The Shanghai Museum manuscript carrying the title Zhuangwang ji Cheng 莊王既成 (~300 bce) presents the modern reader with a puzzle. It bears two clearly differentiated anecdotes, the first a dialogue between King Zhuang of Chu (楚莊王 r. 613–591) and the Deputy of Shen (沈尹), the second relating an encounter between the Duke of Chen (陳公) and King Ling of Chu (楚靈王 r. 540–529).Footnote 1 Each anecdote opens with a relatively standard framing formula and closes with a punctuation mark and blank space.Footnote 2 Based on both content and formal criteria, it is therefore clear that each anecdote could stand on its own, and this has indeed been the usual approach to this and related manuscripts in prior scholarship.Footnote 3 Nonetheless, the manuscript has only one title, and since other manuscripts use similar physical characteristics to divide a single text into multiple sections, the independence of its textual units seems less than clear-cut. While it is unclear whether differences in the conception of the material as separate units versus an integrated whole had particular significance to a Warring States audience,Footnote 4 to approach the Zhuangwang ji Cheng as a multi-text manuscript versus a single text composed of different sections reflects a methodological problem in the study of early texts. Simply put, the question at stake is whether to read the two anecdotes as separate from each other by default, or whether their proximity and other physical connections should be assumed to reflect the production of an additional, combined layer of meaning in the minds of those who composed, produced, or read the manuscript in its original context.
In this article we approach this problem from the angle of reception: we read the anecdotes both as individual texts and in conjunction with each other, to explore the different layers of meaning such readings enable. The texts’ use of cryptic language and ambiguous treatment of well-known intertextual tropes, we find, provides for a powerful “what if?” reading experience, inviting the reader to decode the deeper significance of the individual anecdotes. Structuring the anticipation generated by these motifs within a clever chronological frame, the anecdotes as composite text guide the reader between a mode of engagement with the past based on the immediate experiences of its denizens, and one glimpsed through the judgemental lens of hindsight.Footnote 5 Yet a combined reading of the texts, we argue, also calls into question the value of foreknowledge and, by extension, prophecy in determining how to act; and since foreknowledge as a device assumes a knowledge of history, the shared framing therefore paradoxically at once introduces and invites the reader critically to appraise the explanatory value of historiography viewed from the longue durée. This multivalent perspective on history works because, not in spite, of the composite nature of the manuscript, in which discrete, self-contained narrative units combine to create a narrative superstructure with its own causal logic. The case study of this manuscript thus epitomizes how the manuscript culture of Warring States China, in which recombination and modularity were common, shaped text producers’ and recipients’ approaches to the basic historiographical problem of how narrative relates to the experience of the past.
The structure of the manuscript: unit, set, or unrelated parts?
The manuscript comprises nine slips and carries the title Zhuangwang ji Cheng on the middle of the back of slip 1, written, according to Li Songru, in a different hand or a specific title style not matched elsewhere in the corpus.Footnote 6 The whole length of the slips bears writing,Footnote 7 and on the fourth slip, a hook-shaped ink mark followed by a blank space about equal in height to one graph divides the manuscript into two sections. The text preceding this point relates an anecdote beginning with the phrase Zhuangwang ji cheng (“Once King Zhuang had completed…”), and after the break comes the anecdote referred to as “Chengong chen Lingwang” (“The Duke of Chen served as minister to King Ling”) based on its content. Both texts are complete, and a hook mark closes the second text as well. The remaining space on the final slip after the hook mark is left blank. As noticed by Gao Youren, the recto side of slip 9, just above the top binding string notch, features an imprint left by the portion of the binding string that was knotted when the slips were tied together in a bundle. It is therefore unlikely that the texts were bound together with other materials into a single manuscript.Footnote 8
The material under discussion here has been linked, on the basis of physical similarity and content, with other materials relating stories on Chu kings.Footnote 9 In volume 4 of the Shanghai manuscripts, two texts, entitled *Zhaowang Hui Shi – Zhaowang yu Gong zhi Zhui 昭王毀室·昭王與龔之𦞠? (“King Zhao demolishes the hall – King Zhao and Gong zhi Zhui”) by the editors, were written by one hand on the same manuscript carrier.Footnote 10 Likewise, reorganization of the slips based on handwriting and physical characteristics has shown that two stories in volume 6, *Pingwang Wen Zhengshou 平王問鄭夀 and Pingwang yu Wangzi Mu 平王與王子木, share a single manuscript roll.Footnote 11 This manuscript was written by two different scribes, one of whom also produced Zhuangwang ji Cheng.Footnote 12 All these materials relate stories of former Chu kings, opening up the possibility that they were conceived of as a set, and some suggest that they might have been used to instruct Chu princes.Footnote 13
We have here, then, a situation where multiple scribes copied texts concerning Chu kings into sets of manuscripts, frequently writing two short texts on the same carrier. The similarities in both content and production characteristics (slip lengths, endings, notches, and bindings) across sets,Footnote 14 in addition to closeness in script styles across different hands, suggest that most of these materials were produced at roughly the same time and possibly in the same workshop. As early as 2004, Li Ling already arranged this mass of historical manuscripts into two large groups, later shown to have close relations.Footnote 15 Despite the fact that these materials lack any archaeological context, then, there are solid reasons to think that early readers might have associated them with one another. Reading them together may thus reveal potential layers of meaning, genre affiliation, and common storytelling characteristics that would not be evident from reading the individual pieces in isolation.
