Liangzhu archaeology, connecting it with the changes of thinking that Chinese neolithic archaeology has undergone in the past half century. The second section discusses a few of the issues raised by Liangzhu jades: material sources, the origin of the bi and cong shapes, and the relation between Liangzhu jades and Shang jades.

The Huainanzi is a Former Han 前漢 dynasty (202 B.C.E.–9 C.E.) compendium of knowledge written at the court of Huainan and presented to Emperor Wu of the Han 漢武帝 in 139 by Liu An 劉安 (?179–122), the king of Huainan. Liu An was the grandson of the Han “progenitor” Gaozu 高祖 (Liu Bang 劉邦 r. 202–195), and he was the uncle of the reigning emperor Wu (r. 140–87). According to the author(s) of the text’s postface, “Yao lue” 要略 or “A Summary of the Essentials,” the work seeks to provide a comprehensive account or chronicle of the dao 道 (conventionally translated as the “Way”), understood broadly to encompass the cosmos (tiandi 天地 or “Heaven and Earth”), human beings (ren 人) and their affairs (shi 事), and the relationship between them. The account of the dao presented in its chapters is not, however, purely descriptive. The Huainanzi is foremost a political treatise containing instructions worthy of a sage-king (shengwang 聖王) to be employed by the ruler as the proper model or standard by which to govern the empire.

In this paper I discuss paleographic texts recording local-level religious practices during the Qin dynasty that archaeologists recovered from Liye and Zhoujiatai. The Liye materials are bureaucratic records of state-sponsored sacrifices that took place in 215 and 212 b.c.e., indicating the types of sacrifices and reflecting the processes by which the bureaucracy managed the items offered. The Zhoujiatai text appears to give instructions for individual sacrifices and provides information about the locations and types of offerings, as well as the verbal formulae employed. The article begins with consideration of Qin practices in transmitted texts and of the agricultural spirit Xiannong, which appears in both the Liye and Zhoujiatai texts. Since in the past there was virtually no information extant about local-level religious activity under the Qin, the details in these paleographic texts represent an advance in understanding the history of the period.

With the weakening of the Zhou royal line many began to wonder if someone qualified to replace it might not be found in another lineage. The myth of the sage king Yao ceding his kingdom to Shun, an unrelated commoner, helped to make licit the yearning for such a figure, and at times argued for meritocracy, an ideal some thinkers counterposed against the sanctity of hereditary monarchy. After the fall of the Qin that ideal and the myth remained closely associated through most of the Former Han dynasty.

Sometime in the latter half of that period, however, certain scholarly circles connected with the imperial house began to develop the doctrine that the Han Lius were in fact descended from Yao, a doctrine which became orthodoxy with the rise of Wang Mang. After the establishment of the Later Han dynasty, Guangwudi (r. 25–57) attempted to force this doctrine and a prophetic literature supporting it, called chenwei (usually translated apocrypha), on the newly rehabilitated Imperial Academy. Some of these texts were created by applying to the Spring and Autumn Annals a hermeneutic mode that many Western scholars still hold does not occur in the history of Confucian scholarship: typological allegory—in this case to show that the rise of the founder of the Han was prefigured in the Annals. Meanwhile, ideologues excluded from the academy, but favored by the emperors, were putting the image of Yao to an unprecedented use—to support an ideology wherein the right to rule was unquestionably tied to heredity regardless of merit.

This article discusses some of the political developments and the exegetical interventions that helped produce these new uses of the Yao/Shun myth.

Oracle-bone scholars have long uniformly read the charges (i.e., the portion that mentions the event being divined) of Shang oracle-bone inscriptions as questions. Since the 1970's, many foreign oracle-bone scholars have proposed a new view that the charges are never questions, or at least are generally not questions. Whether or not the charges are actually questions is a very important question bearing not only on oracle bone studies, but also on research on ancient divination and on ancient Chinese grammar. Based on an examination of a great number of Shang oracle-bone inscriptions, the author of this essay believes that charges that can now be determined to be questions are mainly those choice-type charges in early inscriptions that contain the final particles yi and zhi, and true-or-false type charges that contain yi. Charges of the type “V bu V” (such as “rain not rain” [yu bu yu]) and “V bu,” regarded by many as choice-type questions, are actually comprised of the charge and a verification or use notation, the “bu V” being a verification and the “bu” being either a verification or a use notation (similar to the notation bu yong, “do not use”). Charges that can now be determined not to be questions are mainly in those inscriptions with complex charges, such as “this *spring the king ought not ally with Wang Cheng to attack Xia Wei, (for if he does) he will not receive divine assistance” (jin ?chun wang wu bi Wang Cheng fa Xia? Wei, fu qi shou you you, and “On ren we ought not hunt, (for if we do) it will rain” (ren wu tian, qi yu), the syntax of which shows that they cannot be questions.

