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This volume gathers seven Warring States-period manuscripts with stories about Springs and Autumns period affairs from Zheng鄭，Qin秦，Jin晋，and Chu楚.Originally published in volumes 6 and 7 of the Tsinghua Manuscripts, these were brought together in the Collated Interpretations （ Jiaoshi 校釋）and the present volume because of their topical and material proximity. [1] The sequence chosen reflects the chronological order and geographical division amongst the texts, and where relevant, the similarity of the writing support:
1．* Zheng Wu Furen gui ruzi 鄭武夫人規孺子 (Zheng, events ca.744 BCE)
2．* Zheng Wen Gong wen Tai Bo A鄭文公問太伯（甲）(Zheng, events ca.672 BCE)
3．* Zheng Wen Gong wen Tai Bo B鄭文公問太伯（乙）(same as above)
4． Zi Fan Zi Yu 子犯子餘 (Qin, Jin, events ca.637–636 BCE)
5．* Jin Wen Gong ru yu Jin 晋文公入於晋 (Qin, Jin, events ca.636–628 BCE)
6．* Zi Yi 子儀 (Qin, events ca.621 BCE)
7．* Zhao Jianzi 趙簡子 (Jin, events ca.500? BCE)
The events narrated in these texts span well over two and a half centuries, involving well-known figures from Zheng, Qin, and Jin, as well as Chu history.The majority of these narratives present dialogues between famous rulers of the period and a varied cast of interlocutors, including foreign emissaries, ministers, generals, elders, and mothers.Except for the outlier * Jin Wen Gong ru yu Jin —likely a companion piece to the Zi Fan Zi Yu —which is a monologue, the texts are all dialogues that feature the rulers in an inferior position to their interlocutors.These rulers are either looking for goodwill or they receive advice—solicited or unsolicited—from their often more experienced counterparts.While the texts themselves do not have counterparts in received literature, this power dynamic between ruler and minister is familiar from the larger body of literature on the Springs and Autumns. [2] In terms of style, this type of text has been compared especially to texts such as the Guo yu , and other unearthed texts such as the narratives on Springs and Autumns Chu from the Shanghai Museum manuscripts, and, of course, the Zuo Zhuan . [3]
This volume is divided into two parts.The first part introduces the texts and studies their narrative form.I focus on the narrative structure of the texts, the types of narration and dialogue, the way the story’s characters are represented, and the use of image-based language.The second half of the study presents the texts line by line, followed by a presentation of the full text in Chinese and English.
Broadly speaking, the slips of the manuscripts in this volume are of two lengths.
The *
Zi Yi
and the *
Zhao Jianzi
feature shorter slips, at around 41.6–41.8 cm in length (maximum values) and 0.6 cm in width.The other manuscripts feature slips around 45 cm in length and 0.5–0.6 cm in width.Of the latter group, at least the *
Zheng Wu Furen gui ruzi
, *
Jin Wen Gong ru yu Jin
,
Zi Fan Zi Yu
, and *
Zheng Wen Gong wen Tai Bo
manuscripts feature verso-lines carved on the back of the slips.
[4]
Among the manuscripts, only the
Zi Fan Zi Yu
comes with a title written on the back of the first slip.
[5]
All manuscripts are bound with three threads.Obvious similarities aside, the present state of the evidence does not allow us to make a firm assessment as to whether some of the manuscripts formed a larger, multi-text manuscript or not.
[6]
Similarities in the material carrier may equally have been due to production habits associated with a specific workshop,
and need not necessarily reflect that the texts were bound together to form a single manuscript.
Nevertheless, given that the Shanghai Museum manuscripts contain evidence of multi-text manuscripts with multiple historical narratives from the Springs and Autumns, it is possible that some of these manuscripts were originally bound together. [7] Especially the Zi Fan Zi Yu and * Jin Wen Gong ru yu Jin would have formed a likely couple, given the presence of a title on the former and the historical progression between the events narrated in both texts. [8]
Table 1: Basic manuscript data [9]
Li Songru李松儒has argued that the *
Zi Yi
manuscript shares the same handwriting with the
Zi Fan Zi Yu
, *
Jin Wen Gong ru yu Jin
, *
Zhao Jianzi
, and *
Yue Gong qi Shi
越公其事from volume 7, and the *
Zheng Wu Furen gui ruzi
, *
Zheng Wen Gong wen Tai Bo
A and B from volume 6, and finally, parts of the *
Huang Men
from volume 1 of the Tsinghua manuscripts.
