Imperial Order and Local Variation: The Culture of Ghost in Early Imperial China

Reviewed by: Artisans in Early Imperial China Anne P. Underhill Artisans in Early Imperial China by Anthony J. Barbieri-Low. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2008. Pp. x + 394. $60.00. Barbieri-Low’s engaging book, Artisans in Early Imperial China, tackles an important topic that has not been adequately addressed by historians, art historians, or archaeologists: the people behind the production and distribution of hand-crafted goods during the Qin and Han periods, 221 b.c.e.–c.e. 220. Whereas other scholars often discuss the finely made art objects from this era in isolation, Barbieri-Low breathes life into them, revealing their hidden human dimensions. He argues convincingly that “one cannot truly understand the visual and material cultural remains of early imperial China without understanding something about how they were made, who made them, and under what social and economic circumstances they were fashioned” (p. 26). Barbieri-Low succeeds in demonstrating the effectiveness of adopting a multidisciplinary approach to investigating ancient artisans and their products. He uses historical texts and inscriptions on objects to uncover information about the lives of artisans and the division of labor in production, art history to analyze the artisans’ creations, and anthropology to analyze the socioeconomic context. His aim is to employ historical, art historical, and anthropological (including archaeological) data in equal measure. He has, moreover, organized the chapters of his study to highlight the lives of artisans from different perspectives; he examines artisans in society (Chapter 2, which covers the topics of social status and social mobility), in the workshop (Chapter 3, which covers production methods, division of labor, work conditions), in the marketplace (Chapter 4, which deals with the organization of official markets and marketing methods), and at court (Chapter 5, which discusses the role of art objects in palaces and the organization of palace workshops). Chapter 6, “Artisans in Irons” examines non-free artisans, such as convicts, who were forced to produce for the state. His analysis of texts and inscriptions especially provides an illuminating view of the lives of artisans and the objects they made during the early imperial era. [End Page 491] Readers should know that anthropologists have long employed a holistic approach to research on craft goods, analyzing goods within systems of production, distribution, and consumption, rather than in isolation. For these scholars (including myself), the focus has always been the people behind the artifacts, revealed through the study of such topics as social identity, labor organization, craft specialization, exchange systems, consumption patterns, and regional economic systems.1 Research projects have included the production, distribution, and use of craft goods (especially ceramics, stone objects, textiles, metal objects) in prehistoric and early historic societies. Relevant publications exist for most world areas, including societies comparable in social complexity and scale with early imperial China such as the Inca empire.2 Considering the anthropological literature on these topics, I offer suggestions here for future research on early China. My intention is not to replace the productive multidisciplinary approach advocated by Barbieri-Low, but to discuss how one might amplify the anthropological component even further to provide more information on the producers and consumers of craft goods in early China. [End Page 492] The bulk of Barbieri-Low’s book treats the term “artisan” as a highly trained and skilled person who makes fine objects by hand. His book thus implies that such beautiful objects, works of art, were produced primarily for elite consumers. While recognizing that objects of beauty can be made for more than one type of consumer, the anthropological literature also distinguishes between various craft goods on the basis of class, status, gender, and ethnicity of the consumers. Researchers investigate how certain kinds of goods may bring prestige or wealth to consumers. They focus on how people actively use different kinds of goods in a social system. Also worthy of future investigation is the impact that consumer demand in early China had on the production of various kinds of craft goods. Consumer demand affects the production of both prestige-bearing goods and the common goods used in daily life. Barbieri-Low provides clues about variation in the social and ideological aspirations of consumers during the Qin and Han...

Discussions of food, the exchange of food, commensality, and food sacrifice pervade the dialogues and treatises of philosophers, persuaders, and ritualists in late Zhou and early imperial China. Meticulous care was invested in the preparation and serving of food in sacrificial rituals and banquets. Ritual codes suggest that the presentation of food reflected a host’s integrity toward the human or otherworldly guests that were to be feasted. Ritual itself, according to the Liji (Book of Rites), originated with eating and drinking (Liji, 21.586). Philosophers and moralists on their part adopted attitudes toward food as a yardstick to measure a person’s character or moral aptitude. In early China, as in most past and present societies, culinary culture transcended the necessities of nourishing the body or pleasing the palate. Debates on fasting or feasting, on eating or feeding others—in this world or the hereafter—reveal a gamut of social, moral, and religious codes that made up the fiber of early Chinese society.

