Keeping Record: The Materiality of Rulership and Administration in Early China and Medieval Europe, 2024
Introduction to the volume, Keeping Record: The Materiality of Rulership and Administration in Ea... more Introduction to the volume, Keeping Record: The Materiality of Rulership and Administration in Early China and Medieval Europe
This volume results from the online workshop 'Keeping Record: The Materiality of Ruler ship and A... more This volume results from the online workshop 'Keeping Record: The Materiality of Ruler ship and Administration in the Pre-Modern World', hosted by Heidelberg University on the 24-25 March 2022. The workshop was co-organised by sub-projects B09 'Bamboo, Wood, Silk and Paper as Writing Materials in Early China' and B10 'Rolls for the King' of the Collaborative Research Centre 933 'Material Text Cultures: Materiality and Presence of Writing in Non-Typographic Societies'. The editors would like to thank all the scholars who took part in the online workshop for providing a stimulating two days of discussion. Particular thanks must go to the contributors of the chapters in this volume for all their efforts-especially regarding the tight turnaround from workshop to print-in helping this book come to fruition. We are also grateful to Nicolai Dollt and students Sarah Kupferschmied, Linda Mosig and Leon Wölfelschneider for their assistance and support in ensuring the smooth organisation of the workshop and the preparations of these proceedings for publication. Finally, we would also like to extend our thanks to the German Research Foundation (DFG) for having financed the conference and the publication of this volume within the framework of the CRC 933 and its MTK series (Project Number 178035969-SFB 933).
Keeping Record: The Materiality of Rulership and Administration in Early China and Medieval Europe, 2024
This article discerned the interplay between political authority of local rulers and the material... more This article discerned the interplay between political authority of local rulers and the materiality of administrative documents through the study of the so-called “the lord’s instruction” (junjiao 君教) manuscripts from the Eastern Han Wuyiguangchang 五一廣場 manuscripts. It discovers that there was a swift, non-linear transition between multi-piece and single-piece “the lord’s instruction” manuscripts between 105-108 CE in the Linxiang 臨湘 county. This phenomenon seems to delineate the boundary between central and local authorities, suggesting that despite the manifold standards instituted by the central government, local rulers retained certain autonomy in everyday administrative affairs. This probably led to various individual practices across different administrative units. However, evidence from Wuyiguangchang manuscripts also suggests that the choices of officials were never totally unconstrained. Rather, they were inevitably affected by manuscript culture of the time. The employment of relatively narrow wooden tablets in the multi-piece instructions, for example, may be ascribed to the fact that tablet was often associated with reporting to one’s superior. Such an affordance may account for the use of wooden tablets in the multi-piece instructions, which also comprise reports of subordinate officials.
This chapter discusses the formation of collective communal memories and identities during Easter... more This chapter discusses the formation of collective communal memories and identities during Eastern Han China. Rather than focusing on the cultural memory in its totality and reducing memories formulated by smaller social groups to "subcultures" or "subformations," this chapter explores the spatial dimension of group memories, that is, the "communal memory" of various social organisations, such as the ancestral memory of the powerful Kong lineage, as well as the collective memories dedicated to individuals and community events. Evidence from Eastern Han stelae suggests that these collective memories could have been monumentalised and maintained for a much longer time than the threshold of 80-100 years. Regardless of modes, however, it is shown that monumentalisation represented a pivotal technique which individuals in different power relations employed to visualise and eternalise the communal memories they sought to uphold.
beyond the Archives Missing Sources and Marginal Voices For a long time, silk, tea, Sinocentrism,... more beyond the Archives Missing Sources and Marginal Voices For a long time, silk, tea, Sinocentrism, and Eurocentrism made up a big patch of East Asian history. Simultaneously deviating from and complicating these tags, this edited volume reconstructs narratives from the periphery and considers marginal voices located beyond official archives as the centre of East Asian history. The lives of the Japanese Buddhist monks, Eastern Han local governors, Confucian scholars, Chinese coolies, Shanghainese tailors, Macau jossstick makers, Hong Kong locals, and Cantonese workingclass musicians featured in this collection provide us with a glimpse of how East Asia's inhabitants braved, with versatility, the ripples of political centralisation, cross-border movement, foreign imperialism, nationalism, and globalism that sprouted locally and universally. Demonstrating the rich texture of sources discovered through non-official pathways, the ten essays in this volume ultimately reveal the timeless interconnectedness of East Asia and the complex, nonuniform worldviews of its inhabitants.
