Chinese manuscripts

This is a paper about the young Lajos Ligeti being mistaken for Sir Aurel Stein in Jehol in 1930. The background is a massive media campaign directed by the Society for the Preservation of Antiquities against Stein, trying to force the government to revoke his visa and stop his fourth expedition to Western China. Ligeti, of course, had nothing to do this but he had a Hungarian passport and was very interested in manuscripts, which led local authorities to suspect him of being Stein.

A manuscript from the 2nd century BCE provides insights into the dark side of life in ancient China: 22 excerpts from case files and historical didactic texts focusing on particular judicial officials shed light on diverse crimes such as theft and extortion, treason and fornication, murder and manslaughter and on how these offences were tried. But the manuscript raises numerous questions. Quite a few of the cases described would be well suited as plot for a movie, and sometimes a reader might ask himself: Are these records related to real legal cases, or are they mere fiction?

This article partly parallels my study of “Zhou history and historiography: Introducing the Bamboo manuscript Xinian” published in T’oung Pao  2014. It advances deeper into the exploration of Xinian primary sources with a specific focus on the Annals of the state of Chu, the traces of which are observable in Xinian.

Modern observers tend to simplify the complex process of textual transmission and imagine that in a manuscript culture texts were handed down by scribes copying manuscripts in a long line of succession extending for generations. It is less commonly recognized, however, that manuscript copies were also routinely made from non-handwritten material, such as printed works or stone inscriptions. This paper looks at dated copies of stele inscriptions among the Dunhuang manuscripts, in an attempt to demonstrate the inherent difficulties in dating and establishing provenance for such copies. One of the main questions is whether the date in the colophon refers to the time when the text was carved into stone or the moment of creating the manuscript copy. The analysis reveals that there is no automatic answer to this problem, and the decision has to be made on a case-by-case basis. An additional lesson is that in many cases manuscripts are composite objects the components of which had a history of their own. The panels comprising a typical scroll often came from different locations and were written decades or more apart. It is through analyzing the interrelation of the texts and panels that we begin to uncover the complex process of the manuscript’s creation and the different layers of time and locations.

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This article explores textual, paleographic, and archeological evidence about the “Long Wall” of Qi, arguably one of the earliest long walls erected on Chinese soil. It analyzes the possible dates of the Wall’s constructions, its route, its defensive role, and its relation to military, political, economic, and administrative developments of the Warring States period (453-221 BCE). I argue that the Long Wall played a significant role in Qi’s military strategy in the fifth-fourth centuries BCE bolstering its defensive capabilities. In the long term, however, the Wall might have inadvertently hindered Qi’s southward expansion, placing it in a disadvantageous position versus its rivals.

A look at foreign elements in Dunhuang manuscripts from the 9th-10th centuries, including bookbinding format, paper, orthography and other issues. Dunhuang was a cosmopolitcan city on the Silk Road and a closer analysis of the manuscripts reveals that many of even the Chinese manuscripts were likely to have been written by non-Chinese people. This attests to the multilingual nature of contemporary communities and, from our modern point of view, to the fluidity of concepts such as literacy, ethnicity, language.

This article examines a collection of manuscripts of travel writings kept in the National Library of China. Many of the texts are copies of articles and travel accounts published in magazines, papers, or books during the first decade of the Republican period. Although the majority of texts are by Chinese authors, nine of them can be verified as translations from other languages, even though almost no information is available regarding their source texts and original authors. Identifying the sources of the translations permits a better understanding of how this group of writings ended up as a collection. More importantly, we can consider how their content and function changed when they became adopted into an entirely different environment.

Στην παρούσα δημοσίευση δε γίνεται εξαντλητική αναφορά στην κόλαση, χριστιανική και κινέζικη, παρά δίνονται ενδεικτικά παραδείγματα, στα οποία φαίνονται εξαιρετικές ομοιότητες ανάμεσα στις δύο θρησκείες και στο εννοιολογικό και στο εικονογραφικό σχήμα απόδοσης των ατομικών τιμωριών.

