This paper calls into question a consensus belief that the term “ti”帝 (and the term “shang-ti” 上帝), as used in the Shang oracle texts, denoted a supreme deity. Such an interpretation of the term is entirely satisfactory for textual sources postdating the first century of Chou rule, but the evidence of Shang texts suggests that term ti was employed therein as a corporate term denoting deities collectively, as a generic term referring to members of the Shang pantheon individually but not by name, or as an honorific term for the father of the Shang ruler. By exploring the semantics of the term ti through Shang usage and cognate words, a speculative root meaning of “father” is proposed, the graph being a representation of the ancestral altar or of altar figures. If this theory is valid, it calls into question the extent to which proto-bureaucratic features can be ascribed to the Shang pantheon. It also suggests that the concept of supreme divinity in China was either derived from the pre-conquest religion of the Chou, centered upon the deity T'ien, or through a post-conquest universalization of the Chou religion.

The significance of the conferral of gifts recorded in Western Chou appointment inscriptions, together with some related linguistic issues, is considered in this article, with the intention of indicating the distinction between gifts as regards and gifts as insignia of office, and, in the latter case, of establishing the far greater importance to the recipient of the “charge” or appointment to the king's service, with its attendant implications of recognition and honor.

This essay seeks to argue the merits of one approach to reading the Shiji, which casts the complex text more as a product of contemporary religious beliefs than as the product of either the taishi's individual genius or desire for historical objectivity. By the religious reading, Sima Qian fulfilled some part of his filial obligations when he honored his father's dying wish to “continue our ancestors” by bringing together the tales they had gathered. Equally importantly, insofar as Sima Qian had restored to life an array of remarkable men and women from the Central States, he lived in the pious hope that these especially potent spirits among the civilized dead would choose in return to confer benefits on Sima Qian and his family as long as the Shiji continued to be read. When compared with the more standard readings, this proposed reading strikes the author not only as less anachronistic for the period,but also as more fully reflective of the whole text, including the eloquent appraisals appended to the end of each chapter in the Basic Annals, Hereditary Houses, and Biographical Traditions sections.

Over the past two decades, remarkable collections of Warring States, Qin, and Han manuscripts have been purchased on the behalf of major academic institutions in China. This article introduces one of the latest acquisitions, the Han bamboo strips donated to Peking University in January 2009. Although the Peking University Han strips offer exciting new materials that promise to significantly advance the study of early China, research on them has been encumbered by the fact that they were not archaeologically excavated. This has invited concerns not only over the manuscripts’ authenticity, but also about the role our scholarship plays in fostering a market for looted artifacts. The article reviews current debates over the authentication of purchased bamboo strips, and discusses how the Peking University Han manuscripts were authenticated in particular. A refutation is given to recent arguments that the Peking University Laozi is a forgery. A methodology is then proposed to positively authenticate purchased manuscripts, taking the Peking University Cang Jie pian as a case study and establishing its antiquity. The article concludes by addressing the professional ethics of scholars working with looted manuscripts, giving voice to the “rescue archaeology” position largely adopted in Chinese scholarship.

This paper reviews the interpretation of Chinese Neolithic burials by Chinese archaeologists, comparing their approaches to those of some processual and symbolic archaeologists of the West and also of western Marxist anthropologists. Descriptions of recent Chinese burial practices provide ethnoarchaeological comparison. The author concludes that there may have been a shift from “matrilineal” to “patrilineal” organization, but that this shift cannot be documented from archaeological data alone. Exploration of the spatial and symbolic aspects of the burials is advocated. The paper concludes with a pilot project devoted to the statistical discovery of sets of ceramic vessels used in rituals ancestral to those of the Bronze Age.

