Humans perceive and conceptualize who we are by making a consistent and coherent story of the past. Without making this story, existence is fragmented and dissolved into a series of physical, chemical, or biological states that we can only passively accept. Instead, we recall past moments, selecting and linking them to other ones in a logical manner, composing a reasonable story that explains our existence consistently and coherently. Only by choosing, connecting, and sequencing our experiences and signifying them with concepts, and thereby producing an understandable story, can we identify who we are and what we do.

Constructing a story of the past is similar to composing a narrative fiction whereby we make sense of our identity with pre-existing signifiers, drawing upon values in the culture in order to establish meaning. The moments of existence that are not remembered or not selected in the story-making remain external to the being as if they had never existed. In this regard, we are creatures of our own story. The story provides us with an explanation of our identity through time and legitimizes how we will exist in the future.

Likewise, to identify and explain who the people of a society are and how they should behave, society needs its own story. That is, a society must compose its own story about what it has experienced through time. This group remembrance is referred to as collective memory or social memory—the constructed ideas of particular past event(s) that individuals have communally experienced. The social memory goes through editing processes such as selecting, excluding, elaborating, emphasizing, deleting, and re-sequencing procedures in the pre-existing linguistic, conceptual, ethical, aesthetic orders of the culture. In this sense, society's story is essentially “fictional” in nature.

Unlike individual/personal memory, however, those who experienced the same past event are plural in the society. Due to this plurality, there is tension resulting from different story-making of the same event in the past. The attempt to compose a different story about the past is not entirely resolved, but it remains a possibility for an alternative story.

Diversity in collective memory necessarily causes, in the society, a competition among the plural memories for broader, deeper, and stronger acceptance and recognition of a particular memory by fellow society members. In the contest that is conditioned and affected in political and cultural power-relations, one specific memory and story wins out and becomes prevalent and dominant. It is then imposed and embodied in social regulations such as law and justice, and in cultural practices such as education and mass media. The social story is thus a doing, a performance to be done over and over.

In this regard, what the modern mind has termed as “history” is a society's own self-constructed story that is narrated, written, and re-written by its members out of numerous coexisting and competing memories of the past in a repetitive, reconstructive manner. Concerned more with signifying the identity of the society than with concrete facts, history is a dominant story of the memory that the community has come to approve as the narrativistic legitimation of its own identity through time.

Within this theoretical framework, this thesis studies how “history” emerged in so-called Early China, the period roughly from Warring States (ca. fifth to third century b.c.e.) to Western Han (206 b.c.e.–9 c.e.). It explores the cultural practice of sharing and transmitting various earlier collective memories of the past by representing them in the form of short narrative to establish an “authentic” and “official” memory, i.e., a “history,” by manipulating, editing, revising, or developing the earlier social memories and adopting a developed version of the memory and discourse into the works that had been canonized as the “true” representation of the past in the cultural tradition.

For this, the current study first pays attention to a genre of writing, which I term “Episode Text.” Often termed as “anecdotes” that assumes to have trivial and inferior nature in cultural significance, the Episode Text represents an earlier social memory of a past event and its narrative representation in the culture. Consisting of a short story in various lengths, about a past event of political or cultural figures and their speech, it is free-standing and self-contained as one independent textual unit in nature.

What makes the Episode Texts significant is that many stories in the Texts are comparable to those of transmitted classics of the past. Assuming that the Episode Text reveals earlier collective memory of the past and its literary representation, we can trace how the social memory of the certain past event has changed and developed. By comparing the parallels between the Episode Texts and received classics of “history,” we can see how earlier memories and stories have evolved or were modified when they were recognized and adopted as a part of the canonical texts in the later culture.

The Episode Text remained relatively unknown and received less attention until it was re-discovered and re-signified in modern archaeological excavation projects in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. However, the Episode Text seems to have been already popular in the socio-cultural reality around fourth century b.c.e., in which a robust cultural need arose for individual political entities to identify their connection to the past, particularly to their great earlier ancestors. The stories offered to explain and legitimize their current status by creating their own stories of the past after the breakdown of the former hegemonic Central State, Western Zhou, which had provided the conceptual, ethical, aesthetic orders to its subordinates with political and cultural power and imposed the Zhou's story to the subordinate individual entities. In this sense, Episode Texts were made and shared as a social effort for individuated small states to be released from Zhou's cultural hegemony after its breakdown, to cope with their new socio-political circumstances, to explain their origin, and to justify their existence. This was possible within the changing cultural environment where the one absolute cultural and political power no longer existed, and each entity pursued its own story of the past.

