Rumor in the Early Chinese Empires, by Lu Zongli, tr. Wee Kek Koon

Abstract

This book is a translation of a monograph by Lu Zongli, a specialist in early Chinese history and thought, which originally appeared in 2011 under the Chinese title Han dai de yaoyan. A brief review such as this can hardly do justice to the author’s erudition or to this study’s empirical richness. Readers will also benefit from consulting the ‘Introduction to the English Edition’ provided by Mark Edward Lewis, another well-known authority on early Chinese history, which compares and contrasts Lu’s work with Western (anglophone and francophone) scholarship on rumours. Occasional typographical or grammatical infelicities notwithstanding, this is an admirably executed translation which consists of the author’s original preface, Lewis’s introduction, six main chapters, and a new epilogue written by the author in 2019. The basic structure of the core chapters consists of a thorough interrogation of Chinese terms used to describe a range of ‘rumor-like expressions’, followed by a presentation of specific examples within their proper historical contexts and, finally, some discussion of how such categorisations reflected and often dictated the official dispositions and responses of government authorities towards the particular types of unsanctioned speech and information under consideration.