Book Reviews 143 Food, Sacrifice, and Sagehood in Early China ROEL STERCKX. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. vi, 235 pages. ISBN 978-1-107-00171-8. £55.00, US$90.00, hardcover. Roel Sterckx’s new book is a welcome addition to the growing volume of publications on early Chinese history. Sterckx explores aspects of food culture in early China, primarily— albeit not exclusively—in the context of sacrificial activities; this focus allows him to address manifold issues concerning the philosophy of sacrifices, conceptualization of human senses, and early Chinese economic history and political thought. This rich and well written book will become indispensable to everybody interested in China’s food culture, in early Chinese religious history, and also to many students of early Chinese philosophy. References to food and food-related metaphors are ubiquitous in early Chinese texts, and this very richness of sources may have impeded systematic research on these topics in the past. In facing this challenging task, Sterckx relies on his awesome erudition, which was fully visible already in his first magnum opus, The Animal and the Daemon in Early China.1 In Food, Sacrifice, and Sagehood Sterckx utilizes, even if inevitably briefly, most of the received texts from the Springs-and-Autumns (770–453 BCE), Warring States (453–221 BCE), and the Han (206 BCE–220 CE) periods; these, in addition to occasional references to the paleographic sources and to archeological discoveries, allow Sterckx to present a panoptic view of Chinese sacrificial culture. The scope of the book is impressive both in terms of the periods covered (Sterckx expands his discussion at times both backwards, to the Western Zhou period [ca. 1045–771 BCE], and forwards, toward the post-Han sources) and in terms of topics covered, which include food habits of the elite, food as philosophical and political metaphor, nature of the human interaction with the deities, the economics of sacrifice, and aspects of sagehood and of rulership in pre-imperial and early imperial China. While not all of these topics are covered with equal density, and while the discussion on many issues may require further fine-tuning and modifications, overall the position of the Food, Sacrifice, and Sagehood as a standard for any future exploration in the field seems to me undeniable. The quasi-encyclopedic nature of the Food, Sacrifice, and Sagehood allows a reader to select a chapter close to his/her field of interest and read it as a separate essay; yet it is also possible to discern a few common ideas that underlie Sterckx’s discussions. Among these, the most interesting to the present reviewer is the author’s emphasis on multiple tensions that accompanied almost any imaginable aspect of food and sacrificial culture. Food and drinks were the source of nourishment and high joy, but also potentially of self-destructive overindulgence; deities had to be fed much like the humans, but the most exquisite offering was, paradoxically, the tasteless stew; sacrifices were essential for the community well-being, 1 Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2002. 144 Journal of Chinese Religions but also potentially damaging due to the waste of resources; and, while the sage rulers were supposed to be all-hearing and clairvoyant (congming 聪明), their ears and eyes had to be covered to prevent direct contact between their senses and their environment. By highlighting these tensions, Sterckx adds another dimension to our understanding of the deeply contradictory nature of China’s sacrificial, and, more broadly ritual culture with its embedded tension between the ritual and reality, between the image of perfect order generated through elaborate ceremonies and the imperfect sociopolitical situation; between persistent appeal to divine support and a somewhat equivocal belief in its efficacy. Speaking of tensions, one may identify some of them in the book itself. Perhaps the most significant one is between Sterckx-anthropologist and Sterckx-historian. The first tends to depict Chinese food consumption and sacrificial practices as if they were uniform throughout the six to ten centuries under discussion, perpetuating, inadvertently, the long bygone image of changeless China. The author frankly explains why he eschews chronological treatment of the topics under discussion: given the notoriously unreliable dating of major texts, most notably of ritual compendia...

