Stanisław Kuczera (May 5, 1928–July 28, 2020) was an eminent figure in Polish, Soviet, and Russian Chinese Studies, holding the position of one of leading experts in a vast number of fields (most prominently, archeology, epigraphy, and the translation of classics) over a period decades, until his last days. His life, filled with a thirst for knowledge and harsh vicissitudes, is a story that is worthy of being told and remembered.

Zhang Changshou was one of the most important archaeologists of modern China, and a founder of Western Zhou archaeology. Zhang is particularly well known as the author of a series of works that established the chronology of the Western Zhou material culture and is esteemed for his excellent scholarship also on bronzes and jade objects, characterized by a strong basis in field archaeology. Among his academic appointments are Director of the Feng-Hao Archaeological Team in 1963–1988, and Associate Director of the Institute of Archaeology (Chinese Academy of Social Sciences) in 1985–1988. Zhang was also a pioneer of Sino-American collaboration (with Harvard University) in field archaeology and was elected a Corresponding Member of the German Archaeological Institute in 1988. Zhang passed away in Beijing on January 30, 2020. This article summarizes his academic accomplishments.

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 description of the “Nine Provinces” (Jiu zhou 九州) found in the Rong Cheng shi 容成氏 (Mister Rong Cheng?, late fourth century b.c.e.) manuscript from the Shanghai Museum Bamboo Slips Collection (Shangbo cangjian 上博藏簡) is the only manuscript version of it known to date. Its discovery immediately raised the question of its relation to the cluster of descriptions on the “Nine Provinces” transmitted from the late Warring States to the early Western Han periods. There is general consensus that the manuscript description of the “Nine Provinces” has close affinity with the transmitted descriptions, as well as with a wide spectrum of transmitted early Chinese texts in general. It is distinguished by the eclectic combining of known spatial concepts, rather than manifesting any radically new or specifically Chu traits. In this study I reassess this impression with respect to the reference to the Han River in the manuscript, which up to now has been noted only in passing as an unsolved puzzle. I argue that the Han River is referred to here as the central axis that divides terrestrial space into southern and northern halves, something that implies a shifting of the mapped area to the South and thus conveys a Chu view of space. Together with philological analysis of the descriptions of terrestrial space, I apply an innovative method of investigation of these descriptions through landmarks, using as a visual aid traditional Chinese historical maps. In addition, I explore the predominance of waters as the distinguishing feature of the representation of terrestrial space in the Rong Cheng shi manuscript and demonstrate its difference from the structuring of terrestrial space proceeding from mountains to waterways to be seen in the majority of transmitted early Chinese texts.

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 looks beyond the dichotomy between silence (mo 默) and speech (yan 言) and discusses the functions of and attitudes toward silence in the Yanzi chunqiu 晏子春秋 as a case representing the variety of ideas of silence in early China. In the West, silence has been widely explored in fields such as religion and theology, linguistic studies, and communication and literary studies. The consensus has moved away from viewing silence as abstaining from speech and utterance—and therefore absence of meaning and intention, toward seeing it as a culturally dependent and significant aspect of communication. However, beyond a number of studies discussing unspoken teachings in relation to early Daoism, silence has received little attention in early China studies. This article approaches the functions of silence by pursuing questions regarding its rhetorical, emotive, political, and ethical aspects. Instead of searching for the nature of silence and asking what silence is, this article poses alternative questions: How do ancient Chinese thinkers understand the act of silence? What are the attitudes toward silence in early China? How does silence foster morality? How does silence function as performative remonstrance? How is it used for political persuasion? How does silence draw the attention of and communicate with readers and audiences? How does silence allow time for contemplation, reflection, and agreement among participants? How is silence related to various intense emotional states? These questions lead us to reflect on previous scholarship which regarded silence in early China as the most spontaneous and natural way to grasp the highest truth, which is unpresentable and inexpressible through articulated speech and artificial language. In this sense, the notion of the unspoken teaching is not only understood in opposition to speech, but also as a means to reveal the deficiency of language and the limits of speech. However, through a survey of dialogues, stories, and arguments in Yanzi chunqiu, I show that silence is explicitly marked and explained within the text, and is used actively, purposefully, and meaningfully, to persuade, inform, and motivate audiences. In other words, silence is anything but natural and spontaneous. Rather, it is intentionally adopted, carefully crafted, and publicly performed to communicate, remonstrate, criticize, reveal, and target certain ideas. That is to say, silence is as argumentative as speech and as arbitrary as language. Finally, an awareness of and sensitivity to silence provides a new perspective to engage with other early Chinese texts.

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.

This article studies the promulgation of law in Qin and Western Han China (221 b.c.e.–9 c.e.) based primarily on excavated legal and administrative texts. It shows that a new law was handed down from the emperor to the relevant offices on the day of enactment. The article argues that, to an extent, the subject matter and function of a law determined for whom it was passed and promulgated. Depending upon the location, rank, and official duties of the offices, the laws known and used could be quite different. Although it was required that documents of imperial decisions be forwarded swiftly and safely by courier at the prescribed speed, delays in forwarding such documents to distant local offices were probably common in Qin and Western Han China. Evidence indicates that district- and prefecture-level officials publicized laws that needed to be made known by the common people, by reading them aloud in local gatherings, for example, or posting them in conspicuous places. The article further argues that a law came into effect in offices on the day it arrived at local courts or on the day it was enacted in the central court, depending on the existence of related extant laws. It concludes that a new law in Qin and Western Han China was ex post facto, as it reached backwards to a past action and retroactively attached liabilities to the action at the point when it was performed.

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 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.

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.