Garden of Eloquence / Shuoyuan 說苑

Author:

Liu Xiang

Translator:

Eric Henry

Publication date:

January 2022

Publisher:

University of Washington Press

Abstract:

In 17 BCE the Han dynasty archivist Liu Xiang presented to the throne a collection of some seven hundred items of varying length, mostly quasi-historical anecdotes and narratives, that he deemed essential reading for wise leadership. Garden of Eloquence (Shuoyuan), divided into twenty books grouped by theme, follows a tradition of narrative writing on historical and philosophical themes that began seven centuries earlier. Long popular in China as a source of allusions and quotations, it preserves late Western Han views concerning history, politics, and ethics. Many of its anecdotes are attributed to Confucius’s speeches and teachings that do not appear in earlier texts, demonstrating that long after Confucius’s death in 479 BCE it was still possible for new “historical” narratives to be created.
Garden of Eloquence is valuable as a repository of items that originally appeared in other early collections that are no longer extant, and it provides detail on topics as various as astronomy and astrology, yin-yang theory, and quasi-geographical and mystical categories. Eric Henry’s unabridged translation with facing Chinese text and extensive annotation will make this important primary source available for the first time to Anglophone world historians.

In the Forest of the Blind： The Eurasian Journey of Faxian's Record of Buddhist Kingdoms

Author:

Matthew W. King

Publisher:

Columbia University Press

Publication date:

March 2022

Abstract:

The Record of Buddhist Kingdoms is a classic travelogue that records the Chinese monk Faxian’s journey in the early fifth century CE to Buddhist sites in Central and South Asia in search of sacred texts. In the nineteenth century, it traveled west to France, becoming in translation the first scholarly book about “Buddhist Asia,” a recent invention of Europe. This text fascinated European academic Orientalists and was avidly studied by Hegel, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche. The book went on to make a return journey east: it was reintroduced to Inner Asia in an 1850s translation into Mongolian, after which it was rendered into Tibetan in 1917. Amid decades of upheaval, the text was read and reinterpreted by Siberian, Mongolian, and Tibetan scholars and Buddhist monks.

Matthew W. King offers a groundbreaking account of the transnational literary, social, and political history of the circulation, translation, and interpretation of Faxian’s Record. He reads its many journeys at multiple levels, contrasting the textual and interpretative traditions of the European academy and the Inner Asian monastery. King shows how the text provided Inner Asian readers with new historical resources to make sense of their histories as well as their own times, in the process developing an Asian historiography independently of Western influence. Reconstructing this circulatory history and featuring annotated translations, In the Forest of the Blind models decolonizing methods and approaches for Buddhist studies and Asian humanities.

Table of Contents:

Introduction

1. Chang’an to India

2. Beijing to Paris

3. Buddhist Asia to Jambudvīpa

4. Jambudvīpa to Science

5. Science to History of the Dharma

Conclusion

Appendix. The Inner Asian Record

Designing Boundaries in Early China: The Composition of Sovereign Space

Author:

Garret Pagenstecher Olberding

Publisher: 

Cambridge University Press

Publication date: 

November 2021

Abstract:

Ancient Chinese walls, such as the Great Wall of China, were not sovereign border lines. Instead, sovereign space was zonally exerted with monarchical powers expressed gradually over an area, based on possibilities for administrative action. The dynamically shifting, ritualized articulation of early Chinese sovereignty affects the interpretation of the spatial application of state force, including its cartographic representations. In Designing Boundaries in Early China, Garret Pagenstecher Olberding draws on a wide array of source materials concerning the territorialization of space to make a compelling case for how sovereign spaces were defined and regulated in this part of the ancient world. By considering the ways sovereignty extended itself across vast expanses in early China, Olberding informs our understanding of the ancient world and the nature of modern nation-states.