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 reifica-tion of fate implied an understanding of ming as an external, amoral, and determining force that limited humans without accepting inter-communication 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. Overview Early Chinese texts make us witnesses to (sometimes implicit) debates about the power, or lack thereof, that humans had over the course of

This contribution (to the collective volume New Visions of the Zhuangzi) begins by repositioning the Zhuangzi as a whole within pre-Qin thought under the impact of newly excavated materials. Moving away from the traditional classification of texts according to schools, it focuses instead on varying approaches to life issues. Centering the discussion on life situations and changes we have no control over, including the unpredictable vagaries of fate (ming 命), it outlines several typical responses. One is adaptation, finding ways to go along with what life demands, and even avail oneself of the new opportunities it brings about. Another is a turning inward, a focus on the inner self, hold-ing on to ethical and other standards and making sure one does the right thing regardless of the outcome of one’s actions.
While the former appears in several chapters of the Zhuangzi, notably in chapter 6, the latter is central to the Qiongda yishi 窮達以時 (Failure and Success Depend on Opportunity), a manuscript excavated at Guodian. However tempting it may be to characterize one approach as Daoist and the other as Confucian, they both appear within the Zhuangzi compilation together with a third approach to fate, showing the fluidity of philosophical discussion and the futility of thinking along the lines of traditional boundaries.

"The manuscript here introduced and translated, with the title Bu shu 卜書 (text on divination) provided by the editor, Li Ling, can be dated between 350 to 300 BCE and ascribed to the former state of Chu, and it has been recently published in volume 9 of the Shanghai Museum Chu manuscripts collection.
It contains the earliest known methodological treatment of turtle shell divination and crack interpretation and represents therefore a new fundamental piece of evidence in the history of Chinese divinatory practices. "

As integral part of the broader field of the study of early Chinese manuscripts, reconstruction efforts regarding bamboo and wood manuscripts from pre-imperial and early imperial China can be dated back to the first important finds of such manuscripts in the early 20th century. To explain the importance of the most recent developments and to be able to integrate these new perspectives into the frame of criteria and methods that have been developed over the past century, a review seems in order. As new stages in the development of criteria and methods were often enabled by new discoveries and the respective manuscript publications, this review will not try to draw a comprehensive picture of all research related to this topic. Instead it will highlight the most important trends and the manuscript discoveries they were based on. In conclusion it will provide a catalogue of the criteria that were applied for reconstruction until the year 2010 and point out remaining problems.

Reading Warring States manuscripts we are confronted with a number of graphs that are not only structurally different from modern characters and the small seal forms of the Shuowen jiezi but show variation even among themselves. While some of these graphs may be characters that have since disappeared, the majority of them are variants of known ones and represent words in much the same way as seen in transmitted sources. In early manuscripts we often see character structure varying within the same corpus or, at times, even within the same document. In most cases, the context provides enough information for deciphering the meaning of graphs, yet it is always a question whether we can link structural discrepancies with grammatical differences or shades of meaning. In other words, do graphic differences have any relevance to how the word is to be interpreted? Or are they inconsequential errors committed by scribes working in a hurry or perhaps possessing lower literacy skills?

This paper is a preliminary study an partial translation of a hitherto unidentified Tangut translation of a Chinese tract which consists of Emperor Tang Taizong querying his minister. An attempt is made to connect the content of the text with that of similar known texts.

Excavated bamboo or wooden manuscripts dating from the 5th to 3rd centuries BCE have now become important new sources of data for Old Chinese phonology. The ways these sources are interpreted are necessarily based on methodological assumptions for Old Chinese reconstruction. So when debated issues in the latter are involved, disparate observations about the same materials turn out to manifest differences in the methodologies themselves. The study of Old Chinese through excavated manuscripts seems to become further complicated by considerations of the nature of the 'pre-Qin' archaic script and the provenances of the manuscripts. In response to these problems, as argued in this article, it is essential to recognize that the writings from the ancient Chu and Qin regions, notwithstanding the impressive range of graphic variability reaffirm the logographic nature of the Chinese writing system. The imperial 'script-unification' of the Qin dynasty was primarily an orthographic standardization in accordance with the norms of the old ___________________________________________________________________________________ Acknowledgment I would like to thank the anonymous peer reviewers for their useful comments and suggestions.

