37.3204, Reviews: The Narration of China (Part 1): Chen Zhi (ed.) (2025)

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Subject: 37.3204, Reviews: The Narration of China (Part 1): Chen Zhi (ed.) (2025)

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Date: 06-Oct-2026
From: Geoffrey Sampson [sampson at cantab.net]
Subject: General Linguistics: Chen Zhi (ed.) (2025)


Book announced at https://linguistlist.org/issues/36-3689

Title: The Narration of China (Part 1)
Subtitle: Ancient China between the Lines
Series Title: Ancient Languages and Civilizations
Publication Year: 2025

Publisher: De Gruyter Brill
           https://www.degruyterbrill.com/?changeLang=en
Book URL: https://brill.com/display/title/69731

Editor(s): Chen Zhi

Reviewer: Geoffrey Sampson

SUMMARY
The book under review is the first volume of a two-volume Festschrift
for the eightieth birthday in 2023 of the Sinologist William
Nienhauser. The division into two volumes is chronological; this Part
1 comprises ten papers on historical and literary topics from the
Western Zhou dynasty (1040?–770 BC) to the 8th century AD. (Part 2,
which I have not seen, contains twelve papers on topics from the 8th
to 18th centuries.)
After several pages of photos of Nienhauser with colleagues and
friends, chapter 1, by Edward Shaughnessy, concerns one of the
nineteen documents in an archive included among the grave goods in a
tomb in Henan province, probably of a high official of the state of
Wei 魏, discovered by tomb-robbers in AD 279; Shaughnessy dates the
burial to 299 BC. This archive is seen as making major contributions
to early Chinese history, to knowledge of early cultural interactions
with the outside world (including with Europe as early as the 4th
century BC), and to palaeography for the period before the
3rd-century-BC unification of Chinese script.
The archive was edited within a few years of being discovered, but
this involved large problems. Chinese documents at that period were
written on bamboo strips each containing a column of script; these
would originally have been bound together, but the binding did not
necessarily survive centuries of burial. Furthermore the tomb-robbers
had no interest in the documents, burning some of them as torches to
help them find more obviously valuable grave goods. It has long been
recognized that the original editing was much less than perfect.
Shaughnessy’s paper is about one of the texts, the “Biography of Son
of Heaven Mu (穆)”, who reigned over Wei in the 10th century BC.
This biography has been seen as the best-preserved single text in the
archive. However, Shaughnessy shows, by comparing the received modern
version of the text with quotations from it in early literature, that
at least up to the 11th century AD there were rival editions in
circulation; and he also shows that the received modern version
contains plenty of correctable errors, such as insertion of passages
of wording that originally belonged to other texts entirely, and cases
where a sequence of events has been reversed in a way that makes no
sense.
Chapter 2, by the volume editor Chen Zhi 陳致, is written to draw the
wider world’s attention to an account in the Chinese press of the
recent discovery of a text on bamboo strips recording a ‘yin zhi’ 飮至
celebration following the Zhou overlord Wu’s conquest of the fief
usually called Li 黎 (though given another name in this text). ‘Yin
zhi’ was a custom whereby, after a battle, the victorious leader would
invite his followers to a drinking session. According to this text,
the conquest of Li occurred earlier than usually believed, namely
shortly before Wu overthrew the king of Shang, whose vassal he was,
thus making Zhou the hegemonic polity in place of Shang and
inaugurating the Zhou dynasty. This would make the ‘yin zhi’ described
the earliest one recorded. The ‘yin zhi’ custom is known in detail
from poems in the earliest monument of Chinese literature, the 詩經
“Book of Odes”, and from other early writings discussed by Chen. It
was intended as a solemn occasion, at which the Zhou equivalent of
medals were conferred. But we know for instance that the host would
appoint an inspector, with an assistant to take notes, since, as the
Book of Odes tells us (Sampson 2020: 263–5): “When the guests first
take their places, their attitude is warmly respectful … But when they
get tipsy, their dignity totters. They get up from their places and
move around, they take to capering wildly to the music … Guests who
are drunk start shouting and making a racket … Drinking wine is a fine
thing, but only provided one behaves properly.”
The newly-discovered bamboo strips also apparently contain a number of
poems similar to various poems in the Odes, which may be relevant to
the issue of how those poems originally came into existence. But
Chen’s paper is stronger on data than on drawing inferences from the
data.
An unexplained puzzle for me in Chen’s chapter is that he repeatedly
gives the title of the new text, in romanization and Chinese script,
as ‘Qi du’ 耆夜. Here, Qi is the alternative name for the state of Li;
the second graph means “night”, so the two words might be a reasonable
title for a celebration which doubtless took place in the evening. But
