This study identifies two textual strata in the “Zhao shijia” of the Shi ji: the “wo 我 stratum” and the “legendary stratum.” While the “wo stratum” points to the existence of Zhao local historical records, the “legendary stratum” reveals an interpretive framework that guides the chapter's presentation of the Zhao history toward the central concern and anxiety over the succession of lineage and power. The series of prophetic dreams and supernatural encounters that were emplotted in the narrative of Zhao history comprise this “legendary stratum” and point toward a key figure, King Wuling of Zhao, during whose time the Zhao state reached its pinnacle of power and prosperity. Accounts that are clearly fabrications, such as the story of the orphan of Zhao and later prophecies of the decline of the Zhao, show hidden connections to the personal experience of Sima Qian and to possible political dissent and discourses criticizing Emperor Wu of Han. In identifying such fabricated “empty writing” hidden in the chapter's framework of interpretive emplotment, this article aims to offer one way to read the Shi ji's account for the hereditary house of Zhao that follows a coherent pattern on the meta-level of historical narrative.

This article presents fresh evidence and arguments regarding the historical study of sensory experience through a focus on the mechanical treatments of bronzes and jades in ancient China. The techniques employed to polish and engrave hard bronze surfaces before the invention of iron tools that are harder than bronze remain a mystery. The article provides new insights into engraved/chiseled bronze inscriptions, which can be too easily dismissed by connoisseurs as fake. Through a focus on post-processing techniques for cast bronze objects made before 1 b.c.e. in China and exchanges of techniques between bronze producers and jade workers, I argue that some of the traces found on bronze objects that may have been left by working with abrasives such as those used in lapidary industry demonstrate that lapidary techniques and post-processing of cast bronze objects were interrelated. Investigations as to how bronze and jade producers interacted show that they aimed to improve the visual and tactile experiences for their customers or patrons. Active and frequent exchanges of ideas and techniques took place between the bronze and jade production communities. Their emphasis on visual and tactile experiences demonstrates how such industrial powers developed in ancient China and how they were sustained throughout the last two millennia b.c.e.

The Xia-Shang Zhou Chronology Project was a five-year state-sponsored project, carried out between 1995–2000, to determine an absolute chronology of the Western Zhou dynasty and approximate chronologies of the Xia and Shang dynasties. At the end of the five years, the Project issued a provisional report entitled Report on the 1996–2000 Provisional Results of the Xia-Shang Zhou Chronology Project: Brief Edition detailing its results. A promised full report was finally published in 2022: Report on the Xia-Shang Zhou Chronology Project. Although numerous discoveries in the more than twenty years between the publications of the Brief Edition and the Report have revealed that the Project's absolute chronology of the Western Zhou is fundamentally flawed, and some of the problems are acknowledged by the Report, still the Report maintains the Project's chronology without any correction. In the review, I present four of these discoveries, from four different periods of the Western Zhou, discussing their implications for the Project's chronology. I conclude with a call for some sort of authoritative statement acknowledging the errors in the report.

The scribe has been granted a special role in the creation of ancient Chinese narrative prose. Many texts seem to imply the presence of his person or written records, and scholars have often treated this feature as an indication of authorship. In this paper, I argue that another way of relating the scribe to ancient Chinese narrative prose is to see in him not an author but a witness of the events told. I will use several examples to demonstrate that the figure of the scribe stands out by its function of authenticating the narratives in which scribes takes part. Moreover, occasionally scribes appear to have been added to pre-existing “scribe-less” narratives. I will conclude my discussion by detailing how these findings shed light on the composition of individual pieces of literature and the nature of ancient Chinese narrative writing in general.

By systematically analyzing the relative relationship between complete bronze inscription dates, this study deduces the lunar phases described by the specialized terms jishengba 既生霸, jiwang 既望, and jisiba 既死霸, finding that the term chuji 初吉 is unrelated to the lunar phase. The study then reconstructs a complete chronology of Western Zhou that is highly consistent with archaeological and textual evidence. The results support the traditional notion that the Zhou calendar year began in the month containing the winter solstice, and show that the Western Zhou calendar month began with the first invisibility of the waning lunar crescent while the calendar day began at sunrise. The overall evidence indicates that King Wu 武王 led an initial campaign against the Shang in 1046 b.c.e. and defeated Zhòu 紂 in 1044 b.c.e., lending credence to the narrative of the military display at Mengjin (觀兵孟津). The derived chronology reveals a previously unknown seven-year gap between King You's 幽王 final year and King Ping's 平王 first year, thus explaining the discrepancies between Shi ji 史記 and the archaeological evidence. This study demonstrates that the Modern Text (jinben 今本) Bamboo Annals 竹書紀年 is unsuitable for use in chronological studies, and suggests that the dates of Western Zhou were already obscure in Eastern Zhou. These results provide testable hypotheses and raise new questions that can guide further research into Western Zhou archaeology, history, society, and culture.