https://hjas.org/

A recent article argued that “texts can be used as tools for enacting identities in social settings” (Reading Research Quarterly 44.4 (2009): 416). Considering the multitude of manuscripts yielded by fourth through first-centuries BCE burials, such a statement seems pertinent for early Chinese society as well. What does it say about the self-concept of an individual when his ability to write and / or read assumed a prominent role in funerary rites?
This paper analyzes evidence of literacy that may be found in Chinese textual sources (received and archaeological) and tombs by applying identity concepts developed in anthropology and the social sciences to Chinese funerary data. It not only argues that the actual ability to write is palpable through certain kinds of texts that were associated with writing paraphernalia, but that literacy in particular was a crucial aspect of the self-representation of a particular group of people, namely the shǐ 史 (“scribes”).

Yu Yue was one of the most prolific and talented scholars of the late Qing Dynasty. His corpus of works included commentary on a large number of the Confucian classics, compiled in his well-known work Qun Jing Ping Yi. Since its first printing more than a century ago, Qun Jing Ping Yi has always remained in wood-block print form only, or photocopies of its wood-block form. There is a small number of varying editions available to us today, and these different editions have differing value, in that the collation and redaction work that went into the different versions ranged from meticulous to sloppy. This paper introduces the various editions and explains their differences, both in major editing principles and in subtle textual details. This analysis draws heavily on Yu Yue's hand-written manuscripts of Qun Jing Ping Yi which, while only partial, are of enormous academic value because they can both reveal and correct textual errors that have gone undiscovered since the book’s first publishing more than one hundred years ago. (Chinese language)

北京国家图书馆与上海华东师范大学图书馆分别收藏了俞樾《群经平议》的稿本残卷，都是尚未得到应有重视的罕见版本。二单位所藏稿本内容不重复，可以互补，加起来约相当于《群经平议》三分之二。稿本与通行刻本内容大同小异，然而其中不同之处，对于校勘、整理与阅读《群经平议》则大有裨益。本文在梳理探讨各版本基本情况的基础上，进行深入比较研究。从而揭示此两个手稿本具有很高校勘与文献价值，能够纠正通行刻本《群经平议》的若干文本错误，进而有助于理清俞樾的经学思想。

Xinian繫年 is a recently published bamboo manuscript from the collection of Qinghua (Tsinghua) University. It is the lengthiest, most detailed historical text unearthed in recent decades. The text narrates major events from the history of the state of Chu 楚, its rivals, and its allies from the beginning of the Western Zhou (ca. 1046-771 BCE) period to the early fourth century BCE. In this introductory article I argue the following: first, both the language and the content of Xinian indicate that this text was based on earlier historical sources from the states of Chu and Jin 晉, in addition to sources from within the Zhou royal domain; second, the authors’ utilizations of their primary sources differ markedly from those observable in the Zuo zhuan 左傳 (with which the Xinian has many overlapping parts) and in later collections of anecdotes; and third, Xinian may represent an unknown genre of “informative history.” In addition, I explore the new perspectives that Xinian sheds on early Qin 秦 and Chu history.

This paper is the first systematic critique of the conventional chronology of the so-called earliest statements of Christian faith in China, The Messiah Sutra 序聽迷詩所經 and On One God 一神論, which are believed to have been translated into Chinese by the first Christian missionary to the country Aluoben 阿羅本 around the 640s. To achieve this, it has surveyed the early publications and re-read the alleged textual and historical clues. The paper reveals that the common arguments
accepted since the 1920s are plagued with defects and that therefore the conventional chronology does not withstand scrutiny. The significance of this paper lies in proposing to reconsider not only
the traditional dates of these two documents but the conclusions derived therefrom. Based on some clues, this paper also speculates that The Messiah Sutra and On One God might be two of the latest ancient Chinese Christian sources.