the word for “night” is pronounced ‘ye’, not ‘du’. I can find no
Chinese graph pronounced ‘du’ that looks closely similar to 夜, and
that graph has no relevant alternative value. I cannot make out what
has happened here.
Chapter 3, by Hans van Ess, discusses one four-word saying in the
‘Analects’ of Confucius (551–479 BC): ‘you jiao wu lei’ 有教無類,
literally “there.is teach there.isn’t category”. This has standardly
been rendered in European languages along the lines “My teaching is
available to all without distinction of social class”; and thanks to
the obvious appeal of this idea to Marxists the passage has become one
of the more frequently-discussed ‘Analects’ quotations in modern
China. But van Ess points out, first, that this rendering assigns no
role to the first word, ‘you’, which normally has only verbal uses,
and that if Confucius were really talking about his own teaching one
would expect a first-person pronoun in this place. Furthermore it is
not obvious that the very general word ‘lei’ refers here to social
class in particular; and indeed, in contemporary writings ‘wu lei’
often occurred as a set phrase meaning something like “uncivilized,
unaware of categories of right and wrong behaviour”. So the true
interpretation might be closer to “Teaching is available for
uncivilized savages” – barbarians aren't irredeemably barbaric,
teaching can civilize any human being. This is in fact similar to the
interpretation placed on the words by the famous 12th-century
philosopher Zhu Xi, which has been lost sight of in modern times.
Chapter 4, by David Knechtges, is by far the longest chapter in the
volume. It is about a recently-discovered poem of the ‘fu’ 賦 genre,
now (and perhaps originally) titled ‘Fan Yin’ 反淫 “Against Debauchery”.
It is closely similar to a known ‘fu’ of the 2nd century BC, ‘Qi Fa’
七發 “Seven Stimuli”: both recount attempts to persuade a central
figure, who is prostrated through overindulgence, to arise from his
sickbed. The persuasion consists of describing a series of attractions
(a banquet, a chariot race, etc.) that will be available if the man
gets up and about; only the final enticement, which consists of the
evidently unbeatable thrill of listening to learned scholars
propounding their doctrines, succeeds in quelling the hangover and
getting him out of bed – in ‘Fan Yin’, “sweat profusely poured forth,
/ and suddenly his illness was cured.” The “meat” of both poems
consists largely of picturesque descriptions of the various
enticements: the section of ‘Qi Fa’ about viewing the Guangling tidal
bore reminded me, linguistically as well as thematically, of Robert
Southey’s extraordinary “Cataract of Lodore” poem.
‘Fan Yin’ is sufficiently similar to ‘Qi Fa’ that one must surely have
influenced the other, but it is not clear which is older. The
newly-discovered ‘Fan Yin’ is full of philological obscurities;
Knechtges analyses these, and offers a complete translation.
Scott Cook's chapter 5 discusses concepts of the nature and purpose of
historiography which emerge from various ancient Chinese historical
writings, leading up to the half-million words of the ‘Shi Ji’ 史記
“Records of the Historian” by Sima Qian (ca 145–86 BC) – that famous
book, incidentally, is the focus of the honoree William Nienhauser’s
life’s work. Cook brings early Chinese thinkers’ ideas about
historiography into relationship with Western philosophers of history,
including Emerson, Nietzsche, and R.G. Collingwood. If an awkward
factual detail obscures the moral lesson to be drawn from some
historical episode, is it a good idea to change the detail in the
record in order to keep the lesson clear? – and if teaching morality
is not the purpose of writing history, why do it at all? Some early
Chinese historians might have answered such questions in different
ways.
Chapter 6, by Li Jia 李佳, concerns conflicting assessments by various
historians of one Zhang Qian 張騫, who lived in the 2nd century BC and
is best known to posterity for having explored the largely mountainous
and desert regions to the west of China Proper (nowadays the Chinese
province of Sinkiang, in the modern romanization Xinjiang, but at the
time ‘terra incognita’ for the Chinese). According to Li Jia, Zhang
Qian has been regarded as a pioneer in creating what became known as
the Silk Road; he was described by Sima Qian (see the previous
paragraph) as having 鑿空 ‘zuo kong’ the Western Regions – Li Jia
translates ‘zuo kong’ as “hollow out”, a term she does not explain,
but from the context I infer that it means what in English would be
called “opening up”: converting ‘terra incognita’ to territory whose
main geographical features were known, making contacts with and
perhaps even concluding formal alliances with the inhabitants, and so
forth.
(A general problem with Li Jia’s chapter is that her translations of
the many passages of Chinese she quotes often appear to me to be
rather loose.)
For these achievements Zhang Qian has been seen by many as a heroic
figure. But others have viewed him negatively. China for much of its
history has been a high civilization surrounded exclusively by peoples
at a far lower level of cultural and economic development, and there
