The Chu Silk Manuscripts from Zidanku, Changsha (Hunan Province) Volume II

This book is the second in a two-volume monograph on the Zidanku Silk Manuscripts. Looted in 1942 from the Warring States-period Chu tomb at Zidanku, Changsha, the manuscripts date to the turn from the 4th to the 3rd centuries BCE and are the only pre-Imperial Chinese manuscripts on silk found to-date. The monograph represents the culmination of almost four decades of research by Professor Li Ling of Peking University. Volume One addresses the circumstances of the discovery of the Zidanku Silk Manuscripts and the subsequent provenance history in China and the United States.

Volume Two provides the first complete transcription of the Zidanku Silk Manuscripts in their entirety together with reproductions of the original manuscripts. The transcription is accompanied by comprehensive annotations, with full paleographic and philological analysis of the texts. An English translation of the texts has been added by Professor Donald Harper. For the first time, the Zidanku Silk Manuscripts can be read as a single corpus, constituting a unique source of information that complements and goes beyond what is known from transmitted texts. The Zidanku Silk Manuscripts reveal a range of cosmological and religious ideas, and shed new light on the formation of correlative thought in the Warring States period.

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“This volume represents the continuation of the important study that Professor Li Ling devoted to the history of the discovery of the Chu manuscripts from Zidanku. It includes the photographic reproduction, transcription, and detailed study of three manuscripts and several fragments, identified thanks to the efforts spanning more than four decades by the greatest expert on hemerological texts of the Warring States period.”

“This beautifully produced volume, with full color plates of all the manuscript fragments, does vivid justice to the meticulous, painstaking, and rigorous decades of masterful work that Li Ling, the world’s foremost authority on the subject, has poured into the reconstruction, decipherment, and interpretation of these important textual artifacts, much of which is brought to light here for the first time.”

“The collaboration of the two most eminent experts of Chinese paleography, Li Ling in Beijing, and Donald Harper in Chicago, is again a felicitous demonstration of what Sino-American cooperation can achieve.”

“This volume compiles and assesses with immaculate accuracy and critical acumen all extant relevant material that Li Ling uncovered during his over forty-year pursuit for answers in and out of China among archaeologists, historians, paleographers, and conservation scientists—a true model of interdisciplinary and international research, and an inspiration to all scholars in early China studies.”

“Professor Li Ling’s splendid book offers to the Western public the first ever comprehensive monograph on the Chu Silk Manuscripts from Zidanku. This masterful research, to which he has devoted more than forty years, is not only a minute investigation—the most extensive of its kind on the famous manuscripts—but also a very valuable contribution to our understanding of the intellectual life of the Late Warring States period.”

“Complemented by high-quality color pictures, old photographs, hand facsimiles of the manuscripts, as well as an updated bibliography and a comprehensive index of the ancient graphs, this English edition should undoubtedly be regarded as the new reference edition for these excavated texts.”