Examining the birth and population control methods employed by a given culture reveals much about the power and politics of its religious and legal institutions; it can also yield important conclusions about the hierarchical relations between young and old and male and female. But conventional methods for controlling the size and gender composition of a family in the early phases of Chinese history have received little attention. In this essay I will focus on the ways in which one important form of population control, infant abandonment, was discussed and practiced in Han times, paying particular attention to the various rationales given for it and the arguments made against it.

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.

The “Jinhou Su bianzhong” is one of the most important archaeological discoveries in recent decades. The long inscription of 355 characters provides important information concerning various aspects of late Western Zhou history. This article begins with a preliminary account of the Jinhou Su bells, including an annotated translation of the inscription. Next, studying the identification of the Zhou king in the inscription that has already prompted lively discussions, the author shows that more concrete evidence supports a King Li dating of the inscription. Based on the relationship between Zhou and Jin documented in the “Jinhou Su bianzhong” inscription, the author finally argues that the state of Jin was becoming powerful with the decline of the Zhou king's authority in the late Western Zhou period.

The zhiyan described in the “Entrusted Words” chapter of the Zhuangzi (“Zhiyan come forth daily, and are harmonized with the heavenly divisions; through this they spread out, and thus years draw to a close”) have long aroused debate and confusion among readers, as the word zhi usually refers to a type of wine goblet. Contemporary readers cannot easily obtain clear assistance from traditional commentaries, because the mainstream of Zhuangzi scholarship has been disturbed by Guo Xiang's original notes: “This zhi is [a thing which] tips when full, rights when empty, and does not stay fixed.” The questions which arise from this note are two: (1) What sort of goblet could “tip when full, right when empty”? And (2) how would this remarkable behavior on the part of the goblet relate to the original text of the Zhuangzi?

No decorative arts in China have aroused as intense modern academic interest as the TLV mirror that was mass-produced in the Han dynasty. Scholars from different fields have strived to rival one another in identifying its obscure design since the beginning of the twentieth century. With new evidence, particularly a mirror and a wooden board unearthed in 1993 at Yinwan, it is time to settle and set aside the old disputation about identification, and to move on to the intellectual adventure of the cultural significance of the TLV mirror in Han China. This paper first considers the complex of art, game and divination. It then discusses how the TLV mirror can serve a cultural sign that demonstrates the “auspicious mentality” of the Han. It also considers how the formal variants of the TLV mirror illustrate the life of a cultural sign.

Pigs are prominent in the ceremonial and ritual iconography of the Hongshan culture, including jade pig-dragons found in high-status burials, a life-sized pig statue made of unbaked clay, and a mountain that resembles a pig. To attempt to link real pigs with the iconography, the place of actual pigs in the society is examined. Continuity of artifact types from sites 7000-3500 B.C. allows the assumption that pigs were initially important in the subsistence base. I suggest that pig iconography implies pig rituals, and that the pig rituals may have aided in the formation of an elite class. The elite are archaeologically manifested in the elaborate tombs, and their existence can also be inferred by the need for managers in creating the tombs and the artifacts within, as well as in procuring jade and possibly copper.

The archeological discoveries of the past several decades have radically expanded our knowledge of the Laozi and its context. Thus far, most research has focused on the various manuscript versions of the text itself, but there is another way in which archeological evidence has changed our knowledge of the Laozi: the discovery of several other cosmogonic texts, all dated to around the same time as the Guodian materials. While these texts share some concerns and assumptions, they also disagree and offer conflicting positions. Thus rather than assuming that anything sounding vaguely like the Laozi is saying the same thing in different words, we should be attuned to subtle differences on issues ranging from cosmogony to conceptions of action. We should also allow for the possibility that the Laozi itself incorporates diverse positions. This article analyzes one particular example, the role of “the one” (yi 一) in the Laozi. It argues that the five chapters discussing the one represent an attempt to incorporate what was originally a distinct position that took the one as the ultimate and had no concern with the interdependence of opposites. That position is expressed in the recently discovered Fanwu liuxing.