Early is best known for the dazzling artifacts it has left behind. These terracotta figures, gilt-bronze lamps, and other material remnants of the Chinese past unearthed during archaeological excavations are often viewed without regard to the social context of their creation, yet they were made by real individuals who contributed greatly to the foundations of early Chinese culture. With Artisans in Early Imperial China, Anthony Barbieri-Low combines historical, epigraphic, and archaeological analysis to refocus our gaze from the glittering objects and monuments of to the men and women who made them. This book represents the first in-depth social history of artisans in early China. How did they live? How were they trained? How did they market their products? How free were they? In this engaging and illuminating analysis, Barbieri-Low explores these artisans' lives and careers from a variety of aspects. First, he examines their position within early Chinese society, analyzing their social status, social mobility, and role in the early Chinese economy. Delving deeper, he steps into their workshops to learn how they were trained, what tools they used, and what workplace hazards they faced. Following their wares to the marketplace, he investigates some of the marketing techniques used by artisans and merchants, including such startlingly modern practices as family trademarks, rhyming jingles, and knockoffs of royal products. From the dirt and din of the marketplace, Barbieri-Low enters the rarefied air of the court, with its own visual and material culture and its own professional artisans. This court was constructed upon the backs of yet another class of artisans, the most abject, those found in labor camps and slave markets. These were the men and women who built and decorated many of the great palaces, temples, and tombs of early China. Barbieri-Low compellingly argues that the state used a cold-blooded mathematical formula to optimally exploit these coerced laborers without upsetting the balance of the economy or fostering revolt. Artisans in Early Imperial China humanizes the material remains of the past, revealing the men and women who made the beautiful artifacts we know today. This book will appeal to anyone interested in Chinese history, as well as to scholars of comparative social history, labor history, and Asian art history.

In early imperial China, the dead were remembered by stereotyping them, by relating them to the existing public memory and not by vaunting what made each person individually distinct and extraordinary in his or her lifetime. Their posthumous names were chosen from a limited predetermined pool; their descriptors were derived from set phrases in the classical tradition; and their identities were explicitly categorized as being like this cultural hero or that sage official in antiquity. In other words, postmortem remembrance was a process of pouring new ancestors into prefabricated molds or stamping them with rigid cookie cutters. Public Memory in Early China is an examination of this pouring and stamping process. After surveying ways in which learning in the early imperial period relied upon memorization and recitation, K. E. Brashier treats three definitive parameters of identity--name, age, and kinship--as ways of negotiating a person's relative position within the collective consciousness. He then examines both the tangible and intangible media responsible for keeping that defined identity welded into the infrastructure of Han public memory.

Reviewed by: Women in Ancient China by Bret Hinsch Sheri A. Lullo Women in Ancient China. Bret Hinsch. London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2018. 226 pp., 20 figures, glossary, notes, bibliography, index. Hardback US $79, ISBN 978-1-5381-1540-4. Bret Hinsch has made a number of contributions to the history of gender and sexuality in China, primarily for the ancient and premodern eras. His latest book, Women in Ancient China, "details the process of growing sexual inequality as it unfolded" across the Neolithic, Shang, and Western and Eastern Zhou periods (seventh millennium to third century b.c.) (p. x). This work greatly expands upon Hinsch's summary of these periods in a chapter in his other recent book, Women in Imperial China (Hinsch 2016:1–32). It also serves as a welcome and long-awaited companion to his Women in Early Imperial China (2002), which covers the Qin and Han periods (third century b.c.–a.d. third century). Like many of his books, Women in Ancient China takes a chronological approach, which allows Hinsch to examine the various ways that a woman's identity and status were affected by the shifting social, political, and institutional structures of each ruling power. Thus, each chapter is a comparative study that looks both back in time and anticipates future developments or changes. Drawing from multiple disciplinary perspectives, this useful and comprehensive study synthesizes the growing body of secondary scholarship on women's lives in ancient China. Hinsch's central thesis is that "growing institutional complexity affected female rights and privileges" (p. xii). The study details the various ways that gendered hierarchy became standardized with the expansion of a patriarchal governing system, relegating women to roles in which they invariably served to aid or help legitimize men. Interwoven within this narrative, however, are stimulating accounts of instances where women occupied positions of political, moral, and maternal authority. Hinsch's chronological study is framed by chapters that take up two prominent and influential "myths" in the study of gender in early China, including theories of matriarchy and a rhetoric of females causing the downfalls of major dynasties. Following the "Introduction," chapter 1, "The Myth of Matriarchy," addresses the "vexing methodological problem" with early and in some cases current scholarship that views early society in China as matriarchal (p. xiv). Such theories developed in the mid-nineteenth century under the influence of Marxism; to a certain extent, they remain part of state orthodoxy (though they are quietly disregarded by most scholars today) (p. 5). As Hinsch demonstrates, evidence of matriarchy and matrilinealism in Neolithic China and into the succeeding periods has been disproven. These approaches, however, must be acknowledged in an historical survey of women in ancient China since for decades they have been an underlying assumption of many scholars from numerous disciplinary perspectives, including archaeology, religion, social history, and linguistics. By including this "critical discussion" at the opening of his book, Hinsch positions his research as separate from this outdated body of scholarship (p. xiv). It should be noted, however, that a rather crucial part of the historiography of the "matriarchy myth" is missing from Hinsch's summary. Quite relevant to the purposes of his book are some of the positive outcomes that came with the quest to uncover China's matriarchal beginnings, as explained very clearly in an article by Gideon Shelach (2004) titled "Marxist and Post-Marxist Paradigms for the Neolithic." According to Shelach, misguided as they were, theories of matriarchy were foundational to the study of gender in the archaeological record of China: The Marxist paradigm fostered in China a coherent discussion on issues such as the family structure during the Neolithic period and forced Chinese archaeologists to think of archaeological methods that could flesh out these abstract social norms. Contrary to commonly held views in the West, Chinese archaeologists vividly debated theoretical and methodological issues related to concepts such as [End Page 413] matriarchy, matrilineality, patriarchy, and patrilineality. (Shelach 2004:14) These are some of the very issues that are central to Hinsch's book and as such should have been properly acknowledged. In chapter 2, Hinsch surveys the Early, Middle, and Late Neolithic periods of China, with dates provided...