Warring States narrative and philosophical manuscripts include several examples of similar clusters of texts related to each other in terms of both content and physical form, and the relationship between these forms of similarity has spurred some prior discussion. Some modern readers have, for example, sought topical and philosophical coherence among the *Chengzhi Wenzhi 成之聞之, *Zun De Yi 尊德義, *Xing zi Ming Chu 性自命出 and *Liu De 六德 from Guodian, triggered in part by the physical similarity of the manuscripts and in part by the misunderstanding that these manuscripts belonged to a tutor of the Chu crown prince.Footnote 16 Likewise, Li Ling has suggested that the Shanghai Museum *Lubang Da Han 魯邦大旱, Zigao 子羔, and the *Kongzi Shilun 孔子詩論 possibly form one manuscript, albeit without suggesting relations on the textual level.Footnote 17
These discussions share a focus on the physical features of manuscripts as determining affiliation between texts, as well as an assumption that texts were brought together (by a scribe, author, or compiler) on purpose in order to present some kind of intellectual programme or set of texts for a particular school of thought. Richter has rightfully questioned this approach and its underlying assumptions,Footnote 18 and it seems clear that any perception of possible affiliation among early materials would ultimately reside in the reader, rather than deriving simply from their sharing of a common carrier and, by implication, a common compiler, author, or scribe. Nevertheless, when reconstructing manuscripts that lack archaeological context, modern scholars have to rely on exactly such combinations of material and textual characteristics when proposing divisions of the text into individual units.Footnote 19 How, then, may we establish textual identity within or across a manuscript such as Zhuangwang ji Cheng based on these limited criteria? Two common approaches are viewing the material as either a composite text or a multi-text manuscript.
As Boltz and others have shown, much of early Chinese text formation is characterized by combining existing textual material into new compositions.Footnote 20 Wise sayings, lines of poetry, and anecdotes were part and parcel of the cultural memory of the Warring States; this body of material was adapted, juxtaposed, and re-arranged to form new texts. Similarly, arranging multiple anecdotes into compositions that gained in meaning across and beyond the individual units is a mode of composition increasingly common from the late Warring States period onwards. Manuscripts such as the Shanghai Museum Rongcheng shi 容成氏 and *Juzhi Wang Tianxia 舉治王天下, or the Qinghua University *Xinian 繫年, among others, combine historical narratives on former rulers and content dealing with different periods into a single text.Footnote 21 The latter two in particular are divided into different sections distinguished by textual structure, punctuation, and spacing on the bamboo.
