Hereditary House Research Articles

HISTORY AND LORE: INTERPRETIVE EMPLOTMENT AND “EMPTY WRITING” IN THE “HEREDITARY HOUSE OF ZHAO”

AbstractThis study identifies two textual strata in the “Zhao shijia” of the Shi ji: the “wo 我 stratum” and the “legendary stratum.” While the “wo stratum” points to the existence of Zhao local historical records, the “legendary stratum” reveals an interpretive framework that guides the chapter's presentation of the Zhao history toward the central concern and anxiety over the succession of lineage and power. The series of prophetic dreams and supernatural encounters that were emplotted in the narrative of Zhao history comprise this “legendary stratum” and point toward a key figure, King Wuling of Zhao, during whose time the Zhao state reached its pinnacle of power and prosperity. Accounts that are clearly fabrications, such as the story of the orphan of Zhao and later prophecies of the decline of the Zhao, show hidden connections to the personal experience of Sima Qian and to possible political dissent and discourses criticizing Emperor Wu of Han. In identifying such fabricated “empty writing” hidden in the chapter's framework of interpretive emplotment, this article aims to offer one way to read the Shi ji's account for the hereditary house of Zhao that follows a coherent pattern on the meta-level of historical narrative.

Rewriting Bondage: Literacy and Slavery in a Qing Native Domain

AbstractThe article examines legal plaints authored by the household slaves, bondsmen, bonded tenants, concubine, wife, sisters, and affines of the chieftain of a native domain in northern Yunnan Province, China in 1760. These kin and enslaved persons of the chiefly house were struggling over whether a slave baby should become the chieftain of this sprawling realm. The documents were preserved in the hereditary house of the native chieftain along with some 500 manuscripts in an indigenous script now called Nasu, which carried its own assumptions about what writing was and what it could do. I read the Chinese-language legal documents with an eye to the tradition of Nasu ritual writing. I argue that a group of bondsmen accused of rebelling against the chiefly household were actually seeking to preserve it by extending the ritualized tasks of writing ancestry and descent into the realm of Qing legal practice. This allows me to extend the first of two methodological suggestions: that the kinship of bondage and the bondage of kinship are best seen as participating reciprocally in a single field of relations. I then follow a group of domestic slaves as they travel to the administrative city and search for a litigation master to write up their own legal plaint. With this exercise, I propose a second methodological argument: that reading and writing are complex human skills, often partly available even to those who cannot use pen and paper, and involving the coordination of forms of textuality across different planes of inscription.

What is an Author? Taking Confucius for an Example

The proposed study is a case study of the author function by examining a famed ＂author＂-Confucius. Preliminary results are presented of an analysis based on ＂The Hereditary House of Confucius＂ in ＂The Records of the Grand Historian＂ by Sima Qian that paints a picture of Confucius as an author, as conceived in the 2nd century BCE (the Former Han dynasty). The study uses the method of qualitative content analysis to answer the following research questions: (1) What types of authorship is Confucius said to have performed according to his biography by Sima Qian? (2) What are the works related to Confucius? (3) What does each type of authorship entail? To answer these questions, a three-stage process is conducted to analyze the text: First, isolation of useful segments; then, identification and coding of relevant works mentioned in the biography; and finally, specification and analysis of the outcomes. Tentatively, the analysis has identified at least three types of authorship: writer, editor, and transmitter. As part of a larger study to examine the images of Confucius as an author over time, the primary purpose of the research reported here is to gain more understanding of the author function in Chinese culture. This study's findings are undoubtedly important for expanding research on authorship in KO. Eventually such research will lead to improved KO system design, especially in the area of author data.

