1. The archaic form of the verb occurs, to my knowledge, only in the inscriptions on the Te 德 ting and kuei and the Shu. kuei, vessels dating from the reign of Ch'eng-wang, when the form must be viewed as “archaizing” rather than “archaic.” However, the archaic form seems not to be attested to in Shang oracle-bone or bronze inscriptions, where only the abbreviated version appears. Nevertheless, the many analogous oracle-bone characters involving similarly shaped “vessels” (Kunio, Shima, Inkyō bokuji sorui, Tokyo:1967, pp. 385–391Google Scholar) with sacrificial connotations suggest that the “overflowing vessel” of the archaic form of originally signified the archetypal occasion for unlimited generosity--that of pouring libations in sacrifice.

One might note here that the customary reading of as hsi, following, no doubt, the later editings of the Shu-ching, etc., is unjustified on the basis of Chou bronze inscriptions. Hsi occurs, to my knowledge, in only one inscription, the mid-seventh century Tseng-po Yu? fu, 1.4, where, however, it must mean “tin” rather than “to give.” In the late Eastern Chou period, as evidenced by the Chung-shan-wang Ts'oting, 1.53, appears with the cowry radical, indicating that tz-u rather than hsi is its proper reading. The Chung-shan inscriptions also provide instances of meaning “easy” (ting, 1.33) and “to change” (fang-hu, 1.17 and round hu, 1.14; the latter is quite interestingly written with both “water” and “fire” elements).

2. With only one exception which I have noted among Western Chou inscriptions: Yuting, 1.5–6, ( written with an “eye” occurs sporadically in Chou inscriptions, still meaning “to give,” except that on the Mao-kung ting, 1.22, , it must mean either “changeable” or “easy,” “to be taken lightly”).

3. It is worth stressing here that the recipients of the royal charges documented in Late Western Chou appointment inscriptions were not the “feudal vassals” or “feudal lords” , that is, the lords of the outer domains such as Lu, Ch'i, or Yen, but minor gentry living on relatively small estates within the Royal Domain, mainly in the area of the Wei River valley capitals in Shensi and the eastern capital of Ch'eng-chou near present-day Lo-yang. The civil and military duties with which they were charged surely did not extend beyond the fringes of the Royal Domain. To insist otherwise (Creel, Herrlee, The Origins of Statecraft in China, Volume One, The Western Chou Empire, Chicago: 1970Google Scholar) or to imply otherwise (Michio, Matsumaru, ed., Sei Shu to sono kokka [Bronze Culture and the Western Chou State], Tokyo: 1980Google Scholar) is to create a distorted view of the Western Chou polity and the extent of the powers of its “centralized government.” On the other hand, the Royal Domain during the Western Chou was very large, extending all along the Wei River and the Yellow River eastward to the state of Lu and as far westward, southward, and southeastward as the king cared to exert his authority. It was undoubtedly the most densely populated, intensively cultivated, richest, and most intellectually, militarily, artistically, and technologically advanced area of the kingdom, admired and emulated by the outer domains, which must have seemed truly provincial in contrast. The trusted officials and functionaries who received the king's charges and cast the bronze vessels which document them constituted the incipient bureaucracy created to help the king govern this Domain. Although this incipient bureaucracy must surely have been imitated to a certain extent in the outer domains, it is important to recognize that, with one possible exception (the Pu Ch'ikuei), no bronze inscriptions, or even bronze vessels, can be attributed to these outer states during the latter half of the Western Chou period.

4. The character here translated as “neglect” or “disregard” is (), a character which is used as fa in 1.3 of the Chung-shan fang-hu. Senolars have recognized that in many Western Chou inscriptions in which it appears in the “Do not neglect my charge” admonitions by the king, it must mean not fa but fei, that is, something like the opposite of fa (Fa-kao, Chou, ed., Chin-wenku-lin [hereafter CWKL], Hong Kong:1974,ch. 10, #1297Google Scholar). To my knowledge, the character appears in its “positive” sense only once in Western Chou inscriptions--the Ta Yü ting, 1.5. The same character appears in its “negative” sense in 1.18 of this inscription. The etymology of this character thus remains something of a curiosity.