This paper traces the history of the notion of female chastity (zhen) in China from pre-Qin to the mid-imperial era and argues that, prior to the arrival of Buddhism in China, the idea of female “chastity” was concerned not so much with physical virginity as the dutiful fulfillment of wifely obligations as stipulated by the Confucian marriage rites. A woman's chastity was determined by her moral rectitude rather than by her biological condition. The understanding of the physical body as a sacrosanct entity that must be defended against defilement and violation emerged under the influence of Buddhist notions of the uncontaminated body, the pious observance of the Buddhist monastic code, and the performance of religious charity that became popular in early imperial China. Based on a critical analysis of a wide array of Confucian canonical texts, dynastic histories, Indian Buddhist scriptures, biographies of Chinese monks and nuns, the monastic code, and Chinese Buddhist encyclopedias, this paper delineates the gradual process by which the Buddhist concept of the “pure body” became fully assimilated into the indigenous Chinese notion of female “rectitude” and the notion of female chastity finally acquired an ontological identity around the end of the sixth century.

There were numerous general prescriptions for ritual behavior in court in early imperial China. Exceptions to some of these were occasionally granted to eminent persons, the classic case being that of Hsiao Ho, Han Kao-tsu's illustrious adviser. These grants of special privileges and exemptions were used to enhance the prestige of various individuals, some of whom became founders of dynasties. The present paper adduces instances from the second century B.C. up to the accession of the Chin in A.D. 265.

From a comparative perspective, this paper argues that early Chinese empires lacked the concept of talion or tort law when malicious violence or intent became factors. Instead, wrongdoers were required to pay fines to the government or received punishment as hard labor for the state. Victims not only could not receive compensation but were sometimes punished along with the offender if their loss was perceived as a loss to the empire. I argue that the absence of corrective justice in criminal cases can be traced back to the philosophical underpinnings of the body politic, a prominent discourse in early China that viewed the emperor and the people as a single, organic entity. When people were conceived of as constituting a unified, singular entity, criminal actions against an individual were interpreted as damage to the empire. Therefore, punishments for offenders were designed to compensate the empire, not the individual. Furthermore, in the context of the body politic, the suffering of both victims and offenders was regarded as metaphysically equal, which justified frequently pardoning culprits on a large scale to secure harmony within the empire. Originally, the body politic was employed to admonish and criticize the throne, urging the emperor to align his interests with the well-being of his people, but in practice, it compromised the practice of justice.

This article examines the development of road networks in Roman and early Chinese imperial contexts, analyzing the role of political ideology and cultural frameworks in shaping infrastructure. It argues that Roman roadbuilding, deeply intertwined with notions of public participation and republicanism, developed into a system where roads symbolized power and facilitated state control. Early Imperial China saw similar approaches to roads with a few stark contrasts. These included a greater restriction of access and usage, and a more equivocal stance on the ethics of road construction, with roadbuilding becoming less emphasized in favor of waterways and hydraulic engineering in the Han period, reflecting a different mode of territorial management and imperial ideology. This study highlights key structural and ideological divergences in the two civilizations' approaches to infrastructure. The Roman 'hodological' worldview contrasts with the broader territorial understanding evident in early Chinese cartographical and hydraulic initiatives. By offering a comparative analysis, this paper provides a foundation for further inquiry into the political and cultural dynamics of imperial roadbuilding.

