The Chu Silk Manuscripts from Zidanku, Changsha (Hunan Province). Volume 1: Discovery and Transmission

Li Ling. The Chu Silk Manuscripts from Zidanku, Changsha (Hunan Province). Volume 1: Discovery and Transmission. Translated and edited by Lothar von Falkenhausen. Hong Kong : Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2020. xxvi, 252 pp. ISBN 9789882370975 (hardcover).

There is much to love in this volume, and much to remark upon, even if it is passing strange to be reviewing a book that is in some sense the prelude to the more important volume, which will show and translate the Zidanku 子彈庫 materials, also known as the Chu Silk Manuscripts. As Li Ling remarks, the Zidanku discovery was important for several reasons: (a) it supplied the first corpus of late Zhanguo 趙國 writings discovered in the twentieth century; (b) these writings were not administrative documents from an archive but fully philosophical writings on silk (the only other examples of which come from the nearby early Western Han tombs at Mawangdui 馬王堆); (c) the discovery prompted the first studies of regional logographic variants from Chu 楚, which in turn spurred work on the regional scripts from Wu 吳 and Yue 越 as well; and (d) the manuscripts join text and image in ways that are particularly illuminating.

Many historians of the early empires in China tend to find problematic sweeping statements such as "Books written on bamboo and silk are in every respect the fountainhead of Chinese scholarship" (introduction, xi). The word shu 書 is best translated as "writings" for good reasons: the writings on bamboo and silk are much shorter than what the average modern reader deems to be "books," being more like essays in length; the word book properly refers to the codex, as Pierre-Étienne Will once reminded me; and whether these writings are really the "fountainhead" of Chinese scholarship is a much debated point. Absent sufficient context, the significance of these writings on bamboo and silk often proves hard to assess, and they are harder to translate with confidence.

Early on, I bring up what may seem a quibble because we in academia are now confronting ever greater problems, with many due to the gaps between historical and archaeological readings—gaps badly misconstrued as "humanistic" versus "scientific" by those who have not read or taken in the main points registered in Giorgio Buccellati's Critique of Archaeological Reason: Structural, Digital, and Philosophical Aspects of the Excavated Record (2017). Buccellati's contention is that archaeological materials require just as many levels of interpretation as artifacts transmitted down through history in the "received tradition," often more, and sadly, some archaeologists are ill-informed about the periods they study (not Li Ling, needless to say). In my limited experience, those who think "what you see is what you get" tend to rely on the textbook truisms they mastered in high school. I was recently reminded of this when perusing two recent books based on a trusted "consensus" among archaeologists, who were proudly purveying the same Marxist linear progressive history that has been challenged everywhere but in Chinese studies (and now seems even more outdated and lazy, with the publication of David Graeber's and David Wengrow's The Dawn of Everything [2021]). Let me quote Li Ling: "The history of paleography is full of cases when powerful scholars were misled by wanton guesswork and the scholarly community at large was in turn misled by those powerful individuals" (xv). As in Li's own work, painstaking reconstruction requires a sound and comprehensive knowledge of history and archaeology, as when Li cites Hanshu 漢書 (History of Han) and Ying Shao's 應劭 (ca. 153–196) Fengsu tongyi 風俗通義 (Comprehensive Discussion of Customs) to understand a type of sword (12).

I shall return to the problem of history, in relation to early writings, but for the moment let me simply celebrate the triumphs of Chinese scholarship, beginning with Wang Guowei's 王國維 (1877–1927) work on seal and clerical scripts and Li Ling's own account (thrilling) of how a good paleographer works, as he looks for textual parallels in great numbers of writings. Li has spent thirty years of his life studying Silk Manuscript 1, as well as the Silk Manuscript fragments (pp. xvi, xix), and it shows. Few scholars would have thought it worth the time and trouble to marshal and reproduce in volume 1 all the documentation for the materials, from the time of their discovery in 1942 to their final (or is it penultimate?) resting place in the Freer Gallery, Arthur Sackler Wing, in preparation for receiving Li Ling's translation, as mediated by Donald Harper in the forthcoming volume 2. That decision was sheer genius, for it immeasurably enriches the historical record and leads to my next observation: what the documentation demonstrates is how faulty, partial, and misleading official and unofficial documents in the modern period can prove to be. I do not refer here to the numerous debates over the significance of the Chu Silk Manuscripts over the course of sixty-plus years, perhaps exacerbated by the personalities (as when the conflict between Noel Barnard and Arthur Sackler came to a head in the years 1967–1973; see 167–68). I refer instead to the confusions, omissions, misstatements, and anomalies generated in the multiple reports connected with the finds. A few examples should suffice: a bamboo case holding clay mingqi 銘器 imitations of Chu block money was overlooked in most accounts (5); one early misleading description of the tomb was "guided by his [the writer's] desire to establish conformity with what is stated in ancient books" (7); another confounded by technical nomenclature (8); people move in and out of the story, in generally inexplicable ways (as at 17, when Tailor Tang surfaces, or at 189, when I myself unaccountably play a role), and unnamed and unknown individuals inspire versions of the truth (19). When does "agreement in broad outlines" suffice to constitute the "truth" of the matter (28, 123, 207)? And when may transmitted texts be entered in evidence, and when not (82 roams across the centuries, evincing some understandable desperation)? Even in the modern translation, the main text and footnotes do not agree in tone (e.g., 123 vs. 123n29). "It is a disjointed, fragmented story" (207), after all.

Perhaps even a brief review should not avoid sounding some concluding notes. Of all the materials looted from the Zidanku tomb in the autumn of 1942, apparently only one fragment from a silk manuscript remains in the People's Republic of China, thanks to a donation made by Shang Chengzuo 商承祚 (1902–1991) to the Hunan Provincial Museum. (A reexcavation of the same tomb in 1973 retrieved a silk painting depicting a man riding a dragon, as well as other funerary objects.) This loss reflects a geopolitical imbalance that has plagued serious research since the "Japanese bandits" in 1944 and continues down to today. The close connections between the main looters during wartime and the later archaeological department of the Hunan Provincial Museum (where all four looters became technical staff in 1958) should alert us to other curious realities on the ground. Lastly, I would note the age-old tropes that thread throughout these narratives, making it almost normal to ascribe the suicides of two or three women to "our 5,000-year-old ritual-abiding civilization" (99), not to mention the Freer's decision to show photographs of the find only to a "select, international group of researchers" (176). Finally, was it really only the "peasantry and artisans" who "created wealth and created culture" (111), and what about the tomb attests to the "debauched lifestyle of the feudal aristocracy" (111)? The larger questions remain unanswered: what should we admire in this particular find, and what values should we uphold as global citizens going forward?