This paper compares variant characters in large-scale dictionaries from the pre-modern period with actual writing habits using a special subset of variants known as 'semantic compounds' (huiyi 會意) as a case study. The results show that despite their prominent presence in traditional dictionaries, only a fraction of such variants were in everyday use. Most of the forms recorded in dictionaries were preserved and handed down as part of the lexicographic tradition, to some extent irrespective of genuine writing habits. Going one step beyond recognising that only some of the documented forms were at any given time in common use, the analysis presented here measures the discrepancy between dictionaries and manuscripts as a percentage.

The present paper investigates three terms that were all used to refer to acts of writing in the early imperial administration: shu 書 , xie 寫 , and shu 署. Based on an analysis of their usage in administrative and legal texts, it illustrates the semantic differences of these terms, which also bear implications for our understanding of the production and use of administrative documents.

Traditional Chinese scholarship understood the principles of character formation according to the six scripts (liu shu 六書) model initially set forth in Eastern Han sources towards the end of the first century CE. Although initially these categories were not intended as etymological principles, in later times they were also used to explain the origin and early development of the script. Even some modern models of the origin of Chinese writing, which generally stem from the critique of traditional views, rely on the concept of liu shu as they try to determine the actual number of principles at play during the formative stages of the script. All of these models, however, seem to carry the assumption that writing had been created in the distant past and then creation essentially stopped. This paper is an attempt to demonstrate that character creation, that is, the development of orthographic structure, was an ongoing process that involved a number of principles beyond the traditional liu shu categories. Along the same line of thought, I am trying to draw attention to the value of interpreting character forms in terms of their medieval structure, rather than disregarding what we see in an effort to find out what an archaic structure might have been at the time the character first came into being.

《身分叙事与知识表述之间的医者之意——6-8世纪中国的书籍秩序、为医之体与医学身分的浮现》[Medicine as Ongoing Meanings between Historical Epistemology and Narratives of Identity: The Order of Books, Physicians’ Body and the Emergence of Medical Identities in 6-8th Century China], Shanghai: Shanghai Ancient Books Press, 2019, January.

This is the front matter and Introduction to my newly published book on early Zhou historiography. The study is based on the juxtaposition of recently unearthed texts (most notably the bamboo manuscript Xinian 繫年, the fully annotated translation of which is provided) and the transmitted texts (most notably Zuozhuan 左傳).
Customers in the United States, Canada, the Caribbean, East Asia, and most of Latin America who purchase the book through the Columbia University Press website (http://cup.columbia.edu/book/zhou-history-unearthed/9780231196635) can receive a 20% discount off the price of the book by using the promo code CUP20.
For customers in the United Kingdom, Europe, Africa, Middle East, South Asia, and South Africa, contact John Wiley & Sons (customer@wiley.com) to order a book and for information regarding price and shipping cost.

Heng Xian is a previously unknown text reconstructed by Chinese scholars out of a group of more than 1,200 inscribed bamboo strips purchased by the Shanghai Museum on the Hong Kong antiquities market in 1994. The strips have all been assigned an approximate date of 300 B.C.E., and Heng Xian allegedly consists of thirteen of them, but each proposed arrangement of the strips is marred by unlikely textual transitions. The most plausible hypothesis is one that Chinese scholars do not appear to take seriously: that we are missing one or more strips. The paper concludes with a discussion of the hazards of studying unprovenanced artifacts that have appeared during China's recent looting spree. I believe the time has come for scholars to ask themselves whether their work indirectly abets this destruction of knowledge.

