The *Wu ze you xing tu 物則有形圖 silk manuscript was discovered inside a lacquer case in Mawangdui Tomb 3. This little-known manuscript of unusual design contains a philosophical text on the relationships between things (wu 物), forms (xing 形), names (ming 名), and speech (yan 言), and the text is arranged on the surface of the silk in the form of a densely clustered spiral within a ring inside a square. The writing on the manuscript is also accompanied by colors and shapes that represent a domed Heaven (tian 天) above a square Earth (di 地). Since it was first catalogued in 2004, just a few studies of the *Wu ze you xing tu have been published in Chinese, and the manuscript is almost entirely absent from Western scholarship. This article aims to remedy this situation by providing a detailed description of the manuscript, transcriptions and translations of its contents, a consideration of its philosophical context, and an analysis of its design. In the process, I show that this silk document functioned not just as a convenient surface or carrier for an important philosophical text, but as a material artifact in its own right, one that was designed to have a powerful impact on its viewers, readers, and users, forcing them to move their eyes and bodies in ways that reinforced its central philosophical message.

With the weakening of the Zhou royal line many began to wonder if someone qualified to replace it might not be found in another lineage. The myth of the sage king Yao ceding his kingdom to Shun, an unrelated commoner, helped to make licit the yearning for such a figure, and at times argued for meritocracy, an ideal some thinkers counterposed against the sanctity of hereditary monarchy. After the fall of the Qin that ideal and the myth remained closely associated through most of the Former Han dynasty.

Sometime in the latter half of that period, however, certain scholarly circles connected with the imperial house began to develop the doctrine that the Han Lius were in fact descended from Yao, a doctrine which became orthodoxy with the rise of Wang Mang. After the establishment of the Later Han dynasty, Guangwudi (r. 25–57) attempted to force this doctrine and a prophetic literature supporting it, called chenwei (usually translated apocrypha), on the newly rehabilitated Imperial Academy. Some of these texts were created by applying to the Spring and Autumn Annals a hermeneutic mode that many Western scholars still hold does not occur in the history of Confucian scholarship: typological allegory—in this case to show that the rise of the founder of the Han was prefigured in the Annals. Meanwhile, ideologues excluded from the academy, but favored by the emperors, were putting the image of Yao to an unprecedented use—to support an ideology wherein the right to rule was unquestionably tied to heredity regardless of merit.

This article discusses some of the political developments and the exegetical interventions that helped produce these new uses of the Yao/Shun myth.

The rule of surname exogamy, which has been an important feature of Chinese social organization down to recent times, seems to have originated with the Zhou dynasty. Its importance is symbolized in the myth of Jiang Yuan姜媚 or 姜原, the mother of Hou Ji后稷, Lord Millet, the ancestor of the Zhou kings, whose surname was Ji姬. Contrary to a view that has become popular, it is argued that Ji and Jiang could not have been the names of two originally separate peoples with different geographical origins that came together and formed an intermarrying alliance but were the names of the two leading, intermarrying, clans of a single people. After the Zhou conquest of Shang, marriage politics, which required the rulers of originally non-Chinese states to have clan names of the same kind, played an important part in gradually incorporating such states into the Zhou, Hua-Xia華夏, polity. The fact that the surnames Ji and Jiang were also found among peoples known as Rong 戎 who were not recognized as Hua-Xia but were probably also Sino-Tibetan in language seems to be consistent with traditional accounts of Zhou's northwestern origins. The words Ji and Jiang are probably etymologically related and although yang羊 “sheep” plays a phonetic role in the graphs of both the surname Jiang and the ethnic name Qiang 羌, Jiang and Qiang are two separate words and need not have anything to do with one another.