This article explores how the memory of the conquest of Shang and the rise of the first Zhou kings was transmitted during the early centuries of the Zhou dynasty, specifically as it was reflected in inscriptions on excavated bronze vessels and bells from the Western Zhou period (ca. mid-eleventh to early eighth century b.c.e.). Approaching these inscribed objects and their texts from the perspective of the theories of social memory and cultural memory reveals that commemorating the foundational past of the dynasty became part of an intentional policy of the Zhou royal house as early as the first half of the tenth century b.c.e. It demonstrates that by the mid-tenth century b.c.e., a stable narrative emphasizing Kings Wen 文 and Wu 武 as the founding fathers of the Zhou dynasty was established at the expense of King Cheng 成, whose role was gradually downplayed following the general logic of lineage organization, according to which the commemoration of the earliest common ancestors serves as the foundation of corporate integrity in a network of patrilineally related families. It shows that most of the men who included such commemorations in inscriptions indeed belonged to the royal patrilineal network, wherein they occupied the highest positions. It further exemplifies that the royal house cultivated the memory of the first kings using various media, including rituals, utensils, royal speeches, and inscriptions. From the analysis of such inscriptions, we can infer that that the foundational memory of the Zhou dynasty was usually reactivated in the context of political negotiations, some of which included addressing lineage outsiders. Finally, it shows that both the royal house and other metropolitan lineages modified the foundational narrative according to their current needs. This article thus contributes both to tracing the roots of the early Chinese historiographic tradition and to understanding memory production in a society as an ongoing process of negotiations and adaptations.

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.

The graph used to write the name of the mythical emperor Shun 舜 in received texts is a puzzling one. It is not obvious that any component in the graph, as it appears today, is semantically motivated, nor is there any element well suited to representing the name Shun phonetically. Texts like the Shuowen jiezi 說文解字 preserve an alternate writing of the name under the rubric “guwen 古文,” but this too is hard to analyze in terms of the semantic and phonological motivation of the graph components. Without a clear understanding of why the name Shun is written the way it is, a reliable reconstruction of its Old Chinese pronunciation is difficult, and many of the graphic and phonological associations with “Shun” and related words made by early Chinese script, texts, and commentaries would be opaque.

A graph that is clearly writing the name Shun, seen for the first time in two of the Warring States-period manuscripts from Guodian 郭店, partially resolved these difficulties, and in particular the question of the phonological spelling of the name. This in turn allows a series of interesting textual problems to be resolved. This article presents a selection of these, and discusses their implications for the history of the Chinese script and for textual transmission.

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.

With the publication of Madman of Chu: A Myth of Loyalty and Dissent in 1980, Laurence Schneider established the view that the controversy over Qu Yuan between various erudites during the Han dynasty was a dispute between adherents and opponents about the question of what the Chu minister and poet stood for. The present study challenges this view by demonstrating that, aside from the so-called biographies by Sima Qian and Liu Xiang, all other contributions to the debate represent readings of the Li sao. Once this is understood, each contribution to the debate can not only be seen in its own light but it can also be examined in its relation to the section and sentence commentary by Wang Yi written in the second century C.E. The understanding of the controversy as a discourse of rather varied interpretations of the Li sao enables us to regard the Chuci zhangju by Wang Yi as a commentary that stood at the end of this controversy that lasted more than three centuries. It also enables us to see that the controversy rested on a particular set of premises, especially the question of the literary status of the Li sao and its author. The final thesis resulting from the present study is that the main reason for the lasting influence of Wang Yi's commentary together with the fact that it remained unchallenged until the twelfth century is that it was built on a sound and varied exegetical foundation, namely the controversy on the Li sao during the Han.

The first part of this article examines the contributions to the controversy by Jia Yi (201–165), Liu An (?178–122), Sima Qian (145–?86), Liu Xiang (79–8), Yang Xiong (53 B.C.E-18 C.E.), Liang Song (?–83 C.E.) and Ban Gu (32–92) in chronological order. The second part juxtaposes their works with the commentary of Wang Yi in order to understand how the Eastern Han commentator employed the contributions of his predecessors and how he reacted to them.

