You know you are reading an excellent academic book when you find yourself taking extensive notes. Rumor in the Early Chinese Empires, by Lu Zongli 呂宗力, is an impressively researched study of the various species of unverified tales that circulated in Qin and especially Han society. The book was originally published in Chinese in 2011; this translation, by Wee Kek Koon 黃克群, is preceded by a helpful introduction by Mark Edward Lewis (pp. 1–7) that walks the reader through the argument that follows.
Lu identifies six types of rumors, which he illustrates with copious examples: “disseminated talk” (liuyan 流言, pp. 8–25), “unverifiable talk” (eyan 訛言, pp. 25–41), “portentous talk” (yāoyan 妖言, pp. 46–106), “popular songs and rhymes” (yáoyan 謠言 or geyao 歌謠, pp. 107–68), “chen prophecies” (chenyan 讖言 or chenyao 讖謠, pp. 169–244),Footnote 1 and “myths and legends” (shenhua 神話, pp. 245–75). Lu emphasizes that these categories naturally overlapped. A myth about a pretender's ancestry could entail a prophecy about his rise to the throne (e.g., the case of Liu Xiu 劉秀, the future Emperor Guangwu of Han 漢光武帝 [r. 25–57 CE], pp. 246–47), and the difference between “disseminated talk” and “unverifiable talk” seems to be that the former took hold at court, the latter among the populace (p. 26). (My sense is that the latter term is also more pejorative.) In an environment in which ministers could be executed for a single unwelcome suggestion, it is understandable that liuyan was often regarded as a safer avenue for criticism.
The state's interest in popular songs rested on the venerable notion (sometimes called shi yan zhi 詩言志, “poetry speaks the will”) that people spontaneously express their emotions in song and dance, and thus their musical utterances should be collected and analyzed in order to gauge their temperament. Lu is well aware that, in reality, the populace did not speak with one voice (p. 141). Hence, any attempt to promote a certain poem as representative of the people's feelings was, at least to some extent, manipulative.
Like “fake news” today, all six of Lu's categories were subject to cynical deployment. The government was not above decrying inconvenient opinions as “reckless portentous talk” and the like, even as it actively spread rumors of its own. Thus, when Lu writes that the state sought to clamp down on rumors because they “misled the masses” (p. 292), my reaction—informed by Lu's convincing examples—was rather that the state wished to reserve the power to spread rumors for itself. Misleading the masses was one of its most effective techniques.
With literally hundreds of quotations from primary sources, the book could not have been easy to translate, and Wee is to be commended for rendering it accurately. In other respects, however, the production by Cambridge University Press leaves a lot to be desired. It starts with the back-cover blurb: whoever was responsible for it appears to be under the misapprehension that Zongli is the author's surname. More consequentially, the index is inadequate for a book that deserves to be read with such care, and the glossary of Chinese graphs is poorly executed, because completely unrelated words are jumbled together if they happen to be Romanized identically (e.g., yao 妖， 謠， 堯， 姚, p. 344—with no tone markers and no explanations). With today's typesetting software, it would have been easy to insert Chinese graphs directly in the text, where they would have been more useful. Similarly, specialists will be annoyed by the practice of citing all Chinese titles in English translations—without providing the original Chinese, even in Romanization—because these can be difficult to locate in the bibliography.
In sum, this is the most rewarding book on early Chinese history that I have read in some time. It presupposes considerable familiarity with the sources, but scholarly readers will come away greatly enriched.
