Discovery of Bamboo Chronicle and its impact on the identity of Yuezhi and Kushan tribes (2024)

East Asian History, 1991

Chinese Studies (Hanxue yanjiu漢學研究) vol. 37, no. 4 , 2019

The story of Emperor Wu of the Liang dynasty 梁武帝 (r. 502-549) rescuing his wife Lady Xi 郗氏 from an unfortunate rebirth as a snake was a common subject in popular literature related to Buddhist beliefs in late imperial China. Its history can be dated back to the twelfth century, when it quickly spread throughout the country. It is interpreted as a foundation of monastic Buddhist rites for the salvation of the dead, and it has also appeared as a narrative used in ritual storytelling and drama in several areas of China. Although Lady Xi's story played a major role in the dissemination of Buddhist ideas and rituals among the common folk, its history and cultural impact still remain understudied. The present paper explores the development of Lady Xi's story in the particular literary form of baojuan 寶卷 (precious scrolls) with the focus on 漢學研究第 37 卷第 4 期 2 performance traditions of southern Jiangsu. It compares three different recensions of the Baojuan of the Liang Emperor that represent two distinct periods in the development of the baojuan genre (the so-called "sectarian" scriptures of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and the "folk" narrative texts of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries), as well as two regional traditions (Northern China and Wu dialect-speaking areas of Jiangsu). The evolution of this subject shows how elements of historical narrative were incorporated into Buddhist ritual storytelling. The article also demonstrates the connections between differences in the contents of the recensions with their functions in ritualized performances based on information from contemporary recitations of this baojuan in southern Jiangsu.

關於商代年代學和戰國史學的兩個問題

David S. Nivison, well known for his wide-ranging studies of Chinese history and philosophy, was the Walter Y. Evans-Wentz Professor Emeritus at Stanford University. Before he passed away on October 16, 2014, he sent the following two essays to BJAS. Though conceived separately, the relationship between the two essays is self-apparent, and the editors have chosen to present them together in this issue. Both essays attempt to take seriously the knowledge of Warring States scholars with regard to Chinese chronology as ancient as the beginning of the second millennium B.C. The first essay is entitled “Was Warring States China ahead of Greece in Science? ” Using both the Bamboo Annals and other early sources, Nivison argues that the compilers of the Bamboo Annals had astronomical records from the remote past that were far superior to those of the ancient Greeks. He thus answers his own question in the affirmative with regard to this particular issue. The second, “The 31 Years Problem, ” presents an intricate argument regarding a single discrepancy in the chronology of the Bamboo Annals, which Nivison argued was an authentic and largely accurate chronology. The essay includes thought-provoking reflections on epistemology and the philosophy of history. Nivison ’s unique combination of historical breadth and rigorous numbercrunching leads to countless keen observations, and challenges us to treat ancient texts seriously and with imaginative sympathy. The two essays are presented here with only slight editing, since their informal writing style vividly captures Nivison ’s creative thought processes.倪德衛教授是斯坦福大學 Walter Y. Evans-Wentz 榮譽退休教授，他對中國歷史與哲學的研究貢獻向來最為人稱道。倪德衛教授於 2014 年 10 月 16 日逝世前，曾向《饒宗頤國學院院刊》投遞兩篇論文。雖然兩篇論文各自獨立，但卻有相當密切的關係，因此本刊編輯決定於是期同時發表這兩篇論文。 兩篇論文以出現於兩千年前的歷史年表《竹書紀年》為基礎，試圖去理解戰國時代學者們的知識水平。第一篇論文題為「戰國時期的中國在科學方面領先於希臘嗎？」借由《竹書紀年》以及其他早期資料，作者認為《竹書紀年》的編撰對於遠古時期的星象記錄遠勝古希臘人，因此針對這一問題給予了肯定的回答。第二篇論文討論「三十一年問題」，此文談及《竹書紀年》中的複雜問題；作者認為此年表的記載大體準確，應是可信的文獻。除此之外，此篇論文中還反省了認知論與歷史哲學，發人深思。 倪德衛教授治學獨闢蹊徑，以豐富的歷史知識結合嚴謹的史料甄別，提出了許多深具慧眼的敏銳觀察，促使我們以嚴肅且富有想像力的態度去看待古代文獻。兩篇論文的風格不同，但不拘格套，展現了倪德衛教授富有創造力的思索過程，故在此僅略作格式方面的修改。

Asiatische Studien / Études Asiatiques , 2021

This paper explores the relationship between the Shiji's authors and their sources by examining how they constructed the historical narrative of the fall of the Qin Empire. While Sima Qian and his father Sima Tan have been traditionally credited as the authors of the Shiji, their authorial voice was recently challenged by scholars. In response to the revisionist view, this paper discerns that the Shiji maintains a consistent narrative of the Qin collapse, which is generated through rigorous source redactions whereby Sima Qian and/or Sima Tan were able to incorporate their ideological agenda and personal opinions in subtle ways that are almost invisible to the reader. With such anonymity, the historiographers succeeded in establishing the authority of their historical narratives. Rather than simply juxtaposing the narratives of their sources, the Simas indeed authored their "patterned past" of the Qin collapse. However, the past constructed in the Shiji comprises various independent narratives whose plausibility is contingent upon the respective epistemic quality of their evidence rather than a harmonious discourse.