What would make these anecdote collections unified wholes composed, for lack of a better word, out of chapters, as opposed to a manuscript such as Zhuangwang ji Cheng? For one thing, both the *Xinian and *Juzhi Wang Tianxia texts are significantly longer and thus offer a broader sample set, wherein patterns of similarity and difference across the sub-units may be perceived. *Xinian also provides textual and material clues supporting its arrangement into a single text – for example, its use of numbers on the back of its slips, which facilitates a chronological arrangement of the individual sections.Footnote 22 *Juzhi Wang Tianxia, on the other hand, is formatted more like the Zhuangwang ji Cheng in that its sections are written one after another, with section dividers yet without starting each section on a new slip.Footnote 23 While it might well represent a more ad hoc collection of short anecdotes on ancient rulers, the repetition of formulaic opening sentences and a common dialogue form repeated across three of its sections support reading it as a single, coherent composition. By comparison, the short Zhuangwang ji Cheng, at first glance, provides little basis for establishing either an overarching chronology or a pattern of structural repetition.Footnote 24
A multi-text manuscript, on the other hand, is a manuscript that bears multiple texts on a single carrier. Historically speaking, multi-text manuscripts have taken a wide variety of forms wherein texts of multiple origins are copied out together on a single manuscript, often but certainly not always with a similar topical focus. A good example of this from early China are the rishu 日書 manuscripts, on which various independently titled texts dealing with the selection of auspicious days for certain activities were brought together, often arranged in registers, with yinyang theory, calendars, and diagrams.Footnote 25 The units from which rishu are composed occur in similar configurations across a range of manuscripts, yet in their specific articulations, they betray local or individual concerns.Footnote 26 For historical narrative texts, Xiao Yunxiao has argued that three texts concerning the character Yi Yin 伊尹 found in the Qinghua manuscripts belong to one physical manuscript, and while the texts are vastly different in style and clearly originated from various sources, they show remarkable similarity to a composite narrative in a Lüshi Chunqiu 呂氏春秋 chapter.Footnote 27 This last example shows how the act of bringing together different texts in a multi-text manuscript could play a formative role in textual production and transmission, leading, at least in some cases, to the formation of a composite text perceived as a single textual unit.Footnote 28
In this discussion, then, we seek to explore the full range of readings made possible by the particular form of the relatively short Zhuangwang ji Cheng manuscript. We begin from the standpoint that, from the perspective of reception, the fact that two anecdotes appeared together on the same manuscript carrier provided a physical basis for reading the two together, while the punctuation and white space between them allowed their simultaneous recognition as separate textual units. A recipient could thus choose to read the anecdotes both separately, as individual texts, and together, as a set of representative narratives on early Chu kings. Our questions then become: what different readings does this physical conjunction of distinct but related materials enable? And what different layers of meaning do these readings generate, and how do they relate to each other?
We read the anecdotes first individually and then together, taking into account that the narratives were part of a widely shared body of cultural memory that provided a wealth of intertextual references and background knowledge relevant to the stories. When reading the anecdotes individually, these intertextual associations help contextualize characters and events and provide a means to understand the more oblique references. When reading them together, these associations define a frame within which one may analyse claims made across the materials. For example, how are time and foreknowledge construed in these narratives? Or if we understand collections such as the Zuozhuan 左傳 and the Guoyu 國語, among others, as repositories of the cultural memory of the Chunqiu period available during the Warring States, then what happens when the stories under discussion relate encounters and events and plot developments absent from those collections? The answers that this manuscript provides, the discussion shows, depend on the interaction between the levels of meaning created by reading the texts singly, together, and as a part of the composite that was Warring States historical knowledge in general.
“Zhuangwang ji cheng”
The anecdote “Zhuangwang ji cheng” is in dialogue form and introduces the reader to King Zhuang of Chu at the height of his power. King Zhuang came to be remembered as a valiant and wise if power-hungry ruler who, after a brief period of debauchery at the beginning of his reign, led Chu to major victories over states such as Jin, Chen, Song, and Zheng. In the generations following him, a series of successions contested among the sons of King Gong (r. 590–560 bce), son of King Zhuang, plunged the state into an internecine power struggle.Footnote 29 Eventually, the forces of the southeastern state of Wu briefly took the Chu capital, and King Zhao (r. 515–489 bce), great-grandson of King Zhuang, was briefly driven out.Footnote 30 The reign of King Zhuang thus represented a peak of the consolidation of power from which the Chu royal house rapidly descended, before Chu again emerged as a dominating force during the Warring States period.Footnote 31 The “Zhuangwang ji cheng” anecdote exemplifies this framing:
【1V】莊王既成
【1R】莊王既成無射，Footnote 32 以問沈尹子莖曰：“吾既果成無射以供春秋之嘗，以【2】待Footnote 33 四鄰之賓Footnote 34， [吾]後之人，幾何保之？” 沈尹固辭，王固問之，沈尹子莖答【3】曰：“四與五之間乎？” 王曰：“如四與五之間，載之傳Footnote 35 車以上乎？” 繄Footnote 36 四航Footnote 37 以【4A】逾乎？” 沈尹子莖曰：“四航以逾。”┗
When King Zhuang [of Chu] had completed [the bell(s) called] “Tireless” (wuyi), he asked Zijing, the Deputy of Shen, about it: “I have managed to complete the ‘Tireless’ for use in providing the chang-offerings in the spring and autumn and hosting the guests of the neighbouring states.Footnote 38 How many of those who come after me will protect it/them?”