While many aspects of Shi ji authorship are either unknown or speculative, the source texts of Shi ji and Sima Qian's use of them are viable yet underexplored paths to a deeper understanding of this monumental work. From the 1920s to the present, seven scholars from China, Japan, and Taiwan have attempted to ascertain the extent of Sima Qian's textual perusals and adaptations by compiling bibliographies of Shi ji source texts. This article compiles some of their results for comparison and analysis. From this, principles are highlighted for generating a more comprehensive methodology.

The ideal of the gentleman occupies an important position in the Confucian Analects. Many elements of this ideal appear in pre-Confucian sources as fundamental images of aristocratic excellence. This article presents several of those images as they appear in Western Chou bronze inscriptions, the Shih-ching and Shu-ching. In particular, we will study the role of model behavior and model emulation as well as images of Wen Wang, noble ancestors and their virtue, te. We shall see the application of these expressions of human excellence gradually extended beyond royalty and nobility to become components of a new definition of human worth applicable to all men.

One of the medical manuscripts recovered from Tomb No. 3 at Mawangdui (dated 186 b.c.e.) states that, “When a person is born there are two things that need not to be learned: the first is to breathe and the second is to eat.” Of course it is true that all healthy newborn human beings possess the reflexes to breathe and eat. Yet, the implications of death should have been just as obvious to the ancient Chinese. Once the human brain ceases to function, there is no longer a biological need for oxygen and nourishment. Nevertheless, a large number of people in late pre-imperial and early imperial China insisted on burying food and drink with the dead. Most modern commentators take the deposition of food and drink as burial goods to be a rather trite phenomenon that warrants little reflection. To their minds both kinds of deposits were either intended to sustain the spirit of the deceased in the hereafter or simply a sacrifice to the spirit of the deceased. Yet, a closer look at the archaeological evidence suggests otherwise. By tracking the exact location of food and drink containers in late pre-imperial and early imperial tombs and by comprehensively analyzing inscriptions on such vessels in addition to finds of actual food, the article demonstrates that reality was more complicated than this simple either/or dichotomy. Some tombs indicate that the idea of continued sustenance coincided with occasional sacrifices. Moreover, this article will introduce evidence of a third kind of sacrifice that, so far, has gone unnoticed by scholarship. Such data confirms that sacrifices to spirits other than the one of the deceased sometimes were also part of funerary rituals. By paying close attention to food and drink as burial goods the article will put forth a more nuanced understanding of early Chinese burial practices and associated notions of the afterlife.

The study of the economic views of the eminent Han statesman and thinker Sang Hung-yang (152-80 B.C.) permits various approaches. One tendency has been to examine his ideas within the context of the general history of economic thought. T'ang Ch'ing-tseng, for instance, has attempted to find modern European parallels in his analysis of the Yen t'ieh lun (especially those theories attributed to Sang). Later attempts, however, which examine Sang's economic ideas in the context of the history of Chinese economic thought itself seem more fruitful. For example, V. M. Stein has convincingly established the connection between the Kuan-tzu and Sang's views in the Yen t'ieh lun. Stein concluded first that Sang was “a Legalist of a new formation” who “approved of any source of income,” even of the kind of “profiteering” which was later endemic to the society of Peter the Great of Russia; and, second, that he was a practical financier, who borrowed the theoretical basis for his measures to regulate the economy from the Kuan-tzu, but disregarded the “deep-laid ethical basis” of this work.

This article deals with facets of the political ideology of late pre-imperial and early imperial China as documented by remnants of a dozen texts belonging to an under-explored genre known in English as weft (wei 緯) writings or the “Confucian Apocrypha.” Its focus is on the transcendence of hierarchy and sovereignty, the transfer of dynastic legitimacy, and the pragmatic vehicle of “tangible” revelation. After a terminological introduction, the study turns to weft concepts of society and sovereignty as being consubstantial with the intrinsic hierarchical order of the universe, then moves on to explore how these concepts are dealt with in a cluster of weft narrative materials. Focused on a rite of jade disc immersion, the final section bridges the gap between the “mythical” sphere of weft narrative and conventional history, showing how some weft ideas actually determined political action. Weft theories contributed to the formation of the early imperial ideas of sovereignty and legitimacy and remained active throughout the early medieval era, having a lasting impact on the political sphere as well as liturgical practices intended to reenact the transcendent experience of epiphany.