Michael Loewe has repeatedly and as recently as 2021 looked at how Confucius appears in Han sources and has drawn attention to his lack of prominence, at least to the degree one might expect. Here, a preliminary assessment of the sources of opposition to Buddhism in one key sixth-century c.e. collection of polemics further demonstrates that adherence to mingjiao 名教 (Teaching of a Good Name) or to lijiao 禮教 (teaching on ritual) appears there as the main identifiers of opponents; rujiao, the term often later translated as “Confucianism,” is mentioned but once. While the commitment to values such as filial piety promoted by opponents of Buddhism is clear; their institutional coherence and self-awareness as a group does not seem to have been at all on a par with that of the Buddhist community. That situation did not start to shift until the Tang dynasty.

This essay, which focuses on the reigns of Emperors Xuan and Yuan in Western Han, complicates the prevailing presumption that Ban Gu identified as a Ru 儒, and valued the Ru contributions to good governance above those who were identified with other forms of expertise. By a close reading of biographies of all major Ru scholars active during the time of these two emperors as well as some later ones, this essay provides further proof in support of points registered by Michael Loewe throughout his long career.

This article proposes that oral performance could be a philosophical activity in early China. The focus is on the Huainanzi, a densely rhymed philosophical treatise compiled by Liu An in the second century b.c.e. I show that the tome contains various sound-correlated poetic forms that are intended not only to enable textual performance but also, by means of aural mimesis, to encourage the intuitive understanding of its philosophical messages. Thus scholars of ancient poetry, philosophy, or intellectual history, despite being habituated to reading silently and observing disciplinary boundaries, should be attentive to these sonic patterns in order to do justice to the poetic-cum-philosophical richness and originality of this text. More importantly, I argue that these poetic forms enable readers and audiences to experience, embody, and, above all, enact the Way through textual performance. Thanks to the sound patterns of the Huainanzi, the somatic processes of aural reading and philosophical praxis can occur simultaneously. Vocalization becomes an actionable and repeatable spiritual exercise, which facilitates the intuitive understanding and internalization of philosophical values. In other words, the perennial knowing–doing gap is heroically closed by the Huainanzi.

Yue gong qi shi 越公其事 is a recently published manuscript from the Tsinghua University collection. The manuscript provides a new version of the well-known story of King Goujian of Yue 越王句踐 (r. 496–464 b.c.e.), who turned defeat into victory and overcame Yue's formidable rival, the state of Wu 吳. My exploration of this text focuses on its two most notable aspects. First, the story about the policy of self-strengthening allegedly adopted by Goujian offers new insights into the evolution of political thought in the Warring States period. Second, the text allows deeper insight into the genre of didactic historical narratives that became prominent at a certain point of time between the Springs-and-Autumns (Chunqiu 春秋, 770–453 b.c.e.) and the Warring States (Zhanguo 戰國, 453–221 b.c.e.) periods.

Over the past few years, additional evidence has surfaced that supplements my prior authentication of the Peking University Han strips, and in particular the *Cang Jie pian 蒼頡篇 manuscript from this collection. The present article surveys this fresh evidence, including confirmation of spiraling verso lines on the archaeologically excavated Shuihudi 睡虎地 Han strips, as well as further textual parallels, both with a previously unidentified Cang Jie pian strip from Niya 尼雅, and also with newly published content from the Shuiquanzi 水泉子 *Cang Jie pian. The article also critically examines in greater detail the methodology previously employed to authenticate the Peking University Han strips. Limitations are acknowledged, both in regard to supporting negative appraisals, and in the determination of “novelty” for manuscript features. To demonstrate these issues, the article analyzes a conflict between the Peking University and Shuiquanzi Cang Jie pian manuscripts and introduces the publication of the so-called “Han board” *Cang Jie pian witness largely unknown to the field before.

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.

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 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.