Theorie und Systematik materialer Textkulturen: Abschlussband des SFB 933, 2023
Ein Text kann gesprochen, gehört oder auch nur gedacht werden, kann in seinem Wort laut im Detail... more Ein Text kann gesprochen, gehört oder auch nur gedacht werden, kann in seinem Wort laut im Detail definiert oder auch wandelbar sein. Wird der Text aufgeschrieben, legt dies seinen Wortlaut fest. Während im digitalen Zeitalter das bloße Aufschreiben den Text noch offenhält für jegliche Form der Darstellung desselben, bringt unter den Bedingungen materialer Schriftkultur der Akt des Aufschreibens zwangsläufig noch eine zweite Festlegung mit sich: Der Text bekommt eine konkrete Gestalt. Diese ist bestimmt durch die verschiedensten Faktoren: so etwa durch den Schriftträger, durch die Schreibtechnik, durch die verwendeten Buchstaben/Schriftzeichen, ggf. durch deren Kombination mit nicht-sprachlichen Zeichen auf demselben Schriftträger, durch die räumliche Anordnung all dieser Elemente auf dem Schriftträger.1 Dieser letzte Punkt, in dem die genannten Aspekte zusammenlaufen, ist derjenige, welcher hier als Layout verstanden wird und im Folgenden einer Analyse unterzogen werden soll.2 Die genannten Aspekte hängen vielfach miteinander zusammen und bestimmen in komplexer gegenseitiger Bedingtheit gemeinsam das Phänomen umfassend verstandenen Layouts. So hängt die spezifische Stilisierung von Buchstaben gotischer Buchschrift nicht nur an individuellen, im Rahmen zeittypischer Schriftästhetik arbeitenden Schreiber:innen, sondern steht auch in einem Zusammenhang mit dem Duktus des Schreibwerkzeugs ‚Feder' auf dem Schriftträger ‚Pergament'.3 In welcher Weise das Layout eines Textes mehr als nur Schriftzeichen umfasst, ist unter anderem von der Art und dem Material des Schriftträgers abhängig. So mag das Layout des Geschriebenen in einem prächtigen liturgischen Codex bildliche Elemente verschiedenster 1 Wir legen für diese Definition von Layout den Normalfall eines Schriftträgers von überschaubaren Dimensionen zugrunde: Papyrusrollen, Buchseiten, Steinstelen und Ähnliches. Fälle, in denen der Schriftträger derartige Dimensionen bei Weitem sprengt, und mehrteilige schrifttragende Monumente (z. B. die Steinoberflächen einer öffentlichen Platzanlage mit den dort zusammenkommenden Inschriften), wo sich die Frage nach dem Layout mit derjenigen nach der Topologie berühren würde, werden im Folgenden nicht mit in die Betrachtung einbezogen.
This paper examines the interplay between ideology and social reforms under Qin governance. It de... more This paper examines the interplay between ideology and social reforms under Qin governance. It demonstrates that although the Qin rulers honored the social values of the preceding Zhou tradition (e.g., benevolence, uprightness, filial piety), the way in which they instilled them into the populace was through the quintessential twin Legalist instruments — punishment and reward. The present argument goes another step further: it takes note of new Qin evidence that reveals state coercive power as the primary means to materialize the Qin regime’s social engineering program that sought to rectify its subjects’ behavior and reconfigure family relations, hopefully thus eliminating unsanctioned learning, institutionalizing certain social values, and disarming the empire’s new territories in the east and south. The ultimate implication of the interplay as suggested, is that the ideal social order that the Qin rulers envisioned might have been conceived as extending to the farthest ends of the known world though aggressive military campaigns. The paper’s conclusion summarizes the foregoing as “moral-legalist supremacism.”
