Since the 1970s, the increasingly frequent recoveries of bamboo-slip and silk manuscripts have dramatically transformed our understanding of early Chinese history. The transmitted corpus of pre-imperial (before 221 BCE) texts, whether the Shangshu 尚書 (The Exalted Scriptures), Zuozhuan 左傳 (Zuo Tradition), or Daodejing 道德經, had all been redacted by imperial-period scholars. The manuscript finds circumvent the ideological filters of later periods and offer new perspectives on the Warring States (mid-fifth century–221 BCE) and early imperial (221 BCE–220 CE) eras. Collectively, their impact on scholarship is comparable to other major manuscript discoveries, such as the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Oxyrhynchus Papyri, and the Dunhuang Library Cave. The Tsinghua University Warring States Manuscripts, containing more than 2500 slips dating to around 300 BCE, is one of the largest and most important collections among these new sources. As of now, fourteen of the estimated sixteen volumes have been published. The ambitious English translation series, produced by a team of established scholars led by Edward L. Shaughnessy, aims to make available this entire collection to the global academic community. This review introduces the first four volumes published thus far. I highlight the scope and significance of this collection and the contribution of each translation.

The Tsinghua manuscripts contain both previously unknown materials and parallel versions of transmitted texts. Some of the translated texts are of startling new finds. The first text in Volume 3, for instance, Chijiu zhi ji Tang zhi wu 赤鳩之集湯之屋 (A Red Pigeon’s Alighting on Tang’s Hut), is a wildly fantastical narrative featuring a magic crow, a noxious white rabbit, healing rituals, and possession by an animal. It exemplifies the type of “unorthodox” accounts that were eventually filtered out in the imperial period by selective copying; its recovery enables the project to retrieve from oblivion earlier religious, medical, intellectual, and literary histories. As another example, the final chapter of this volume, Yin Gaozong wenyu San Shou 殷高宗問于三壽 (The High Ancestor of Yin Asked the Three Long-Lived Ones), defies the customary categorization of pre-imperial intellectual lineages. Future translations will feature a diverse range of materials. In addition to the traditional genres of classics (jing 經), historiography, philosophical writings, and verses, the Tsinghua corpus also encompasses technical writings on calendrical, divinatory, mathematical, medical, and musical subjects, pharmacological recipes, prayers, and ritual protocols. They open up new windows into the intellectual and everyday life of the fourth century BCE.

Even the texts in more familiar genres contain new insights. Volume 6 consists of anecdotes on events and figures of the Spring and Autumn period (722–mid fourth century BCE) that are already known from the Zuozhuan and Guoyu 國語 (Discourses of the States). Yet these accounts, as the translator Rens Krijgsman argues, offer alternative perspectives in both form and substance. Similarly, in Volume 2, the well-known trope of seeking worthy ministers is coupled in Fu Yue’s Command (Fu Yue zhi ming 傅敓之命) with a previously unknown etiological account, in which a rival leader gives birth to twin boars. A few texts in the first two volumes bear traces of the orthography of bronze inscriptions, such as The Command Enfeoffing Xu (Feng Xu zhi Ming 封鄦之命) in Volume 1 and Houfu 厚父 in Volume 2. While bronze inscriptions are closely related to compositions in the shu 書 genre (“scripture,” more commonly rendered “document”), we do not yet fully understand the mechanisms of knowledge transfer between these two types of sources. For this reason, such traces of interaction are highly suggestive.

It is important to note the unfortunate circumstances under which the Tsinghua collection was acquired. Like several other major caches of Warring States period manuscripts, these bamboo slips were unearthed by tomb looters and recovered from the Hong Kong antiques market; the wealth of information from their original archaeological context is lost. The ethics of researching looted manuscripts is a debated topic; Shaughnessy’s General Preface, included in each volume, offers an overview of the debate. Despite their murky provenance, the Tsinghua Manuscripts are widely accepted as genuine by the community of paleographers. New archaeological evidence continues to reinforce their authenticity, as Shaughnessy’s preface delineates.