The character here translated as “fail” is (), equated with chui but always written simply as “pig.” However, the one occurrence of thus far attested in a Western Chou inscription (Hu kuei, 1.3) does not seem to possess any negative connotation. Therefore, the simple equation of with may not be quite exact for the Chou period. Both and continue to be used as “failure” terms in Eastern Chou inscriptions, each occurring, for instance, on the mid-sixth century Shu I. chung, 1.6 and 1.47.

It is interesting, however, that in the one Western Chou inscription which refers to the Yin loss of its Mandate, the Ta Yü ting, 1.5, the verb used is , a neutral, non-judgmental term meaning merely “to hand over,” “to pass along,” or “to proceed to” (see Hsiao-ch'en Tz'ukuei, 1.3 or Wu Huiting, 1.2). To equate this verb with , as Kuo Mo-jo and others have done may actually violate an important piece of evidence concerning Early Western Chou attitudes toward their Shang predecessors.

5. The emphasis on the duties and obligations imposed on the recipient of a charge or command is expressed in the imagery of the character itself for ling: the kneeling figure is clearly that of the recipient not the giver of the charge. The addition of the “mouth” element (the disembodied voice of command) begins in inscriptions towards the end of the reign of Mu-wang, creating the character ming () without altering the meaning or rendering obsolete the earlier form, which continued to be used.

One might note here that ling is never used as an adjective in Chou inscriptions and that its frequent occurrence in the Shin-ching with the meaning of “good,” “excellent,” “admirable,” etc., must result from the editing which at some later date substituted ling for ling (an adjective occurring in a number of variations in Chou inscriptions down to the end of the sixth century but subsequently obsolete). Takayama Setsua's attempt to prove that also could mean “good” () during the Western Chou rests on his reading of “” in 1.17 of the Shih Ts'ai ting. In fact the character in question is not , nor can it be convincingly equated with any other known character and thus must remain for the present unidentifiable. Takayama's essay (“Sei Shū kokka no okeru ‘Ten-mei’, no kino,” in Matsumaru, op. cit., pp. 325-389), esepcially those portions concerned with his views on the connotations of ming during the Western Chou (pp. 344-359) should be treated very cautiously.

6. Fifty strings as a reward for military prowess on the Wu-kuei, where the recipient also is granted a total of one hundred fields at two different places, presumably located in the vicinity of the eastern capital of Ch'eng-chou, where the king makes the award.

7. For a useful discussion of the various types of gifts and conferrals in Shang and Chou bronze inscriptions, see Yin-wai, Wong (Huang Jan-wei), Yin Chou ch'ing-t'ung-ch'i shang-tz'u ming-wen yen-chiu, Hong Kong: 1978, pp. 162–213Google Scholar (based, however, on a corpus which does not include many of the inscribed bronzes published since 1972).

Another item not mentioned in this list of conferrals, nor included in Huang Jan-wei's text, but constituting a kind of “salary,” is the character ch'uan (?) , which occurs in some eight Western Chou inscriptions in the forumla; so many “(ranging from five to thirty lüeh). In connection with its occurrence on the Mao-kung ting, 1.26, Professor D. Nivison has translated the formula as ”You may exact fines up to 30 lüeh.“Aside from the fact that thirty lüeh may have been a rather insignificant fine (the wrongdoer on the Ch'enyi is threatened with a fine of three hundred lüeh) and that the character for ”fine“() is well known in inscriptions, it is interesting to observe that, while in four inscriptions (including the Mao-kung ting) the formula in question follows the charge but precedes the ”gifts,“in the other four inscriptions it follows both the charge and the other ”gifts." In this position it could only be interpreted as part of the gifts, not an additional charge. I believe that it was a kind of salary or recompense drawn out of the fund of fines exacted from wrongdoers, although how frequently it could be drawn by the appointee remains uncertain.

8. It has not been possible to demonstrate any relationship between the number and types of items conferred as official insignia and the importance of the office or duties being assigned. It does seem that when the king speaks of “continuing” or “renewing” the previous king's charge to an official, the items conferred may be relatively few in number (e.g., Chienkuei, Shih Yüankuei, Shanting, etc.), suggesting that an official already in possession of the appropriate accouterments of his office would not be given the same items a second time, even though it was necessary for his charge to be reconfirmed by the new king.