This paper explores the relationship between the Shiji’s authors and their sources by examining h... more This paper explores the relationship between the Shiji’s authors and their sources by examining how they constructed the historical narrative of the fall of the Qin Empire. While Sima Qian and his father Sima Tan have been traditionally credited as the authors of the Shiji, their authorial voice was recently challenged by scholars. In response to the revisionist view, this paper discerns that the Shiji maintains a consistent narrative of the Qin collapse, which is generated through rigorous source redactions whereby Sima Qian and/or Sima Tan were able to incorporate their ideological agenda and personal opinions in subtle ways that are almost invisible to the reader. With such anonymity, the historiographers succeeded in establishing the authority of their historical narratives. Rather than simply juxtaposing the narratives of their sources, the Simas indeed authored their “patterned past” of the Qin collapse. However, the past constructed in the Shiji comprises various independent ...
This essay revisits the territoriality of the Qin empire by examining the spatial division undern... more This essay revisits the territoriality of the Qin empire by examining the spatial division underneath its commandery-county system. With the universal implementation of centralized administration, scholars usually believe that the Qin empire exerted strong control across its territories. But new Qin sources suggest otherwise. It is evident that the Qin regime devised multiple schemes to structure its empire into three concentric zones with asymmetrical political relations. The respective features and functions of these zones were consonant with those of the center, semiperiphery, and periphery in the “core-periphery” model. The regime’s spatial strategy can be understood as a compromise made to accommodate the diverse landscape in different parts of its vast empire, especially in the newly conquered regions. This reminds us that despite having installed the unitary commandery-county system, the territorial control wielded by the Qin regime in its new territories was tenuous at best.
After its epochal unification of the Huaxia ecumene in 221bce, the First Emperor of Qin embarked ... more After its epochal unification of the Huaxia ecumene in 221bce, the First Emperor of Qin embarked on a series of political and social reforms. One of the most influential measures was the universal implementation of a centralized and unitary provincial administrative system, conventionally called the "commandery-county system" (junxian zhi 郡縣制). Beneath this uniform picture, however, the Qin ruler instituted schemes to structure its empire into three concentric zones with asymmetrical political relations. In this essay, I shall detail how the Qin used various border control measures to demark their empire's internal territories, and how these territories were designed to function. The commandery-county system has been regarded as the highest achievement of the short-lived Qin empire. The mid-Tang statesman Liu Zongyuan 柳宗元 (773-819), in his "On the Enfeoffment and Establishment of Regional Kingdoms" (Fengjian lun 封 建 論), singled out this system as the most vital means to exert strong territorial control and avert the chaos and wars that the Zhou multistate system had engendered.1 Liu's opinions were shared by later generations of literati who often recognized the advantages of the Qin provincial administrative system even as they despised the brutality of its governing policies.2
This paper explores the relationship between the Shiji's authors and their sources by examining h... more This paper explores the relationship between the Shiji's authors and their sources by examining how they constructed the historical narrative of the fall of the Qin Empire. While Sima Qian and his father Sima Tan have been traditionally credited as the authors of the Shiji, their authorial voice was recently challenged by scholars. In response to the revisionist view, this paper discerns that the Shiji maintains a consistent narrative of the Qin collapse, which is generated through rigorous source redactions whereby Sima Qian and/or Sima Tan were able to incorporate their ideological agenda and personal opinions in subtle ways that are almost invisible to the reader. With such anonymity, the historiographers succeeded in establishing the authority of their historical narratives. Rather than simply juxtaposing the narratives of their sources, the Simas indeed authored their "patterned past" of the Qin collapse. However, the past constructed in the Shiji comprises various independent narratives whose plausibility is contingent upon the respective epistemic quality of their evidence rather than a harmonious discourse.