Texts from pre-imperial and early imperial China are replete with dietary information, regimens for nourishing the body and instructions on how not to soil its inner purity. Sources have far less to say about the body’s effluvia and the waste and muck that is shed and excreted by human and non-human animals. This article studies references to excreta and excretion in early China. It shows how human and animal faeces as well as the locus of excretion connoted both negative and positive spheres. Excreta were deemed noxious yet also beneficial, they were to be discarded yet also reused. Latrines were liminal zones, operating at the intersection of social propriety and physical and moral rejection. The process of excretion made the body vulnerable to external influences such as demonic illness, yet faecal matter of itself also had medicinal healing powers. In agriculture, matter exuded was matter used to fecundate and fertilize crops. The waste and human nightsoil that accumulated in the concealed domestic space of the latrine and pigpen ended up as sought-after produce infusing life into seeds, fields, and public productivity. By bringing together evidence across a range of textual and material sources – from latrines, to pigs, to a line in the Laozi 老子 and its commentaries – this article traces excretory experience and matter through its cycle from defecation to regeneration.

Reviewed by: Literate Community in Early Imperial China: The Northwestern Frontier in Han Times by Charles Sanft Sujane Wu (bio) Charles Sanft. Literate Community in Early Imperial China: The Northwestern Frontier in Han Times. Albany: State University of New York, 2019. xxiii, 252 pp. Hardcover $90.00, isbn 978-1-4384-7513-4-252 pages. As implied in the title of his book, Literate Community in Early Imperial China: The Northwestern Frontier in Han Times, Charles Sanft undertakes his tasks on four aspects—literacy, community, early Han era (time frame), and the northwestern frontier (location)—by using the archaeological discoveries in the area located within modern Gansu Province and the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region in recent decades. Through his case study on the excavated written texts in various forms (e.g., edits and private letters) and on a variety of [End Page 105] materials (e.g., silk, paper, wood, and bamboo strips), the author argues that in the northwestern frontier—a border region being "far removed from the centers of culture and politics" (p. xv)—during the Han times, men and women at the lower social level were in fact meaningfully interacting with text. Furthermore, Sanft also argues that all these non-elite people (i.e., local residents and soldiers as well as their families from other regions) worked as a "community," rather than as individuals, when they encountered an opportunity to engage with texts. In addition to the introduction and conclusion, this book consists of eight chapters that can be summarized as follows: The first two chapters elaborate on the major theme—that is, the not-elite people's interaction with the texts that occurred not in the central power-holder location. While chapter 1 expounds on the meanings of "literacy and community," chapter 2 explains the significance of given time period and location studied. For the remaining six chapters that follow, the author provides his close examination and interpretation to a variety of excavated texts—namely, posted texts; statements of individuals and groups; composite texts; practical texts; cultural texts; and private letters—and in each chapter, he focuses on one kind of text and offers his interpretation and analyses. In chapter 1 titled "Interacting with Text in Early Imperial China and Beyond," the author sets up a framework for his case study on the border region and elaborates on the reasons behind his approach. In this chapter, he also notes that he wants to reconsider and redefine the word "literacy" when it is used in a distant past in China. He says, "This chapter makes the case for considering reading, including reading aloud; listening to others read aloud; writing; and dictation as different ways of doing one thing: interacting with text" (p. 1). That said, he redefines and broadens the meaning of "literacy" in this book. He remarks, by referring to Nicholas Orme's statement, that our common (and narrow) understanding of literacy as an individual's ability to both read and write is "because we live in a society that places an emphasis on people as individuals" (p. 21). He argues that when the concept of "literacy" is applied to the distant past, we need to think from a more collective perspective. He further emphasizes that "thinking in terms of community rather than individuals also provides a way to work around the intractable questions connected with determining rates of literacy" (p. 22). A "literate community" thus denotes how a group of people, being in "physical closeness," interacts with texts (p. 23). In chapter 2, the author offers the intellectual and historical "contexts and sources" for his case study in which he focuses on the excavated documents from the four commandaries—Zhangye 张掖, Dunhuang 敦煌, Wuwei 武威, and Jiuquan 酒泉—four newly established Han commandaries郡 in the northwestern border region. The function of this chapter, as he notes, is to give the reader a background in Han military presence in this area and an overview [End Page 106] of how the documents produced and transmitted among people (and how people interacted with them)—all the information necessary to understand his approach to the main chapters (3-8) in the book, which will be briefly discussed later. The author begins his close examination...

