Ziliang Liu. Review of "The Art of Terrestrial Diagrams in Early China" by Michelle H. Wang.

Abstract “Labor” as a specific domain of embodied experience and a source of imagery and figurative language in early China remains understudied. The study invites critical attention to this topic, focusing on four types of imagery of labor—plowing, weaving, fishing, and hunting—which constituted an interpenetrated rhetorical body sustaining varying socio-political and intellectual agendas. Either foregrounded with expressive rhetorical figures like metaphor and allegory or sedimented in commonplace language, the four types of labor imagery emerged and proliferated to present a constellation of moral, epistemic, and aesthetic values toward the characterization of specific practices of ruling, learning, speaking, and writing, as well as the intellectual agency thereof. This rhetorical phenomenon emerged in pre-imperial China and gained new prominence during Han times. Especially since the first century bce , the four tropes of labor were made particularly useful to characterize a growing body of intellectual labor, which was increasingly engaged and coupled with literary learning and production in a manner of self-oriented accumulation and manifestation. This change worked in concert with a forcefully emerging and proliferating literary culture, as well as its embedded scholarly aesthetics and ideology.

ROME AND CHINA - †Michael Loewe , Imperial Institutions in Ancient Rome and Early China. A Comparative Analysis. Edited by T. Corey Brennanand Michael Nylan . Pp. xvi + 237, ills, maps. London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2025. Paper, £24.99 (Cased, £75). ISBN: 978-1-350-44512-3 (978-1-350-44511-6 hbk).

Most primitive religions originated from the devout worship of celestial deities, earthly spirits, and ghosts. In oracle bone inscriptions, rituals related to praying for rain, temple worship, river deity worship, and the worship of great deities were referred to as “fang” 方 or “yi fang” 以方. The Supreme God was the paramount deity of the Yin Shang Dynasty people; by the early Zhou Dynasty, the Supreme God and ancestral spirits began to merge. The hexagram of Contemplation 觀卦 (guan gua) establishes instruction through the concept of “contemplation” fully presenting the entire process of shamans, sorcerers, or ritual hosts participating in temple sacrifices, and completing the hand-washing ritual 盥 (guan) and the sacrifice-offering ritual 薦 (jian). It emphasizes the sincere communication between humans and Heaven. When a monarch performs the guan ritual, he embodies inner “sincerity and clarity” 誠明 (chengming); in response, the celestial deities will “show trust” 有孚 (youfu). Thus, it can be verified that deities exist in Heaven, and an interactive, responsive relationship is formed between Heaven and humans. The nine in the fifth place (the dominant line) possesses great inspiring power. The two fundamental dimensions for interpreting the hexagram structure are “the great view is above” 大觀在上 (da guan zai shang) and “[t]hose below look toward him and are transformed” 下觀而化 (xia guan er hua). These dimensions not only highlight the infinite transcendence, charisma, and appeal of the worshipped deities but also underscore humans’ profound reverence and faith in deities and the absolute existence. Sages 聖人 (sheng ren), as intermediaries between humans and deities, established religion for the sake of human life but did not regard themselves as religious leaders. However, from the Shang and Zhou dynasties to the Spring and Autumn period, a transition occurred in the spiritual life of the Chinese people: from shamanism to ritual propriety 禮 (li), and from theistic culture to humanistic culture. This transition laid the fundamental direction for the development and evolution of Chinese culture over the following 2500 years. Confucius attempted to replace or eliminate the shamanistic elements in early Confucians with personalized moral experience and ethical consciousness.

: <i>In the Mind, in the Body, in the World: Emotions in Early China and Ancient Greece</i>

