This study introduces a bamboo-strip manuscript of the Zhou Yi or Zhou Changes purchased by the Shanghai Museum in 1994. The fragmentary manuscript includes 58 strips, about one-third of the received text of the Zhou Yi. Orthographic features suggest that it was copied in the southern state of Chu about 300 B.C.E. Although the manuscript includes numerous orthographic variants vis-à-vis the received text, it does show that the text was stable by this date of copying. The most unusual feature of the manuscript is a pair of symbols written after the hexagram name and at the end of the hexagram text. Although several explanations of these symbols have been advanced, none of them appears to be convincing to date. A final question about the manuscript concerns the sequence of hexagrams in it. Since the binding straps of the manuscript had already decayed and the strips become disordered, and since each hexagram text begins on a new bamboo strip, no sequence is apparent. However, the physical circumstances of the strips, especially the points at which they are broken, may suggest that the sequence was more or less similar to that of the received Zhou Yi.

This essay concerns the single case of illicit sex included in the Zouyan shu excavated at Zhangjiashan. Interest in this particular case has been high, since the case offers indisputable evidence regarding the separation of legal and moral principles in relation to domestic affairs at the time the judgment was rendered. Previous theories about the interpretation of the case have focused upon the quality and timeliness of the evidence brought to the judges for their consideration, while this essay draws attention to the probable relevance to the case of contemporary laws on residency, inheritance, and the proper ways to report crimes to higher authorities.

Texts from the Zhou and Han periods regularly use the term quan “to weigh” when describing or prescribing human action. This essay seeks to determine precisely which concrete acts of weighing underlie the metaphoric application of the term to human action. A survey of the available textual and archaeological evidence shows that even before the Eastern Han, when steelyards became the most common weighing device, the act of weighing might have been executed and conceptualized in multiple ways. A similar conclusion is drawn from a survey of pictorial and literary references to metaphoric weighing in non-Chinese traditions. More precisely, I suggest three distinct possibilities: matching the object to be weighed with a known standard, determining which of two objects weighs heaviest, and, lastly, seeking the point at which the balance beam will gain or recover balance.

Early Chinese texts provide examples of all three (quan A, B, and C). Quan B became prominent especially during the 3rd century B.C.E., when persuaders discussed how every choice had negative as well as positive consequences. Quan A and C are attested in texts usually dated to the 4th century B.C.E. or before. In this essay I argue that it is quan C that became the dominant metaphor in moral-political discourse, and that it had two competing interpretations: it could refer either to the multiple ways in which a sage adapts his actions to the circumstances, or to a temporary lifting of moral standards during an emergency. Whereas scholars in the Han and Qing dynasties generally accepted that moral rules were not absolute, Song scholars were scandalized by the notion that deviations from the rule were part and parcel of moral action.

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 Construction of Space in Early China is a monumental volume. Few studies can match its breathtaking breadth, its richness of detail, its perfection of organization or–most notably–its continual display of its author's awesome erudition. In five hundred closely printed pages, Mark Edward Lewis touches upon an extraordinary variety of topics, ranging freely from medicine to political philosophy and from popular customs to legal codes. He takes the reader down into the tombs and up into the heavens, visits the marketplace and ascends imperial towers and city walls, enters the human body and calls on the emperor's harem. Lewis incorporates in his study almost every imaginable kind of evidence, from military treatises to tomb wills, from odes and rhapsodies to administrative documents, and from philosophical texts to popular almanacs. His 120 pages of footnotes and 40 pages of “Works Cited” provide a useful overview of the secondary literature in Chinese, Japanese and Western European languages. All this makes The Construction of Space an indispensable volume for any student of early and, more broadly, traditional Chinese history.