As Beijing prepared to host the 2008 Olympics, a small drama was unfolding in Hong Kong. Two years earlier, middlemen had come into possession of a batch of waterlogged manuscripts that had been unearthed by tomb robbers in south-central China. The documents had been smuggled to Hong Kong and were lying in a vault, waiting for a buyer


The manuscripts’ importance stems from their particular antiquity. Carbon dating places their burial at about 300 BCE. This was the height of the Warring States Period, an era of turmoil that ran from the fifth to the third centuries BCE. During this time, the Hundred Schools of Thought arose, including Confucianism, which concerns hierarchical relationships and obligations in society; Daoism (or Taoism), and its search to unify with the primordial force called Dao (or Tao); Legalism, which advocated strict adherence to laws; and Mohism, and its egalitarian ideas of impartiality. These ideas underpinned Chinese society and politics for two thousand years, and even now are touted by the government of Xi Jinping as pillars of the one-party state.


The newly discovered texts challenge long-held certainties about this era. Chinese political thought as exemplified by Confucius allowed for meritocracy among officials, eventually leading to the famous examination system on which China’s imperial bureaucracy was founded. But the texts show that some philosophers believed that rulers should also be chosen on merit, not birth—radically different from the hereditary dynasties that came to dominate Chinese history. The texts also show a world in which magic and divination, even in the supposedly secular world of Confucius, played a much larger part than has been realized. And instead of an age in which sages neatly espoused discrete schools of philosophy, we now see a more fluid, dynamic world of vigorously competing views—the sort of robust exchange of ideas rarely prominent in subsequent eras.

Liu told a crowd of about one hundred the story of how he and other members of the team saved the strips from rot in 2008. He showed pictures of how the strips were now being held in trays in a dark room and how the university was building a museum and research center. Then he outlined some of the new texts soon to be released: a chart for multiplying and dividing complex numbers, as well as new books of divination.

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rodaki said:

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Professor Sarah Allan has just completed a book with some surprising revelations about early Chinese political theory that she discovered in the Tsinghua and other bamboo manuscripts. (Photo by Eli Burakian ’00)​

... After the first emperor, Qín Shǐ Huáng, had unified China in 221 BCE, he wanted to stamp out the ideas of Confucius and other philosophers who might present a challenge to his authority, so he not only executed many scholars but also burned their books and banned private libraries. The bamboo manuscripts, buried safely underground, escaped that fate. They give us a glimpse of intellectual life—what people were reading—in the formative period of Chinese thought.

... Allan recently completed a book with some surprising revelations about early Chinese political theory that she found in the Tsinghua and other bamboo manuscripts. The manuscripts reveal that some early philosophers advocated abdication and rule by merit rather than heredity.

«Such ideas were suppressed because they presented a challenge to the hereditary dynasties of later periods», she says. «We didn’t know such theories existed, but once you find them in the manuscripts, you suddenly see that many ideas in the texts that have been transmitted to us are actually arguments against them. So you know that such theories were actually current at that time.»

And another piece of the puzzle falls into place.


Source: Tsinghua Bamboo Manuscripts Offer Clues About Early China. Drmouth, May 22, 2013
Link: http://now.dartmouth.edu/2013/05/tsinghua-bamboo-manuscripts-offer-clues-about-early-china

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