Hungry Ghosts

Hungry Ghosts Jee Leong Koh (bio) 1. the grand historian makes a virtue of necessity Dear Heart, you hear the gossip Lord Hu circulatesabout how I begged the Emperor to castrate meinstead of quaffing down the poisoned cup, how baseI am to return a remnant of the blade to my father. The slander passes in wine cups around the courtonce every year. More often if the border’s quiet.My name’s divulged to new officials as a jokeor else a warning not to defame the Son of Heaven. Defame! Because I spoke up for General Li,who fought the Xiongnu brutes until he was brought down.Each day my bowels twist nine times. The nights! So wroteZhouyang: Accumulated slander destroys bone. Sweat springs from my cold hands and runs into the ink.I have completed writing Records—all one hundredand thirty chapters—from the earliest sage-kingsdown to the present reign: more than two thousand years. To the fragments gathered by my father for the workhe dreamt about but did not start, I added fleshand bones, stitched them together into history.The Master edited one Spring and Autumn Annals which Records extends—Essays, Chronological Tables,Hereditary Houses. Lord Hu’s father preensin Chapter Fortynine, embroidered with such truecolors that his son’s balls, in his rich robe, will shrink. [End Page 124] In my Biographies, kings are threaded with assassins,male favorites, butchers, turtleshell diviners, women,whose names are commonly lost unless they cling like fleasto a warhorse tail flying over bamboo strips. My work will live and penetrate every house,village, city, district, province, court and state.The written word is sharper than the word of mouth.It will scratch out my shame in Silkworm Hall. It will revise my name. In Hell my father will have his bookthough not his son. I chose, my Heart, a higher dutywhen I begged him for my mutilated life. Burnthis letter in a cup of wine and drink to me. 2. the scholar minister gives career advice He has come to display his respect and so court my support,this young scholar who topped the imperial examination, like so many before him year after year. Already he follows the fashion of snipping a sleeve.Already he wears a fine powder to whiten his face, accentuate his swallow brows. He refreshes this ashen room like spring rain. A young bambooat once strong and supple, he flowers but yearns to buckle his body in a public robe. In my hands The Sayings—the graying calligraphy,the bamboo ribs bound by a belt of twine and worn by age and use. The sage’s words are imperial edicts engraved on the heart’s bronze urn.He’s repeating his question. I answer, Virtue is forged through loyal service to the court. 3. the emperor’s male favorite waits up for him Holding the mirror, I study my plucked eyebrows, worry my fringecurl, touch my lips with rouge. [End Page 125] He gave me this mirror. On its back, twin dragons braid their jadescaled bodies into sinew. The Peach Terrace glints under the autumn moon, pink as skin seen through red silk gauze. Are the lights in the Audience Hall still burning or has he removed Heaven to some other room? I asked Eunuch Shu earlier for the Emperor’s mood. The army has pushed back the barbarians, he said, and recouped the loss of ten frontier towns they took from us a month ago. A victory then. Another change. The wine has turned cold. On the old coverlet, the kingfisher molts. 4. the taoist magician’s last address My followers, I am about to turn immortal.After ingesting cinnabar for years,I’ll soon become like Princely Qiao and Song. You know the costs—I have spoken of them,when I was stricken by the longing to live—how longing broke and drove me out of me: resigned from lucrative town temple posts,slept in a different bedroom from my wife,and even sent away the serving boy. When lust sneaked past the bodyguards yet again,I...

“A Genuine Republican”:

“A Genuine Republican”:

Another Installment of a Crucial Translation

Another Installment of a Crucial Translation Grant Hardy (bio) Ssu-ma Ch’ien. The Grand Scribe’s Record. Volume 9, The Memoirs of Han China, pt. 2. Edited by William H. Nienhauser Jr. Translated by J. Michael Farmer, Enno Giele, Christiane Haupt, Li He, Elisabeth Hsu, William H. Nienhauser Jr., Marc Nürnberger, and Ying Qin. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011. lxiv, 425 pp. Hardcover $59.95, ISBN 978-0-2533-5590-4. Although the Shih chi or Shiji (Grand scribe’s records), written about 90 b.c.e., is one of the fundamental texts of Chinese civilization, it still awaits a full rendering into English. (I will defer to Nienhauser and employ Wade-Giles transcription in this review, but I wish that he had used pinyin.) This volume is the sixth in William Nienhauser’s ongoing translation project. It is a monumental undertaking, for which Nienhauser has enlisted the assistance of an international consortium of scholars. Once again, those efforts have paid off handsomely. The only comparable endeavor was Burton Watson’s 1961 two-volume translation of exactly half of the Shih chi’s 130 chapters (with another dozen or so chapters published later), and now Nienhauser’s team has bested that number with a total of 74 chapters translated. Yet the two projects are quite dissimilar. Watson presented Ssu-ma Ch’ien’s words with very few explanatory footnotes, and the effect was not only to introduce this groundbreaking Chinese historian to Western audiences, but also to make him sound a bit like the Penguin editions of Herodotus or Thucydides. Nienhauser, by contrast, offers fully annotated translations where the footnotes often take up half the page or more. It seem to me that this latter strategy is a better fit for Ssu-ma Ch’ien’s work since the structure and style of the Shih chi suggests that it was not meant to be read linearly. To understand Ssu-ma’s meaning — which can sometimes be a puzzle — it is necessary constantly to compare what he has written in one chapter with how the same event or character is depicted in other chapters of the Shih chi. So the footnotes in Nienhauser’s volume refer not only to geographical identifications, cultural explanations, historical details, chronology, and textual variants, but they also include references to parallel accounts elsewhere in the Shih chi, with specific notations of alternative narratives or omitted details. For instance, on page 387, we read the story from Shih chi chapter 112 of how Chu-fu Yen drove the King of Ch’i to commit suicide; at the bottom of the page is a footnote outlining the quite different version of the tale as it was related in chapter 52. Ssu-ma Ch’ien’s innovative historiographical form does not present a single version of the past; rather, it invites readers to consider events and figures from multiple angles, in different contexts. To read the Shih chi’s five overlapping sections of annals, chronological tables, treatises, hereditary houses (lineage [End Page 159] histories), and memoirs is to be drawn into a conversation among the book’s constituent parts. Nienhauser and his fellow translators guide us through some of the intratextual dialogue, but their annotations also bring us into three additional conversations. The first is with the Han shu — the second book in the Chinese Standard Histories, written about two centuries after the Shih chi. The Han shu covers much of the same history as its predecessor, often in much the same language, and the subtle differences between the two texts can sometimes be revealing. The footnotes in the Shih chi offer a continuous comparison between parallel accounts in the two histories, and on pages 306–308, there is some useful material to add to the debate on whether certain passages in the Han shu were actually written first and then copied back into the Shih chi (see also p. 344 n. 212). Similarly, the footnotes bring us into the 2,000-year Chinese commentarial tradition. From the Han dynasty to the Qing dynasty, the Shih chi was the focus of tremendous scholarly attention, and Nienhauser and his collaborators help us follow the twists and turns of...

The Grand Scribe's Records, Volume 5.1: The Hereditary Houses of Pre-Han China, Part I (review)

Reviewed by: The Grand Scribe's Records, Volume 5.1: The Hereditary Houses of Pre-Han China, Part I Esther Klein (bio) Sima Qian; William H. Nienhauser Jr., editor; Weiguo Cao, Zhi Chen, Scott Cook, Hongyu Huang, Bruce Knickerbocker, Wang Jin, Zhang Zhenjun, and Zhao Hua, translators. The Grand Scribe's Records, Volume 5.1: The Hereditary Houses of Pre-Han China, Part I. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2006. xlviii, 501 pp., maps. Hardcover $72.95, ISBN 0-253-34027-6. This book is the latest installment of the University of Wisconsin group's annotated translation of the Shiji, the massive historical text compiled primarily by Sima Qian (145–ca. 86 B.C.). The present volume covers chapters 31–40, the first ten of the "Hereditary Households" that comprise the Shiji's fourth division.1 This is the first time these chapters have been rendered into English, and they are presented here with a wealth of scholarly annotations. Each chapter recounts the story of a given region's ruling house: from its origins in the semi-mythical past, through the successive ages of its glory and decline, and finally, in each case, to crushing defeat and annihilation. William Nienhauser's introduction includes a brief discussion of the "Hereditary Household" as an historical subgenre and is especially praiseworthy for examining interpretations by various scholars, both traditional and modern. The "Hereditary Households" are chronological in form, and their primary concern is genealogical; the generations of the houses are given, along with the often sordid details of their successions, and sometimes other information about how they conducted the internal and external affairs of their domains. Although Nienhauser does not mention the fact, the "Hereditary Household" as a genre was excluded almost completely from later dynastic histories, though these in other ways modeled themselves closely on the Shiji's structure.2 This is probably because the genre—like the feudal-type system it reflected—was politically problematic. Each chapter in this volume, for example, has its own chronology and version of events, and differences among them (to judge by commentarial wranglings past and present) at times prove irreconcilable. Without discounting the very real possibility that the compiler was simply overwhelmed by the complexity of his material, we can still take these contradictions as a symbol and symptom of tensions between nominal center and the semi-independent states, as well as the diplomatic and military conflicts among those states. The chapters clearly show how each hereditary household was engaged in its own ongoing struggle, whether for domination or mere survival. An analogous tension appears in the nature of the translation. Rather than presenting the work as a communal endeavor, the Wisconsin group has taken pains to preserve the separateness of each translator's contribution (in most cases, one chapter per translator). There is noticeable variation in style and quality from chapter to chapter. Occasionally there are differences in translation conventions as well. One example is the translation of the character Ji 姬 as it appears in a name. Ji [End Page 544] was one of the major surnames (cognomens) during the period in question, but in historiographic conventions of the time it rarely appears as part of a person's name except in the case of high status women. In some cases, it seems to have taken on an extensional meaning of "a palace beauty" generally, as in the present volume's "Duke Li had many favored beauties" (p. 358, original on Zhonghua shuju Shiji 39.1680). Therefore, some translators in this volume have decided to render Ji as "Beauty" (chap. 9) or "Belle" (chaps. 2, 10) or "Lady" (chap. 7) whenever it occurs as part of a woman's name. In the case of the "many favored beauties" mentioned above, a semantic rendering seems appropriate, but in most other cases Ji is better understood as a surname. Thus the translator of chapter 6 quite properly gives it in romanized form (pp. 227, 229).3 Whatever the translators' final decision, it should have been made consistent, rather than causing (for example) the same woman to be referred to as Xia Ji in chapter 6 (p. 227) and as Beauty Xia in chapter 9 (p. 355). In...