This study focuses on the stories in two canonical classics of “history” in Chinese tradition, Zuozhuan and Shangshu, and compares them to the newly found narratives in the Episode Texts that reflect earlier memories of the same events. This study shows that the creation and establishment of these two seminal texts was a long-term process in which earlier social memories were edited and re-written in various ways, including detailing, refocusing, merging, splitting, re-messaging, re-didacticization, deleting, and excluding.

Notably, the case of textual comparison between the received “Wuyu” in the Guoyu and a bamboo slip manuscript found at Cili, Hubei, convincingly suggests that long passages that comprise thousands of written characters in the received “historical” texts such as Guoyu, Zuozhuan, and Shangshu may have been formed by merging several separate Episode Texts into a single text coherently. Generally, how later people cognized, conceived of, and understood what had occurred in the early past has been shaped and framed with these key references.

Nonetheless, despite the strong and steady efforts to establish specific memories as a socio-cultural norm in the imperial setting of the Han, there remained intellectual attempts to diverge from the growingly dominant memories and reconstruct “history” out of different threads of social memory from earlier days in the culture. These disparate threads of memory were also represented in the form of short narrative and were widely shared in the society. They were often explicitly critical of the figures or concepts in the increasingly dominant stories. They pursued alternative values, thoughts, and ideas by employing different personalities and a more fictive and imaginative tone and style. The disparate threads of memory explain the plurality of collective memory and the tension for appropriating the past in the society. The received Zhuangzi text exemplifies the intellectual conflict and struggle for domination in remembering the past in Early China.

The cultural process of constructing, establishing, challenging, and reconstructing the normative discourse of the past through canonizing such works is understood as a part of the never-ending, repetitive process of a society's own locating, identifying, and legitimating of itself through time. Thus, this thesis concludes that the process was the journey of the early communities to construct and reconstruct themselves as the ideal, the Center State of the cosmos, the state that now is rendered as China. In this course of consolidating discrete memories and producing the dominant ways of remembering and representing the past through canonical texts, the early societies were dreaming of themselves becoming that Center State—namely, China.

This dissertation explores the relationship between empire-building and economic change during the formative process of the Qin Empire. It employs transmitted and excavated textual materials as well as archaeological evidence to reconstruct institutions and practices of surplus extraction and economic management and their evolution during the period of Qin's expansion culminating in the emergence of the first centralized bureaucratic empire in continental East Asia. I argue that the commercial expansion and the formation of markets for land, labor, and commodities during China's early imperial period (221 b.c.e.–220 c.e.) can only be understood by considering their origins in the distributive command economy of the late Warring States and imperial Qin. The study focuses on the southern frontier zone of the empire, which is exceptionally well documented in the official and private documents excavated from the Qin and Han sites along the Middle Yangzi and its tributaries.

Chapter One “Introduction” outlines historiographical approaches to the study of the relationship between empire-building and economic change, particularly the impact of imperial conquest and extraction on the commercial growth. It addresses the importance of frontiers as the sites of economic innovation and change in the ancient empires. I discuss the importance of the recent archaeological discovery of legal and administrative manuscripts from the Warring States (453–221 b.c.e.), Qin (221–206 b.c.e.), and Han (202 b.c.e.–220 c.e.) eras for the study of the administrative and economic organization in the early empires. The Introduction also outlines the new perspectives on the Qin empire-building and economic change made possible by the excavated documentary evidence.

