Contra the consensus view of the Shi jing 詩經 (Classic of Odes) and Chu ci 楚辭 (Verses of Chu) as the products of two distinct literary cultures, one northern and one southern, this article argues on the basis of intertextual analysis that the Chu ci developed in direct response to the Shi jing. The foremost poem in the anthology, the “Li sao” 離騷 (Parting's Sorrow) emerges as a metadiscursive journey through various Shi jing archetypes, the goal of which is to authorize its hero to say farewell to his ruler and homeland—a possibility denied by Shi jing poetics. A final section explores the relationship between the oppositional poetics of the “Li sao” and the rest of the Chu ci. The article concludes with some reflections on the limitations of the north–south model for historians of early Chinese literature.

The silk manuscript texts of the Yijing and Comtnentatires — “Xici” “Yi-zhiyi,” “Yao,” and “Ersanzi Wen” — though excavated more than twenty years ago were published, albeit incompletely, for the first time in 1993. The physical state and the organization of these versions of the classic and commentaries were described by Edward Shaughnessy in Early China 19 (“A First Reading of the Mawangdui Yijing Manuscript”), and it is my intention in this article to begin to explore in some depth the differences between the silk manuscript Commentaries and the received text of the Xici to determine what they tell us about our understanding of the Zhou yi tradition. Even with our partial scholarly understanding of these texts it is possible to venture some preliminary judgments on the structure of the Commentaries, on the differing content of the silk manuscript version, on the enigma of the recurring phase “Zi yue” and on the date of its composition. Three main differences can be identified: discrepancies in characters, in sentences, and in chapter sequence. Nevertheless, the structure of the silk manuscript Xici and that of the received Commentaries are largely in agreement and what differences are in evidence, such as the scattering of certain parts of the received Xici in the heretofore unknown Yizhi Yi and Yao commentaries, may be explained by Qin discrimination against ru tradition following the conquest of Chu in 278 B.C. One of the principal discoveries resulting from comparison of the excavated and received texts is the presence of numerous loan graphs in the silk manuscript text, and it is through a better understanding of the function of such loans that a satisfactory explanation of the age-old enigma of “Zi yue” that occurs frequently and in the same places in both texts may be obtained.

From the outside, it would almost seem as if the authors and the editor of New Sources of Early Chinese History (hereafter, Sources) had completed their job before it was due. After all, this volume, which is no. 3 in the Early China Special Monograph Series,1 is the first Western book exclusively devoted to introducing a broad range of Chinese epigraphical materials: inscriptions in bones, turtle plastrons, and bronze as well as manuscripts written on stone tablets, wooden and bamboo strips, and silk.

In a previous article in these pages (EC 7.1981-82:2-37) I reported on the discovery in the jinben version of the Bamboo Annals of verifiable records of the planetary conjunctions of 1576 and 1059 B.C. I argued that literary and chronological evidence drawn from a variety of Zhou and Han sources indicates that the two celestial events were taken at the time to signal Heaven's conferral of legitimate right to rule on the new dynasty, first Shang and then Zhou.

If this view is correct, the discoveries not only establish the historicity, and indeed the great antiquity, of certain chronological and atronomical records in the Bamboo Annals, they also prove that a concept akin to the Zhou “Mandate of Heaven” must have existed as early as the founding of the Shang in the midsecond millennium B.C., just as implied in the Shangshu. Equally noteworthy is the finding that numerous Zhou and Han works, including those of a notoriously “soft” variety such as the apocryphal “weft” commentaries of mid-Han date, contain mythicized though recognizable accounts of the same celestial phenomena.

Twelve years after Professor Keightley published The Ancestral Landscape, which was a fascinating, elegant summary of decades of investigations of the Bronze-Age Late Shang dynasty, he has now published another wonderful book on the same era, under the title Working for His Majesty. As the title suggests, and as he recounts in a highly personal preface looking back at the origins of this work, he returns in this book to the topic of his doctoral dissertation on Shang labor (Public Work in Ancient China: A Study of Forced Labor in the Shang and Western Chou, Columbia University, 1969).

The old accepted theories concerning the direction of cultural influence between China and the Eurasian steppes during the Eastern Zhou period need to be reassessed in the light of recent archaeological discoveries. The pictorial scenes on the “Hunting Hu,” the trend toward naturalism, the long sword and scabbard slide, all credited at one time or another to northern barbarian influence, can now be shown to reflect Chinese innovations instead. A Shang priority can be recognized for the coiled feline, which was to become a leitmotif of the steppe “Animal Style” world. In the future, extreme caution is suggested when attempting to identify the ultimate cultural source for any unusual steppe or Chinese feature that seems exotic.