The Deputy of Shen firmly declined [to answer], and the King firmly asked again. Zijing, the Deputy of Shen, replied: “Between four and five?”Footnote 39
“If [it will be] between four and five”, said the King, “[will they] load [it/them] on a single cart and go up, or [will they] head downstream on four boats?”
“Head downstream on four boats”, said Zijing, Deputy of Shen.
The first line sets the scene with reference to the king's casting of a bell called wuyi (or a metonymical set). Here, this is probably meant to evoke the casting of a set of bells by King Jing of Zhou (r. 544–520) – an historically later event, but likely known to a Warring States readership – which came to symbolize his waste of resources and inability to find balance in government.Footnote 40 King Zhuang's appetite for power is elsewhere symbolized by bronze as well, in the famous scene where he inquires after the weight of the ding-cauldrons of the Zhou royal house.Footnote 41 This reference to the wuyi thus activates an intertextual web of associations that both thicken the idea of Duke Zhuang's hegemony and hint at the problems to come after his reign.
This reading of the bell as signifier of the hegemony of the Chu royal house sets the discursive terms of the narrative. After noting that he cast the bell to be used in the seasonal offerings and in the interactions of his realm with its neighbours – in other words, to support his reign both temporally and spatially – King Zhuang asks the Deputy of Shen how many successors of his will preserve it, i.e. maintain his current power. Showing the usual reluctance to answer a question the audience knows to have negative implications, the Deputy is finally pressured into cryptically answering “between four and five?”Footnote 42 Fully aware that the Deputy is dodging the real question, the King presses on and asks whether the future of his house should be likened to loading the heavy bell on a cart and pushing it upwards, or to going downriver on four boats. The Deputy of Shen suggests the latter.
Here the ambiguity of the metaphor comes into play. Pushing a heavy cart uphill, as noted by Zhou Fengwu, is a common metaphor for describing hardship,Footnote 43 and the alternative provided would seem to represent “smooth sailing”, so to speak. Yet since as readers we know that the subsequent history of the Chu royal house was anything but smooth, is this indeed King Zhuang's understanding of the metaphor? Alternatively, the Deputy of Shen's answer could be read in the reverse. While arduous, the image of the cart suggests the house of Chu working together on a single goal, i.e. getting the one bell onto a single cart and slowly pushing it upwards. The four boats then, should perhaps be considered not as a flotilla tied together and working in tandem to carry the bell, but rather as symbolizing the division of the reign along a quick succession of four to five rulers while the reign is steadily “going south”. More concretely, the metaphor refers to the eventual sacking of Ying during the reign of King Zhao. As Chen Wei and Kunihiro Yuasa have pointed out, Chu was threatened both by Jin (north, or “up”) and Wu (downriver of Chu), before the Wu armies sacked the capital and destroyed Chu's bells, taking the glory they represent downriver.Footnote 44 As such, the text might be taken to refer more directly to future events. Here, the intertextual significance of the bronze bell comes full circle. The very symbol of Duke Zhuang's overlordship would eventually be destroyed during the sacking of Ying, and in light of that, the ominous overtones of the “Tireless” bell in other stories ring true here as well. In any case, the reading of the metaphor is not specified in the anecdote itself; it is up to the reader to appreciate it in light of later events in Chu history.
