Throughout China’s entire imperial era (221 BCE–1912 CE), diviners, doctors, and artisans played extremely important roles in Chinese political and social life––their status invariably a function of their level of service. Stephan N. Kory’s exemplary book, Technicians and Artisans of Heaven-and-Earth: Imperial Memories of Diviners, Physicians, and Craftsmen from Mid-Medieval China, as its title suggests, adopts a top-level approach. Indeed, it focuses almost entirely on elite life in northern China (roughly above the thirty-third parallel) during the Northern Wei dynasty (386–534), the Northern Zhou dynasty, (557–581), and the Sui dynasty (581–618). All three regimes had northern capitals, and all three drew almost exclusively upon northern talent.Footnote ¹

Kory has long been interested in what he refers to as the “mid-medieval” period of Chinese history, a “remarkably diverse and somewhat neglected” slice of time spanning from roughly the late fourth to the early seventh centuries of the Common Era. As Kory puts the matter on page one of his refreshingly straightforward Introduction, “although sinological scholarship published over the past several decades has greatly advanced our understanding of the technical and intellectual aspects of ancient and medieval Chinese divination, medicine, and crafts, practitioners of these ‘techniques and arts’ (shuyi 術藝) have rarely been featured.”

Technicians and Artisans of Heaven-and-Earth showcases these practitioners, admirably filling many gaps in the scholarly literature. Based on a careful and thorough examination of virtually all relevant primary and secondary sources––and giving particular attention to the sections titled “Arrayed Traditions of Technicians and Artisans” (Shuyi liezhuan 術藝列傳) in the official histories of the Northern Wei, Northern Zhou, and Sui dynasties––the author has produced a first-rate study of divination, medicine, and artisanship as practiced and promoted by forty-one prominent specialists in mid-medieval China. The sample may seem small but the details are revealing and broadly significant.

The first several chapters of Kory’s book (164 pages) discuss in turn the compilation of the three “Arrayed Traditions;” the place of divination, medicine, and crafts in “medieval knowledge systems”; the role of technicians and artisans as “interpreters and agents of Heaven-and-Earth”; the official selection and appointment of these individuals; and the reception and transmission of their skills. These chapters are followed by careful translations of the “Arrayed Traditions” (151 pages), an appendix identifying two dozen “exemplars” of various mantic, medical, and technical skills drawn from the official history of the Sui and intended to reflect “early Tang imperial Confucian classicism” (15 pages), and a Glossary (26 pages).

Technicians and Artisans of Heaven-and-Earth has something for everyone. It is part history, part historiography, part biography, and part literary analysis. Kory’s sources range widely, encompassing material mined not only from the official dynastic histories and their commentaries, but also from privately produced writings of various kinds. In piecing together the lives and achievements of Chinese “technicians and artisans” (shuyi zhi shi 術藝之士) Kory includes and discusses at length the literary compositions they produced, including memorials, poetic works, and prefaces to texts. Through a comparative, intertextual, and literary study of these materials, he not only adds to our knowledge of the roles and functions of diviners, physicians, and craftsmen in and around the imperial courts of mid-medieval North China; he also provides us with fascinating insights into a dynamic period that “modern histories of China often ignore.”

In addition to his exhaustive examination of primary materials, Kory draws upon and complements the work of dozens of scholars in East Asia and the West, whose earlier research and writing sheds valuable light on the closely related themes of divination, shamanism and medicine in early imperial China. Worthy of special mention are the pioneering studies of Kenneth DeWoskin, Donald Harper, Marc Kalinowski, Li Ling 李零, Li Beilei 李倍雷, Liu Lexian 劉樂賢, Ngo Van Xuyet, Lisa Raphals, Sakade Yoshinobu 坂出祥伸, and Paul Unschuld.

Kory’s contribution to the literature has been to provide fully annotated translations of the three above-mentioned biographical collections, which inform his preliminary chapters. The extensive annotations to these translations supply valuable and at times essential technical, linguistic, literary, and historical information. On occasion, Kory’s footnotes occupy as much or more space on a page than the translated text itself.

Most of the “technicians and artisans” accorded biographies in the three dynastic histories were scholars and/or professional exponents of “formulas and techniques” (fangshu 方術). Several were celebrated more for their literary skills than their mantic ones. For example, the Grand-Scribe Astrologer Zhang Yuan 張淵 (ca. 385–424), despite his exalted bureaucratic position, was once criticized for employing “common forms of divination” (changzhan 常占) that were incapable of “hooking the deep to reach the distant” (goushen zhiyuan 鈎深致遠). But the translation of his long, esoteric “Rhapsody on Observing the Images” (Guanxiang fu 觀象賦) occupies nineteen pages (169–188) of Kory’s heavily annotated text.

