The early Chinese spindle-wheel was originally invented in conjunction with silk-technology and was linked to silk production, as pictured in some Han stone reliefs. It is concluded that the spindle-wheel is a Chinese Invention which may be dated to the early years of the Warring States period. In the course of time people realized the advantages of the spindle-wheel and it was adopted for plant fiber production.

The spindle-wheel may have been brought to Europe at the same time as silk-technology was introduced, most probably in the second half of the first millenium A.D. Only when the continuously working spinning-wheel with flyer was invented in fifteenth century Europe did a better and more efficient spinning device become available.

The following interview with Li Xueqin took place at his home in the Tsinghua University campus on June 5, 2012. In the early 1980s, I was a graduate student at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, and I first became acquainted with Li when he was on a visit to SOAS. My interview began with questions about Li's experiences travelling to the West soon after China first opened up and his contributions towards building a bridge between the Chinese and Western academic communities and his.

Based upon current knowledge of the Yin Oracle-Bone Inscriptions, this article argues that potential inscriptional records of the total lunar eclipse on June 16, 2011, which was observable in Beijing, could only be the same as those of the lunar eclipse recorded in Yingcang 885/886 and that lunar eclipse inscriptions on those two rubbings of Yingcang were records of an eclipse like the one on June 16, 2011. Both eclipses began sometime after midnight and ended shortly after sunrise. Between 1400 b.c.e. and 1148 b.c.e., only the lunar eclipse on August 14, 1166 b.c.e. could match the time and ganzhi dates of the eclipse in Yingcang 885/886. In 1998, Chang Yuzhi and I independently put forward this view. In this article, I reach the same conclusion by means of an innovative method.

The discovery in 1977 at Fuyang (Anhui province) of several mantic instruments dating from the beginning of Western Han (ca. 165 B.C.E.) marked a decisive change in modern studies of early Chinese science, divination, and religion, many of which now regard the shi 式 as the material basis for modes of thought in Warring States, Qin, and Han culture. While the examples of devices discovered to date have provided a valuable interpretative key to early Chinese schematic cosmography, the meaning of the term shi remains a source of perplexity as its connotations are imprecise and can vary from one author to the next. Whether this change is an accurate representation of ideas about the shi in pre-Han and Han is precisely the issue at stake in the present paper. The following conclusions are drawn: (1) the existence during the Han of several instruments of the shi type no longer permits the use of the term to refer to a singular and unique device, even though evidence drawn from the received texts tends to show the contrary; (2) the multiple meanings of the term shi, as well as the gradual shift between its strict sense as mantic device (shipan 式盤) and its broad sense as calendrical astrology (shizhan 式占) give rise to serious misunderstandings when it is used alone; (3) since these mantic devices are primarily offshoots of pre-Han and early Han astrographic and calendrical theories, the patterns and designs that appear on their surface (shitu 式圖) need to be considered within the larger scope of the spatial representations of calendrical time cycles, of which the excavated texts and artifacts now offer numerous examples; (4) the widespread use of the term shi-method (shifa 式法) in modern studies when referring to some mantic techniques described in the manuscripts raises the interesting question of how to delineate boundaries between the early developments in calendrical astrology and the hemerological practices in general.

This article examines the attitudes of Warring States textual witnesses to the increase in presence of and reliance on bamboo manuscripts in communicating knowledge. Based on a rereading of transmitted materials and four manuscript texts (*Wuwang Jianzuo A and B, *Baoxun, and the Zhou Wuwang you ji) from the Warring States period, I analyze how contemporaries dealt with questions about the status of (manuscript) texts, their use and transmission, their trustworthiness, and their ability to preserve knowledge. These are texts that talk about themselves. They remark upon the physicality of text and the act of writing, the problem of oral and written transmission, and the differences in the ability of memory and manuscripts to store, hide, and reveal knowledge. I argue that these different reflections reveal a change in the predominant medium of communicating knowledge towards an increased reliance on bamboo manuscripts gradually and partially replacing traditional knowledge practices.

The Qin jiandu yanjiu 秦簡牘研究 (Research on Qin strips) book series, edited by Chen Wei 陳偉, presents important findings from the “Comprehensive Arrangement and Study of the Qin Bamboo Slip Manuscripts” research project. Organized thematically into five volumes, detailed case studies on newly unearthed Qin texts address issues in institutional history, law, geography, mantic arts, and linguistics. The Qin jiandu yanjiu series supplements the Qin jiandu heji 秦簡牘合集 (Corpus of Qin documents written on bamboo and wood) and Liye Qin jiandu jiaoshi (diyi juan) 里耶秦簡牘校釋(第一卷) (Annotated transcriptions of the Liye Qin strips (volume one)) reference works, and indirectly serves as a state of the field for Qin manuscript studies.