Vermander, Benoît, Textual Patterns and Cosmic Designs in Early China

The Mohist doctrine of “non-offensive warfare” (fei gong) is fundamentally grounded in the principles of robust defense and the strategic use of strength to deter armed conflict. In contrast to the Confucian conception of “righteous war”, the Mohist philosophy of peace exhibits a distinctly pragmatic orientation: it reconceptualizes the very nature of warfare by rejecting annexation and expansion motivated by avarice; it seeks the cessation of war not through moral exhortation but through the establishment of effective defensive capabilities; and it develops a systematic military thought that privileges defense over aggression. This intellectual shift is deeply rooted in the socio-political transformations of the Warring States period, during which the collapse of the old order rendered appeals to moral authority insufficient to counterbalance the pervasive drive for territorial consolidation. Departing from prior scholarship that has largely focused on the Confucian ideal of “harmony as the highest virtue”, this study contends that Mohist fei gong embodies an active pacifism—a proactive paradigm of self-defense aimed at the prevention of war. This framework offers a more dynamic and agentive philosophical resource than models of “passive peace”, thereby illuminating the historical lineage and civilizational foundations of China’s peace-oriented thought.

ABSTRACT For early China, the assumption has been that craft production was centrally controlled by autocratic rulers in early cities. In this paper, we present new findings of stone tool assemblages at the small Nanyangjiazhuangzi site (Longshan period, 2400–1800 b.c.) in the coastal area of Shandong Province, China. At Nanyangjiazhuangzi, the unusually high density of stone artifacts and debris, associated with the early stages of tool manufacture, indicates that the site had an important role in the reduction process that worked raw stone material into tools. The discoveries yield critical evidence for the source of unfinished preforms and polished stone tools discovered over generations of research at the larger site of Liangchengzhen, 25 km away. The finding that specialized production for exchange was not restricted to large settlements in Late Neolithic eastern Shandong serves as a basis to question the notion that such production was centrally controlled by ruling elites.

Abstract Considerable evidence survives of the cooking and eating of kebabs as a major form of meat consumption in early China. Not only are there numerous artistic depictions in both painting and low-relief stone sculpture of this practice, but there are also some very early excavated skewers, grills, and indeed preserved meat kebabs, not to mention references in contemporary literature, and this evidence significantly predates any documentation of kebabs in the Middle East. However, in spite of this wealth of documentation, this tradition has gone largely unexplored, partly due to scholars failing to understand the relevant terminology and partly due to an unjustified belief that all kebab cooking must derive from the Middle East. This article explores the indigenous ancient Chinese tradition of kebab cooking, focused on grilling and roasting of smaller ( luan ) or larger ( zi ) pieces of meat seasoned with soybean pastes and sauces, which developed independently of other similar culinary practices elsewhere. This analysis is focused on literary evidence of the Chinese kebab, with particular reference to the contents of a recently discovered very early cookbook, dating to the Han Dynasty, excavated from the tomb of Wu Yang, first marquis of Yuanling, who died in 162 BCE.

The idea of hell entails a type of extramundane retribution, and such extramundane retribution is useful as a deterrent to antisocial behaviour. This functionalist view of extramundane retribution was, in fact, explicitly countenanced during pre-imperial China. Also, like many roughly contemporaneous pre-Christian cultures in western Eurasia, pre-imperial China had a notion of an “underworld”. For early China, then, the more relevant “problem of hell” might be this one: why does hell appear to be so marginal? This paper surveys the idea of hell in the pre-Qin and Han periods, and concludes that an answer may be found in the Ruist appropriation of Zhou ideas about acquisition of virtue-power (de) and the afterlife, which were promulgated as state orthodoxy during the Han. With the fall of the Han, however, this state orthodoxy crumbled, and the culturally-adaptive memetic power of hell reasserted itself in the interdynastic and Tang periods. During these periods, a mélange of Buddhist and Daoist ideas of hell more strongly informed popular belief, and the idea of hell was arguably thereafter marginal in appearance only.

This article compares how sundials arose and were shaped in the GrecoRoman world and in early China between the fourth century BCE and the fourth century CE. It uses published historical sources together with archaeological catalogues to group the Mediterranean examples into the usual typesspherical, conical, planar and cylindricaland to comment on several portable pieces. For the Chinese side, it turns to excavated instruments and transmitted texts to follow their appearance and early find contexts, and to note the main disagreements about how they were used and how they should be classified. Viewed together, both traditions start from measuring a shadow cast by a vertical gnomon, but later forms moved in different directions because the social tasks assigned to timekeeping and the technical choices were not the same. Placing the two bodies of evidence side by side helps to show what was common to early time measurement and what was specific to each cultural setting.