The author’s approach to Technicians and Artisans of Heaven-and-Earth appears early in the book (4):

As this passage suggests, a constantly reiterated theme in Kory’s study is the particularly close political, social, and cosmological connection between divination, medicine, and craftsmanship in mid-medieval times.

The examples Kory adduces to make this claim, attributable primarily to cultural changes that occurred during the era of political division known as the Six Dynasties period (c. 222 CE–589 CE), are compelling. I am not entirely persuaded, however, that the connections he identifies were appreciably different (except, possibly in the case of crafts) in mid-medieval China from either the Later Han or in the succession of highly centralized dynasties that followed the Sui unification in 589 CE. At various points in Kory’s book he provides evidence of continuities in both the theories and the practices of Chinese doctors and diviners over time, but he makes few systematic comparisons of this sort.

Among the many virtues of Technicians and Artisans of Heaven-and-Earth, in addition to Kory’s excellent translations and his thorough analysis of the inspiration, authorship, and influence of his primary sources, is his Glossary, which consists of far more than the usual laundry list of terms. Rather, it provides a catalogue that explains in considerable detail various “Techniques and Arts Featured in the Three Collections.” The Glossary is organized under six rubrics: (1) yinyang-related mantic techniques (including a wide range of divinatory approaches, ranging from numerical calculations and astrology to meteoromancy and portentology); (2) “tone and pitch” (pertaining to music) (3) oracle bone and stalk divination (osteomancy, achilleamancy, and various Changes-related procedures; (4) physiognomy; (5) medicine (medications, elixirs, pulse diagnosis, acupuncture, moxibustion, spirit-medium techniques, and “Daoist methods”); and arts (mainly calligraphy, engraving, painting, “encirclement chess,” or weiqi, and “mechanical crafts”). Readers unfamiliar with the basic theories and practices of Chinese divination, medicine, and crafts might consider reading this section of the book first, bearing in mind that techniques with the same or similar names might vary across time and space, since they evolved constantly (another useful point made by Kory).

As it stands, Technicians and Artisans of Heaven-and-Earth lacks an overall conclusion, although its strong chapter-by-chapter arguments do not require reinforcement. It is unfair for a reviewer to ask more of a book than its author intended to provide, but selfishly speaking I would have liked to see more comparative attention paid to the production and reception of works on divination and medicine in the periods prior to, and especially after, the mid-medieval era––although there are a few pages dedicated to longitudinal comparisons of this sort in Chapter 1 (esp. 33–36). A quick glance at the “Formulas and Skills” (fangji 方伎) section of the official Ming History, produced in the Qing period (1636–1912), yields a picture similar to the “Arrayed Traditions” detailed in the histories of the Northern Wei, Northern Zhou, and Sui dynasties, although it lacks the literary emphasis of the earlier biographies.

In short, a concluding chapter addressing issues of continuity and change in post-Tang official views of divination, medicine, and craft productions would have been particularly useful and comparatively easy for the author to do, thanks to a great many online, word-searchable sources such as imperially commissioned Qing encyclopedia titled Complete Collection of Illustrations and Writings, Past and Present (Gujin tushu jicheng 古今圖書集成, 1726). This gigantic compilation devotes eight thousand or so of its approximately 800,000 printed pages to “artisans and technicians (yishu 藝術)––mainly fortune-tellers, their mantic texts and their predictive methods––from antiquity to the present. About the same number of pages in the encyclopedia are devoted to doctors, medical texts and therapeutic techniques. It is true, however, that this material is heavily weighted toward late imperial China.

Another useful source for tracking the lives and works of diviners over time, including doctor-diviners, is Yuan Shushan’s 袁樹珊 massive compilation titled Biographies of Diviners in China by Periods (Zhongguo lidai buren zhuan 中國歷代卜人傳; 1948). Based largely on official histories, and other such sources, including hundreds of local Chinese gazetteers, it documents the lives of well over 3,000 individuals from the distant past into the early twentieth century, who engaged in divination and/or wrote books about it––most of them elites, and several of them from mid-medieval China. Kory cites this book in his expansive bibliography, but he seems not to have employed it in his analysis––perhaps because at least one third of Yuan’s entries focus on the Qing dynasty.

No matter. Technicians and Artisans of Heaven-and-Earth deserves to be read and savored on its own substantial merits. It is not an easy read, and at times can be rather repetitive, but it is deeply rewarding, nonetheless.