was a longstanding tension between policies of cultivating
relationships with these barbarians and perhaps absorbing them into
China, versus keeping them at arm’s length as neighbours from whom
there was little or nothing to be gained. Critics of Zhang Qian
evidently saw him as wasting resources through a policy towards
barbarians that could never be profitable, and represented him as
gulling emperor Wu (reigned 140–85 BC) into embracing this misguided
policy. Reading Li Jia’s quotations, though, I wonder whether the
critics’ real target was the emperor himself, and they were attacking
Zhang Qian as a way of criticizing the imperial policy indirectly, as
a safer alternative to openly accusing the emperor of error.
Robin Yates’s chapter 7 discusses a recent archaeological discovery in
the city of Changsha of documents on wood or bamboo from about AD 100,
consisting of legal records. These are worth study because they deal
with routine matters too local and low-level to be covered in the
literature that has come down to us from so long ago. Yates discusses
particularly a subset of these documents dealing with prosecution of
officials for corruption or other misbehaviour in office. Yates’s
overall summary is that some officials were accepting bribes or
misappropriating tax receipts, but “they had honest colleagues who
went out of their way to follow the strict legal and administrative
guidelines to pursue and arrest them. The guidelines were evidently
clearly stated”.   A particularly interesting insight is a case where
“the officials take the same care in recording the injuries suffered
by a slave trying to help his master resist arrest when he was
confronted as they did in cases of murder of commoners. A slave was
apparently treated as a normal human being by the law.”
I cannot claim to understand chapter 8, by Sun Bao. It is about ‘tu
xie’ 圖寫, a term which can refer broadly to Chinese brush-and-ink
painting or more narrowly to the calligraphy which is an integral part
of the genre. One problem is that Sun would have been better advised
to ask a native speaker to help with his English prose. A question
like “Was Yan Yanzhi just arbitrary or specific to entertaining
himself with ‘tu xie’?” is hard to interpret. But, beyond that, his
chapter reads as a jumble of names, of painters, pictures, and texts,
almost all of which are likely to be unfamiliar to almost every
English-speaking reader, and from which it was beyond me to
disentangle an overall thesis. A typical remark occurs on Sun’s third
page: “And all of ‘Book of Mountains and Seas’ 山海經, ‘Nine Odes’ 九歌,
and ‘Tian Wen’ 天問 (Questions about Heaven) were the early works based
on paintings.” None of these names has been mentioned previously, and
(despite Sun’s initial “And”) nothing in the context tells me how they
relate to anything else Sun discusses. I will pass on.
The honoree William Nienhauser has argued, in a chapter in Mair
(2001), that the Tang dynasty literary genre of ‘chuanqi’ 傳奇,
supernatural tales, evolved from a pre-existing genre of (factual)
historical biographies. In chapter 9 of the book under review, Qian
Liu illustrates this idea by analysing a particular ‘chuanqi’, 李衞公靖
“Li Jing, Duke of Wei” (not the same Wei as in chapter 1 above!). Qian
Liu provides a complete translation of this tale in an appendix, which
is best read before reading her analysis; I shall summarize it as
briefly as I can.
As a young man, while out hunting the duke becomes lost and benighted;
encountering an unknown mansion, he asks the lady occupant to put him
up for the night. Around midnight, visitors arrive to present a “tally
from Heaven” demanding that the man of the house immediately provide
rain to relieve the drought from which the area is suffering. The lady
explains to the duke that (the mansion actually being a dragon’s
palace) this is a reasonable command which must be obeyed, and since
her sons are away he must please do it. She provides a flying horse
and a small jar of water, telling him to release it very sparingly,
one drop at a time. But the duke is specially fond of the village
where he stays while hunting, so when he overflies it he is unwilling
to be stingy, and releases twenty drops of water. When he lands back
at the mansion, the lady explains that one drop in the sky is a foot
of rain on earth, so he has drowned his village under twenty feet of
water. The tale ends with the duke making an unexpected choice between
slaves whom the lady offers as alternative farewell gifts.
Qian Liu’s analysis begins by pointing out that Li Jing, the
protagonist of the tale, was a real historical figure, a military
general who lived from 571 to 649. The tale is allegorical; but,
according to Ms Liu, the real individual for whom the duke in the tale
stands was not Li Jing (if it were, the incidents in the tale could
not be related to Li Jing’s career), but a later Duke of Wei, Li Deyu
(787–849). Qian Liu spells out how the allegory works; for instance,
Li Deyu’s career involved an episode of demotion in connexion with a
disastrous flood. The tale is a kind of passive aggression, attacking
Li Deyu in a way that can readily be deflected in case of trouble –