Ever since Hayden White declared that as a literary artifact the historical text is indistinguishable from fiction, the study of historiography has ceased to be the prerogative of historians. It is thus no accident that we owe some of the finest recent works on the Zuo zhuan, China's oldest narrative history, not to historians but to scholars of Chinese literature. In her splendid book on The Readability of the Past in Early Chinese Historiography (Cambridge 2007) Li Wai-yee demonstrates just how fruitful it is to treat Chinese historiography from a literary perspective. She puts to rest the “idea that kernels of historical truth can or should be separated from the rich verbal fabric” in favor of “what is more germane to the sense of history,” namely “the conscious formulation of patterns and principles to understand the past” (Li 2007, pp. 2–3).

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 Spring and Autumn (Chūn Qiū) is a highly formally regular chronicle of apparently objective entries recorded in the state of Luˇ for the period from 722 to 479 (or 481) b.c.e. The present study is a formal analysis of the Spring and Autumn (Chūn Qiū), showing that its records were written in adherence to strict prescriptive rules governing what types of events could be recorded and the form of those records. Entries recording the same type of event were recorded using the same form, including the same degree of specificity in date notation, style of reference to individuals, as well as main verb and sentence pattern. Other variables affecting the form of records included the rank of individuals mentioned in the record and their home state. Regular diachronic changes in form may also be identified, and their presence demonstrates that the Spring and Autumn (Chūn Qiū) accrued over time and was not the product of a single author or editor. Classes of records associated with events, persons, or states deemed to be of greater importance were marked by inclusion of more detail such as names or precise dates, or use of special (honorific or euphemistic) verbs. The use of formal marking to indicate the exceptional significance of classes of records apparently extended to individual records, suggesting that the value judgment associated with the class had been applied to an individual event. While the Spring and Autumn (Chūn Qiū) contains no explicit value judgments, formal irregularities may indeed have been used to express value judgments on the events recorded in the Spring and Autumn (Chūn Qiū).

The crossbow trigger was a powerful device in early Chinese warfare that had a profound impact on military tactics. Against such a background, the word for “trigger,” namely ji, became a pregnant metaphor in ancient texts from the Warring States onwards. It refers to the correlation between a “subtle” initial state and a “dangerous” and far-reaching consequence, because the small movement of pulling the trigger may kill a person at a great distance. Borrowing insights from Hans Blumenberg's metaphorology, I offer a new theory of the original meaning of ji and argue that the trigger mechanism inspires a complex metaphorical scheme that consists of three levels of ambiguities and a web of associated images. It provides a linguistic and cognitive pattern for organizing a wide range of heterogeneous life-world situations, from the moral precariousness of human speech to the vulnerability of an outnumbered army in battle.

Through an analysis of every instance of the term qing 情 in the text, this article explores the role of this concept in the ethical thought of the second-century b.c.e. text Huainanzi. The Huainanzi authors draw on several features of the semantic range of qing in the early Han dynasty to help support their overall argument that the text provides an exhaustive and authoritative account of how to effectively govern an empire. As part of this project, I argue that the authors also use qing to articulate the meta-ethical features of the cosmos and human beings that make ideal moral action possible, as well as to explain the process of how humans can cultivate themselves to the ideal state of sagehood. Understanding the role of qing in the Huainanzi is thus essential to understanding the text's ethical content.

*Ming xun 命訓 is a text included among the Tsinghua University corpus of Warring States manuscripts and corresponds with a chapter by the same title in the Yi Zhou shu 逸周書. Although the manuscript and received text are quite similar, nevertheless there are numerous textual variants between them. This study provides examples of these variants, divided into five different categories: mis-writing or mis-copying; classifier variation; phonetic loans; graphic similarity; added or deleted text, as well as a sixth type of variant that might be termed “identical variants.” The study also provides complete translations of both the manuscript and received text.