The *Wu ze you xing tu 物則有形圖 silk manuscript was discovered inside a lacquer case in Mawangdui Tomb 3. This little-known manuscript of unusual design contains a philosophical text on the relationships between things (wu 物), forms (xing 形), names (ming 名), and speech (yan 言), and the text is arranged on the surface of the silk in the form of a densely clustered spiral within a ring inside a square. The writing on the manuscript is also accompanied by colors and shapes that represent a domed Heaven (tian 天) above a square Earth (di 地). Since it was first catalogued in 2004, just a few studies of the *Wu ze you xing tu have been published in Chinese, and the manuscript is almost entirely absent from Western scholarship. This article aims to remedy this situation by providing a detailed description of the manuscript, transcriptions and translations of its contents, a consideration of its philosophical context, and an analysis of its design. In the process, I show that this silk document functioned not just as a convenient surface or carrier for an important philosophical text, but as a material artifact in its own right, one that was designed to have a powerful impact on its viewers, readers, and users, forcing them to move their eyes and bodies in ways that reinforced its central philosophical message.

The ideal of the gentleman occupies an important position in the Confucian Analects. Many elements of this ideal appear in pre-Confucian sources as fundamental images of aristocratic excellence. This article presents several of those images as they appear in Western Chou bronze inscriptions, the Shih-ching and Shu-ching. In particular, we will study the role of model behavior and model emulation as well as images of Wen Wang, noble ancestors and their virtue, te. We shall see the application of these expressions of human excellence gradually extended beyond royalty and nobility to become components of a new definition of human worth applicable to all men.

While many aspects of Shi ji authorship are either unknown or speculative, the source texts of Shi ji and Sima Qian's use of them are viable yet underexplored paths to a deeper understanding of this monumental work. From the 1920s to the present, seven scholars from China, Japan, and Taiwan have attempted to ascertain the extent of Sima Qian's textual perusals and adaptations by compiling bibliographies of Shi ji source texts. This article compiles some of their results for comparison and analysis. From this, principles are highlighted for generating a more comprehensive methodology.

This article examines the earliest examples of replication of bronze objects of complicated structure in China. It uses four quadrupeds from the Freer Gallery (National Museum of Asian Art, Smithsonian Institution), the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, the British Museum, and the Yūrinkan Museum in Kyōto as examples to illustrate the complex technology required in replicating bronzes. It provides evidence to define identical bronzes and proves that the four quadrupeds shared the same decorated model. The application of section-mold casting, spacers, clay cores, and mold section assemblage will be examined using 3D scanning, X-ray photography, computerized tomography (CT) scanning, and alloy composition analysis.

This article analyzes the bamboo strips recovered from the northern chamber of the tomb of Marquis Yi of Zeng (d. 433 b.c.e.). It argues that the strips comprised at least two separate texts that were integral to the organization and performance of the Marquis's funerary cortège. One text lists on individual strips the chariots and horse teams used in the procession, as well as their donors, categorizing them under bureaucratic offices. A second text describes these same chariots one after another, along with their drivers, decorations, and armor. Counting marks next to each of the chariot names appear to have verified the written totals found in the text. This evidence demonstrates that the director of the cortège combined together donated materials from a vast geographic area in order to create a distinctive funerary spectacle that displayed the wealth, status, and power of the Marquis and the state of Zeng. The article further argues that characterizing the Zeng texts as “inventories” (qian'ce 遣策)—so often analyzed for evidence of ideas about the afterlife—hardly does justice to the complex role that the texts played in the funeral procession and Zeng royal display. It concludes that this political display function drove the production of the texts and the organization of the funeral, not least because Marquis Yi's heir and Zeng state officials would have wanted to ensure a smooth transfer of power.

The Construction of Space in Early China is a monumental volume. Few studies can match its breathtaking breadth, its richness of detail, its perfection of organization or–most notably–its continual display of its author's awesome erudition. In five hundred closely printed pages, Mark Edward Lewis touches upon an extraordinary variety of topics, ranging freely from medicine to political philosophy and from popular customs to legal codes. He takes the reader down into the tombs and up into the heavens, visits the marketplace and ascends imperial towers and city walls, enters the human body and calls on the emperor's harem. Lewis incorporates in his study almost every imaginable kind of evidence, from military treatises to tomb wills, from odes and rhapsodies to administrative documents, and from philosophical texts to popular almanacs. His 120 pages of footnotes and 40 pages of “Works Cited” provide a useful overview of the secondary literature in Chinese, Japanese and Western European languages. All this makes The Construction of Space an indispensable volume for any student of early and, more broadly, traditional Chinese history.

