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Legal manuscripts excavated from tombs serve as important materials for research on Qin and Han laws. These manuscripts differ from received legal texts or law documents found at archaeological sites in nature and function, as they were stored as funeral texts in tombs. This article studies the Ernian lüling manuscript in terms of its nature and function. It argues that the manuscript compiled in the second year of Empress Lü (186 bce) nearing the death of the owner was not produced for official use but specifically for burial in the tomb. This article further proposes that the burial of the Ernian lüling manuscript may have taken place to illustrate the social status and official capabilities of the owner to the underworld. The investigation of the Ernian lüling manuscript in its archaeological context helps us achieve a stronger understanding of the dating, origins, completeness, and compilation of its text. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses articles in the issue on topics including Chinese manuscripts, textual transmission and excavated Chinese materials.

Inspired by the British bibliographer Donald F. McKenzie’s “sociology of texts,” this article explores the material form of early Chinese manuscripts and its impact on the production, circulation, reading habits, and the relationship between literary and administrative texts in the Warring State, Qin and early Han periods. Because the material format of early Chinese texts was scrolls (“juan”) of bamboo or wooden strips, the basic unit for circulation is often “pian,” a unit smaller than a “book.” The fluidity of early China texts was the consequence of the material media and the ways of transmission (both oral and written copying) in early China. The article also argues that the canonization process in early China tried to control the accuracy of textual production and transmission, such as double checking the copies, the increasing notion of organization of a book, the use of table of contents and preface, and character count at the end of a text. The article finally calls for the integration of the studies on excavated literary manuscripts on one hand, and administrative, personal documents, and technical manuals on the other. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article is directed against some Western scholars’ unfounded claim that early Chinese texts were predominantly transmitted orally (either through dictation or writing from memory), and discusses the importance of the scribe in the transmission of pre-Qin texts. Concrete evidence from excavated manuscripts suggests that early Chinese texts were primarily transmitted as copies that passed from hand to hand and text to text. The author then discusses, through handwriting analysis, examples of texts copied by a single scribe as well as multiple scribes, and how the copyists treated texts and scripts that originated from different states of the Warring States period. The article then discusses how scribes treated textual errors, omissions, and redundant graphs and texts arising during the process of textual transmission. Finally the author discusses the social status of the scribe in early China and hypothesizes that there may have already been bookshops in the Warring States period. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This study examines a problematic passage which occurs simultaneously in the "Six Virtues" and the "Five Conducts" from the corpus of Warring States manuscripts excavated in Guodian. By proposing new solutions to problems in textual decipherment and interpretation, this study attempts to reconstruct early discourses on "benevolence" and "righteousness," focusing specifically on the potential conflict between the two moral conducts. Such a discussion provides a better basis for reading the "Six Virtues," and restores a missing link in the current understanding of the development in thought from Confucius to Mencius. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]