Table of Contents:

I. Preamble
II. The basis of ancient borders
III. The visual modeling of space in text and map
IV. Movement and geography
V. The perception of the "state": the internal definition of sovereign space
VI. The perception of the "enemy": the external definition of sovereign space
VII. Transgressions: rupturing the boundaries between sovereignties
VIII. Conclusion

[Open Access] Documentation and Argument in Early China：The Shàngshū 尚書 (Venerated Documents) and the Shū Traditions

Author:

Dirk Meyer

Publisher:

De Gruyter Mouton

Publication date:

July 5, 2021

Abstract:

This study uncovers the traditions behind the formative Classic Shàngshū (Venerated Documents). It is the first to establish these traditions—“Shū” (Documents)—as a historically evolving practice of thought-production. By focusing on the literary form of the argument, it interprets the “Shū” as fluid text material that embodies the ever-changing cultural capital of projected conceptual communities. By showing how these communities actualised the “Shū” according to their changing visions of history and evolving group interests, the study establishes that by the Warring States period (ca. 453–221 BC) the “Shū” had become a literary genre employed by diverse groups to legitimize their own arguments. Through forms of textual performance, the “Shū” gave even peripheral communities the means to participate in political discourse by conferring their ideas with ancient authority. Analysing this dynamic environment of socio-political and philosophical change, this study speaks to the Early China field, as well as to those interested in meaning production and foundational text formation more widely.

Table of Contents:

Introduction

1 Shū traditions and philosophical discourse

2 Archiving cultural capital

3 The materiality of meaning networks

4 Moulds of discourse

5 Shū traditions in narrative

6 Shū genre in manuscript cultures

7 Conclusion: the Shū and political argument in early China

*Link: https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9783110708530/html

The King's Harvest: A Political Ecology of China from the First Farmers to the First Empire

Author:

Brian Lander

Publisher:

Yale University Press

Publication date:

November 30, 2021

Abstract:

This book is a multidisciplinary study of the ecology of China’s early political systems up to the fall of the first empire in 207 BCE. Brian Lander traces the formation of lowland North China’s agricultural systems and the transformation of its plains from diverse forestland and steppes to farmland. He argues that the growth of states in ancient China, and elsewhere, was based on their ability to exploit the labor and resources of those who harnessed photosynthetic energy from domesticated plants and animals. Focusing on the state of Qin, Lander amalgamates abundant new scientific, archaeological, and excavated documentary sources to argue that the human domination of the central Yellow River region, and the rest of the planet, was made possible by the development of complex political structures that managed and expanded agroecosystems.

Table of Contents:

Introduction

1. The Nature of Political Power

2. Seeds of Life: How People Came to Build Their Own Ecosystems

3. Herding People: The Rise of Political Organizations in China

4. The Power in the West: A History of the State of Qin

5. Watching Over the Granaries: The Ecology of the Qin Empire

6. A Hundred Generations: How China's Empires Shaped Their Environments

Epilogue: States of the Anthropocene

Violence and the Rise of Centralized States in East Asia

Author: 

Mark Edward Lewis

Date Published: 

March 2022

Publisher: 

Cambridge University Press

Abstract:
Violence, both physical and nonphysical, is central to any society, but it is a version of the problem that it claims to solve. This Element examines how states in ancient East Asia, from the late Shang through the end of the Han dynasty, wielded violence to create and display authority, and also how their licit violence was entangled in the 'savage' or 'criminal' violence whose suppression justified their power. The East Asian cases are supplemented through citing comparable Western ones. The themes examined include the emergence of the warrior as a human type, the overlap of hunts and combat (and the overlap between treatments of alien species and alien peoples), sacrifice of both alien captives and 'death attendants' from one's own groups, the impact of military specialization and the increased scale of armies, the emergent ideal of self-sacrifice, and the diverse aspects of violence in the regime of law.

Table of Contents:
1. Definitions
2. Violence in the Shang world and other 'bronze age theocracies'
3. Violence in the eastern Zhou: spring and autumn through the warring states
4. Violence under the early empires
5. Conclusion