Through a detailed comparison of several great figures of the Southern Yue empire and kingdom, I highlight different types of interactions between Southern Yue and the Han imperial state. I examine the construction of elite identity in an attempt to measure how rulers of the Southern Yue viewed their own relationships to Yue culture and the people over whom they ruled. Rather than assume a simple model of sinicization, I present culture change and identity construction as complex processes contingent upon changing local conditions and international relations, especially with respect to how Southern Yue kings perceived the benefits of belonging to or resisting the Han imperial state. Moreover, I underscore instances in which individuals appropriated or implicitly accepted the values and political tools associated with local or foreign cultures, paying heed to their reasons for choosing certain values and tools over others.

This essay describes a distinct model for intellectual participation in public life promoted by the Tian kings of Qi during the Warring States Period (418–221 B.C.E.). Recent scholarship has too often assumed that categories like “Master,” “disciple,” and “school” had broadly conventional and stable meanings in early China, and that the social patterns of intellectual life ran along common and predictable lines established by these constructs. In fact, however, the sources demonstrate that all of the different categories with which intellectual life was depicted in early texts were heatedly contested and prone to volatile fluctuations in meaning and usage, as different interest groups fought to establish preferred parameters for the conduct of intellectual life. The Tian kings of Qi, in support of their bold usurpation of the Qi throne from the Lü clan, promoted a model for intellectual life radically different than the highly personal Master-disciple bond depicted in the Analects. In patronage texts like the Guanzi and Yanzi chunqiu, the Tian kings advocated that intellectuals identify with the Qi state in the abstract rather than with an individual “Master” or particular “school,” and that they should do so anonymously as thinkers, teachers, students, and writers in the service of Qi. The Jixia patronage community arose as a compromise between this advocacy position of the Tian kings and the preferences of the intellectual community at large, which generally favored the maintenance of the personal prestige of individual Masters. Jixia was founded on the basis of patronage practices that were widely current among powerful and wealthy figures of the Warring States, but Jixia itself was very atypical of such patronage communities. Unlike other client retinues, Jixia was made up exclusively of intellectuals who were lodged as clients of the Qi state rather than of an individual patron. Also, the dispensation of emoluments to individual clients was not tightly controlled at Jixia as in other patronage communities, but was “subcontracted” to the few Grand Masters who retained their own large retinues of disciples. Jixia thus combined the Tian king's desire to subordinate intellectual activity to state service while preserving to a degree the autonomous prerogatives that intellectuals had established for themselves and their own chosen leaders.

Since they were first excavated in 1983, the early Han dynasty texts discovered in Tomb M247 at Zhangjiashan have been the subject of much scholarly research. This paper focuses on the Gai Lu, the only military text excavated at this site, and one that continues to pose many problems. Although the manuscript of the Gai Lu appears to have been written at the very beginning of the Western Han dynasty, the text is highly corrupt and is likely to have gone through many recensions prior to being buried in this tomb. The antiquity of this text is entirely consistent with its status as an early example of a yin-yang military text, an important branch of strategic thought in early China which is recorded in the “Yiwen zhi” chapter of the Han shu, but which is now survives only through archaeological material. These have allowed scholars to interpret transmitted military texts in an entirely new light. The Gai Lu represents an extremely important example of such a yin-yang text, and also forms part of a major early Chinese literary genre: writings connected with the conflict between the kingdoms of Wu and Yue.

Han dynasty scholar-officials employed the classics as well as statutes and edicts in considering legal matters. The most famous exponent of this was political thinker Dong Zhongshu, whose Chunqiu jueyu is the best-known example of the phenomenon. Many scholars have argued this work influenced Chinese law in two main respects: bringing in the consideration of subjective factors in making legal decisions, and introducing the privilege of hiding a relative's crime(s). This article uses recovered Qin and early Han legal materials to demonstrate that these two things in fact grew out of earlier practice. Chunqiu jueyu marked a development in Chinese legal rhetoric but did not effect the changes commonly attributed to it.

The meaning of the lunar phase terms in bronze inscriptions is a difficult problem in Western Zhou chronology. Scholars have attempted to discover their meanings by various means, including philological and textual analysis and by dating the inscriptions to specific historical contexts and to the reigns of particular kings. But because there are a number of uncertainties about the early texts, the reigns to which bronze vessels belong, as well as the lengths of reign of the Western Zhou kings, several different interpretations of lunar phases still persist. The present article presents a method which avoids the questions of historical date and reign length, and instead investigates the possible range of meaning of each lunar phase term by means of the relational constraints imposed by the calendar dates themselves. Seven groups of materials were selected, each having two or more lunar phases and calendar dates so their separation in days could be calculated. Within each group of inscriptions arithmetic constraints then make it possible to establish the range of days to which the lunar phase term could possibly refer. The results obtained from the seven groups are all consistent: jishengba and jisiba ought to refer to the waxing and waning halves of the month, respectively. Chuji refers to certain days at the beginning of the month, probably the first occurrence of the auspicious heavenly stems (gan 干).

A recent study of David W. Pankenier has held that the twenty-two cyclical signs emerged at an early, perhaps pre-Shang, stage in intimate association with a nascent calendrical astronomy. I attempt a systematic elaboration of this conjecture, with critical recourse to the conviction that observed connections between the signs and the larger Old Chinese lexicon and graphicon are material and not incidental, as has been universally assumed. Following a brief introduction, presented first is a series of etymological and epigraphical analyses of the Di Zhi offering the view that the Branches originated as a set of lunar phase names. The subsequent and more cursory treatment of the Tian Gan, built around Pankenier's specific claims regarding the original stellar status of traditional fourth member ding 丁, provides support for an interpretation of the Stems as first naming a cycle of ten asterisms proximate to the ecliptic. It is proposed finally that employment of these two astronomical series in concert, as in composition of unitary records of phase and position of the moon, might sensibly account for the distinctive parallel-cycling operation of the sexagenary series of Shang and later eras.

At the invitation of the current Editor of Early China I have accepted to write a response to Sophia-Karin Psarras's review of my book, published in 2002, Ancient China and Its Enemies, The Rise of Nomadic Power in East Asian History (Early China 31, 2007: 227–259, published in June 2010).

As a frequent book reviewer myself and former book review editor, I do believe that reviews have an important role in academia, but it is a role sometime abused, and something needs to be said when the credibility of a book and its author is treated in a manner that, by any standard, can only be regarded as prosecutorial. A point-by-point rebuttal would be a tedious and unnecessary exercise, and therefore I shall address only a few illustrative issues.

On p. 231 I am accused of appropriating Lin Yun's language and of having taken terms from him without proper attribution (implying some kind of plagiarism). But in the passage that immediately precedes the incriminating excerpts, I say: “The standard typology of the Northern Zone's complex metal inventory, provided by Lin Yun [my emphasis] includes daggers, axes with short sockets, axes with tubular sockets, mirrors, and ‘bow shaped’ objects.” Did the reviewer miss this?