The Division of Labor and Administrative Coordination between Guan and Cao Organizations in the Q... more The Division of Labor and Administrative Coordination between Guan and Cao Organizations in the Qin County Administration: Evidence from the Liye Manuscripts
A Preliminary Study on the Efficiency of Administrative Communications of the Qianling County in ... more A Preliminary Study on the Efficiency of Administrative Communications of the Qianling County in the Qin Dynasty
Keeping Record: The Materiality of Rulership and Administration in Early China and Medieval Europe, 2024
Introduction to the volume, Keeping Record: The Materiality of Rulership and Administration in Ea... more Introduction to the volume, Keeping Record: The Materiality of Rulership and Administration in Early China and Medieval Europe
This volume results from the online workshop 'Keeping Record: The Materiality of Ruler ship and A... more This volume results from the online workshop 'Keeping Record: The Materiality of Ruler ship and Administration in the Pre-Modern World', hosted by Heidelberg University on the 24-25 March 2022. The workshop was co-organised by sub-projects B09 'Bamboo, Wood, Silk and Paper as Writing Materials in Early China' and B10 'Rolls for the King' of the Collaborative Research Centre 933 'Material Text Cultures: Materiality and Presence of Writing in Non-Typographic Societies'. The editors would like to thank all the scholars who took part in the online workshop for providing a stimulating two days of discussion. Particular thanks must go to the contributors of the chapters in this volume for all their efforts-especially regarding the tight turnaround from workshop to print-in helping this book come to fruition. We are also grateful to Nicolai Dollt and students Sarah Kupferschmied, Linda Mosig and Leon Wölfelschneider for their assistance and support in ensuring the smooth organisation of the workshop and the preparations of these proceedings for publication. Finally, we would also like to extend our thanks to the German Research Foundation (DFG) for having financed the conference and the publication of this volume within the framework of the CRC 933 and its MTK series (Project Number 178035969-SFB 933).
Keeping Record: The Materiality of Rulership and Administration in Early China and Medieval Europe, 2024
This article discerned the interplay between political authority of local rulers and the material... more This article discerned the interplay between political authority of local rulers and the materiality of administrative documents through the study of the so-called “the lord’s instruction” (junjiao 君教) manuscripts from the Eastern Han Wuyiguangchang 五一廣場 manuscripts. It discovers that there was a swift, non-linear transition between multi-piece and single-piece “the lord’s instruction” manuscripts between 105-108 CE in the Linxiang 臨湘 county. This phenomenon seems to delineate the boundary between central and local authorities, suggesting that despite the manifold standards instituted by the central government, local rulers retained certain autonomy in everyday administrative affairs. This probably led to various individual practices across different administrative units. However, evidence from Wuyiguangchang manuscripts also suggests that the choices of officials were never totally unconstrained. Rather, they were inevitably affected by manuscript culture of the time. The employment of relatively narrow wooden tablets in the multi-piece instructions, for example, may be ascribed to the fact that tablet was often associated with reporting to one’s superior. Such an affordance may account for the use of wooden tablets in the multi-piece instructions, which also comprise reports of subordinate officials.
This chapter discusses the formation of collective communal memories and identities during Easter... more This chapter discusses the formation of collective communal memories and identities during Eastern Han China. Rather than focusing on the cultural memory in its totality and reducing memories formulated by smaller social groups to "subcultures" or "subformations," this chapter explores the spatial dimension of group memories, that is, the "communal memory" of various social organisations, such as the ancestral memory of the powerful Kong lineage, as well as the collective memories dedicated to individuals and community events. Evidence from Eastern Han stelae suggests that these collective memories could have been monumentalised and maintained for a much longer time than the threshold of 80-100 years. Regardless of modes, however, it is shown that monumentalisation represented a pivotal technique which individuals in different power relations employed to visualise and eternalise the communal memories they sought to uphold.
beyond the Archives Missing Sources and Marginal Voices For a long time, silk, tea, Sinocentrism,... more beyond the Archives Missing Sources and Marginal Voices For a long time, silk, tea, Sinocentrism, and Eurocentrism made up a big patch of East Asian history. Simultaneously deviating from and complicating these tags, this edited volume reconstructs narratives from the periphery and considers marginal voices located beyond official archives as the centre of East Asian history. The lives of the Japanese Buddhist monks, Eastern Han local governors, Confucian scholars, Chinese coolies, Shanghainese tailors, Macau jossstick makers, Hong Kong locals, and Cantonese workingclass musicians featured in this collection provide us with a glimpse of how East Asia's inhabitants braved, with versatility, the ripples of political centralisation, cross-border movement, foreign imperialism, nationalism, and globalism that sprouted locally and universally. Demonstrating the rich texture of sources discovered through non-official pathways, the ten essays in this volume ultimately reveal the timeless interconnectedness of East Asia and the complex, nonuniform worldviews of its inhabitants.