[10]
In general, the similarities between the writing of these manuscripts are quite apparent, and it seems likely that the materials came out of a single workshop, and possibly were written by a single scribe.
It could be argued that Li Songru’s analysis is not decisive because it is based mostly on stylistic criteria, and focuses less on structural qualities of the graphs. [11] Nevertheless, given the variation introduced through errors of form visible throughout the manuscripts, [12] and the fact that variation in structure in the * Zheng Wen Gong wen Tai Bo A and B stemmed from the scribe faithfully copying the structural features of the writing on the base-manuscripts, it seems fair to say that variation in structure is likewise not necessarily a determining criterion to distinguish hands in this batch of manuscripts and that stylistic criteria are therefore a useful aid in establishing scribal hand.
The texts in this volume are commonly studied alongside, and in comparison with, the Zuo zhuan , Guo yu , and other collections of narratives on the Springs and Autumns period. [13] The Collated Interpretations by Wei Dong, includes a wide range of references to these texts, inviting the reader to draw parallels and look for (dis-) similarities. [14] Much of the scholarship has focused on the historical import of the texts, and how they provide information previously unknown from, or in contradiction to, the transmitted and increasingly growing unearthed record of narratives about the Springs and Autumns. [15] In the analyses that follow, I will adopt a different perspective and instead analyze the literary structure and narrative devices of the texts.
These texts spoke to a Warring States audience, and conveyed a particular reading of the past to its audience.As stories, they filled gaps in other contemporary renditions of the past.These narratives present a characterization of the figures that inhabited the past, probing into their motivations and rhetorical skill, and, to an extent, their inner workings.By analyzing these texts as stories about Springs and Autumns’Zheng, Qin, Jin, and Chu, I make no claim about their historicity or factuality relative to other materials, or, whether contemporaries read them as fiction. [16] Instead, I discuss how these texts drew on narrative technique and devices to make for a compelling reception experience.The value of these texts to a Warring States audience, I suggest, did not just reside in the narratives’ability to contextualize past events, but also in their ability to transport their audiences and make present the past. [17]
In the following study, I draw on the toolkit of narratology.The study of narrative has gained renewed traction in our approach to the ancient world, especially in Classics, owing to the application of this toolkit to materials ranging from Homeric epic to classical historiography. [18] While narratives from classical Greece, Rome, Egypt, and Sumer, for instance, displayed markedly different concerns in their texts, reading them as narrative has provided us with a range of theoretical and methodological insights useful to the study of early Chinese texts, in particular the historiographical materials that concern us here. [19] Through comparison, the familiar becomes problematic, allowing us to see writing about the past in a new light.
Within early China studies, there is likewise a tradition of analyzing narrative technique, often focusing on transmitted texts, particularly the
Zuo zhuan
.
[20]
But the unearthed materials are not the
Zuo
.While the
Zuo
is a vast collection of complexly interwoven narratives, most of the narratives covered in this study stood on their own.At most, some of these texts may have shared a manuscript carrier, but there is no attempt to connect these texts through references or common events.
Nevertheless, the analysis below shows that these narratives shared a number of formal characteristics and themes.Do these unearthed narratives form a set or even genre of their own? What varieties do they reveal? Do they reveal similar concerns, share habits of using literary devices, and perhaps even assume a common audience? These are some of the questions that this study is concerned with.
Without the Zuo zhuan ’s interpretive framework and paratextual encapsulation mediating the reader’s engagement with the text, [21] texts and their stories behave and are read differently.In the unearthed narratives, there is no going back and forth between stories within a larger collection, no prophecy or signs inserted early on or flashbacks revealing the origins of events, [22] there are no unifying paratextual features such as the junzi 君子comments or a Chunqiu 春秋 Springs and Autumns frame of reference heading units of text.The stories, in general, feature a comparatively limited range of interlocutors and the description of these characters does not hinge on earlier narratives introduced in preceding stories.It is tempting, therefore, to introduce such an interpretive framework by reading the materials through and against the Zuo .But this is likely not how a recipient encountered the narratives.And while we cannot know for sure whether the texts gathered in this volume were at some point read together, I will show that while they have their differences, they certainly also share a range of commonalities in their mode of narration that allows us to read the stories together.
That is not to say that the materials included in this volume operated in a vacuum.Narratives about the Springs and Autumns period functioned within a broader horizon of expectations and touched upon the same basic framework of the past.
[23]
Indeed, that is exactly why we must ask how these short narratives managed to edge out a niche within Warring States historiographical discourse at large.