The challenges posed by these manuscripts do not stop at the ethical predicament and questions about authenticity. The study of early Chinese paleography is known as a formidable peak of academic study (juexue 絕學). The reconstruction and decipherment of Warring States manuscripts is moreover a dynamic field, since most extant sources only began to emerge during the 1990s (the lion’s share of earlier manuscript finds date to the early imperial period). In addition, while the imperial-period scholars who redacted the transmitted compilations to different degrees kept in mind their legibility to future readers, the excavated and recovered manuscripts, largely miscellaneous collections of short texts, were most likely intended only for use in more immediate contexts. The loss of their Sitz im Leben (i.e., their contexts of production and use) is thus a major obstacle to exegesis.

For these reasons, unlike the translation of many other types of materials, the legibility of these manuscripts requires an extensive apparatus. Accordingly, the Tsinghua series contains copious introductions and annotations, making available the different types of research enabling the reconstruction of these artifacts. They range from the decipherment of individual characters and the accruing codicological knowledge facilitating the reconstitution of loose slips, to the possible contextualization in early Chinese history and the postulation of relationships with the transmitted textual traditions. In doing so, they offer a comprehensive synthesis of the existing scholarship on each manuscript. As a book historian, I especially appreciate the presentation of these sources not only as texts, but also as material artifacts produced by a scribal culture, whose practices of writing, redacting, and collecting researchers are only beginning to unravel.

While the organization of each volume is tailored according to the nature of the manuscripts and the translator’s expertise and interest, every volume contains:

• • Two General Prefaces by the editors of the series, Shaughnessy and Huang Dekuan 黃德寬. They articulate the significance of the Tsinghua corpus from the perspective of Chinese language scholarship.

• • Introductions and studies on topics related to each volume as a whole.

• • Introductions to each text.

• • Interlinear, slip-by-slip transcription and translation. Each page contains four representations of the text from a single bamboo slip: 1) The images of the individual characters, rearranged horizontally and left-to-right. 2) The “strict transcriptions” (yanshi liding 嚴式隸定) of the characters, where the components of a graph are rendered into counterparts in the standard orthography of Traditional Chinese (fantizi 繁體字). 3) The “interpretative transcription” (kuanshi liding 寬式隸定), a translation of each graph into a standard Traditional Chinese character. As a typical example, the strict transcription of the Warring States script is 惪, and its interpretive transcription is 德 (the image of the manuscript character is taken from page 78 of Volume 1). 4) An annotated English translation. Graphs found on the verso side of the slips, largely titles and slip numbering, are also included.

• • After every slip is thus interpreted, there are recapitulations of the full text in Chinese (i.e., the interpretative transcription) and English, arranged into paragraphs.

• • A photo reproduction of the entire manuscript in reduced format.

• • Supplementary texts and translations of related materials, such as parallel versions found in the transmitted corpus.

Turning to the individual volumes: 1 and 2, devoted to texts in the shu genre, are both translated by Shaughnessy. Texts selected for Volume 1 are judged to be related to the noncanonical Yi Zhou Shu 逸周書 (which Shaughnessy translates as the Leftover Zhou Scriptures), those in Volume 2 to the canonized Shangshu 尚書 (The Exalted Scriptures). Both are extensively supplemented by texts and translations of full chapters from these two transmitted volumes, including parallel versions as well as chapters sharing related titles or formal features. If the Dead Sea Scrolls have contextualized the formation process of the Bible, these manuscripts similarly reveal a vibrant and expansive tradition of compositions in the shu genre, from which the two transmitted compilations were culled and adapted. Some of these manuscripts—unlike texts in less elevated genres—closely mirror their transmitted counterparts, suggesting the onset of textual stabilization during the fourth century BCE. Others, such as Zhai Gong zhi gu ming 祭公之顧命 (The Duke of Zhai’s Retrospective Command) in Volume 1, reveal that the distinction between the “exalted” and the “leftover” was still evolving, and the canon far from closed. Rendering shu 書 as “scriptures” (cf. Yegor Grebnev’s 2022 monograph Mediation of Legitimacy in Early China) underscores the parallels in canonization processes around the ancient world; not unlike the matter-of-fact title of shu, words such as biblia and scriptura also simply meant “scrolls” and “writing.”