Theorie und Systematik materialer Textkulturen: Abschlussband des SFB 933, 2023
Ein Text kann gesprochen, gehört oder auch nur gedacht werden, kann in seinem Wort laut im Detail... more Ein Text kann gesprochen, gehört oder auch nur gedacht werden, kann in seinem Wort laut im Detail definiert oder auch wandelbar sein. Wird der Text aufgeschrieben, legt dies seinen Wortlaut fest. Während im digitalen Zeitalter das bloße Aufschreiben den Text noch offenhält für jegliche Form der Darstellung desselben, bringt unter den Bedingungen materialer Schriftkultur der Akt des Aufschreibens zwangsläufig noch eine zweite Festlegung mit sich: Der Text bekommt eine konkrete Gestalt. Diese ist bestimmt durch die verschiedensten Faktoren: so etwa durch den Schriftträger, durch die Schreibtechnik, durch die verwendeten Buchstaben/Schriftzeichen, ggf. durch deren Kombination mit nicht-sprachlichen Zeichen auf demselben Schriftträger, durch die räumliche Anordnung all dieser Elemente auf dem Schriftträger.1 Dieser letzte Punkt, in dem die genannten Aspekte zusammenlaufen, ist derjenige, welcher hier als Layout verstanden wird und im Folgenden einer Analyse unterzogen werden soll.2 Die genannten Aspekte hängen vielfach miteinander zusammen und bestimmen in komplexer gegenseitiger Bedingtheit gemeinsam das Phänomen umfassend verstandenen Layouts. So hängt die spezifische Stilisierung von Buchstaben gotischer Buchschrift nicht nur an individuellen, im Rahmen zeittypischer Schriftästhetik arbeitenden Schreiber:innen, sondern steht auch in einem Zusammenhang mit dem Duktus des Schreibwerkzeugs ‚Feder' auf dem Schriftträger ‚Pergament'.3 In welcher Weise das Layout eines Textes mehr als nur Schriftzeichen umfasst, ist unter anderem von der Art und dem Material des Schriftträgers abhängig. So mag das Layout des Geschriebenen in einem prächtigen liturgischen Codex bildliche Elemente verschiedenster 1 Wir legen für diese Definition von Layout den Normalfall eines Schriftträgers von überschaubaren Dimensionen zugrunde: Papyrusrollen, Buchseiten, Steinstelen und Ähnliches. Fälle, in denen der Schriftträger derartige Dimensionen bei Weitem sprengt, und mehrteilige schrifttragende Monumente (z. B. die Steinoberflächen einer öffentlichen Platzanlage mit den dort zusammenkommenden Inschriften), wo sich die Frage nach dem Layout mit derjenigen nach der Topologie berühren würde, werden im Folgenden nicht mit in die Betrachtung einbezogen.
This paper examines the interplay between ideology and social reforms under Qin governance. It de... more This paper examines the interplay between ideology and social reforms under Qin governance. It demonstrates that although the Qin rulers honored the social values of the preceding Zhou tradition (e.g., benevolence, uprightness, filial piety), the way in which they instilled them into the populace was through the quintessential twin Legalist instruments — punishment and reward. The present argument goes another step further: it takes note of new Qin evidence that reveals state coercive power as the primary means to materialize the Qin regime’s social engineering program that sought to rectify its subjects’ behavior and reconfigure family relations, hopefully thus eliminating unsanctioned learning, institutionalizing certain social values, and disarming the empire’s new territories in the east and south. The ultimate implication of the interplay as suggested, is that the ideal social order that the Qin rulers envisioned might have been conceived as extending to the farthest ends of the known world though aggressive military campaigns. The paper’s conclusion summarizes the foregoing as “moral-legalist supremacism.”
This paper explores the relationship between the Shiji’s authors and their sources by examining h... more This paper explores the relationship between the Shiji’s authors and their sources by examining how they constructed the historical narrative of the fall of the Qin Empire. While Sima Qian and his father Sima Tan have been traditionally credited as the authors of the Shiji, their authorial voice was recently challenged by scholars. In response to the revisionist view, this paper discerns that the Shiji maintains a consistent narrative of the Qin collapse, which is generated through rigorous source redactions whereby Sima Qian and/or Sima Tan were able to incorporate their ideological agenda and personal opinions in subtle ways that are almost invisible to the reader. With such anonymity, the historiographers succeeded in establishing the authority of their historical narratives. Rather than simply juxtaposing the narratives of their sources, the Simas indeed authored their “patterned past” of the Qin collapse. However, the past constructed in the Shiji comprises various independent ...
