Between 2008 and 2018 a significant number of inscriptions and manuscripts from early China were discovered or published. These sources include hundreds of new oracle bone and bronze inscriptions; more than thirty scientifically excavated literary manuscripts; thousands of private and official scientifically excavated documents; and more than seventy literary texts acquired from the antiquities market. This review article, focusing mainly on artifacts with archaeological provenance, offers a global overview of these new materials that have already renewed, or will certainly soon renew, the field of early China studies.

Received and excavated sources from early imperial China employ various terms for pieces of bamboo or wood that served as writing support. In many cases, neither the exact meanings nor diachronic differences in usage of these terms are sufficiently clear. What kinds of concrete objects the terms actually referred to in a certain period accordingly turns out to be quite an intricate question. This article focuses on the terms du 牘 and die 牒, which not only occur most frequently in the sources, but can also be considered as a complementary pair. Investigating differences in form and function that can be gathered from the way the terms are employed in both administrative documents and legal prescriptions of the Qin and Han period (including a newly published Qin ordinance) it argues that du and die were connected to two conceptually different types of manuscripts, namely single- and multi-piece manuscripts. It shows that these two types also entailed differences in how the manuscripts were kept for storage and transport, which were likewise reflected by special terminology. Finally, it proposes that the increasing use of multi-piece manuscripts instead of single-piece ones, especially since the time of Emperor Wu of Han 漢武帝 (r. 141–87 b.c.e.), probably had both pragmatic and economic reasons, which fit well into the setting of a gradually consolidating empire with an ever-growing volume of bureaucratic record keeping.

Although Wang Chong has often been categorized as a kind of fatalist, many scholars maintain that his fatalism does not include one's moral autonomy, as he argues that one's inborn moral tendencies can be changed through education. He even acknowledges that a person can live a different life from what one's ming must have dictated. But in this article, I show that even when Wang seems to claim that personal effort is important in life, he soon claims that even the abilities to make efforts or to strive to be a better person are more or less decided at birth. And even when he claims that people born with evil nature can be guided to goodness, nowhere does he suggest that to be good or evil is a matter of our choice. And if there is an occasion where one does not live up to what one's ming has predetermined, it is only because there was another ming, one that is more powerful than that of an individual, that interfered with the realization of one's original ming, not because that one's original ming has changed. In the end, I argue that even though Wang Chong may not be a fatalist in its fullest sense, since fatalism means that every event is necessitated, he comes very close to being one, as he sees that in so many instances of our lives, we are not free to act in any other way than in the way that ming has prearranged.

I would like to thank Professors Fan, Li, and Wang for what has been for me a most stimulating exchange of ideas on a problem of seminal importance in the history of early China. From these three scholars, we have seen three interpretations, radically different both from each other and also from the interpretation I presented above, of a small set of oracle-bone inscriptions. I believe that these four interpretations represent virtually every possible alternative and, by having them presented together in a forum such as this, the scholarly world should now be better able to evaluate their relative merits.

I believe it is clear from each of the above discussions that the differences in interpretation here owe more to anthropology than to paleography (although a correct paleographic interpretation of these inscriptions, and especially of H11:84, is an essential starting point). Would it have been possible for the leader of one kinship group to offer cult to the ancestors of a separate kinship group? I am grateful to Professor Fan Yuzhou for his citation of Sumerian evidence showing that such indeed has been possible in other historical situations. Nevertheless, as Professor Wang Yuxin has properly pointed out in critique of my own reference to Xiongnu sacrifices in honor of Han emperors, this type of evidence, being either temporally or culturally distinct from the society that produced these inscriptions, cannot be used to describe Shang or Zhou practice.

Discovered by farmers from an unmarked tomb in 1972 in Gansu, the Wuwei strips and tablets set forth a wealth of information about ancient Chinese drug formulary and acupuncture. The present article supplies the first English-language translation of its contents along with a brief introduction.

What did the early Chinese medical body look like before it was inhabited by the five viscera and before canonical medical rationale was framed in terms of the five agents (wuxing 五行)? This article makes the case for a body with an outwardly visible ‘form’ (xing 形) that housed invisible qi 氣 internally. The qi contained in this body was not the universal qi and all-pervasive stuff that we encounter in later medical texts. Nor can it be limited to the ‘breath’ referred to in the context of meditation techniques, since the term referred also to a moral dimension, thoughts and feelings. In the body's upper spheres, qi took on yang 陽 qualities and was associated with feelings of grief or joy; in its lower ones, it took on yin 陰 qualities and was associated with anger. Since this body was primarily a function of emotional and moral aetiologies, it is in what follows called a ‘sentimental body’, and is contrasted with the canonical ‘body ecologic’ which was most importantly a function of the seasons.