Tradition says that Yu, first ruler of the Xia Dynasty, was chosen by the “sage emperor” Shun as Shun's successor. The “Modern Text” Bamboo Annals (Jinben Zhushu jinian) dates this act of choice to the fourteenth year of Shun. (With E. L. Shaughnessy, “On the Authenticity of the Bamboo Annals,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 46 (1986), we accept this text as at least in part the text found in a royal tomb of Wei in A.D. 281.) Following D. Pankenier's argument (“Mozi and the Dates of Xia, Shang and Zhou,” Early China 9–10 [1983–85]), we date this event to 1953 B.C., the year of a dramatic five-planet conjunction. (K. Pang independently dated this conjunction to Yu's reign in his article “Extraordinary Floods in Early Chinese History and their Absolute Dates,” Journal of Hydrology 96 [1987].)

We next use K. Pang's discovery (“Extraordinary Floods”) that there was an eclipse of the sun on 16 October 1876 B.C., that exactly satisfies descriptions in the Zuo zhuan (Zhao 17) and in the Bamboo Annals for Xia, Zhong Kang fifth year, of an eclipse associated with the (post-Han Shang shu) “Punitive Expedition of Yin” (except for the day-cycle in the Annals, which we assume to be a later calculation); i.e., it occurred on the first of the ninth lunar month (Xia calendar), the sun's location at the time (188å) was in lunar lodge Fang, and the eclipse was visible in the probable Xia capital area. No other eclipse within many centuries satisfies these criteria.

Extending D. Nivison's theory (“The Dates of Western Chou,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 43 (1983)) that Western Zhou royal calendars began only after completion of mourning, i.e., two years after accession, we then assume that there were similar two-year mourning breaks between Xia royal calendars (possibly reflected in the irregular interregnums in the present Annals). For a demonstration of this chronology, see the chart on page 94.

This article reexamines the hypotheses of Guo Moruo and H.G. Creel that Shang Di was the high god of the Shang and Tian, that of the Zhou. It proposes that Shang Di was originally the spirit of the pole star. As such, it was the one celestial body which was higher than the ten suns, with whom the Shang ancestors were identified. Tian was not a high god, but quite literally, the sky. The sky was the location of the Shang Di and the other ancestral spirits, so it came to serve as a euphemism for Shang Di or, more broadly, for Shang Di and all the celestial phenomena and spirits who were under his aegis. The primary distinction between the Shang and Zhou was not that Shang Di was particular to the Shang, but that the Shang rulers identified themselves with the ten suns. Shang Di, as the pole star, was acknowledged by both Shang and Zhou as the highest of the spirits. Tian, as the sky, was understood primarily as the celestial bodies that inhabit it. As in later time, the sky was a spiritual force associated with patterns of time, which were revealed in the movements of the celestial bodies. Thus, the original tian ming (“celestial mandate” or “mandate of heaven”) was, quite literally, an astronomical sign, a “command” seen in the sky during the reign of Wen, whose son Wu founded the Zhou Dynasty.

This article considers the Interaction between technological development in agriculture and social change. In the early Han, a period of comparatively strong and centralized rule, the government encouraged and subsidized a particular type of agricultural development designed to benefit independent small-holders, thus discouraging the formation of large estates and maximizing the state's Income from taxes. Later as the power of the landed gentry grew, large ‘manorial’ estates superseded Independent small-holdings as the dominant mode of production despite government efforts to reverse this trend. The change in tenurial pattern was accompanied by marked changes in agricultural technology and production which became far more ‘rational’ and market oriented than had been possible in a small-holder economy.

This article discusses the several previously unknown Confucian texts discovered in 1993 in a Warring States tomb at Guodian, near Jingmen, Hubei Province. I believe that these works should be understood as doctrinal material deriving from a single tradition of Confucianism and datable to around 300 B.C. Of the surviving literature from the same period, they are closer to the Xunzi than to any other text, and anticipate several characteristic themes in Xunzi's philosophy. These are: the notion of human nature (xing 性),and the controversy over whether the source of morality is internar or “external”; the role of learning (xue 學)and habitual practice (xi 習) in moral development; the content and origin of ritual (li 禮), by which human beings accord with the Way; the conception of the ruler as the mind (xin 心) of the state; and the psychological utility of music (yue 樂) in inculcating proper values.