The dispute over whether burial rites should be frugal or lavish is a prominent feature of late Zhou philosophical literature. It originated with Mozi's attack on ritual and then continued unabated as the Ru and Mo schools argued the issue and hurled epithets at each other. The two Lüshi chunqiu chapters “Jiesang” and “Ansi” represent the arguments in favor of moderation in the middle of the third century B.C. While the chapters clearly owe their overall position to their Mohist forebears, they nonetheless ignore or reject several arguments that are central to the Mozi. Nowhere in them do we see, for example, Mozi's urgent call for the conservation of resources. On the other hand, they embrace Ruist concepts, most prominently the innate feeling of loyalty and concern that the Mengzi claims mourners have for their deceased relatives. The Lüshi chunqiu justifies its arguments by pointing to changing social realities, most notably an uncontrollable epidemic of grave robbery. Other features of style of disputation in the Lüshi chunqiu can be traced to the text7s attempts to blend together harmoniously what were originally conflicting points of view. None of the sources in the debate provides much insight into ancient conceptions of death and the afterlife. The elaborate architecture and rich furnishings of tombs excavated in the last several decades are not so much a contradiction of arguments in favor of moderation as they are testimony of a system of religious belief not at all reflected in philosophical literature.

This article explores the dating of the Book of Lord Shang (Shangjunshu 商君書). Despite the importance of this text as one of major ideological products of the Warring States period (453–221 b.c.e.), it remained largely ignored in mainstream Western Sinology, in part because of the confusion about the dates of its composition. The article analyzes different criteria employed by earlier scholars to ascertain the dates of individual chapters of the Book of Lord Shang and investigates the relative weight of each of these criteria. This results in a methodologically transparent discussion, which not only advances our understanding of the complex textual history of the Book of Lord Shang but also makes a step toward establishment of a commonly acceptable set of dating determinants which may be employed in investigating the dates of other pre-imperial (i.e. pre-221 b.c.e.) texts.

The study of the economic views of the eminent Han statesman and thinker Sang Hung-yang (152-80 B.C.) permits various approaches. One tendency has been to examine his ideas within the context of the general history of economic thought. T'ang Ch'ing-tseng, for instance, has attempted to find modern European parallels in his analysis of the Yen t'ieh lun (especially those theories attributed to Sang). Later attempts, however, which examine Sang's economic ideas in the context of the history of Chinese economic thought itself seem more fruitful. For example, V. M. Stein has convincingly established the connection between the Kuan-tzu and Sang's views in the Yen t'ieh lun. Stein concluded first that Sang was “a Legalist of a new formation” who “approved of any source of income,” even of the kind of “profiteering” which was later endemic to the society of Peter the Great of Russia; and, second, that he was a practical financier, who borrowed the theoretical basis for his measures to regulate the economy from the Kuan-tzu, but disregarded the “deep-laid ethical basis” of this work.

The towering earthen mound standing at the center of the First Emperor of Qin, Qin Shihuangdi's (259–210 b.c.e.) Lishan necropolis at present-day Lintong in Xi'an, Shaanxi province was arguably the single greatest burial marker in ancient China. For centuries, this gigantic unopened monument has sparked curiosity and aroused interest among people regarding its nature. Without physically damaging the target, in 2001–2003 Chinese archaeologists used a new geophysical remote sensor to scan the surface of the mound, digitally probed into its inner structure, and detected a nine-stepped wall that bounds an aboveground burial shaft stretching down deep into the ground. This novel structure begs the following questions: what are the basic elements of this tomb mound, how do they work together within a coherent plan, and why was it made?

Based on previous scholarship, this article conducts a more thorough analysis of the tomb mound and compares it with the excavated Eastern Zhou royal tombs of the Qin, Wei, Zhao, Qi, Chu, Han, Yan, and Zhongshan states. The results demonstrate that rather than following a single model of a single state, the Lishan tomb mound incorporated almost all the major features of its Eastern Zhou predecessors, including but not limited to the external tumulus, the internal stepped wall or terrace, simulated galleries, and the freestanding ritual halls. This article argues that by creatively incorporating all the provincial ingredients into one imperial unity, the complex tomb mound unified multiple funerary practices of China. What's more, the tomb mound, most likely constructed after Qin's political unification of China in 221 b.c.e., perfectly embodies the new notion of empire and the political ambition of the First Emperor who strove throughout his life for becoming the “first” in Chinese history by merging all the past traditions.