Chapter Two, “Strategies of Conquest and Resource Extraction in the State and Empire of Qin, Mid-Fourth to Late Third Century BCE,” explores the geographical and logistical rationales for the campaigns that brought the Qin armies to the Middle Yangzi and paved the way for further advance to the south of the river. I argue that the Qin developed its fiscal institutions as solutions to the problems of military supply and control over the conquered territories. This system of surplus extraction proved efficient in financing warfare and ensuring central government's control over its local agents. However, it faced severe challenges as its operational costs soared in process of territorial expansion, while the redistributive effects of the fiscal system pitted the principal against the agents. The successes and failures of the Qin model of surplus extraction, and its revision during the subsequent Western Han period, profoundly influenced the approaches to economic and territorial management throughout China's imperial history.

Chapter Three, “Formation of the Imperial Frontier: From Interaction Zone to Centralized Administration,” focuses on the background and the immediate aftermath of the Qin conquest of lands to the south of Middle Yangzi, roughly coinciding with the modern province of Hunan and the southern part of Hubei Province. The chapter examines the longue durée of economic and political integration along the Middle Yangzi from the Late Neolithic period (third millennium b.c.e.) to the dawn of the imperial era. This analysis sheds new light on the background of Qin imperial expansion in this region and the strategies of the “reconstruction of the South” adopted by the Qin emperors and the succeeding Han Empire. I conclude the chapter with detailed analysis of administrative organization and economic management in the Qin county of Qianling in the present-day Western Hunan, whose archive was partly recovered during the archaeological excavation of the remains of the Qin town at Liye.

Chapter Four, “Between Command and Market: The Economy of Convict Labor,” studies the enormous system of unfree labor that incorporated considerable portion of the Qin Empire's population and was the key instrument of the Qin command economy. The chapter offers a comparative perspective on the historical regimes of forced labor, which allows identification of economic rationales for such systems and organizational challenges they faced. It proceeds with an analysis of the legal foundations of penal labor in the Qin and characteristics of the main groups of forced laborers before exploring the organization of unfree labor economy at the Qianling County where detailed data is available concerning the size of convict population, their economic roles, and the management of their labor. The chapter then discusses changes in the Qin system of unfree labor, its decline after the fall of the Qin Empire, and its impact on the formation of markets for labor in early imperial China.

Chapter Five, “Conquering Distance: Transferring Goods and People in the Qin Empire,” discusses the long-distance transfers of resources, goods, and people. As many other imperial states, the Qin sought to control physical mobility of its subjects and resources by directing them into desirable channels and restricting unwanted moves. Excavated texts shed light on the previously unknown aspects of the integration of economic and humanitarian space within the empire. Although the imperial connectivity remained fragile and suffered setbacks when the physical and intellectual infrastructures of communication shrank or collapsed with the decline and fall of centralized power, the shared sphere of geographic mobility was essential for the formation of the imperial economy, society, and culture. It tended to regenerate itself after the periods of contraction or disruption and should therefore be considered an important factor in the resilience of centripetal trends in China's political history.

Chapter Six, “The State and the Private Economy,” utilizes the Qianling archive materials to study the relationship between the state and private economies. Although the ideologists of state-strengthening reforms in mid-fourth century b.c.e. Qin cherished the idea that the latter should be completely subsumed under the governmental dirigisme, by the times of the Qin Empire, officials recognized the autonomy of private markets and their own inability to substitute for the later with distributive schemes. In its engagement with private economic actors, the government was guided by considerations of taxation and resource procurement; cost-reduction in the state economy; and maintenance of public order through delineation of rights and obligations. Transformation of the state economy, its increasing exposure to private markets, and the expansion of the latter, often caused by the state demand for materials and manpower, were powerfully facilitated by the monetization of the frontier region attested in the textual and archaeological evidence.

Chapter Seven, “Conclusion,” summarizes the mutually constitutive relationships between the empire-building and the economic change in the Qin Empire; traces the development of economic and institutional changes, which become observable during the Qin imperial period, in the subsequent Han era; and formulates some general patterns of state-economy relationship that may be of use in the comparative study of imperial economic systems.