It is especially important for scholars to take note of these connections with Xunzi, in view of the emerging trend to associate the Guodian manuscripts with Zisi, the famous grandson of Confucius, whom Xunzi bitterly criticized.

The bamboo-slip medical manuscript entitled Yinshu (Pulling Book) from Zhangjiashan tomb 247, Hubei (burial dated ca. mid-second cen¬tury B.C.), includes a passage that uses the analogy of the bellows attested in received literature in Laozi V. In Yinshu the analogy is placed at the head of a macrobiotic technique. This article discusses the technique and argues that the bellows analogy most likely developed as part of the Warring States medical tradition of macrobiotic hygiene; that is, the bellows analogy in Laozi V was borrowed from medicine.

The ancient Chinese diviner's instrument known as a shih was an adjustable cosmic model. A similar object, the ‘lodge dial’, was probably a simple analogue computer for use in calendrical astronomy. Such instruments were forerunners of the armiliary sphere in China. It is possible that the phrase hsüan chi yu heng in the 5th/4th century B.C. Yao tien is a reference to some instrument related to the shih.

The meaning of Shang ritual imagery has long baffled scholars. Art historians and anthropologists have wrestled with its meaning every since 1928 when bronzes began to be excavated at Anyang, the Late Shang capital. It is now possible to explore various data to identify the religious significance of Shang ritual art From an art historical point of view, it is evident that certain standard modes of representation were designed to symbolize the theme of metamorphosis from the human to the animal spirit realm. This symbolism also helps to explain why the ubiquitous animal image in Shang art is conceived as a mask. Epigraph-ical data support the interpretation that Shang religion was based on the belief of metamorphosis as represented in art, and that the Shang king once acted as shaman-priest, chief-in-charge of invocation and a mask wearing rite. This interpretation depends on data provided by key terms in Shang bone inscriptions, such as gui 鬼, usually translated spirit ghost and others, directly related, such as the unpronounceable ff and zhu 祝. My intention is to elucidate why spirit ghosts of ancestors, gui were envisioned as anthropomorphized animal masks and how this conception is connected with the shamanic foundation of Shang religion. Although bone inscriptional data indicates that there is a dramatic shift away from exorcistic practices of shamanic origin to cult worship focused on dead royal ancestors, the combined evidence from art and epigraphy strongly argues for a Shang religion founded on the belief in metamorphosis and the king as shaman-priest.

Remonstrances (jian 諫) reveal a great deal about the writing of history in China during the Eastern Zhou. As represented in the Zuozhuan and Guoyu, remonstrances, like other speeches, are normally delivered in court and address questions of official policy. They tend to test contemporary phenomena against the lessons of the past, especially as those lessons have been formulated in the Shijing, the Shangshu, aphorisms, and other forms of what I term “inherited speech.” Remonstrances also have the support of the third-person historical narrative which surrounds them; the ruler who ignores a remonstrance always suffers for his obstinacy. After briefly discussing the importance of speeches in the Zuozhuan and Guoyu, I outline the structure of a remonstrance and examine four passages in which critical speech, including remonstrance, is said to have circulated freely in the courts of an idealized early period. Next I show how remonstrances match observed historical particulars with fragments of inherited speech. The famous remonstrance of Gong zhi Qi, an exemplary episode, shows how this application of inherited speech guides rhetorical choices and establishes Traditionalist or Confucian terms as the keys to historical intelligibility. Finally, I examine a set of remonstrances which are exceptional in that they do not include overt citations of inherited speech. Among these, military remonstrances can genuinely eschew explicit citation of lessons of the past, while others borrow the authority of inherited speech without seeming to do so. In one case, a brief remonstrance has apparently acquired the status of an aphorism, so that already when it is first uttered it qualifies as a sort of inherited speech. In another case, a precursor of the indirect remonstrances (fengjian 諷諫) of later periods, remonstrators use a theatrical combination of actions and speech to criticize their superior's departure from correct ways. As texts in which the speakers (and behind them the authors) of the Zuozhuan and Guoyu state explicitly their understanding of historical causation, remonstrances make it possible for us to understand the ideals which operate implicitly throughout the narratives of these works.