A new account of the “Nine Provinces” (Jiu zhou九州) discovered in the Rong Cheng shi容成氏 (Mister Rong Cheng?) manuscript of Chu provenance dated to the late 4th century BC has resulted in the immediate addition of this text to the list of the key early Chinese sources describing terrestrial space. Its importance is enhanced by the general rarity of manuscripts among early Chinese terrestrial descriptions, its description of the “Nine Provinces” being the only manuscript version known to date. However, it has close affinity with a wide spectrum of transmitted texts, and is distinguished by its combining of diverse spatial concepts with the central role of draining excess waters. Its eclectism thus throws more light on transmitted versions of the “Nine Provinces” than manifests any radically new or specifically Chu traits. This conclusion is true with respect to the description proper of the “Nine Provinces” and is based on parallels with other texts. In this study I reassess this conclusion with respect to the context of this passage in the Rong Cheng shi, challenging an initial impression of its lack of any Chu flavour.
While the parallels of the new description of the “Nine Provinces” with those in transmitted texts has attracted considerable scholarly attention, its relation with other issues concerning terrestrial space in the Rong Cheng shi has not yet been studied. Before discussing the spatial issues in this manuscript, I shall first revise all the reconstructed sequences of its slips (Introduction). Then I shall focus on the especially controversial slip 31, which appears to be of primary relevance to spatial concepts (Part 1). It contains a reference to a “cosmograph”-like pattern followed by a description of managing landscape features, beginning with waterways. I shall discuss the place of this pattern in early Chinese cosmography, in particular, the link of the “policy statement” on the predominance of waters to the version of the “Nine Provinces” in the manuscript. I suggest that, from the point of view of the revealed spatial concepts, slip 31 should be placed prior to the group of slips that describe terrestrial disasters that preceded the establishment of the “Nine Provinces”. Having concluded that the predominance of waters is the distinguishing feature of the representation of terrestrial space in the manuscript, and comparison with another cosmographical manuscript of Chu provenance contemporary with the Rong Cheng shi, the Chu Silk Manuscript no.1 (ca. late 4th century BC), I suggest that this feature may be characteristic of Chu descriptions of terrestrial space. My main attention will be focussed on solving the spatial problem in the conclusion to the “Nine Provinces”, which up to now has been noted only in passing as somewhat confusing (Part 2). It provides a summary of structuring terrestrial space through waterways, and cuts the space thus mapped into southern and northern halves along the Han River. I argue that this unusual usage of the Han River as the central axis implicitely shifts the mapped area to the South, and thus conveys a Chu view of space, while explicitely respecting the spatial framework of transmitted descriptions of the “Nine Provinces”. In addition to philological analysis of the descriptions of terrestrial space, I shall apply an innovative method of investigation of them through landmarks. Landmarks found in these descriptions, including the Han River, will be explored as elements of relational mapping. Relational mapping is characteristic of traditional Chinese cartography. The earliest specimens of relational mapping of the entire imperial realm date from the twelfth century onwards. Although the majority of these maps appeared as part of commentaries on early terrestrial descriptions and are products of a continuous tradition of representing space, they are rarely taken into consideration in studies of early texts. Finally, I shall discuss a correlation between structuring terrestrial space through waterways and the concept of Yu’s personal and exhausting physical engagement in hard work (Part 3).
The description of the “Nine Provinces” with the related preceding and following slips – slips 31 and 23-15-24-25-26-27-28-29 – is provided in the ANNEX).

FROGBEAR SEMINAR (“From the Ground Up”)
“Graphic Variation, Modification and Replacement in Medieval Chinese Writing: Case Studies and Resources”
August 17, 2021

This part of the seminar aims at providing various materials concerning the topic of “variation”, drawing mainly from Dunhuang manuscripts and sometimes - for reasons of comparison – medieval epigraphical material (mainly 墓誌)
The term variation is used here in a very general sense, referring to phenomena related to the use of non-standard / variant Chinese characters, phonetic (and other) substitutions, non-standardized representations of colloquial / dialect words in the script, as well as various scribal “mistakes”
Naturally, this comprises a huge array of complex phenomena, and in the framework of this seminar only a few aspects can be covered, in order to trigger / stimulate further interest / research in this field
In the first part (introduction), several phenomena related to variation will be randomly presented, whereas the second part comprises of a small case study (a section of a manuscript)
During the limited time frame of the seminar, we will be only able to select and discuss a few aspects, based on the interest of the students

In the Russian collection of Tangut material there is a manuscript which describes a meeting between Confucius and an old sage. It is generally assumed that it is a translation of a Chinese work but attempts at identifying the source text have not been successful. The Tangut title survives on the last page and it has been translated as the Altar Record of Confucius’s Conciliation. This paper identifies a closely related Chinese text among Ming-Qing religious scriptures of secret societies and suggests a new interpretation for the Tangut title. Connecting the title and the text with Chinese religious and intellectual traditions of the Song period also enables us to date the Chinese source text to the late eleventh or early twelfth century.