The unearthing of manuscript texts, especially in the last fifty years, has revolutionized the study of early Chinese civilization. Manuscripts, which bear previously unknown texts and unknown forms of known texts, have greatly destabilized our view of the textual canons that have defined the landscape of genre for two millennia. One preliminary way of understanding the precursors of canonical texts is as freely circulating zhang 章 (pericopes; chapters) that became disposed in compendia at random. Although this may partially account for forces at work in text formation, pericopes can also become appended with paratextual markers that guide their interpretation, categorization, and compilation. This dissertation seeks to shed light on these proto-commentarial features, and reconsider how texts and genres accreted and decayed in Chinese manuscript culture. To this end, I examine an array that includes known transmitted texts as well as manuscript texts of previously unknown structure and form. Controversies surround the genre identity of the manuscript texts, while the transmitted texts have been compiled separately in compendia associated with distinct genres. The dissertation's series of experiments maintains controls of narrative and form: first, all the texts (as contextualized by commentary and paratext) function as sources for the legend of Rui Liangfu 芮良夫, a ninth-century-b.c.e. noble who spoke out against the government of his contemporary King Li of Zhou 周厲王 (r. 853–842 b.c.e.); second, all the texts, while differing in prosody and form, are written in tetrasyllabic verse. Following a general introduction to the dissertation's problems and methods in Chapter One, Chapter Two emerges from a philological study and translation of the *Rui Liangfu bi, a Warring States bamboo manuscript in the Tsinghua University corpus. Proceeding from disagreements about whether the text is a shu document or shi poem, I argue that the text's content and form violates conventions of these genres, at least as these genres are known in transmission. Instead, I identify the texts as “verse albums” on the basis of text-paratext structures in several other manuscripts and one transmitted text. Verse albums function as micro-collections of thematically related literature and come marked with interpretive paratext whose function is similar to prefaces and synopses found in transmitted canons. Chapter Three examines the roots of a historicizing hermeneutic in the Shijing (Confucian Canon of Poetry), in part through the poem Sang rou (Mulberry Shoots) attributed to Rui Liangfu. Here, as with verse albums, I chart the traces of intentionality and proto-commentarial markers that seek to make poems into texts with fixed historical meanings, thus functioning like the narrative paratext found in verse albums of Chapter Two and the commentarial layers of later canons. Examining the conventions of suites of poems, and the tendency of historical poems to form thematically organized suites, I propose a model by which a historicizing hermeneutic might have spread chronologically and laterally, becoming pervasive in the Mao Shi. The fourth chapter is based on a philological reconstruction and translation of the Yi Zhou shu's “Rui Liangfu” chapter. The critical translation employs received editions and a version of the chapter preserved only in Japanese manuscripts of the Qunshu zhiyao, a Tang-era encyclopedic compendium lost in China for centuries. In this study, I demonstrate that both versions of the text derive from similar editions; significant lacunae and errors in the two texts show that much of the damage arose in imperial times. Much of this is due to the delegitimization of the Yi Zhou shu, which has long been viewed as the leftovers that remained when Confucius redacted the Shang shu (Revered Documents) canon. While Chapters Two and Three show how paratextual markers might aid a text's organization and preservation in a collection, Chapter Four shows how the removal of an editor-figure can induce a text's decay. The fifth and final chapter examines intertextual relations among the sources studied in Chapters Two through Four. The texts share a great familiarity with a common legend of Rui Liangfu, yet they share almost no word-for-word text with one another. I propose that at least one of the texts results from historical confabulation—a broad and continuous effort to fill historical lacunae that were revealed by a new, systematizing discourse on the cultural forms (and genres) appropriate to remonstrance. I consider also the possibility that the reconstruction or alleged “forgery” of shu documents literature in early and medieval China stems from a similar historiographic impulse.