[24]
More often than not, the texts cover events, (re-)imagined or not, that preceded or followed famous episodes of Springs and Autumns history.
One striking aspect is the lack of overlap and explicit intertextuality between the
Zuo
and the manuscripts in the concrete narration of events despite the fact that many of the unearthed narratives seem to tell the story left untold in these other traditions.Whether the unearthed narratives were engaging with accounts in the process of crystallization, that had ended up or would end up in collections such as the
Zuo
, or were simply responding to commonplaces in the collective memory of the Warring States, cannot be said for certain.
[25]
Even if we assume that texts close in form to the narratives in the Zuo (let alone the Zuo zhuan text as a whole) were widely distributed during the Warring States, the existence of shorter individual narratives and sets of narratives in the unearthed records should alert us that the past was received in other ways as well. [26] Recent discoveries, if anything, have alerted us to the vast variety of forms of historiography.These include chronological and topical anecdotes collections, lists, and essays. [27] The preservation bias and selection criteria these materials reflect should serve as a counterpoint to the biases inherent in the processes of selection that informed the transmitted materials. [28]
Operating in broadly the same literary ecosphere, the narratives in this volume provided additional layers of meaning, contextualization, and characterization to the motivations, causes, and influences of events prominent in the historical memory of the Warring States literary elite.Some, such as the * Zheng Wu Furen gui ruzi and the Zi Fan Zi Yu , explore the moral or psychological drives of famous rulers from the past.Others, such as the * Zheng Wen Gong wen Tai Bo and * Zhao Jianzi , note the reasons for the success and failures of former rulers in lists of short vignettes.The * Jin Wen Gong ru yu Jin , is one of the few narratives here that focus on the successes of the ruler.And finally, the * Zi Yi poetically explores the background of a potential alliance between Qin and Chu.Beyond examining these narratives for what they tell us about what happened in the past, they allow us to look into the techniques and devices used in telling their stories.Possibly, this in turn reveals some of the expectations a Warring States audience had about the narration of the past.Within the stable framework of historical events, these narratives explored new motivations, explanations, and philosophical underpinnings, all the while catering to their audience in their use of narrative form.
[1] Wei Dong, Qinghua daxue cang Zhanguo zhujian jiaoshi di liu ji .
[2] See especially David Schaberg,“Playing at Critique: Indirect Remonstrance and the Formation of Shi Identity,”in Martin Kern, ed., Text and Ritual in Early China (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2005), 194–225, and Yuri Pines,“From Teachers to Subjects: Ministers Speaking to the Rulers from Yan Ying晏嬰to Li Si李斯，”in Garret Olberding, ed., Facing the Monarch: Modes of Advice in the Early Chinese Court (Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Center 2013), 69–99.
[3] See for instance Chen Wei陳偉， Xin chu Chujian yandu 新出楚簡研讀 (Wuhan: Wuhan daxue, 2010) 203–214, 238–241, and Li Ling李零， Jianbo gushu yu xueshu yuanliu 簡帛古書與學術源流 (Beijing: Sanlian, 2004), 202 ff.
[4] For their use in the ordering of these texts, see for example Jia Lianxiang賈連翔，“Qinghua jian Zheng Wu Furen gui ruzi pian de zai bianlian yu fuyuan”清華簡《鄭武夫人規孺子》篇的再編連與復原， Wenxian 文獻 2018.3: 54–59.
[5] For an overview of the regularities in material characteristics of the Tsinghua manuscripts and how these can be used to infer scribal habits, see Xiao Yunxiao,“Mediating between Loss and Order: Reflections on the Paratexts of the Tsinghua Manuscripts,” Bamboo and Silk 6.2 (2023): 186–237.
[6] See Rens Krijgsman and Paul Nicholas Vogt,“The One Text in the Many: Separate and Composite Readings of an Early Chinese Historical Manuscript,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 82.3 (2019): 473–492.
[7] See for example, Xiao Yunxiao肖芸曉，“Shilun Qinghua zhushu Yi Yin san pian de guanlian”試論清華竹書伊尹三篇的關聯， Jianbo 簡帛 8 (2013): 471–476.
[8] With those considerations in mind, some likely pairings may be: the * Zi Yi and Zhao Jianzi ; the * Zheng Wen Gong wen Tai Bo A and/or B, and the * Zheng Wu Furen gui ruzi .
[9] The data is drawn from the source publications and Li Songru李松儒，“Qinghua qi Zi Fan Zi Yu yu Zhao Jianzi deng pian ziji yanjiu”清華七《子犯子餘》與《趙簡子》等篇字迹研究， Chutu wenxian 出土文献 15 (2019): 177–192; she also provides data on the relative spacing of the binds.Length and width in cm.