This article compares several post-1950s translations of the Liezi, and examines the concept of originality, the degrees of closeness to the original text a modern translation can achieve, and how this “faithfulness” can be understood. I first discuss how the problem of the Liezi's originality has negatively influenced critics' and translators' perception of the text's significance, then compare its different translations to show their specific translational and interpretational problems. Finally, I reflect on the overarching methodological question that frames my comparisons of translations, namely, why compare? I argue that comparing translations cannot be a means to ascertain the best translation, because both concepts of originality and faithfulness are multiple in meaning rather than singularly defined. Instead of measuring translations in terms of “fidelity,” a more insightful practice would be discovering the insights different translations offer into the relationships between the original and translated texts, source and target languages, as well as questioning the construction of texts as “original source texts” through translation by recognizing the potential fluidity and multiplicity of the source text itself.

The towering earthen mound standing at the center of the First Emperor of Qin, Qin Shihuangdi's (259–210 b.c.e.) Lishan necropolis at present-day Lintong in Xi'an, Shaanxi province was arguably the single greatest burial marker in ancient China. For centuries, this gigantic unopened monument has sparked curiosity and aroused interest among people regarding its nature. Without physically damaging the target, in 2001–2003 Chinese archaeologists used a new geophysical remote sensor to scan the surface of the mound, digitally probed into its inner structure, and detected a nine-stepped wall that bounds an aboveground burial shaft stretching down deep into the ground. This novel structure begs the following questions: what are the basic elements of this tomb mound, how do they work together within a coherent plan, and why was it made?

Based on previous scholarship, this article conducts a more thorough analysis of the tomb mound and compares it with the excavated Eastern Zhou royal tombs of the Qin, Wei, Zhao, Qi, Chu, Han, Yan, and Zhongshan states. The results demonstrate that rather than following a single model of a single state, the Lishan tomb mound incorporated almost all the major features of its Eastern Zhou predecessors, including but not limited to the external tumulus, the internal stepped wall or terrace, simulated galleries, and the freestanding ritual halls. This article argues that by creatively incorporating all the provincial ingredients into one imperial unity, the complex tomb mound unified multiple funerary practices of China. What's more, the tomb mound, most likely constructed after Qin's political unification of China in 221 b.c.e., perfectly embodies the new notion of empire and the political ambition of the First Emperor who strove throughout his life for becoming the “first” in Chinese history by merging all the past traditions.

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.

This article examines the question whether aspects of Babylonian astral divination were transmitted to East Asia in the ancient period. An often-cited study by the Assyriologist Carl Bezold claimed to discern significant Mesopotamian influence on early Chinese astronomy and astrology. This study has been cited as authoritative ever since, including by Joseph Needham, although it has never been subjected to careful scrutiny. The present article examines the evidence cited in support of the claim of transmission.

(Translator's Note: This article originally appeared in Kaogu Xuebao 1981.3: 269-284, and is translated with the author's permission.)

I. The appearance of metal is a very important event in human history, marking the start of an age. From the patriarchal clan communes of the late Neolithic period to the slave society of the Bronze Age, there was a great change in the relationship between social development and production. As a result, the origin and development of metal-working is one of the important issues in archaeological research (p. 269).

Early in the Shang dynasty, China had already advanced into slave society, and its brilliant bronze culture is an outstanding phenomenon in the history of the ancient world. Shang civilization evolved from Longshan foundations, and there is ample archaeological proof of the close relationship between the two. But from what origins did Shang bronze arise? Before the Shang, was there an aeneolithic period in which copper was used? These questions have not yet been satisfactorily answered. Since 1949 the new discoveries of copper objects and of bronze objects belonging to an early period have contributed important clues to the solution of these problems.