Investigating textual parallels between pre-Qin writings such as Han Feizi and Lüshi chunqiu and Confucius's statement in Lun yu 13.18 that “a father covers up for his son and a son for his father,” this article argues that the Lun yu passage is most likely derived from the version in Lüshi chunqiu or a closely related version. This has several consequences for scholarly interpretations of the Lun yu. It serves as a reminder that the Lun yu is a heterogeneous collection of textual units drawn from sometimes unexpected sources. It also demonstrates that the Lun yu should be read not in isolation but against the widest possible background of pre-Qin and Han parallels.

In the final part, the article reviews some of the comparisons between Confucius in Lun yu 13.18 and Socrates in Plato's “Euthyphro,” cautioning against over-interpretations of the extremely terse statement attributed to Confucius. A more fruitful way of reading Lun yu 13.18, it is argued, would be to historicize the passage by contextualizing it within the social and legal history of the late Warring States and Han periods.

In his Research Note, “Shun 舜 and the Interpretation of Early Orthographical Variation,” in this issue of Early China, Jonathan Smith made several claims about the early evolution of the graph 舜, in particular suggesting that it should be identified with the graph lin 粦 that occurs in certain Western Zhou bronze inscriptions. While showing that these claims are ill-supported, I nevertheless concur in the identification with the bronze-inscriptional graph, but show that the word being written is 濬 ~ 浚 “deep, profound” and in no way connected with lin 粦.

One of the characteristic forms of the Shih Chi taken over by Pan Ku in his Han Shu is the short passage of critical appraisal appended to each chapter. Both Pan Ku and Ssu-ma Ch'ien felt free to use these passages to express their personal opinions--sometimes directly and sometimes with subtle indirection—not only on the facts presented in the preceding chapter but also on pressing issues of their own day. Students of the Han Shu refer to these passages as tsan, after the phrase with which they are introduced in that work, tsan yüeh (“In appraisal we say”). These tsan vary in length from a few lines to several pages.

One of the most highly developed of all Pan Ku's tsan is that appended to Han Shu 94, the “Memoir on the Hsiung-nu.” It is a substantial, well-written essay and at over one thousand characters in length, by far the longest in the entire Han Shu. It reveals much about Pan Ku's historical method and also provides us with the key to his attitude toward barbarian management in his own day. Without the understanding provided by the tsan, it is not possible to appreciate fully the implications of the form and organization of the “Memoir on the Hsiung-nu” itself.

For nearly a century scholars have debated the meaning of the oracle ¬bone graph shang 商 used by the Bronze Age theocracy in reference to itself and one of its settlements. Since the Zhou, the word shang has borne a political significance as the term for a ruling power group, yet there is no agreement as to the graph's meaning or why it stood as the eponym of China's first historic civilization. Following from Wang Guo-wei's 1923 contention that shang was first a place name — a claim attested to in inscriptions in the common phrase dayi shang (great settlement Shang), the present essay finds that this place was the hallowed site of the ancestral sacrifices of the Zi clan, and offers philological and artifactual evidence that the graph shang first depicted a rite performed before an ancestral image. Over the course of several centuries, the original, literal meaning of shang as the graphic depiction of the telling ritual, gao 吿, was generalized and extended to refer to the ancestral temple, the city where the temple was located, and finally to the Shang dynasty itself.

The recent attempt by Professor David S. Nivison to show that (= yu )/ yu in early Archaic Chinese functioned as a “pronominal” word encourages one to think that the language of bone inscriptions, though arcane and difficult, is, after all, manageable, and that it may be used to understand the later, more evolved language, rather than the other way around. The various arguments in his theory are both well presented and accompanied by rich and meticulous documentation from inscriptions and from pre-Classical texts.

Nivison takes the word yu as a pronominal adjective, variously rendered, according to the context, as “his,” “her,” “our,” “your,” “their,” “the,” “there,” “some,” “of it/them,” “about it,” and “in this matter.” These context-sensitive renditions are possible because yu is construed as a word whose grammatical functions, rather than its fixed meaning, are realized in these various readings. One major contribution of Nivison is that he has shown that the word yu, in certain contexts, functioned attributively. Whether it also did or did not function “pronominally” is the topic with which this paper is concerned primarily.

This essay begins by examining divination records from the Zhou dynasty (such as those from Zhouyuan and Baoshan, as well as records in traditional texts) showing that the topic of divination was invariably announced in the form of a “charge” indicating the desire of the person for whom the divination was being performed. Next, other accounts of turtle-shell divination (in the Shiji, Guo yu and Zuo zhuan) are examined to determine how the results of the divinations were interpreted. The author shows that the diviner was responsible for producing a yao 竊 or “omen-text” that was composed of three lines of four characters, the first describing the crack in the shell (i.e., the omen), followed by a couplet linking this omen to the announced topic of the divination, similar to the way in which the nature evocations of the Shijing are linked to events in the human realm. Finally, the author shows that this omentext is formally identical to the most developed form of the line statemerits of the Yijing, and proposes that from this form can be discerned the divinatory context that originally produced these line statements.