[10] See Li Songru,“Qinghua qi Zi Fan Zi Yu yu Zhao Jianzi deng pian ziji yanjiu,”177–192, and references to earlier work therein.Shi Zhenying史楨英，“Ye shuo Qinghua daxue cang Zhanguo zhujian (qi) shouxie wenti也説《清華大學藏戰國竹簡（七）》寫手問題，Wuhan daxue jianbo zhongxin wangzhan, June 15, 2018, http://www.bsm.org.cn/?chujian/7899.html argues that at least for vol.7, there are two scribes, basing herself on visual and statistical criteria, accordance to patterns of variation etc.
[11] See Matthias Richter,“Tentative Criteria for Discerning Individual Hands in the Guodian Manuscripts,”in Xing Wen邢文ed., Rethinking Confucianism: Selected Papers from the Third International Conference on Excavated Chinese Manuscripts, Mount Holyoke College, April 2004 儒學的再思考：第三届國際簡帛研討會論文集 (San Antonio: Trinity University, 2006), 132–147, for an early critique of only relying on stylistic criteria in determining scribal hands.
[12] See for example Shi Xiaoli石小力，“Qinghua jian di liu ji zhong de e zi yanjiu”清華簡第六輯中的訛字研究， Chutu wenxian 出土文獻 2016.2: 190–197.
[13] The literature is vast; a good example is Chen Wei陳偉，“Zheng Bo ke Duan‘qianzhuan’de lishi xushi”鄭伯克段“前傳”的歷史敘事， Zhongguo shehui kexue bao 中國社會科學報，30 May, 2016.
[14] Wei Dong, Qinghua daxue cang Zhanguo zhujian jiaoshi di liu ji .
[15] Li Xueqin李學勤，“Youguan Chunqiu shishi de Qinghua jian wuzhong zongshu”有關春秋史事的清華簡五種綜述， Wenwu 文物 2016.3: 79–83.
[16] A classic statement of this problem can be found in Hayden White, The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990).
[17] See here the excellent discussion by Jonas Grethlein, Experience and Teleology in Ancient Historiography:‘Futures Past’from Herodotus to Augustine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 1–26.
[18] Irene de Jong, Narratology and Classics: A Practical Guide (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), this study also provides a conveniently structured introduction to some of the key concepts drawing on the work of narratologists such as Mieke Bal, Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative , Third Edition (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009); Gerard Genette, Jane E.Lewin trans., Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980); Irene de Jong, René Nünlist, and Angus Bowie eds., Narrators, Narratees, and Narratives in Ancient Greek Literature (Leiden: Brill, 2004), esp.part 2, pp.101–211; and Jonas Grethlein and Antonios Rengakos eds., Narratology and Interpretation: The Content of Narrative Form in Ancient Literature (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2009), esp.part 5, pp.451–571.
[19] For example, Yang Lei, Narrative Devices in the Shiji: Retelling the Past (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2024), and the work by Xia Dekao夏德靠，for instance, his Guo yu xushi yanjiu 《國語》敘事研究 (Beijing: Zhishi chanquan, 2015).
[20] In recent years, see especially Wai-Yee Li, The Readability of the Past in Early Chinese Historiography (Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Center, 2007), and David Schaberg, A Patterned Past: Form and Thought in Early Chinese Historiography (Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Center, 2002).For early incisive enquiries into the form of narration, see Ronald Egan,“Narratives in Tso Chuan,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 37.2 (1977): 323–352.For an intellectual historical analysis, see Yuri Pines, Foundations of Confucian Thought: Intellectual Life in the Chunqiu Period (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2002).
[21] Genette, Gérard, Jane E.Lewin trans., Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
[22] The one exception is perhaps the * Zi Yi which repeatedly looks back and alludes to events in the past.Note that some of the Shanghai manuscripts allow for such readings, often providing echoes between back-to-back narratives and rendering certain acts as, for example, signifying a future downfall; see Krijgsman and Vogt,“The One Text in the Many.”
[23] As I show below, a variety of context specific arguments are made in the individual texts that do not ascribe to a restricted set of identifiable valuations, a common motif that has been discerned within the Zuo .The stories discussed here may draw from similar motifs; see for instance, the Lord Wen of Jin stories’predilection with heaven’s agency and accordance with ritual propriety (see Li, The Readability of the Past , ch.4), but they are not the mainstay.