Handbook of Ancient Afro-Eurasian Economies, 2019

Monumenta Serica: Journal of Oriental Studies, 2020

Library of Sinology 4, 2020

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 history of studies by Western scholars, as well as an exhaustive bibliography and biographies of important scholars in the field. It is also supplied with a list of Chinese translations of these studies, as well as a complete index of authors and their works.Whether the reader is interested in the history of ancient China, ancient Chinese paleographic documents, or just in the history of the study of China as it has developed in the West, this book provides one of the most complete accounts available to date.

Using both long forgotten and newly available steles from North China, this article looks at these ancient monuments to explore the rise and evolution of an epigraphic practice under Jurchen and Mongol rules (1127–1368). In particular it looks at steles erected to record genea-logical information (called xianyingbei in general) in north China during the twelfth to fourteenth centuries, which was a new usage for the stele in the area. The article's main aim is to demonstrate how cultural integration among different social strata was triggered by the invasions of the Jurchen and Mongol conquerors, which in turn led to the formation of a new and legitimate way to compile family genealogies in north China.

Journal of Chinese Humanities, 2019

David Shepherd Nivison (1923-2014) devoted the last three and a half decades of his life to an attempt to reconstruct the original text of the Bamboo Annals and to use that text to reconstruct the absolute chronology of ancient China. Nivison's attempt to reconstruct that chronology involved astronomy; textual criticism, especially-though not exclusively-of the Bamboo Annals; and a considerable amount of historiographi-cal conjecture concerning both the period of the Xia dynasty and of the Warring States period, during which, Nivison argues, the Bamboo Annals was undergoing multiple revisions. This attempt was also based on three major theses: (1) the Xia kings were named for the tiangan 天干 of the first day of the first year of their reign; (2) irregular gaps of zero, one, two, three, four, and even forty years recorded in the Bamboo Annals between the reigns of Xia kings should invariably have been two years; and (3) the final Xia king, Jie 桀, is completely mythical. In this article, I first present Nivison's arguments and then present a critique of those arguments, based on my own study of the Bamboo Annals. My own study of the Bamboo Annals in turn has shown three points that are important for understanding its annals of Xia: that at least some of the manuscript was damaged or lost when it was taken from the tomb, that the Western Jin editors made some mistakes in their editing of the text, and that they added commentary to the text. Based on this discussion, I conclude that Nivison's hypothesis concerning the chronology of the Xia dynasty remains just that: a hypothesis.

Asian Ethnology , 2020

Journal of the American Oriental Society, 1991

The Rong Cheng shi manuscript is the largest text among the so-called Shanghai Museum manuscripts on bamboo slips (Shang bo cang jian 上博藏簡) considered to be of Chu 楚provenance and dated to the mid through the late 4th century BC. Since the slips were looted from a Chu tomb, precise place and date of this find are unknown. It is, however, commonly accepted that the manuscripts originate from a Chu aristocratic tomb closed shortly before the Chu court was obliged to leave the capital at Ying 郢(Hubei area) in 278 BC.The Rong Cheng shi manuscript is published in the second volume (2002) of the Shanghai guji chubanshe edition of the manuscripts – 上海博物館藏戰國楚竹書 (Shanghai bowuguan cang Zhanguo Chu zhushu – Chu bamboo strips of the Warring States period from the Shanghai Museum), chief-editor Ma Chengyuan 馬承源. Large-scale coloured photographs of numbered slips of the Rong Cheng shi are provided on pp. 91-146, with a transcription and commentary by Li Ling 李零on pp. 247-293. Li Ling’s sequence of slips and comments are reproduced and elaborated on by Qiu Dexiu 邱德修. Different transcriptions of some characters and also different sequences of some slips have been proposed by other Chinese scholars, for instance, in a series of papers concerned with the second volume of the Shanghai Museum manuscripts published in the framework of the ‘Bamboo&Silk (Jianbo)’ network. In particular, a rearranged sequence of slips by Chen Jian 陳劍 seems to have gained scholarly support.One of the reasons for the high degree of scholarly interest in the Rong Cheng shi is an account of the ‘Nine Provinces’ (Jiu zhou 九州) found in slips 24-27, as is pointed out in the preface to the text in the Shanghai guji chubanshe edition. The present paper is concerned with this particular passage. No doubts have been raised about the order of these four slips, but Chen Jian proposes a correction in the sequence of a group of slips dealing with Yu (15-35A): 23+15+24-30+16-21+31-32+22+33-34-35A. A slight correction of Chen Jian’s arrangement of this part of the manuscript is proposed by Bai Yulan 白於藍 : 21-22-31-33-34-32-35A. Another attempt to rearrange of this group of slips is made by Chen Ligui 陳麗桂(15-23-31-16-22-32-35A).