This book is, as the author says in her introduction, “a systematic study of Zuo zhuan,” a “vast repertory of narratives and speeches spanning the 255 years from 722 to 468 BCE.” This text, which, in the form known to us, is tentatively dated by most to the fourth century b.c.e., is where Chinese historical writing begins. As the author also notes, this work “has been accorded a truth status that eludes many other early Chinese texts.” I would suggest that this status arises from 1) the great masses of minute and seemingly factual detail that occur throughout its narratives and 2) its freedom from the obvious anachronisms and absurdities that afflict all other early Chinese historical works, including the all-but-universally venerated Shi ji, or Records of the Historian.

The family cemetery of Zhang Anshi was the first cemetery for nobles to be discovered in which the tomb occupants, dating, and gravesite orientation was so clear to investigators. As such, the site is of enormous historical significance. This essay introduces the entire site to readers and extrapolates aspects of the Western Han mourning regulations from the evidence presented by the jade suits, carriage and horse sets, tomb figurines, shrine, and layout. The essay also assesses scholarly debates concerning the degree to which Zhang Anshi's burial conforms to standards of late Western Han, and the relationship between Emperor Xuan's burial site and Duling with the site of Zhang Anshi's own tomb, questioning the traditional beliefs about “accompanying burials.”

Qian xun 謙遜 in modern Chinese is usually translated as “modesty” in English. In this paper, I examine the arguably earliest version of it in early Chinese thought, qian 謙. I first extract its basic features from the qian hexagram 謙卦 in the Yi jing 易經 and identify very similar features in other texts, such as the Dao de jing 道德經, the Xunzi 荀子, and the Lüshi chunqiu 呂氏春秋. On the basis of this textual comparison, then, I reconstruct the idea of qian in a way that captures what underlies the relevant passages in all of the aforementioned texts. Finally, I understand the qian person to be someone who is disposed not to present himself in a better light than the other person in social interactions but to treat the other person as better by highlighting some aspect of the other person. I ultimately argue that this idea of qian was shared widely among early Chinese thinkers regardless of later historical divisions of different schools of thought.

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 paper reconsiders the dating of the Houma covenant texts in light of new findings from the Wenxian covenant texts. Dating of the Houma covenants has focused on matching certain names found in the Houma covenants to names and events in historical texts. These include the name of the sanctioning spirit invoked in the covenants, and that of the covenant lord overseeing the covenants. I argue that the sanctioning spirit is not, as is often proposed, a former lord of Jin, but a mountain spirit called Lord Yue, and, as such, has no bearing on the dating of the texts. I further argue that the use of the personal name of a Han lineage leader in the Wenxian covenants strongly supports the identification of the figure referred to as jia 嘉 in the Houma texts as the historical Zhao Jia (Zhao Huan Zi). I suggest that the mention of Zhao Jia in the recently published Chu-slips Xinian implies that Zhao Jia came to the leadership of the Zhao lineage around 442 B.C.E., well before 424 B.C.E., the date of his single-year reign reported in the Shi ji. I conclude that the Houma covenants include materials that may be linked to the Zhao Wu incident of the early fifth-century B.C.E., but that those materials in which Zhao Jia is named as the covenant lord probably date to sometime between 442 and 424 B.C.E.

Since April 1982, Professor Dr. Ulrich Unger (Ostasiatisches Seminar der Universitat Münster, 4400 Münster, Prinzipalmarkt 3811, West Germany) has been circulating a series of research notes in German under the title “Hao Ku : Sinologische Rundbriefe.” The following brief English abstracts have been prepared by Lisbeth Egerod Hubbard of the Department of Oriental Languages, University of California, Berkeley. Interested scholars may obtain copies of the German originals by writing Unger directly.

Early Chinese texts make us witnesses to debates about the power, or lack thereof, that humans had over the course of events, the outcomes of their actions, and their own lives. In the midst of these discourses on the limits of the efficacy of human agency, the notion of ming 命 took a central position.

In this article, I present a common pattern of thinking about the relationship between the person and the world in early China. I call it the reifying pattern because it consisted in thinking about ming as a hypostasized entity with object-like features. Although external and independent, ming was not endowed with human qualities such as the capacities for empathy, responsivity, and intersubjectivity. The reification of fate implied an understanding of ming as an external, amoral, and determining force that limited humans without accepting intercommunication with them, thereby causing feelings of alienation, powerlessness, and existential incompetence.

I first show that the different meanings of ming hold a sense of prevailing external reality, and hence can be connected to the overarching meaning of fate. Then, I offer an account of the process of reification of fate in early China and its consequences, theoretical and practical, through cases study of received (Mengzi 孟子) and found (Tang Yu zhi dao 唐虞之道) texts. I end with some reflections on the implications of ming as a nonpersonal and nonsubjective type of actor for both early Chinese and twenty-first-century accounts of agency.

Based on a special issue entitled “Newly Excavated Texts in the Digital Age,” volume 21.2 (June 2011) of the Newsletter of the Institute of Chinese Literature and Philosophy, Academia Sinica (Zhongyang yanjiu yuan Zhongguo wen zhe yanjiu suo tongxun 中央研究院中國文哲研究所通訊), this article reflects on the various digital resources now being developed at institutions in China, Hong Kong, Taiwan and elsewhere, looking, in turn, at topics related to the graphic form of characters, the relation between character and word, and the question of context. In addition, the article considers the web forum, a platform of research and discussion that is increasingly becoming a part of scholarly exchange.