Excavations of a Western Han tomb at Shuangbaoshan in the vicinity of Mianyang, Sichuan, in 1993 have uncovered a black lacquered wooden carving of the human body. Naked, hairless, and roughly anatomical in character, the figurine is understood to be the earliest extant three-dimensional medical model in Chinese culture.

Ten red lines are drawn on the figurine. This article undertakes a preliminary examination of the figurine and offers an interpretation of the lines from two different perspectives. Firstly, the authors compare and contrast the lines with the eleven anatomical pathways of the mai “channels” as described in the medical manuscripts excavated at Mawangdui and Zhangjiashan. From this point of view the figurine adds to the sources that bear upon the early development of theories of pathological physiology which were first formulated in Han times and eventually became central to classical acumoxa theory. Secondly, the lines on the figurine are considered in their relationship to yangsheng “nurturing life” practices popular in elite society of this period. Certain features of the figurine that set it apart from ideas of pathological physiology seem better clarified by reference to contemporary texts, also excavated from the Mawangdui and Zhangjiashan tombs, that treat of yangsheng practices such as massage, therapeutic gymnastics, and breath cultivation.

The present article is a preliminary study of the hemerological system described in the manuscript entitled Xingde yipian (Xingde B) from Mawangdui tomb three (burial dated 168 b.c.), which is one of several manuscripts assigned the title Xingde by the Chinese scholars responsible for editing the Mawangdui manuscripts. The Xingde manuscripts are among a group of Mawangdui manuscripts whose contents are extremely important for the study of calendrical astrology at the end of the Warring States and beginning of the Han. The Xing-De method, which is based on the annual and daily motion of two mantic functions called Xing (Punishment) and De (Virtue) in relation to the sixty binoms of the sexagenary cycle, is attested in the astrological treatise of the Huainanzi. Xingde B not only provides the key to better understanding the very brief description of the Xing-De method in the Huainanzi, but also includes two diagrams that illustrate the motions of Xing and De in space and time.

While it is generally believed that Confucius's devotion to the Zhou ritual system was, in part, a product of his background as a countryman of the traditionalist Zhou state of Lu, this study suggests that Confucius was raised in and influenced by the cultural sphere of a non-Zhou people, the region associated with the state of Zhulou, to which his mother's family belonged. Evidence from the Zuo zkuan lends support to the Shiji account of Confucius's family background, which has long been questioned. This evidence suggests that Confucius's father was a privileged associate of a leading Lu grandee household, the Zang clan, charged with defending the southern border of Lu, an area of Zhulou culture occupied by Lu in the century before Confucius's birth. Accounts of the Zang clan indicate an unusual family stature, involving ritual expertise and hereditary possession of the Lu office of minister of Crime. Shortly before his death, he himself having moved north with the Zangs, Confucius's father took a concubine from the Yan clan of Zhulou, who remained with her family to raise his orphan, Confucius. Evidence suggests that Confucius and his early followers, including members of the Yan clan, displaced, in some critical respects, the role formerly played in Lu by the Zang clan, after the leadership of that clan was exiled from Lu. Tensions between Zang and Yan clan elements appear to have left significant traces in the corpus of early Confucian texts, and to have played a role in the formation of the Ruist school.

This paper discusses some of the difficulties surrounding the interpretation of Mencius 2B. 13. After considering the most important traditional Chinese commentaries, the author discusses the interpretations of a number of modern scholars, from both the East and the West. He then offers two new interpretations and concludes that the second is the most appropriate.