The Xia-Shang Zhou Chronology Project was a five-year state-sponsored project, carried out between 1995–2000, to determine an absolute chronology of the Western Zhou dynasty and approximate chronologies of the Xia and Shang dynasties. At the end of the five years, the Project issued a provisional report entitled Report on the 1996–2000 Provisional Results of the Xia-Shang Zhou Chronology Project: Brief Edition detailing its results. A promised full report was finally published in 2022: Report on the Xia-Shang Zhou Chronology Project. Although numerous discoveries in the more than twenty years between the publications of the Brief Edition and the Report have revealed that the Project's absolute chronology of the Western Zhou is fundamentally flawed, and some of the problems are acknowledged by the Report, still the Report maintains the Project's chronology without any correction. In the review, I present four of these discoveries, from four different periods of the Western Zhou, discussing their implications for the Project's chronology. I conclude with a call for some sort of authoritative statement acknowledging the errors in the report.

This article explores how the memory of the conquest of Shang and the rise of the first Zhou kings was transmitted during the early centuries of the Zhou dynasty, specifically as it was reflected in inscriptions on excavated bronze vessels and bells from the Western Zhou period (ca. mid-eleventh to early eighth century b.c.e.). Approaching these inscribed objects and their texts from the perspective of the theories of social memory and cultural memory reveals that commemorating the foundational past of the dynasty became part of an intentional policy of the Zhou royal house as early as the first half of the tenth century b.c.e. It demonstrates that by the mid-tenth century b.c.e., a stable narrative emphasizing Kings Wen 文 and Wu 武 as the founding fathers of the Zhou dynasty was established at the expense of King Cheng 成, whose role was gradually downplayed following the general logic of lineage organization, according to which the commemoration of the earliest common ancestors serves as the foundation of corporate integrity in a network of patrilineally related families. It shows that most of the men who included such commemorations in inscriptions indeed belonged to the royal patrilineal network, wherein they occupied the highest positions. It further exemplifies that the royal house cultivated the memory of the first kings using various media, including rituals, utensils, royal speeches, and inscriptions. From the analysis of such inscriptions, we can infer that that the foundational memory of the Zhou dynasty was usually reactivated in the context of political negotiations, some of which included addressing lineage outsiders. Finally, it shows that both the royal house and other metropolitan lineages modified the foundational narrative according to their current needs. This article thus contributes both to tracing the roots of the early Chinese historiographic tradition and to understanding memory production in a society as an ongoing process of negotiations and adaptations.

While research on Warring States, Qin, and Han manuscripts is flourishing, much less is known about the use of manuscripts during the earlier stages of Chinese history, for which material evidence has not been preserved. Based on the layout features and textual anomalies in the Western Zhou bronze inscriptions, this article explores the traces of use of perishable writing supports in the process of the production of bronze inscriptions in this period and reconstructs their functions and physical qualities. Based on the surveyed evidence, the article posits that two distinct exemplar manuscripts were used in the inscription-making process: an original “master copy” that was kept aside for proofreading purposes and a secondary “blueprint” that was employed directly in the technical process of inscription-making. A single blueprint would be used consecutively by several craftsmen to produce a set of inscriptions on different types of vessels. The word count and layout of many inscriptions were already carefully planned during the process of their composition, and any study of a bronze text should therefore begin with the evaluation of its visual qualities. Moreover, this probe provides unambiguous evidence for the use of tube-lining in the inscription-making process and reconstructs the complete chaîne opératoire of bronze inscription production in the Late Western Zhou period. The article also offers insights into the level of literacy and the division of labor in bronze workshops, and touches upon the display function of bronze epigraphy during the Western Zhou period.

Several hundred inscribed bronze objects dating from Western and Eastern Zhou periods were commissioned for or by married women. Several dozen inscriptions are known whose commissioners called themselves sheng 生 (甥) of a number of lineages. In pre-Qin Chinese, the term sheng 甥 designated several categories of affinal relatives: paternal aunts’ sons, maternal uncles’ sons, wives’ brothers, sisters’ husbands, and sons of sisters or daughters. The wide geographical and chronological spread of female- or sheng-related vessels, as well as dedications to “many affinal relatives” (hungou 婚購) in bronze inscriptions point to the importance of marital ties in early Chinese society and politics.

Focusing on the inscriptions commissioned by sheng, the present article suggests that even when concluded at a considerable distance, marriages produced long-term mutual obligations for male members of the participating lineages or principalities. Affinal relationships represented social and political capital that could be converted in terms of individuals’ careers and prestige or benefits for their whole lineages/states. In sum, starting from the early Western Zhou period, marital alliances represented a substantial integrative factor in early Chinese politics. On the one hand, marital alliances helped to consolidate the radial network of Zhou states centered on the Zhou king. On the other hand, they facilitated the construction of decentralized regional and interregional inter-state networks. The latter guaranteed the stability of the Zhou political system even when it had a weak center. As a result, the Zhou networks did not fall apart following crises in the Zhou royal house, but continued to expand by the inclusion of new members.