The Spring and Autumn Annals [Chunqiu] is a terse, somewhat cryptic text from early China. A chronicle from the state of Lu, it consists of about 2,000 entries briefly noting events that occurred over a 244-year span (722–449 BCE) dated by year, season, sometimes the month, and occasionally the day. The types of events recorded include marriages, religious ceremonies, natural disasters, military actions, interstate meetings and covenants, diplomatic travels, deaths, and funerals. Entries are typically bare statements of fact, as can be seen in following examples:

These annals would seem to be an important but rather limited resource for reconstructing the history of the Spring and Autumn period (named for this text), especially when compared to much more expansive, detailed works such as the Zuo Tradition [Zuozhuan] or Conversations of the States [Guoyu]. Yet because Mencius thought that Confucius had compiled the Spring and Autumn Annals—a belief no longer widely held—and because it became one of the Five Classics, scholars for over two thousand years have endeavored to uncover its moral meaning, that is, the “praise and blame” manifest in subtle variations of its form and vocabulary.

Newell Ann Van Auken, a longtime student of the Spring and Autumn (her preferred title) and its commentaries, has produced the most systematic, comprehensive treatment of the text to date. With the assistance of digital tools and a linguist's attention to details, categories, and numbers, she has analyzed the Spring and Autumn from a variety of angles. After classifying the entries into forty-two different types of events, she identifies patterns in their inclusions and exclusions, their notations of dates, names, and ranks, and their formulaic vocabulary and phrasing. Through painstaking, precise tabulations, Van Auken has reconstructed the rules that guided the original chroniclers—rules that faded from memory when orthodox scholars in the Han period and thereafter were looking for sagely judgments that Confucius had encoded in the corpus through his editing. In contrast to traditional scholarship, which focused on anomalies or discrepancies, she looks for regular patterns. Indeed, she argues that this is where one can find the real meaning of the Spring and Autumn, in its portrayal of an idealized world order centered on the state of Lu and its rulers. As she notes in her introduction, and then explains in her conclusions, “the primary message of the Spring and Autumn was conveyed not by its content, but by its form” (p. 2).

The historiographical rules that Van Auken recovers can be quite nuanced. Certain types of events, by convention, could not include day notations, even if the information was available to the chronicler, while other events might be consistently or inconsistently dated, with a number of criteria influencing entries of the last type. Personal names, clan names, posthumous epithets, and titles were employed in regular patterns according to rank, gender, and home state (much more consistently in the Spring and Autumn than in the Zuo Tradition, which at some point was arranged into a commentary on the Spring and Autumn). Funerals were noted only half as often as deaths, and three distinct verbs were used to record deaths, depending on the rank of the deceased. In records of warfare, individual leaders were assigned responsibility for attacks, but defeats were ascribed to whole armies. When events involved multiple states, there was a fixed sequence of how they were listed, with three discernable tiers of states based on whether their rulers or noblemen could be specifically mentioned. Not surprisingly, the state of Lu consistently sat at the top of this hierarchy.

Van Auken demonstrates that some entries, particularly those regarding killings and flights into exile, did convey moral judgments, but these were not imposed by a later editor, as was long assumed. Rather, they were implicit in the linguistic conventions followed in the original annals. Regicides could be especially complicated in how they were recorded and who was assigned blame. She observes that Lu annalists consistently omitted references to outgoing diplomatic visits in which their own representatives were put in an inferior position as guests to other rulers, and that two specialized subordinating verbs were only employed in the 116 instances in which Lu formally received visitors, as opposed to the 104 occurrences of Lu diplomats travelling elsewhere. Again and again she marshals exact quantifiable evidence, which she cautiously and persuasively interprets. One of her key findings is that the hierarchical ordering throughout the text is consistent, despite shifts of actual political and military power among Chinese states during the two and a half centuries covered by the Spring and Autumn. The text reflects an idealized ranking, in which the state of Lu was always given priority, even when it was less powerful or influential than some of its neighbors.

Specific events and broad social hierarchies are contextualized and analyzed by comparison with other early texts such as the narratives in the Zuo Tradition and Conversations of the States, as well as discussions in the Rites Record [Liji] and Ceremonies and Rites [Yi li]. In making her assessments, Van Auken draws on the long tradition of Spring and Autumn scholarship in Chinese, along with Western studies of Chinese historiography. (It may be somewhat unusual to point out, but many of her endnotes are a pleasure to read as they survey centuries of scholarship and occasionally make comparative references to ancient Egyptian and Roman historiography.) She also corrects misunderstandings both old and new, for instance when the Zuo Tradition mistakenly claimed that the generic designation ren (人) was used to indicate some sort of blame or criticism (39), or when the pioneering sinologist George Kennedy supposed that the frequency of notices of deaths in other states was correlated with their distance from Lu (270n38).

Throughout her book, Van Auken handles large quantities of complicated data with admirable clarity and precision, with the sixteen tables and sixteen sample data sets being particularly helpful. Exceptions and anomalies are duly noted, exhaustively so, but often in the endnotes, so as not to overly complicate her presentation of patterns. It is important to observe that Van Auken is not especially concerned with the history of the Spring and Autumn period. Rather, as her title indicates, she is interested in historiography. She demonstrates that the purpose of the Spring and Autumn was not to encode esoteric, sagely judgments, nor was it an unsophisticated record of recent events. Instead, it was deliberately shaped to reflect status and hierarchy by Lu scribes following conventional rules of what could and should be recorded, in regular formulas and linguistic patterns. What she has uncovered is not the history of the era, but rather the values and priorities of the annalists. It is hard to imagine this type of textual analysis ever being done more thoroughly or accurately. To my mind, Van Auken has resolved two millennia of scholarly speculation and partial interpretations. Her Spring and Autumn Historiography is a remarkable academic achievement.