ABSTRACT The pre-imperial Chinese Tai 臺 [terrace], through its vertical and horizontal forms, symbolizes cosmic order and serves as a physical link between heaven and humanity. Traditionally, the pre-imperial Tai has been understood primarily through a functionalist lens, lacking a theoretical exploration of its symbolic meaning and mobility. This study examines Tai through three dimensions: The sacred, which grounds its sacred narratives; the order, which explains its transition from mythic consciousness to spatial practice; and the power, which illuminates its religio-political interface through historical events. These dimensions overlap and interact, offering a fresh perspective on the terrace. By situating Tai within mythological, religious, and political contexts, we have explored the interplay between religious beliefs and spatial practices in early China. This paper contributes to the spatial turn in the humanities, enhancing the understanding of traditional Chinese architectural culture.

The role of radiocarbon dating in Chinese archaeology has grown increasingly significant in recent decades. Thousands of archaeological radiocarbon dates have been published along with the development of multiple laboratories. However, radiocarbon dates were published in a fragmented manner, in different languages and limited to specific archaeological sites or topics. This fragmentation has created substantial barriers to cross-regional and interdisciplinary research at various temporal and spatial scales. While several datasets have been compiled, there is a lack of crucial details regarding the archaeological context, geographic information, and essential parameters of the radiocarbon data. This databank seeks to bridge this gap by providing the most up-to-date comprehensive radiocarbon database of Chinese archaeology. This effort involves a systematic review of the relevant literature and the revision of earlier datasets. A total number of 7,083 radiocarbon dates, accompanied by their detailed information, were collected. This databank offers a valuable resource for interdisciplinary research that aims to quantify human activity in prehistoric China, and it establishes a foundational framework for future data collections.

Studies of medium and materiality often focus on specific materials and assume that the material itself is the end goal. In this article I propose a shift in focus to the conceptual aspects of medium as the end goal by arguing for a quality bridging different materials in early China—“luminous luster” encapsulated by the character ze 澤. While its conceptual substratum allows it to transcend any single material, luminous luster also has a clear physical dimension. I use the term luminous luster to reconstruct the dynamics between abstract concepts and material media that shaped how materials were understood, imagined, and worked into objects that constitute the history of art. The importance of luminous luster since the Warring States period at the latest also reflects a larger interest in making vital life forces visually manifest.

ABSTRACT The Zhuangzi is one of the most well‐known early Chinese classics. Subversive and iconoclastic, both in terms of its subject matter and narrative style, the text has profoundly influenced the intellectual and literary history of East Asia. First introduced to the West in the late nineteenth century as an early “Daoist” classic, the Zhuangzi has become a popular and widely read text within Western academia, from Sinology to comparative philosophy and religion. Rather than providing a comprehensive literature review on studies of the Zhuangzi , this paper will maintain a narrow focus, confining its attention to a specific theme: skill mastery. The text features many stories of fantastic masters who have acquired wonderful techniques, such as butchering, swimming, or making bells. In recent decades, these stories have drawn significant attention from Western scholarship, and scholars have shown the narrative's multifaceted nature by reading the stories from various perspectives. The first part of the paper will examine previous studies on the narrative of skill mastery in the Zhuangzi . Having summarized their analytic frameworks, the paper then moves to the second part, presenting an original argument: the skill stories and other stories about self‐cultivation in the Zhuangzi can be read together as a coherent discourse of mastering the body. The paper envisages five successive stages of learning techniques and mastering the body by interweaving the stories scattered throughout the text. Examination of the five stages will make clear that the central focus of the discourse is on the holistic body as one self: the physical body, the heart, qi, and the spirit all work together in harmony. The discourse will also reveal that mastery of the body addresses the issues of death. The paper will conclude that the discourse of mastering the body in the Zhuangzi showcases a unique philosophy of embodiment in early China for its aim of transcendence.