This essay revisits the territoriality of the Qin empire by examining the spatial division undern... more This essay revisits the territoriality of the Qin empire by examining the spatial division underneath its commandery-county system. With the universal implementation of centralized administration, scholars usually believe that the Qin empire exerted strong control across its territories. But new Qin sources suggest otherwise. It is evident that the Qin regime devised multiple schemes to structure its empire into three concentric zones with asymmetrical political relations. The respective features and functions of these zones were consonant with those of the center, semiperiphery, and periphery in the “core-periphery” model. The regime’s spatial strategy can be understood as a compromise made to accommodate the diverse landscape in different parts of its vast empire, especially in the newly conquered regions. This reminds us that despite having installed the unitary commandery-county system, the territorial control wielded by the Qin regime in its new territories was tenuous at best.
After its epochal unification of the Huaxia ecumene in 221bce, the First Emperor of Qin embarked ... more After its epochal unification of the Huaxia ecumene in 221bce, the First Emperor of Qin embarked on a series of political and social reforms. One of the most influential measures was the universal implementation of a centralized and unitary provincial administrative system, conventionally called the "commandery-county system" (junxian zhi 郡縣制). Beneath this uniform picture, however, the Qin ruler instituted schemes to structure its empire into three concentric zones with asymmetrical political relations. In this essay, I shall detail how the Qin used various border control measures to demark their empire's internal territories, and how these territories were designed to function. The commandery-county system has been regarded as the highest achievement of the short-lived Qin empire. The mid-Tang statesman Liu Zongyuan 柳宗元 (773-819), in his "On the Enfeoffment and Establishment of Regional Kingdoms" (Fengjian lun 封 建 論), singled out this system as the most vital means to exert strong territorial control and avert the chaos and wars that the Zhou multistate system had engendered.1 Liu's opinions were shared by later generations of literati who often recognized the advantages of the Qin provincial administrative system even as they despised the brutality of its governing policies.2
This paper explores the relationship between the Shiji's authors and their sources by examining h... more This paper explores the relationship between the Shiji's authors and their sources by examining how they constructed the historical narrative of the fall of the Qin Empire. While Sima Qian and his father Sima Tan have been traditionally credited as the authors of the Shiji, their authorial voice was recently challenged by scholars. In response to the revisionist view, this paper discerns that the Shiji maintains a consistent narrative of the Qin collapse, which is generated through rigorous source redactions whereby Sima Qian and/or Sima Tan were able to incorporate their ideological agenda and personal opinions in subtle ways that are almost invisible to the reader. With such anonymity, the historiographers succeeded in establishing the authority of their historical narratives. Rather than simply juxtaposing the narratives of their sources, the Simas indeed authored their "patterned past" of the Qin collapse. However, the past constructed in the Shiji comprises various independent narratives whose plausibility is contingent upon the respective epistemic quality of their evidence rather than a harmonious discourse.
The Division of Labor and Administrative Coordination between Guan and Cao Organizations in the Q... more The Division of Labor and Administrative Coordination between Guan and Cao Organizations in the Qin County Administration: Evidence from the Liye Manuscripts
A Preliminary Study on the Efficiency of Administrative Communications of the Qianling County in ... more A Preliminary Study on the Efficiency of Administrative Communications of the Qianling County in the Qin Dynasty
State Power and Governance in Early Imperial China delves into the governance and capacity of the... more State Power and Governance in Early Imperial China delves into the governance and capacity of the state by providing an empirical historical study of the collapse of China’s Qin Empire. In contrast to the popular view that the Qin fell suddenly and dramatically, this book argues that the collapse was rooted in persistent structural problems of the empire, including the serious resource shortages experienced by local governments, inefficient communication between administrative units, and social tensions in the new territories. Rather than reducing Qin rulers to heartless villains who refused to adjust their policies and statecraft, this book focuses on the changes that the regime did make to meet these challenges. It reveals the various measures that Qin rulers devised to solve these problems, even if they were ultimately to no avail. The paradox of the Qin Empire seemed to be that, although the regime’s policies and reforms could theoretically have strengthened the state’s power and improved the governance of the empire, their ramifications simultaneously exacerbated the misfunction of local governments and triggered the military failures that eventually destroyed the empire.
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