This dissertation tackles the prevalent idea of inherited responsibility in ancient Greece and early China via a comparative lens, aiming to reveal the affinities and differences between these two cultures on this specific subject. It surveys the major texts and discourses of both cultures with a wide range of genres, from epics, tragedies, historiography, and law to religious texts. On the Greek side, I argue that inherited responsibility was first visible in the Homeric epics as a collective consciousness arising from to the structure of kinship-based communities such as the Trojans and more apparently the Greeks. It was transformed into Solon's political theology and rationalized by Ionian natural sciences, and, later, Solon's doctrines of inherited responsibility became the foundation of Aeschylean tragedies, specifically in the Oresteia. On the Chinese side, it could be noted that what we now call inherited responsibility could be first attested in the Shangshu in the form of collective punishment, not as a sub-product of Buddhism introduced in the third century. Quite different from its lack of execution in Athens in the fifth and fourth centuries, inherited responsibility played a significant role in the political discourses of fajia, most notably in the Guanzi and the Shangjunshu, which emphasized the function of inherited responsibility as a means of social surveillance and policing mechanism. I also discuss in depth the idea of chengfu (承負, transmission and reception of ancestral fault) in the earliest Taoist classic, Taiping Jing, in which the idea of inherited responsibility was absorbed into a new mode of cosmology and was given a new meaning as the justification of social revolution anticipatory of the Yellow Turban Rebellion. As we can conclude from this research, inherited responsibility, constituting the basic feature of kinship-based societies, is apt to be incorporated into the religion-law-politics trinity.

This dissertation interrogates early Chinese thinkers’ engagement with music in political, philosophical, and military treatises of the Warring States (戰國 453–221 b.c.e.) and Western Han (西漢 206 b.c.e.-9 AD) periods. In a few words, it can be defined as ‘a socio-political analysis of musical references in Warring States and Han China.’

The study traces and analyzes musico-political links in texts dating to the abovementioned periods. In doing so, it demonstrates how textual references to music may be used as rhetorical tools, attesting to ideological conflicts raging within early Chinese society. The first chapter argues for a new understanding pertaining to perceptions of sound in early China. By re-examining language and contents of passages relating to sound from some of the most widely read musical discussions of the period (in particular Xunzi's 荀子 ‘Discourse on Music’ 樂論, ca. 340–ca. 245 b.c.e.), the author substantiates that sounds were, in fact, perceived by early Chinese thinkers not only as joyful and educating—as previously emphasized by critics—but also emotionally compelling and, moreover, potentially dangerous. In this quality of sound lies the key to understanding the power of music in early Chinese texts, which is examined in detail throughout the three remaining chapters of the work. Chapter Two discusses the terms and terminology used by early Chinese critics in deeming music “good” or “bad.” It argues that music critics tended to ground their musical arguments in ethical or political rather than aesthetical reasonings, and used music criticism to establish and maintain the sense of local or social identities. Chapter Three examines the role music and sound played in the military, and asserts that within the context of warfare, drums were perceived as sonic communication devices rather than musical instruments per se. Finally, Chapter Four explores conceptualizations of silence and soundlessness, claiming that silence was perceived both positively—as the ancestor of sound, and negatively—as an indicator of ignorance.

The thesis as a whole aims to explore the boundaries of the musical in early China and reveal how both the musical and the boundaries between the musical and the non-musical served intellectuals rhetorically and ideologically. Ultimately, it suggests, it is through the lens of music (albeit music that does not itself survive to us in sound) that one can unveil multiple aspects of early Chinese social, political, and intellectual life that have not, up to this point, been examined in scholarly literature.

This dissertation presents a new approach to the whole corpus of funerary lists from early Chinese shaft tombs (dating from the late fifth century b.c.e. to the first century c.e.). While existing research almost exclusively interprets them as “tomb inventory lists,” I provide an alternative interpretation. Combining codicological, philological, and archaeological data with archaeological and ethno-sociological theories, I argue that the lists were created as tools for short-term administration of material components (sometimes also animals and personal resources) in certain actions before the entombment.

Chapter One introduces the Chinese funerary lists discovered to date and offers an overview of the scholarship on the creation and usage of the lists from the early shaft tombs. Chapter Two guides the reader through the archaeological theory of “field of action,” which I adapt slightly for my analysis of the creation and usage of the early lists. The introduction of this theory is followed by the establishment of a hypothetical model of the early Chinese funerary cycle based on transmitted texts. Furthermore, a combination of this theory with the classic ethnological concept of rites of passage will clarify the motivation of the creation of those lists. Chapter Three presents a detailed case study of the lists from tomb no. 1 at Leigudun, the tomb of the renowned Marquis Yi of Zeng (died ca. 433 b.c.e.). Chapter Four introduces the perspectives of the analytical device “field of action” for approaching the remaining lists. In addition, the two latter chapters indicate that the lists considerably complement the hypothetical model of the funerary cycle.