This article examines the concepts of taiping (peace) and bing (war) in pre-Qin and Han societies: taiping was regarded as an ideal state of social development, while bing should be carefully avoided. By studying the relationship between cloud color and military divination in Yuejueshu and the Mawangdui silk manuscripts, this article explores negative attitudes towards warfare in early China and how different cloud colors were interpreted in military contexts. In Yuejueshu, five colors were believed to predict outcomes. Appearing in order of increasing inauspiciousness, these are: yellow, blue, red, white, black, and mixed. In Mawangdui tianwenshu kaoshi, the order is given as yellow or white, blue, red, black, and then mixed, again as the most inauspicious. While approaches to military divination varied according to time, place, and context, Yuejueshu and the Mawangdui silk manuscripts agreed that color contained vital divinatory clues about an impending conflict’s outcome.

This paper explores how the interpretations of the phrase “tian you qi zhong 天誘其衷” in the Zuozhuan 左傳 (The Zuo Commentary) have changed over time. These changes reflect early Confucian perspectives on the relationship between Heaven and humanity. By examining the polysemous terms (you 誘 and zhong 衷) and by comparing transmitted texts with excavated manuscripts (e.g., Guodian 郭店, Shangbo 上博, and Tsinghua corpora), the paper demonstrates a vital dilemma in early Chinese philosophy: whether Heaven endows moral qualities or simply awakens the innate dispositions of human beings. The paper traces the moralization of tian 天 (Heaven) from the Shang 商 dynasty’s theocentric worldview to the Zhou’s 周 focus on ethical responsibility, showing how the Zuozhuan bridges archaic religious beliefs and emerging Confucian humanism. Traditional commentaries read tian you qi zhong as Heaven “bestowing goodness” or “guiding moral intention,” while the manuscript evidence suggests that the phrase actually meant Heaven “descending its heart or will” to attune human affairs to the cosmos. Han exegetes redefined the term you as pedagogical guidance due to Confucianism’s growing emphasis on self-cultivation. By contextualizing the phrase at a larger backdrop of discussions of the Mandate of Heaven (tianming 天命) and moral cultivation, the study contends that early Confucians transformed tian from a deity figure to a moral principle dwelling in the human capacity, integrating religious reverence and ethical emancipation. This interdisciplinary approach studies ongoing scholarly discussions on the interrelationship between religion, ethics, and philosophy in early China.

Religion played a pivotal role in shaping the political and cultural landscape of early China, particularly through the practice of relocating capitals (遷都). The relocation of capitals is an outstanding theme in early Chinese historiography, setting it apart from many other world traditions. In particular, this practice contrasts sharply with the early Mediterranean context, where the city of Rome transitioned from a modest city-state to a world empire and was celebrated as the “eternal city.” By contrast, early Chinese capitals were deliberately transient, their impermanence rooted in strong religious sentiments and pragmatic considerations. Religious and ideological justifications were central to these relocations. The relocation was not merely a logistical or political exercise; it was imbued with symbolic meaning that reinforced the ruler’s legitimacy and divine mandate. Equally important was the way rulers communicated these decisions to the populace. The ability to garner mass support for such monumental undertakings reveals the intricate relationship between political authority and religious practice in early China. These critical moments of migration offer profound insights into the evolving religious landscape of early China, shedding light on how religion shaped early governance and public persuasion. “Capital relocation” served as a means to rearticulate belief, reaffirm the centrality of worship, and restore faith in the ruling order. Drawing on recent archeological discoveries and updated textual and inscriptional scholarship related to the events of Pan Geng and the Zhou relocation to Luoyi, this article re-examines the motif of “capital relocation” as both a historical and historiographical phenomenon unique to early China.

The main focus of the present paper is upon year-dated inscriptions, which appear in Early China near the end of the Shang Dynasty. Only a small part of bone and bronze inscriptions of the period used year-names, for the purposes that are not yet fully understood. For this reason, examples of such records that have been known for a long time are worth reconsidering. Based on recent paleographic works, this paper offers a review of the year-names, including their content and composition, their position in the structure of ritual inscriptions, and their relationship with the content of ritual inscriptions and writing mediums. I conclude with some observations related to the set of ideas of social order and of the king′s role in maintaining it, which were expressed through the year-dating. This material is valuable for further comparative analysis of early writing in other parts of the ancient world.

The Art of Terrestrial Diagrams in Early China, written by Michelle H. Wang