Sima Qian: A True Historian?

This essay seeks to argue the merits of one approach to reading theShiji, which casts the complex text more as a product of contemporary religious beliefs than as the product of either thetaishi's individual genius or desire for historical objectivity. By the religious reading, Sima Qian fulfilled some part of his filial obligations when he honored his father's dying wish to “continue our ancestors” by bringing together the tales they had gathered. Equally importantly, insofar as Sima Qian had restored to life an array of remarkable men and women from the Central States, he lived in the pious hope that these especially potent spirits among the civilized dead would choose in return to confer benefits on Sima Qian and his family as long as theShijicontinued to be read. When compared with the more standard readings, this proposed reading strikes the author not only as less anachronistic for the period,but also as more fully reflective of the whole text, including the eloquent appraisals appended to the end of each chapter in the Basic Annals, Hereditary Houses, and Biographical Traditions sections.

Ju-tzu Hsi and the Genealogy of the House of Wei

Our knowledge of the genealogy of the feudal houses of the Chou period is based primarily on the Shih Chi “Hereditary Houses” and secondarily on frequent quotations in medieval commentaries of the Shih Pen, a systematic genealogical treatise which, before it was lost in the T'ang, found favor among such historians as Tu Yü (222-284) and Ssu-ma Cheng (fl. 719-736) and classicists like K'ung Ying-ta (574-648). In the “Hereditary House of Wei,” the Shih Chi presents a genealogy at some variance with the genealogy quoted from the Shih Pen in Ssu-ma Cheng's commentary to the Shih Chi and K'ung Ying-ta's “sub-commentaries” to the Tso Chuan and Li Chi. A central point of disagreement concerns Marquis Wen , who is described as the son or grandson of Viscount Huan . This conflict of genealogy is coupled with a serious discrepancy concerning the length and date of the reign of Marquis Wen between the Shih Chi and the reconstructed Chu-shu Chi-nien. I believe that a careful examination of the chronological difficulty will contribute to a resolution of the genealogical conflict and thus prepare the way for a more general solution of points of conflict between the Shih Chi and Shih Pen versions of the genealogy of the House of Wei.

Podiebrad: Bohemia Past and Present

The word Bohemia, it is well known, is a conventional appellation devoid of truth; a name derived from the Boij, a Gallic tribe which settled in that country, 587 B.C. In the seventh century, the Czechs, a Slavonian people, conquered it, and that branch of the great Slavonian race has ever possessed a distinct and original life, as well as a vernacular culture, that has not met with the attention it deserves at the hands of historical students. The Germans of the hereditary house of Habsburg, proclaim that the Czechs owe everything to them— arts, science, civilisation; they have often done so in a somewhat insulting language, despite several glorious epochs in the history of Bohemia, namely, the reign of Ottokar, the competitor of Rodolf of Habsburg to the imperial crown, in 1272; the greatness of the University of Prag, in the fourteenth century, and the glorious episode of George of Podiebrad. As to the Bohemian kingdom of Ottokar, by its importance and extent, it alone deserves a special history. It comprised, besides Bohemia proper, great part of modern Prussia, Carinthia, Croatia, Illyria; it extended from the Baltic to the Adriatic sea, with the harbour of Nao on the latter, thus justifying, as it were, Shakespeare, in whose “ Winter's Tale ” a Sicilian fleet sails into Bohemia, a statement that was eagerly ridiculed by Ben Jonson and others.