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Soon to celebrate his centennial year, Michael Loewe is certainly the most eminent Han historian today. Without his numerous publications—including not only such foundational reference works as The Biographical Dictionary of Qin and Western Han and Early Chinese Texts but also a wide range of more specialized studies—it is hard to imagine how the once-neglected field of Han history could have garnered such respect among scholars in allied fields in Euro-America and abroad. In these introductory remarks, we reflect on Michael Loewe's distinguished contributions to the field of early Chinese history over several decades and his extraordinary record as teacher. We draw special attention to several ways in which Professor Loewe's work continues to challenge such outdated and anachronistic paradigms as “Confucianism,” and we note the careful ways he correlates received, “found,” and excavated sources. We conclude the introduction with a set of reflections situating Professor Loewe as teacher within a distinguished Sinological lineage.

The family cemetery of Zhang Anshi was the first cemetery for nobles to be discovered in which the tomb occupants, dating, and gravesite orientation was so clear to investigators. As such, the site is of enormous historical significance. This essay introduces the entire site to readers and extrapolates aspects of the Western Han mourning regulations from the evidence presented by the jade suits, carriage and horse sets, tomb figurines, shrine, and layout. The essay also assesses scholarly debates concerning the degree to which Zhang Anshi's burial conforms to standards of late Western Han, and the relationship between Emperor Xuan's burial site and Duling with the site of Zhang Anshi's own tomb, questioning the traditional beliefs about “accompanying burials.”

This essay provides an overview of the prescriptions advanced by the Han-era Documents classic, since it was indisputably the Documents that served as the chief guide to political philosophy in the early empires for members of the elite with the requisite high cultural learning. It presents the authoritative pronouncements of the Documents on a number of key issues, such as, Who has the legitimacy to rule? How shall the good ruler and his officials act to retain legitimacy? What is the best form of government? How are punishments to be applied? How are taxes and tribute, domestic and foreign policy, to be administered? It prescribes actions to further the virtues of foresightedness, compassion, and fairness.

Although the term “Five Classics” (The Odes; Documents; the three Rites classics, counted as one; the Annals, and the Changes) was probably coined in Western Han, for much of Chinese history the Five Classics corpus has been the common cultural coin of the realm, familiar to all educated people, regardless of their religious creeds or ethical persuasions. Although parts of the Five Classics have claimed Confucius, as author, editor, or teacher, others may not have derived from self-identified “followers of Confucius,” of which there were very few in Antiquity. Given the importance of the Five Classics as repositories of ethical and political teachings, numerous debates over the “correct” graphs and meanings assigned to passages in the Five Classics have continued unabated from Western Han times down to today, in China, among the Chinese diaspora, and abroad, perhaps the most famous being the Qing-era “New Text/Old Text” debates. Only recently have Euro-American scholars, in company with some of their East Asian counterparts, begun to acknowledge at least two “general shifts in the textual landscape,” the first of which took place during Song, spurred, perhaps, by the Song ancient prose movement, and the second around the turn of the 20th century, when leading scholars and political reformers began to debate the role of the Five Classics in the education of the wenren文人 (men and women of letters) and the general populace, a debate that is still raging in some quarters, given the Chinese Communist Party’s belated flirtation with Confucian ethics. A few modern scholars, in addition, would emphasize the conceptual ruptures that also accompanied the changeovers from seal script to clerical script, and from regular script to simplified. What has proved equally disruptive in recent years is the insistence by some Chinese authorities that unprovenanced materials bought on the market in Hong Kong or Japan be accorded the same “weight” as scientifically excavated manuscripts or texts transmitted via the received literary tradition. Past experience suggests that patient accumulation and sifting of the evidence is preferable to overly hasty judgements about the reliability of such manuscripts.

This article takes three famous historians writing about historians and history-writing as its subject, considering Fan Ye’s work in light of Liu Zhiji’s understanding of history and Fan Ye’s writi...

Montesquieu wrote that &ldquo, China is a despotic state whose principle is fear&rdquo, And indeed, in the early modern context in China, fear and despotism, on the one hand, were opposed to ziyou 自由 (&ldquo, freedom&rdquo, ), on the other. These constructs created a discursive space in which theorists of the nation-state felt the need to articulate the complex relations binding despotism to fear. By contrast, during the early empires in China a different set of relations was imagined, wherein salutary fear was aligned against both despotism and freedom and, crucially, with according others a proper sense of dignity. For by the arguments of remote antiquity, &ldquo, submission to instruction and fear of the gods&rdquo, functioned both as a vital check on despotism and as the key barrier to the unchecked and unhampered self-assertion by subjects and rulers. Yet this notion of ritual operating within a circle of fear it helped to foster has so far escaped scholarly notice, perhaps because it does not square with the ritual theories that dominate our modern discourse and perhaps because such ritual fear has been dismissed easily as remnant, primitive superstition.