Reviewed by: Women in Early Imperial China Li-Hsiang Lisa Rosenlee (bio) Bret Hinsch . Women in Early Imperial China. Lanham, Boulder, New York, and Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002. xi, 237 pp. Paperback $26.95, ISBN 0-7425-1872-8. At a time when Western interest in China is steadily on the rise, Bret Hinsch's book on women in early imperial China, with an emphasis on the Qin and Han dynasties, is a fitting new addition to the volume of recent scholarship on the status of Chinese women. Instead of offering sweeping statements on the overall status of Chinese women, Hinsch focuses on the complexity of the social roles that women play. He lays out his methodology as follows: "Understanding these ideal female roles, and how individual women accepted, comprehended, and contested them, is a powerful method for interpreting the distant female past" (p. 7). The book is composed of eight short chapters, each touching on a specific aspect of society such as kinship, wealth and work, law, government, learning, ritual, and cosmology, providing different perspectives on the range of social roles that women assume and play. According to Hinsch, the advantage of this role-playing approach, as opposed to focusing on the Confucian classics or searching for a single "status" or "position" of women, is that it can encompass different times and places and reveals general trends by grouping individuals into larger social roles. More importantly, it avoids an explicit Western philosophical bias and is thus better able to cross cultural boundaries (pp. 7-8). Hinsch's performative approach [End Page 112] to the concept of womanhood allows for a more dynamic view of woman, whose identity is not static or fixed according to her gender, but instead intersects with a wide range of roles that she plays throughout her lifetime. In addition, Hinsch believes that the three intellectual trends of pragmatism, patrilinealism, and cosmology have also influenced the way that women have been perceived. Pragmatism accounts for the disparity between an elite idealized separation of gender roles and popular practice, which often granted women relative autonomy. Patrilinealism, emphasizing kinship seniority, accords great respect to the role of mother and can thus be manipulated to women's advantage. Han cosmology abstracts both man and woman from their concrete social roles to the realm of metaphysics, where gender becomes a static fact, which in part accounts for the increasing inequality between genders in subsequent centuries (pp. 13, 165). However, whether the cosmological pairs of heaven/earth, qian/kun, and yin/yang can even function as a theoretical explanation for the inferiority of women in imperial China is a hotly contested issue; feminists and sinologists alike disagree over the centrality of cosmology as well as the conventional dualistic interpretation of these cosmological paradigms in the discourse of gender in everyday life.1 Hinsch's take on Han cosmology in relation to gender inequality certainly reflects the position of the proponents of cosmological centrality in this ongoing debate. Prior to the rise of Han cosmology, gender relations were discussed mostly in the context of the appropriateness of the respective social roles that men and women played (p. 12). And kinship based on patrilineal seniority was the prime regulator of women's lives in early imperial China (p. 33). Gender itself was not a social role, nor was it an indicator of social status, but only one factor among many determining the relative status of various kinship roles (p. 52). Oftentimes, generational seniority overrides gender in importance. Patrilinealism, although it emphasizes women's obligation to sacrifice themselves for the well-being of patrilineality, also confers tremendous power on women in the role of mother; Mencius' self-sacrificing yet revered mother is an enduring icon in Chinese history. The principle of generational seniority not only underlay the kinship system but also permeated different aspects of society such as wealth and work, law, and government. For instance, in the area of wealth and work, the moral injunction that a junior may not hold private property while the senior is still alive clearly benefited both senior men and women (p. 61). In the area of law, children could not denounce their parents, and to conceal...

