The present article focuses on the administrative process of the Western Zhou government and addresses the origin of bureaucratic government in China. The article first examines gong 宮 in bronze inscriptions that bore names of individuals or officials, suggesting that such gong had probably functioned as administrative “offices” of the Western Zhou government. Then, it focuses on inscriptions which record appointment ceremonies (ceming 冊命) that took place in the same “offices.” These inscriptions show that there was a certain degree of specialization in the arrangement of appointments and in the use of “offices” for particular administrative tasks. In the appointment ceremonies, Western Zhou officials were normally accompanied by superior officials from the same government units, showing that there were three functional divisions in Western Zhou government administration: royal household, civil administration, and military. Each division operated as a relatively closed system and ceming was a routine administrative procedure within the system. Finally, the article studies the role of the Zhou king in administration, showing that while engaging in the operation of government through his “ritual” role in the appointment ceremony, his visits to various gong seem to have followed a certain routine. The evidence in bronze inscriptions strongly suggests that the Western Zhou government was the earliest bureaucratic government in China.

In the 1970s, the great discoveries of Western Zhou bronze vessels were concentrated primarily in the Wei River valley of Shaanxi province, a pattern of distribution that gave rise to certain theories about a geographically reduced Zhou state. Since then, and especially in the 1990s, inscribed bronze vessels of the Western Zhou period have been found throughout northern China, with particularly important discoveries identified with the state of Yan 燕 near Beijing, Ying 應 at Pingdingshan (Henan), Jin 晉 at Houma (Shanxi), and Guo 虢 at Sanmenxia (Henan). This article introduces these discoveries, translating the more important inscriptions. It also reviews recent discoveries in Shaanxi, especially several bronzes bearing fully-dated inscriptions that have come to light in the course of the Xia-Shang-Zhou Chronology Project.

The section of the Xunzi called “Xing e” 性惡 (xing is bad) prominently and repeatedly claims that people's xing is bad. However, no other text in the Xunzi makes this claim, and it is widely thought that the claim does not express Xunzi's fundamental ideas about human nature. This article addresses the issue in a somewhat indirect way, beginning with a detailed examination of the text of “Xing e”: identifying a core text, removing a series of interpolations, analyzing the structure of the core text, and distinguishing between three positions that are defended there. This analysis shows that the claim that people's xing is bad is not really central to “Xing e.” More ambitiously, it supports the conclusion that Xunzi's ideas about people's xing changed over time. Though Xunzi did claim that people's xing is bad, he later abandoned the claim, and replaced it with an account of wei 偽 “artifice.”

Overseen by hungry gods on the one hand or structured by impersonal cyclic forces on the other, the Eastern Han cosmos eluded a single consistent model accepted by everyone. Yet these cosmological perspectives were not competing arguments held by different people; they were inconsistent genres of discourse found within the same people and sometimes even within the same texts. Late Eastern Han mountain inscriptions may ritually appease sacrifice-eating gods with their hymns of praise, but they simultaneously describe the cosmos as a single pervasive system of qi-vapors, yinyang, and the five phases. How could these two models coexist?

Dated to 183 C.E., the “Stele to the Spirit Lord of Baishi Mountain” (baishi shenjun bei 白石神君碑) demonstrates how certain compromise positions existed between a universe overseen by external agencies and that consisting of resonating cycles. The inscription explains why this mountain deity merited sacrifice, describes the official process in which permission to sacrifice was secured, and identifies this hungry deity as one component within ritualized systems within spatial lineages and geographic bureaucracies and so he is not recognized as an entirely free agent. In addition, the inscription systematizes him by obligating him to participate in mechanical rituals of recompense and by reducing him to a ritualized Classicist stereotype, further diminishing his independence and individuality. The stele inscription s focus on ritual demonstrates how ritual lessens any perceived inconsistency between cosmic agencies and cosmic system.

This article first surveys the Han history of mountain sacrifices and mountain stelae, thereby placing the Spirit Lord of Baishi Mountain into historical context. The translation of the inscription dedicated to him follows, which for the purpose of analysis I divide into eight sections that address themes such as rituals of recompense, the generation of rain, and the transformation of the god into a Classicist hero. The conclusion summarizes how human structures such as lineage and bureaucracy fill in the gaps between these inconsistent genres of discourse human structures that result in impersonal qi-vapors becoming more human and personalized mountain deities becoming more structured.

In his study (1943) of 132 bronze mirrors whose inscriptions specify a date between A.D. 6 and 536, Umehara Sueji examined thirty-eight of Han times (A.D. 6–220), accepting that they are genuine. However, inconsistencies and anomalies both in the inscriptions and the decorative details of the mirrors give reason to doubt the authenticity of seven of these which bear dates between A.D. 6 and 105.