We two scholars, the first a Han historian and the second a cultural geographer, decided to review Rafe de Crespigny’s book together, realizing the multi-faceted and inter-disciplinary nature of th...

Most researchers in Chinese studies shy away from the ‘superstitious’ material in the Sui shu 隋書 ‘Wuxing zhi’ 五行志 (the History of the Sui ‘Treatise on the Wuxing’), preferring to reduce the messages it would convey to the purely political and invoking Liu Zhiji’s condemnations of such treatises in his Shitong 史通 (Generalities on History). This essay suggests that such treatises in the official histories may provide some of the best entry points into the distinctive cast of mind of their compilers in their ventures into world-making. After all, both rulers and officials often subscribed to the belief, reiterated in the Five Classics, that history’s patterns, as reflected in the resonant cosmos, could be read not only for possible insights into past events but also as reliable guides to the future. The Sui shu ‘Wuxing zhi’ therefore becomes an important part of the educational plan for princes and those who serve them. The essay also attests the great flexibility of the formal aspects of such treatises, whose categories grow, shrink and change to adapt to new realities on the ground.

This essay argues that the Guodian citations relating to the Documents (Shu 書) classic, when read together with other evidence regarding early manuscript cultures in China, contradict the dominant scholarly view in the present-day People’s Republic of China, which imagines not only a single Urtext for the pre-Qin Documents classic, but also (no less improbably) a single textual community familiar with the same masterworks and Classics across the entire swathe of land held by the modern nation-state of China. Contrary to this view, the early transmission of manuscripts, both oral and transcribed, generated multiple variants that allowed small textual communities to adapt their authoritative texts to local concerns and agendas and current affairs.

This essay considers the achievements, contrasts, and puzzles that bind the Shiji and Hanshu Tables to one another, and to their respective authors’ historical views. Meanwhile, this essay queries the common wisdom that would reduce the Shiji and Hanshu tables to “mere sequence,” as opposed to creative historical writing, while deriding the tables as either “primitive” or “derivative.”

This essay urges readers of modern Chinese to acquaint themselves with the distinctive readings that the erudite Li Zehou offers for the multiplicity of interpretive traditions attached to the Analects, in the hope that those with an interest in Chinese styles of thinking can advance this particular conversation in more complex and sophisticated ways. Perhaps more than any other scholar, Li demonstrates the enormous gaps separating pre-Han and Han assumptions from those most typical of late imperial China; Li also is thoroughly conversant with philosophy, East and West, in the twentieth century. While one notes what might be seen as Li’s occasional unreflective chauvinism and queries parts of his larger narrative regarding civilization and history, his desire (reminiscent in some ways of Bernard Williams’s project for the Greeks) to convey the superior flavor of the antique rhetoric to readers of today and in the future is to be applauded.

Tradition hailed Dong Zhongshu as the ‘father of Han Confucianism’ because of his influential theories that posit a perfect congruence between divine and human realms kept in balance by the true king, who functions as mediator, moral exemplar and lawmaker. Undoubtedly the most famous exegete in the ‘Gongyang’ commentarial tradition to the Chunqiu (Spring and Autumn Annals), Dong is also credited by convention with the composition of the Chunqiufanlu (Luxuriant Dew of the Annals), though recent scholarship questions this attribution.

Jia Yi, in forging a brilliant synthesis of classical Legalist, Daoist and Confucian doctrines, fashioned a coherent political and educational philosophy in support of strong central government. Jia’s impact on Chinese history can hardly be overestimated; his philosophy significantly shaped the imperial institutions of the Han dynasty (202 bc–ad 220), which became the models for successive dynasties of imperial China.

Master Yang Xiong, the first Confucian classicist and the greatest of the pre-Song metaphysicians, is best known for two major philosophical works, the Taixuanjing (Canon of Supreme Mystery) and the Fayan (Model Sayings). Both works explore the interaction between significant cosmic and social patterns by explicit reference to earlier canonical traditions.

Zheng Xuan, perhaps the most influential commentator on the Confucian classics, is widely credited with constructing both a compelling unitary vision of Chinese civilization and a hierarchy of written authorities which upheld the supremacy of the five Confucian classics as infallible guides to morality and history. Inevitably, scholars (including Zheng’s many critics) have ‘read’ early Chinese society through the filter of Zheng’s surviving commentaries, which ultimately superseded earlier divergent scholastic traditions.