The ‘Mandate of Heaven’ (Tian ming), a heaven-endowed right to rule over ‘All-Under-Heaven’ (Tian xia), receives most of the attention in contemporary discussions of pre-modern Chinese politics. Upon unification under Qin in 221 BCE, however, the ‘Mandate of Heaven’ played no role, with Qin declaring an entirely new imperial order. Nonetheless, its titles and terms drew upon pre-imperial concepts, including the metahuman powers of the ancestral temple and practices of royal gift-giving and punishment. As the centuries passed under Western Han, Xin, and finally Eastern Han rule, such concepts continued to receive pride of place, even while new ideas, including the ‘Mandate of Heaven’, rested on top of them. This chapter analyses four different sources, composed over the early imperial period, to illustrate this conceptual layering over time. The effort provides not only a more accurate understanding of early Chinese imperial politics, but also highlights a feature of all sovereign claims: they inevitably entail call upon history and rest in tension with previous narratives that never entirely go away. Attempts to establish and build political power and institutions must explain away such contradictions and construct narratives which render that power natural and sensical.

Reviewed by: Creating Confucian Authority: The Field of Ritual Learning in Early China to 9 CE by Robert Chard Andrew Lambert (bio) Robert Chard. Creating Confucian Authority: The Field of Ritual Learning in Early China to 9 CE. Sinica Leidensia, vol. 152. Leiden, New York, and Köln: E. J. Brill, 2021. viii, 223 pp. Hardcover $49.00, isbn 978-90-04-46191-8. E-book (PDF) $49.00, isbn 978-90-04-46531-2. Robert Chard's book explores how li (禮)—a term typically translated as "ritual" but which the author approaches with great care—became central to Confucian identity and gradually came to order the political realm in early China. In Chard's words, the book traces "the early formation and evolution of Ritual Learning from before the time of Confucius to the end of the Western Han Dynasty in 9 CE: what it was in different periods, who mastered it, how it was deployed, and what it reveals about the interactions between Confucian Ru and political power" (p. 3). The book explores how a recognized body of ritual practice and norms emerged during this time, eventually becoming codified knowledge in canonical texts. "Ritual learning"—Chard's key term—is defined broadly, as "the study and practice of li" (p. 5) and "all knowledge related to the various aspects of li in early China" (p. 9). The frequent use of the pinyin li is deliberate, as the author seeks to retain its broad range of implications, in contrast to a more constrained term such as "ritual." Chard is careful to limit the scope of his inquiry into li. Excluded, for example, is consideration of analytic treatments of li found in canonical Confucian texts, such as the Xunzi, parts of the Liji and Han cosmological discourse (p. 17). Also, circumvented is the modern trend toward understanding the Confucian tradition in the abstract, as a set of general theoretical commitments or philosophical positions. Instead, using a method described as "cultural history," Chard seeks to understand the practices that constitute early Confucian li, and how knowledge of those practices (rather than other non-Confucian esoteric ritual practices) influenced the formation of later imperial ritual, thereby establishing the Confucian tradition at the heart of state affairs. A further feature of the author's approach is an emphasis on the visual impact of ritual practice (again, in contrast to a more theoretical understanding of ritual). This builds on the author's earlier work, and on the work of other scholars, such as Robert Eno's claim that the driving concern of the early Confucian movement was physical training and mastery, rather than an ideology or set of ideas (p. 9). Understood as a practical and cultural phenomenon, Chard offers four [End Page 177] characteristics of li (pp. 7–8). These are: a "socio-cultural order based on ritual institutions instituted by governments" (lizhi 禮制), "visible, technical mastery," or "ritual performance" (liyi 禮儀), a code of "civilized ethical behavior" (liyi 禮義), and "a regimen of self-cultivation" (xiushen 修身) to which "the personal observation of li was central." The heart of the book consists of three long chapters, each examining a historical period in the development of ritual learning. The chapters move from the Spring and Autumn period, through the Warring States and early Han, and culminate with a study of Confucian ritual's ascendency in the late Western Han (206 B.C.E.–9 C.E.). Chapter 2 covers the first of these three putative stages of ritual learning and focuses on the understanding of li during the Spring and Autumn Era, particularly as portrayed in the Zuo zhuan. At this time, li was one branch of learning, alongside those such as knowledge of the Book of Songs and music. We find a portrait of li as a body of knowledge whose application and significance are in transition: from a "code of conduct among the aristocracy" to a set of practices that were, through Confucius, "made … available to a somewhat broader segment of society" (p. 83). Even though older social orders ruptured, precise observance and visible display of li remained closely linked to social status; however, li also came to be understood as a physical practice that...