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Kingship, Ritual, and Royal Ideology in Western Zhou China
The book shows how the kings of the Western Zhou period used ritual to create and hold onto their power.
The Craft of Oblivion
The Craft of Oblivion is an innovative and groundbreaking volume that aims to study, for the first time, the intersections between forgetting and remembering in classical Chinese civilization. Oblivion has tended to be relegated to a marginal position, often conceived as the mere destructive or undesirable opposite of memory, even though it performs an essential function in our lives. Forgetting and memory, far from being autonomous and mutually exclusive spheres, should be seen as interdependent phenomena. Drawing on perspectives from history, philosophy, literature, and religion, and examining both transmitted texts and excavated materials, the contributors to this volume analyze various ways of understanding oblivion and its complex and fertile relations with memory in ancient China.
Myth and the Making of History
Myth and the Making of History examines the relationship between myth and history in early China, a topic that has been explored by American paleographer and scholar of ancient China Sarah Allan throughout her career. Allan has worked at a crucial and sensitive intersection, where myth and history collide at the very heart of China's origin story. Her work has created an intellectual space in which the disciplines of philosophy, history, anthropology, archeology, philology, and literature have come together, helping to change the way scholars conceive of historical patterns in China's past. In Myth and the Making of History, eleven senior and emerging scholars, from both China and the West, respond to the intellectual challenge raised by Allan's theoretical model of analysis of mythologized and historical figures (and even dynasties) that have intrigued scholars for generations and play a central role in the Chinese historical imagination. The book will be of great interest to all scholars and students of China—of whatever level and discipline—and, indeed, those concerned with other early civilizations as well.
Legal Practice in the Formative Stages of the Chinese Empire
In Legal Practice in the Formative Stages of the Chinese Empire, Ulrich Lau and Thies Staack offer a richly annotated English translation of the Wei yu deng zhuang si zhong 爲獄等狀四種, a collection of criminal case records from the pre-imperial state of Qin (dating from 246 BC–222 BC) that is part of the manuscripts in the possession of Yuelu Academy. Through an analysis of the collection and a comparison with similar manuscript finds from the Qin and Han periods, the authors shed new light on many aspects of the Qin administration of justice, e.g. criminal investigation, stages of criminal procedure, principles for determining punishment, and interaction of judicial officials on different administrative levels.
State Power and Governance in Early Imperial China
State Power and Governance in Early Imperial China delves into the governance and capacity of the state by providing an empirical historical study of the collapse of China's Qin Empire. In contrast to the popular view that the Qin fell suddenly and dramatically, this book argues that the collapse was rooted in persistent structural problems of the empire, including the serious resource shortages experienced by local governments, inefficient communication between administrative units, and social tensions in the new territories. Rather than reducing Qin rulers to heartless villains who refused to adjust their policies and statecraft, this book focuses on the changes that the regime did make to meet these challenges. It reveals the various measures that Qin rulers devised to solve these problems, even if they were ultimately to no avail. The paradox of the Qin Empire seemed to be that, although the regime's policies and reforms could theoretically have strengthened the state's power and improved the governance of the empire, their ramifications simultaneously exacerbated the misfunction of local governments and triggered the military failures that eventually destroyed the empire.
Chinese Annals in the Western Observatory
Since the beginning of the twentieth century, hundreds of thousands of documents of all sorts have been unearthed in China, opening whole new fields of study and transforming our modern understanding of ancient China. While these discoveries have necessarily taken place in China, Western scholars have also contributed to the study of these documents throughout this entire period. This book provides a comprehensive survey of the contributions of these Western scholars to the field of Chinese paleography, and especially to study of oracle-bone inscriptions, bronze and stone inscriptions, and manuscripts written on bamboo and silk. Each of these topics is provided with a comprehensive narrative...
Variants and Variance in Classical Textual Cultures
Given the limited durability of most textual supports, texts must be reproduced if they are to survive. And given the proliferation over time of users, practices, and places which need to have access to the texts that are important for cultural institutions, this is particularly true for authoritative texts. But the reproduction of texts by traditional means - either orally or by hand - inevitably produces variations. These variations can arise because of inattention, confusion, misunderstanding, deliberate modification, physical damage, and many other factors. In general, the more a text is reproduced, the more variations are likely to occur. But although the fact of textual variation in ge...
The Oxford Handbook of Early China
A chronological and interdisciplinary study of early China from the Neolithic through Warring States periods (ca 5000-500BCE).
Zuozhuan and Early Chinese Historiography
Zuozhuan (Zuo Tradition) is the foundational text of Chinese historiography and the largest text from preimperial China. For two millennia, its immense complexity has given rise to countless controversies, with scholars debating its nature, time of composition, and historical reliability. In the present volume—the first of its kind in any Western language—leading scholars of ancient China, Greece, and Rome approach Zuozhuan from multi-faceted perspectives to examine in detail Zuozhuan’s sources, narrative patterns, and meta-narrative devices; analyze the text in dialogue with other ancient Chinese works; and open it to the comparative study with ancient Greek and Roman historiography. Contributors are: Chen Minzhen, Stephen Durrant, Joachim Gentz, Martin Kern, Wai-yee Li, Nino Luraghi, Ellen O’Gorman, Yuri Pines, David Schaberg, and Kai Vogelsang.