Finally, as a conclusion, the lists were no “tomb inventory lists.” Instead, they were created and used in short-term administration of certain fields of action. None of them describes the final organizational pattern of the tomb goods and most of them do not even describe the final organizational pattern of the resources in the individual pre-entombment actions. Their creation and usage were motivated by the wishes to smoothly transform the status of the deceased and the bereaved through various rites de passage. Therefore, my discoveries not only contribute to the rational understanding of the funerary practices involving those lists, but also provide the basis for a fundamental and necessary reorientation in the philological and archaeological research of those lists.

This dissertation is a study of the different kinds of writing excavated in the 1970s from the three Western Han dynasty (202 b.c.e.-9 c.e.) tombs at Mawangdui 馬王堆, including manuscripts on silk, wood, and bamboo, and inscriptions in different media. I examine the ways these texts were produced, performed, used, viewed, and buried in order to determine the different roles writing played in the lives and afterlives of three members of one noble family, and those connected to them, in the second century b.c.e. In the process, I show that in addition to recording or communicating important knowledge or information, written texts were also incorporated into a diverse array of artifacts and integrated into a wide variety of cultural practices, and that writing in early Western Han thus ought to be understood as part of early Chinese material and visual culture.

The Introduction provides an overview of the Mawangdui tombs and their contents, including the manuscripts and texts that were found there, as well as recent scholarship on writing, literacy, and material culture. Chapter One is concerned with the different ways the Mawangdui manuscripts and inscriptions were produced. Chapter Two explores how some of the manuscripts were used in ritual performance and display. Chapter Three describes the use of written texts as amulets and talismans. Chapter Four details the visual effects of certain kinds of manuscripts. And Chapter Five speculates about the ways the manuscripts were used and stored above ground, and why they were deposited in the tomb. Finally, my Conclusion summarizes my findings, and the Appendix provides a table containing information about the material and codicological features of the Mawangdui manuscripts and related artifacts.

It is well known that Chinese philosophers in the Warring States period (475–221 b.c.e.) were enamored with metaphors and analogies in their philosophical discussion. Imageries of plants, tools, and bodily skills abounded in debates over morality, politics, language, and human nature. While previous scholarship on ancient metaphors tends to focus on organic and spiritual ones such as plant and water, I argue that the Warring States period witnessed the emergence of a group of mechanical metaphors, and the metaphorical interest in machines is as ancient as it is cross-cultural. These metaphors started with the Mohist mechanics and the advent of the crossbow around the sixth to the fifth century b.c.e., gradually making their way into the standard vocabulary of morality and politics. They were all based on the lever (quan 權), a simple device widely used in technologies of weighing and weight-lifting. Lever machines, such as the balance, the well sweep, the crossbow trigger, and the trebuchet, provided metaphorical models for conceptualizing balance and imbalance in various kinds of human relationships. Whereas the function of weighing became a metaphor for decision-making in Confucian ethics, the function of weight-lifting became a metaphor for strategic or positional advantage in military and political craft. The two functions correspond to two opposite kinds of rationality—value rationality that seeks to find moral balance in a dilemma and instrumental rationality that seeks to create strategic imbalance in power dynamics (that is, how the few could defeat or control the many). Due to the double function of the lever itself, the classical quan acquired the paradoxical meaning of “weighing” (as in quanheng 權衡) and “leverage” (as in quanshi 權勢), both of which survived well into modern Chinese but lost the mechanical association.

This dissertation is divided into five chapters. Chapter One defines an analytic framework by incorporating the conceptual metaphor theory in cognitive linguistics (with emphasis on the idea of “embodied schema”) and Hans Blumenberg's historical metaphorology. Chapter Two defines the ancient Chinese concept of “machine” and compares it with the Greek mechane in the Aristotelian corpus. Chapter Three describes the embodied schema of the lever's mechanical functions based on the Mohist Canon with philological analysis of its linguistic expressions. Chapter Four analyzes the weighing metaphor in the moral philosophy of Mengzi and Xunzi. Lastly, Chapter Five examines the leverage metaphor in the military philosophy of Sunzi and the political philosophy of Shen Dao.