Social Sciences in China (Chinese Edition)

No. 9, 2022

Documentary Collation and Chinese Book Culture as Seen in the Bamboo Slips and Writing on Silk from the Warring States Period and the Qin and Han Dynasties

(Abstract)

Yang Bo

The excavation of bamboo slips and writing on silk from the Warring States period and Qin and Han dynasties provides a material source for understanding the state of documentary collation prior to Liu Xiang’s collating work and reveals the richness of Chinese written culture. The phenomena of “different forms of the same text,” “different texts in the same volume,” and “many copies of the same text,” and forms of documentary collation such as the goujiao, heji, and tishi of the bamboo slips, as well as the division, classification, and ordering of the early Han dynasty legal code, all show that the collation of books by Liu Xiang and others was done following contemporary conventions. The wooden tally or lu served in part as a “catalog” (mulu) of the ancient texts. It was a simple and quick way to get a whole picture of the information, whether through browsing the contents of the classics by reading the titles recorded on wooden tablets or by accessing the information on money and goods recorded in account books. Ordering was the most important process in the collation of the classical works, and was the key to the emergence of the true sense of mulu. The fixed and widely accepted order of titles was the basis for the standardization of the sequence of classical texts. The various forms of mu and lu as seen in the bamboo slips and silk from the Warring States Period and the Qin and Han dynasties reflect the diverse development and evolution of classical texts in early Chinese book culture. Specifically, in the three documents found in the tomb of the Marquis of Haihun, we see not only mu and lu, but also mulu which are explicitly “individual text titles.” The documents from the tomb actually show the documentary development and evolution of the early culture of classical works.