A Qing dynasty commentator was the first to discover that line 79 of the Chuci “Tianwen”, tian shi zong heng 天式縱衡, referred to the diviner's board, or what the author calls the “cosmograph.” This instrument was a model of the cosmos used by the diviner to determine, among other things, the position of asterisms beneath the horizon. The discovery was echoed by noted scholars in the twentieth century, but no one could determine the significance of the reference. This article analyzes the quatrain in which the line appears and shows how the cosmograph is the microcosmic key to the poem's cosmic interpretation. Quite simply, the answer to the question lies among the stars.

The likelihood that the author of “Tianwen” had a cosmograph in mind when he wrote verse 79 is evidence that other lines may also reflect the existence of such devices. For example, with regard to verse 7, huan ze jiu chong 圜貝九重, in which commentators have always perceived a “nine-tiered” heaven, the author argues that what is “round” is the cosmos, and the jiu chong refers to its “manifold” dimensions. Huan ze then is the “cosmic model”, like the cosmograph, and the succeeding lines of the poem describe its components as a means of depicting the motions of the heavens.

Since the Jin Hou Su chime-bells from the cemetery of the Jin lords at Tianma-Qucun, Shanxi, became known to the scholarly world, the problem of the dates contained in its inscription has attracted the attention of scholars both in and outside of China. In this article we discuss two aspects of this problem. First, while the “thirty-third year” date of the inscription must certainly refer to King Xuan's reign, which is to say 795 B.C., the four full date notations of the inscription are incompatible with this year, but are instead compatible with the following year, 794 B.C. This article suggests two ways to reconcile this discrepancy. Second, while there can be no doubt that Jin Hou Su is Jin Xian Hou, the “Jin shijia” chapter of the Shi ji gives his dates of reign as 822 to 812 B.C., which is in turn incompatible with either 795 or 794 B.C. However, in the Shi ji's genealogy of Jin lords, the son of Xian Hou is Mu Hou and the grandson of Mu Hou is Zhao Hou, which contradicts the zhao-mu structure of the Zhou ancestral system. Therefore, we propose that the Shiji has reversed the order of Xian Hou and Mu Hou, such that Xian Hou's reign actually extended from King Xuan's thirty-third year through his forty-third year (795-785 B.C.). Not only does this simple change in the genealogy of the Jin lords resolve the problem of the dates in the Jin Hou Su bells inscription, but it also serves to explain an entire array of problems in the chronology of early China.

Oracle-bone scholars have long uniformly read the charges (i.e., the portion that mentions the event being divined) of Shang oracle-bone inscriptions as questions. Since the 1970's, many foreign oracle-bone scholars have proposed a new view that the charges are never questions, or at least are generally not questions. Whether or not the charges are actually questions is a very important question bearing not only on oracle bone studies, but also on research on ancient divination and on ancient Chinese grammar. Based on an examination of a great number of Shang oracle-bone inscriptions, the author of this essay believes that charges that can now be determined to be questions are mainly those choice-type charges in early inscriptions that contain the final particles yi and zhi, and true-or-false type charges that contain yi. Charges of the type “V bu V” (such as “rain not rain” [yu bu yu]) and “V bu,” regarded by many as choice-type questions, are actually comprised of the charge and a verification or use notation, the “bu V” being a verification and the “bu” being either a verification or a use notation (similar to the notation bu yong, “do not use”). Charges that can now be determined not to be questions are mainly in those inscriptions with complex charges, such as “this *spring the king ought not ally with Wang Cheng to attack Xia Wei, (for if he does) he will not receive divine assistance” (jin ?chun wang wu bi Wang Cheng fa Xia? Wei, fu qi shou you you, and “On ren we ought not hunt, (for if we do) it will rain” (ren wu tian, qi yu), the syntax of which shows that they cannot be questions.