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Shared Imagery: Eastern Zhou Decors and Iconographies*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 March 2015

Sophia-Karin Psarras
Sophia-Karin Psarras*
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729-C Waverly Street Palo Alto, CA 94301
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Extract

In the pre-imperial period of China, lack of written records removes even the limited clarity attainable in the analysis of Qin-Han political structures and diplomatic relations. How do we identify “China” and “Chinese”? We have only a vague understanding, based mostly on our understanding of relatively late philosophical works, of how China defined itself, let alone of its relations with other polities or among its own components. Extrapolating backward from Eastern Zhou, we assume a central, ethnically Chinese authority directly controlling a small geographic area.

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Type
Articles
Information
Early China , Volume 23 , 1998, pp. 1 - 88
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Study of Early China 1998

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Footnotes

*

Parts of this article appear in Psarras, Han Material Culture (forthcoming), for which I received funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities (Summer Stipend), gratefully acknowledged. My thanks are also due to Donald Harper, Nancy Price, and Lothar von Falkenhausen in particular for their valuable editorial aid.

Chronological divisions for early China are of necessity based on those employed in Chinese archaeological publications. As a convenience to the reader, Appendix 3 provides a list of chronological designations used in this article accompanied by Western years (which must be treated as arbitrary in many respects). The Late Springs and Autumns and Warring States archaeological sites that provide the essential data for this article are identified in Appendix 4, which includes a location map. In romanizing the name of the state of Wey , this transcription serves to distinguish Wey from Wei , which was one of the three successors of the state of Jin (Wei, Zhao , and Han ) following its partition in 403 B.C.