9. Fu-shih Fankuei. Like most other appointment inscriptions, this inscription also demonstrates the incipient “color consciousness” in connection with court garments and jade pendants that ultimately eventuated in the color symbolism associated with bureaucratic ranks in imperial China. In Western Chou, court robes are usually described as black with embroidered borders, and slippers as scarlet, while kneepads (or perhaps a leather apron long enough to cover or shield the knees) may be black or scarlet, the latter color being the more frequent and perhaps the more prestigious. Jade pendants may be vermillion, white or buff-colored, dark-colored, or onion-green, in that order of frequency. This may or may not be the order of rarity or desirability, although cinnabar-colored jade is by no means so common as the other three colors among present-day collections of ancient jades. The coloristic descriptiveness of the official garb of the king, s appointees imparts a visual dimension to the Western Chou scene which does not survive in the archaeological record. (It is interesting and quite puzzling that excavated burials, from which one might hope at least to recover samples of the jade pendants, are surprisingly rare in Late Western Chou, virtually all of the attested inscribed bronze vessels having come from hoards rather than from graves.)

One might further note here that H. Creel (op.cit., p, 436), inadvisedly following the lead of Kuo Mo-jo, has presented a seriously distorted interpretation of the inscription on the Fu-shih Fan kuei, under the misapprehension that both sets of items were conferred during the same ceremony, with the king suddenly “changing his mind” and disregarding the initial brevet. This misinterpretation stems partly from Kuo Mo-jo's misreading of the at the end of 1.4 as a separate character rather than as part of the preceding character for “banner,” and from the unwarranted reading of the which is being increased as “gifts” rather than as “charge.” Concerning the latter, which Creel (ibid., note 55) seems to think is quite frequent in bronze inscriptions, I have in actuality noted only five instances in which ling or ming is followed by objects conferred (see also Takayama, op. cit., pp. 347-348). These occurrences are too rare to justify an alternate reading of ling as "to give." Of these five inscriptions, two (Hsienkuei and Tuankuei) both emanate from the principality of Pi and manifest other idiosyncracies in their phraseology. Of the two archaeologically attested inscriptions (Chikuei and Ch'ukuei), in the former, the phraseology is obviously garbled (something which is rare but not unknown among genuine inscriptions), while in the latter, the single verb is followed by a double object—gifts and Charge. In the fifth inscription, the K'ang ting, is repeated as the verb for both the charge and the gifts, the second occurrence appearing as a simple error on the part of the scribe.

10. An appointee receives his father's or grandfathers banner or garments on the Ta Yü ting, Shan ting, Shin Tuiting, #1, etc. It is quite interesting to note that when, on the Ta Yü ting, Yü is given his grandfather Nan-kung's banner, the king specifically says: “Use it for hunting”(). The king is, on the one hand, “decommissioning” the grandfathers banner, and, on the other hand, absolving Yü of the necessity of reestablishing his military identity under an unfamiliar emblem: the grandfather's banner will be used only during Yü's non-official leisure activities, such as hunting.

11. Bilsky, L.J., The State Religion of Ancient China, Taipei: 1975, vol. 1, p. 23Google Scholar.

12. Kaogu yu Wenwu, 1981.1:9–11Google Scholar. The “shield with five bosses” perhaps should be “armor—five pieces,” since the exact meaning of is uncertain (cf. Hsiao-ch'en Tsekuei and Shih Yenkuei).

13. The importance of a superiors “remembering”()or “not forgetting” () is indicated in a substantial number of inscriptions, such as the Tungfang-ting, #2, Tuan kuei, Ta K'oting, Shih Wangting, Yin Chiting, etc.

14. Oaths are required to be sworn on the Wei ting, #1, Sanp'an, Li Hsiu Ts'ungting, and Ch'en yi.

15. CWKL, ch. 13, #1723; Karlgren, B., Grammate Sericct Recense, Stockholm:1964Google Scholar, #468 (equated with chün ), Chün occurs in the Shih-ching only in the phrase —“the surveyor of fields.”

16. On the Liang-ci'ihsü, the phrase used is , while on the Liang-ch'i chung, the phrase occurs in an analogous position, suggesting a certain interchangeability between and in inscriptions cast by the same man. However, any intepretation of chün must also take into account that the term can likewise be used in reference to the king, particularly in such phrases as “” or “.”

17. The Chuikuei and the Shan-fu k'ohsü.