It Is widely assumed that archaeological material does not speak for itself but requires interpretation. Marxism provides an interpretative framework that can be useful, but not when applied dogmatically and mechanistically. Careful reading of recent archaeological work from China suggests increasing sophistication in the application of Marxism, raising the possibility of eventual convergence in archaeological thinking between Chinese and Western scholars.

Zhong Hui (a.d. 225–264) was a major, albeit neglected figure in third- century Chinese intellectual history. Author of a Laozi commentary and a treatise on the relationship between “capacity” (cat) and “nature” (xing), Zhong Hui played a significant role in the development of xuanxue (Learning of the Mysterious Dao), which came into prominence during the early Wei dynasty and dominated the Chinese intellectual scene well into the sixth century. This essay presents a reconstructed version of Zhong Hui's Laozi commentary and compares Zhong's approach with Wang Bi's. Zhong Hui's work on “capacity and nature” (caixing) captures a major debate in early xuanxue philosophy and will be scrutinized also in this discussion.

The hypothesis presented here is that in Classical Chinese syntax, nouns and noun phrases show signs of being, like verbs, capable of functioning as main predications. A definition of the noun and verb in Classical Chinese is offered, based on analysis of passages from pre-Han and Han texts, and it is argued that Classical Chinese can be more precisely understood by application of the principles of formal logic to the study of quantification, negation, conditionals, and pronominalization. This approach contrasts with approaches based on more traditional phonological, etymological, or philological methods.

The primary expertise of Noel Barnard, who died on February 14, 2016, was in bronze casting, Chu silk manuscripts, and their associated research, and he was internationally renowned for his knowledge of Chinese history and archaeology. Barnard's most important academic works included his ground-breaking Metallurgical Remains of Ancient China, with Satō Tamotsu, published in 1975, and Rubbings and Hand Copies of Bronze Inscriptions in Chinese, Japanese, European, American, and Australasian Collections 中日歐美澳紐所見所拓所摹金文彙編, with Cheong Kwong-yue. His three-volume book manuscript, Inscriptions of Chin and the San-Chin, on which he had spent almost twenty years before its completion, will be published soon. In this obituary, the author recalls his experiences, friendship, and collaboration with him.

The principal function of the ancient Chinese royal capital city was political. From the perspective of archaeology, the physical manifestation of this is primarily revealed through palace buildings and ancestral shrines. Chang’an was the capital city of the Western Han Empire. After extensive excavation and research into the sites of palatial structures and ancestral shrines of Han Dynasty Chang’an city, it is clear that the two are distinct in form. Also, comparative research into the layout of the palaces and ancestral shrines of Han Chang’an that have undergone excavation beside those palaces and shrines of the capital cities of the kingdoms of the pre-Qin era also reveals that the two architectural forms have clear differences. The difference in architectural form between palaces and ancestral shrines reflects the difference in function they performed, between rule through territorial authority and rule through kinship. From the side-by-side placement of palaces and ancestral shrines within the royal precincts of capital cities of the kingdom era (the pre-Qin period), to the separate placement of palaces and shrines in the capital cities of the imperial era (Qin-Han to Ming-Qing periods), as well as in the formation of the system centered on the royal palace, whereby the “ancestors occupy the left, while the altar of soil occupies the right,” the difference in the layout of palaces and ancestral shrines in the capital cities of the kingdom era and those of the imperial era clearly explains how the palace, which represents rule by territorial authority, and the ancestral shrine, which represents rule by kinship, wax and wane in the strength of their social function with the development of society and the change in societal configuration. Archaeological discovery and research into the architectural sites of palaces and ancestral shrines of Han Chang’an city reveals that the kingdom era of ancient Chinese society was a time for the integration of rule through kinship and rule through territorial authority, while from the Qin-Han period to the Ming-Qing era was a time of centralized imperial power, where rule by territorial authority was primary, and rule through kinship was secondary.

Textual transmission is viewed in the West typically as a destructive process that results in ever greater corruption and error in a text, and the enterprise of textual criticism in correspondingly seen as the task of restoring the damaged text to a form as close to its original as possible. In China such a negative view of the process of textual transmission does not normally obtain, and textual criticism therefore does not carry the image of being primarily a rehabilitative procedure.

An important part of the reason for the different perception of the consequences of textual transmission and of the goals of textual criticism lies with the nature of the writing systems involved. Western texts in alphabetic scripts directly reveal errors at the level below that of the word, e.g., spelling errors, grammar errors, pronunciation errors, etc., for which no interpretation is available save that of seeing them as mistakes. Orthographic errors in Chinese texts, written in logographic script, are not prone to such immediate identification as mistakes. All variants in a text written in a logographic script have the potential to be meaningful and therefore are perceived as different, but are not stigmatized automatically as wrong.