The textual material presented in this article suggests that the ‘sentimental body’ with its two yinyang spheres was an early Chinese medical body conception. From an extensive computer search that systematically compared passages on xing and qi in the Yellow Emperor's Inner Canon with texts in the early medical manuscripts from Mawangdui and Zhangjiashan, it emerged as a distinctive body. While the canonical ‘body ecologic’, framed in a pentic numerology, became prominent in medical reasoning during to the Han dynasty (206 B.C.E.–220 C.E.), the ‘sentimental body’, which alludes to yinyang cosmologies, dates to the Warring States period (475–221 B.C.E.).

The article analyses the metaphorical use of weighing body parts such as fingers, arms, or a head. Our understanding of the weighing metaphor has been much influenced by A. C. Graham's characterization of its rhetorical mechanism, followed by Griet Vankeerberghen in her description of one type of weighing (quan B). The basis of this understanding are two corrupt textual fragments in the dialectical chapters of the Mozi. Several Lü shi chunqiu chapters, however, contain a set of argumentative stories in which body parts are weighed in terms of light and heavy. These stories always argue in favor of life and health, they have a relatively consistent structure, and they may have constituted the core of a larger set of related arguments. Insight into their working can therefore enlighten our reading of other texts.

I believe that Professor Edward L. Shaughnessy's review of Professor Wang Yuxin's book XiZhou jiagu tanlun is an important essay, pointing out several problems in the study of the Zhouyuan oracle bones worthy of attention. I intend here to discuss only one of these, the question of whether there are any Shang inscriptions among the Zhouyuan oracle bones.

I should first explain that, based on my understanding, this question pertains to only a very small portion of the Zhouyuan oracle bones, actually only four pieces, all of which come from pit H11 at Fengchu in Qishan County. In a conference paper entitled “Once Again on the Western Zhou Oracle Bones” presented to the “International Chinese Paleography Conference” in Hong Kong in 1983, I already pointed out that these four pieces are H11:112, H11:82, H11:84, and H11:1, and also attempted an interpretation of them (see Li 1985).

Book reviews are too often regarded as an insignificant form of scholarly activity. Journal editors ask us to review a book in 800 words or less. Grant applications ask us to list publications but to omit book reviews. Book reviews do not count, it is rumored, in the publish-or-perish deliberations of tenure committees. This slight regard for reviews -- which is at times accompanied by a decrease in their competence and value (viz. the JAS reviewer [and presumably JAS editor] who thought that Chuanatzu and Chuang Chou were two separate philosophers) -- threatens the health of the field. I believe that good book reviews are vital, especially to our teaching. As lecturers who range over a wide range of materials and eras, we all rely on that questionable, tenuous process by which we abstract material from books in fields in which we are not specialists, and pass it on as quasi-truth. Serious book reviews introduce an essential, critical element into that process. They help keep us honest and alert. They generate the dialogue between the author and ourselves, and the author and the reviewer, upon which the evolution of historical understanding must continually depend. Such considerations are particularly important when a book is on a major topic and likely to be consulted and quoted widely by people outside the field. It is these considerations that lead me to publish here a technical addendum to a book that I have already reviewed elsewhere.

The Laozi is a well-loved and oft-translated ancient text, whose popularity with interpreters and translators seems to have hardly ebbed in over two thousand years. This is attested in part by the number of bamboo and silk manuscript versions of the text unearthed in recent years from the Warring States (475–221 b.c.e.) and Western Han (221–206 b.c.e.), such that few transmitted Chinese texts have so many corresponding manuscript versions. The Laozi's popularity and relative abundance have also made the text instrumental in shaping theoretical approaches to book formation in early Chinese manuscript culture. In particular, the Laozi has been central to the study of how books were assembled out of pre-existent, stable, coherent molecules of text, or zhang 章 (chapters). Emerging from a case study of Laozi chapter 13, in which interpretive problems of the written commentarial tradition are shown to be continuous with those in manuscript culture, this article re-examines the theory of molecular coherence in the Laozi's formation, showing ultimately that the textual and rhetorical patterns by which zhang cohere internally are created by the same forces that deposit zhang in proximity to one another. Moving from the molecular to organismic level, the article also examines the use of conjoining phrases in Peking University's Laozi manuscript to demonstrate how editors, compilers, and interpreters may sacrifice coherence at one level of organization to achieve perfection at another.

The excavation of the Qin wooden documents from Well No. 1 at Liye 里耶, Hunan province has significantly reshaped our knowledge of Qin history. This article examines a multi-slip manuscript from Liye on the Qin management of human resources in a newly conquered area, Qianling County. The manuscript is the best example of the multi-layered structure of a Qin administrative document; it also sheds new light on the difficulties the Qin encountered in resource management during the early years of unification. The manuscript shows that the responsible officials in Qianling County had failed to engage tuli 徒隸 (laborer-servants)—a major labor source in the Qin—in agricultural production, which appears to have deviated from the Qin strategy of managing human resources. To minimize the harmfulness that this deviation might cause, the Qin heavily relied upon a system of supervision and punishment. This article offers a contextualized study of the manuscript with an analysis of the related Qin excavated sources.