“look at the title, it’s about Li Jing who died centuries ago, and
anyway it’s obviously only a fable”. Meanwhile, it is a fun story.
Finally, Qu Jingyi’s chapter 10 is about the role of the poet Zhang
Yue 張説 (667–731) in stimulating literary activity in China in the
early Tang dynasty, both by encouraging other poets in his circle and
by occupying important official positions – from 723 to 726, prime
minister – from which he was able to organize institutional support
for literature. Various commentators, at the time and recently, have
claimed that it was Zhang Yue’s influence which led emperor Xuanzong
(reigned 719–755, and one of the most influential figures in Chinese
history), to begin to favour ‘wen’ 文 (a word which covers a broad
range of concepts, including literature, culture, refinement, “civil”
as opposed to “military”) over naked power as his ideology of
government: as one might put it, Zhang Yue was Alcuin to Xuanzong’s
Alfred the Great. Although Zhang Yue’s own poetry is well-known, Qu
finds that less attention has been paid to the circles of fellow-poets
whom Zhang assembled around him and patronized. Apart from anything
else, in sheer weight of numbers they exceeded almost anything known
before in China. (When Qu writes “rarely known of the Tang dynasty”, I
take “of” to be a misprint for “before”.) The Tang is universally
acknowledged as the all-time high-water mark of Chinese poetry. Qu
argues that, although the poetic standard of the anthologies he
discusses does not rise to the level achieved later in the dynasty,
they opened the way towards the achievements of the High Tang.
EVALUATION
I found many contributions to this Festschrift interesting, and I
certainly learned from it. The level is inevitably somewhat uneven; I
made some criticisms above, and I wondered whether the use Scott Cook
made of Emerson’s concept of “universal history” was possibly a little
overblown relative to the Chinese material he discusses. The topics of
successive chapters are so diverse that few readers will find them all
equally appealing.
But it is difficult to offer a meaningful evaluation of the volume to
an audience of Linguist List readers. The List offered it for review
and I undertook to do this. But the book offers little or nothing to a
reader without a background knowledge of Chinese civilization and at
least some ability to read the Classical Chinese language. My guess is
that this cuts out the great majority of LL subscribers.
In Britain today, I believe it would cut out almost a hundred per cent
of those working in university Linguistics departments. Over the past
half-century the nation’s intellectual horizons have narrowed more and
more to exclude anything distant in time or place; it seems as though
there have never been so many proclaiming woke slogans about the equal
importance and value of all the world’s cultures, while so few
actually know much about any cultures other than their own. I feel
wistful about the grounding in Sinology I was lucky enough to receive
as a Cambridge undergraduate in the 1960s, including reading some of
the same texts discussed in this book (or parts of them at least); I
wonder whether an education like that is available anywhere in the UK
now. It is good to see that, in the USA, the scholarly tradition is
being well maintained.
The book is very well produced, with attractive print; the only
misprints I spotted (other than one already mentioned) were intrusion
of extraneous wording in the middle of a sentence on p. 38, and
“signs” for “sighs” in the first line of p. 274. A more significant
production flaw relates to a few places where attempts are made to
include colour photos of details of ancient inscriptions on wood or
bamboo; in most cases these are so dark that I could not even see
writing, let alone follow the outlines of the graphs.
It is regrettable that the book has no index (in either Part). And it
seems a pity that Chinese contributors’ names are not shown in
Chinese, since huge numbers of Chinese have names which are
indistinguishable when romanized. For instance Li Jia, author of
chapter 6, is not the only “Li Jia” on the staff of her own
institution. It was not hard to guess that her surname is 李, but it
took research to learn that her personal name is 佳. I completely
failed to discover other Chinese contributors’ names.
REFERENCES
Mair, V.H., ed., 2001. The Columbia History of Chinese Literature.
Columbia University Press (New York).
Sampson, G.R., 2020. Voices from Early China: the ‘Odes’ demystified.
Cambridge Scholars Publishing (Newcastle upon Tyne).
ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Geoffrey Sampson graduated in Oriental Studies at Cambridge University
in 1965, and studied Linguistics and Computer Science as a graduate
student at Yale University before teaching at the universities of
Oxford, LSE, Lancaster, Leeds, and Sussex. After retiring from his
Computing chair at Sussex he spent several years as a research fellow
in Linguistics at the University of South Africa. Sampson has
published in most areas of Linguistics and on a number of other
subjects. His most recent book is “Structural Linguistics in the 21st
Century” (2024).



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