Of the four volumes, these first two could prove most challenging to non-specialists, which is in no small part an inherent feature of this archaic and self-archaizing genre. Shaughnessy intends his careful translations for research purposes, opting to prioritize the representation of features in the original over a smooth English rendition (72). His critical essays and extensive annotations focus on philological questions, such as how the manuscript texts may emend the received versions or adjudicate the authenticity of the supposed guwen 古文 (“ancient script”) chapters of the Shangshu—likely patchworks of earlier materials produced during the Eastern Jin. Nevertheless, since this foundational genre is a treasure trove of early Chinese political philosophy, ideology, and rhetoric, the two volumes are well worth the reader’s effort. They moreover benefit from Shaughnessy’s existing publications on these texts as well as his expertise in bronze epigraphy—such as his indication of similarities between a manuscript text and inscriptions of a certain period.

Volume 3, translated by Zhou Boqun, assembles texts revolving around the Shang minister Yi Yin 伊尹 (sixteenth century BCE?). First attested in oracle bone inscriptions (thirteenth to eleventh centuries BCE), Yi Yin attracted an extensive and colorful body of lore during the Warring States period. Some of the texts in this volume employ the language of the shu genre, whereas others, as described above, depart dramatically from the received corpus. While Zhou’s translation has rendered the manuscript texts approachable, several of them are in fact beset with interpretative challenges, requiring the translator to navigate extensive paleographical debates. The introductory essays offer a lucid delineation of the evolving identity of Yi Yin across a millennium. I particularly appreciated Zhou’s discussion of the manuscripts’ formatting and calligraphic features, which could shed light on how the ancient textual producers of the Tsinghua manuscripts might have classified them.

Volume 6 turns to short narratives on events from the Spring and Autumn period, especially those concerning the states of Zheng, Qin, Jin, and Chu. Their plot and characters overlap with the Zuozhuan and Guoyu, but the texts offer few textual parallels. The translator, Krijgsman, brings a clearly defined point of view to this set of materials, situating them as significant sources for the study of narratology and comparative literature. The chapter on image-based language, for instance, engages extensively with scholarship on other ancient literary traditions. While existing studies tend to analyze these materials through the lens of transmitted literature—the Zuozhuan and Guoyu—Krijgsman’s attention to narratology foregrounds features unique to these compositions. For instance, he explores the differences in readers’ reception between the self-contained vignettes of the manuscripts and the continuous historical account of Zuozhuan, where anecdotes are emplotted through foreshadowing and flashbacks. The literary analysis informs Krijgsman’s translation decisions. As an example, having identified the interlocutors’ relationships and status as a driving force, he opts for literal renditions of appellations such as shu 叔 (uncle). His approach also allows the manuscripts to speak on their own terms. For example, while Lady Wu of Zheng is an ill-advised mother in Zuozhuan, Krijgsman presumes no influence from the received text on her far more ambiguous portrayal in *Zheng Wu Furen Gui Ruzi 鄭武夫人規孺子 (*Lady Wu of Zheng Admonished her Young Child; asterisks indicate titles given by modern editors).

I conclude with a few small suggestions: as part of the General Prefaces, an introduction to the basic principles of Warring States paleography would helpfully complement the extensive philological annotations. The books’ production could be further improved, worthwhile since they already reflect meticulous effort. The horizontal and left-to-right sequence of the character-images is a rearrangement of the vertical bamboo texts. This added labor decontextualizes the writing from the material object, obscuring various formatting and calligraphic information. Is a vertical reproduction, approximating the arrangement on the slips, at all possible? An easier problem is the mise-en-page (layout, leading, kerning, font choices) of the English texts; typesetters with expertise in Western-language publications would render it more professionally. Finally, with small tweaks and additional annotations, some of these translations could be more accessible to a wider audience. Could notes intended for undergraduate students be included in the full-text recapitulations?

These minor issues notwithstanding, these volumes should be recognized not only as rigorous translations, but also as “studies”— original works of scholarship in their own right. They participate in ongoing paleographical research and illuminate the manuscripts through the translators’ respective expertise. Each volume, as a compendium of the primary and secondary sources, provides a solid starting point for future research. As a combination of introductory writings and original scholarly output, these volumes would make excellent reading assignments in graduate seminars. In these various ways, the series will enable a wider community of scholars to engage with a major collection, and thus constitutes an important contribution to the study of early China.