The Tsinghua manuscript *Ming xun 命訓 contains a compound sentence that reads: 大命殜罰少命＝身. In an earlier article, the author translated this sentence as “The great mandate for generations punishes; the minor mandates command the person,” understanding the “＝” mark to indicate that the preceding character ming 命 was to be repeated. However, scholars in China have recently noted that the “＝” mark can also indicate the repetition of characters that occur in the same context earlier in the text. This would suggest that the “＝” mark here indicates the repetition of the word fa 罰 in the preceding clause, such that the sentence should read “The great mandate punishes the world; minor mandates punish the person,” which is the reading of the received text of the Ming xun. This scribal practice has important implications for the reading of other manuscripts as well.

The Heguanzi, an eclectic, composite work arguably of the late Warring States to Han period, has long been associated with a school of thought known as Huang-Lao. Unfortunately, little was known about the school until the recent Mawangdui discovery of four ancient treatises commonly referred to as the Silk Manuscripts of Huang-Lao (Huang-Lao Boshu). This article examines the relation between the Heguanzi and Huang-Lao thought as represented in the Silk Manuscripts. The author argues that many of the chapters of the Heguanzi display key features of Huang-Lao thought, most notably a commitment to foundational naturalism and natural law that is first articulated in mature form in the Silk Manuscripts.

There are seventy-nine places in Wang Bi's Laozi zhu where the text of the Laozi transmitted over this commentary differs from quotations of it contained within the commentary. Building on the textual studies of Professor Shima Kunio, this essay demonstrates that the readings given in the commentary are supported in practically every case by a series of early quotations and texts of the Laozi, such as the Mawangdui manuscripts and the “Old Manuscripts” that form the basis of Fu Yi and Fan Yingyuan's editions. A comparison of all of these differences shows that Wang Bi's original text must have belonged to the same broad textual family as these early manuscripts, being most closely linked to the two “Old Manuscripts” and less directly related to the Mawangdui manuscripts. In most of the these cases, the textus receptus has been supplanted by the reading transmitted through the Heshang Gong commentary. Consequently, it is now necessary to replace the textus receptus of Wang Bi's Laozi with a conflated version of the two “Old Manuscripts” and, in some cases, the Mawangdui manuscripts.

This article examines a section in the Shuihudi 睡虎地 Rishu 日書 (Daybooks) entitled “Horses” (ma 馬) which describes the instructions for the performance of a ritual to propitiate a horse spirit. The text is one of the earliest transmitted ritual liturgies involving the treatment of animals. It reveals a hitherto little known aspect of the role of animals in early Chinese religion; namely, the ritual worship of tutelary animal spirits and the performance of sacrifices for the benefit of animals. Furthermore, it corroborates the existence of magico-religious rituals involving the treatment of animals, and demonstrates that cultic worship of animal spirits, criticized by some masters of philosophy, was part of the religious practices of the elite in the late Warring States and early imperial period. The article presents an annotated translation of the “Horses” section, discusses its contents and significance in relation to equine imagery documented in received sources, and examines its value as a source for the perception of animals and animal ritual in late Warring States and early imperial China.

This article aims to illustrate the usefulness of analytical approaches to early Chinese writings which center on effects of textual memory. Due to a dearth of contemporaneous descriptions, concrete practices of oral transmission, dictation, performance, and interpretation in Early China largely lie beyond the ken of present-day scholarship. But recurrence of linguistic-stylistic elements testifies to the presence of these elements in an author's memory. Memory should thus, in principle, provide a comparatively accessible perspective on textual production. To demonstrate this point, the article investigates verbal parallels to a passage from Huainanzi 淮南子 15, “Bing lüe” 兵略 (An Overview of the Military). The internal and distributional patterns as well as the qualitative properties of textual overlaps with other extant writings suggest a composition process that involved a particular type of textual memory. Parallels are fuzzy and patchy; they rarely exceed one or two clauses; they display an irregular distribution across intertexts; the similarities between them cut across linguistic and stylistic categories and recombine in unpredictable constellations. This bundle of characteristics suggests not so much systematic exploitation of trained mnemonic capacities to reproduce long stretches of text verbatim, but instead, a reliance on the aptness of linguistic-stylistic elements of various kinds to spring to mind piecemeal in particular thematic contexts. These specificities are captured well by Boris Gasparov's notion of “communicative fragments.” To invoke an Aristotelian distinction, the resulting effects are close to those of unsupervised remembering rather than the deliberate, goal-directed cognitive activity of recollecting. Looking beyond the present study, it is hoped that future investigations of intertextuality will combine aspects of close reading—as in this article—and methods of digitally enhanced distant reading. This will likely help to elucidate distinct habits of text production and to devise more refined textual typologies, which might eventually feed into more nuanced literary, historical, and philosophical interpretations.