[24] It should be clear by now that I treat the majority of unearthed manuscripts as having enjoyed a meaningful life before internment.Evidence of deliberate destruction of manuscripts（a particularly salient example is the deliberate damaging of several slips in the Shanghai Museum * Kongzi Shilun 孔子詩論）and genres that may have been particularly meaningful to the dead（think of the Gao Di Shu 告地書）aside, we have no reason to assume that the dead were supposed to enjoy other materials than the living, or, that the funeral economy (see Guo Jue,“Western Han Funerary Relocation Documents and the Making of the Dead in Early Imperial China,” Bamboo and Silk 2.2 (2019): 141–273) went out of its way to produce fundamentally different historiographical narratives catering to the dead and their new home in the grave.For an exploration of that possibility, see Yuri Pines,“History as a Guide to the Netherworld: Rethinking the Chunqiu shiyu ,” Journal of Chinese Philosophy 31 (2003): 101–126.For an evaluation of the arguments on reading buried texts as, among others, grave goods, see the discussion in Enno Giele,“Using Early Chinese Manuscripts as Historical Source Materials,” Monumenta Serica 51 (2003): 409–438.
[25] The lack of concrete intertextual referencing seems to favor the latter position, but the engagement with exactly those scenes not narrated in texts such as the Zuo seems to support some form of the former position.
[26] For a discussion of the formation and spread of the Zuo , but with limited reference to the unearthed record, see Durrant, Li, and Schaberg, Zuo Tradition , introduction, esp.XXXVIII-LIX.For a discussion on the diversity of unearthed historiography, see Yuri Pines, Zhou History Unearthed: The Bamboo Manuscript Xinian and Early Chinese Historiography (New York: Columbia University Press, 2020), esp.chapter 3.
[27] Examples include, but are not limited to, the Tsinghua University manuscript’s * Xinian 繫年；see Newell Ann van Auken, forthcoming in this series, Olivia Milburn,“The Xinian: An Ancient Historical Text from the Qinghua University Collection of Bamboo Books,” Early China 39 (2016): 53–109, and, Pines, Zhou History Unearthed ; the * Chu ju 楚居，Chris Foster, forthcoming in this series; the * Chunqiu Shiyu 春秋事語，Pines,“History as a Guide to the Netherworld”；the narratives from the Shanghai Museum manuscripts, in particular the * Zhaowang huishi — Zhaowang yu Gong zhi Zhui 昭王毁室·昭王與龔之脽，* Pingwang wen Zhengshou 平王問鄭夀，* Pingwang yu Wangzi Mu 平王與王子木，and the Zhuangwang ji Cheng 莊王既成，see Krijgsman and Vogt,“The One Text in the Many”；If we include materials not covering the Springs and Autumns period, the picture is complicated even further; see, for example, the Shanghai Museum Rongchengshi 容成氏；see Rens Krijgsman,“Elision and Narration: Remembering and Forgetting in Some Recent Unearthed Historiographical Manuscripts,”in Albert Galvany, ed., The Craft of Oblivion: Aspects of Forgetting and Memory in Ancient China (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2023), 49–69.
[28] For a discussion on Chu mortuary culture as a background to recent manuscript finds, see Lothar von Falkenhausen,“Social Ranking in Chu Tombs: The Mortuary Background of the Warring States Manuscript Finds,” Monumenta Serica 51 (2003): 439–526.For a discussion on the distribution of the Daybook manuscript finds, but bearing on the issue of manuscript distribution and significance more broadly, see Alain Thote,“Daybooks in Archaeological Context,”in Books of Fate and Popular Culture in Early China: The Daybook Manuscripts of the Warring States, Qin, and Han , ed.Donald Harper and Marc Kalinowski (Leiden: Brill, 2017), 11–56.For recent archaeological finds corroborating the spread of these types of texts, see for instance the Wuwang Fuchai qi shi fa Yue 吴王夫差起師伐越excavated from the Zaolinpu paper factory Warring States tomb site in Jingzhou荆州，Hubei.For a discussion, see Zhao Xiaobin趙曉斌，“Jingzhou zaozhi jian Wuwang Fuchai qi shi fa Yue yu Qinghua jian Yue Gong qi shi ”荆州棗紙簡《吴王夫差起師伐越》與清華簡《越公其事》, paper presented at the conference “Qinghua Zhanguo Chujian guoji xueshu yantaohui”清華戰國楚簡國際學術研討會，Tsinghua University, Beijing, November 19, 2021, and Chris Foster’s volume in this series.