“Chengong chen Lingwang”
Like “Zhuangwang ji cheng”, the second anecdote is complete in its own right. It opens with a brief account of an event in the past, providing an anchor point, and then moves back to the narrative present:
【4B】禦於朸述，陳公子皇止皇子。【5】王子圍奪之，陳公爭之，王子圍立為王。陳公子皇見王，王曰：“陳公【6】忘夫朸述之下乎？” 陳公曰：“臣不知君王之將為君，如臣知君王【7】之為君，臣將或致Footnote 45 焉。” 王曰：“不穀以笑陳公，是言棄之，今日【8】陳公事不榖，必以是心。” 陳公跪拜，起答：“臣為君王臣，君王免之【9】死，不以晨（振）Footnote 46 斧疐（鑕）Footnote 47，何敢心之有。” ┗
During the defence of Lishu, Duke Zihuang of Chen detained Huangzi (Huang Jie). Prince Wei stole him away, and the Duke of Chen contested it. [Later], Prince Wei took the throne. Duke Zihuang of Chen had an audience with the king, who said, “Has the Duke of Chen forgotten what happened at Lishu?”
The Duke of Chen said, “I didn't know that Your Majesty would become the ruler. If I had known that you would become the ruler, then perhaps I would have taken it further.”
The king said, “I'm [merely] joking with you over it, and with that I will put [the affair] aside. From now on you must serve me with this same intent.”
The Duke of Shen knelt and bowed. Rising, he replied, “I will serve Your Majesty. [Since] Your Majesty has spared me from execution and has not hefted the axe or knife, how dare [I] harbour any intentions?”
The introductory portion of this anecdote harks back to an event also described in the Zuozhuan. The Duke of Chen – then known as Chuanfeng Xu (穿封戌) – and Prince Wei of Chu set out on a raid against the state of Zheng, in the company of men from Qin.Footnote 48 A certain Huang Jie – the Huangzi of this text – came out from the Zheng garrison at Chengjun 城麇, did battle with the Chu forces, and was promptly taken captive by Chuanfeng Xu. Prince Wei contended with Chuanfeng Xu over Huang Jie, seeking credit for the capture. Thanks to careful telegraphing by Bozhou Li, who was charged with managing the dispute, Huang Jie picked up on the situation and played along with the Prince's claim. The enraged Chuanfeng Xu then went after the Prince with a blade, to no avail.Footnote 49 When the former Prince Wei, now King Ling of Chu, brings the affair up in the dialogue comprising the bulk of the text, the situation is somewhat more serious than is immediately obvious from its framing at the beginning (though an informed reader from Warring States Chu might well know that immediately). The Duke of Chen's relief at escaping death or mutilation contains no hyperbole – it is easy to imagine that the new king might brutally punish someone who had once assaulted him with a deadly weapon.
On the face of it, then, King Ling exercises remarkable restraint in overlooking the Duke of Chen's prior behaviour, and one might take the anecdote as a simple example of the social power of mercy. However, the niceties of the dialogue portray both speakers as quite conscious of the ongoing power dynamic of the situation. King Ling's communicative strategy seems to be to keep the Duke of Chen off guard. Beginning with a confrontational question, the king then listens to the Duke of Chen's awkward backpedalling; then the king disavows his own question with a laugh, only to turn his disavowal around into an immediate demand for loyalty along with a veiled threat. These rapid changes in communicative register seem intended to disorient, amplifying the sense that King Ling is in control of the dialogue.
For his part, the Duke of Chen, in his final acquiescence, leaves room for the reader to question his motives. His rhetorical question, translated above as “how dare [I] harbour any intentions?” (何敢心之有 – literally, “how dare I have [such a] mind”), recalls King Ling's earlier wording: “[you must serve me] with this same intent” (必以是心 – literally, “must use this mind”). The Duke's deferential protestation might thus also be read as repudiating the king's request for loyalty. The Zuozhuan account of Chuanfeng Xu's appointment as the Duke of Chen is of similar character, lending the reading support:
使穿封戌為陳公，曰：“城麇之役不諂。” 侍飲酒於王。王曰：“城麇之役，女知寡人之及此，女其辟寡人乎？” 對曰：“若知君之及此，臣必致死禮以息楚。”Footnote 50
[King Ling] made Chuanfeng Xu the Duke of Chen, saying, “During the campaign at Chengjun, you did not curry my favour”. [Chuanfeng Xu] attended upon the king during a drinking session, and the King said, “During the campaign at Chengjun, if you had known I would come to this, would you perhaps have repudiated me?”
[Chuanfeng Xu] replied, “If I had known you would come to this, I would certainly have given my life to put Chu at rest in accordance with ritual propriety”.
The Duke of Chen's final utterance here is similarly ambiguous. The term xi 息, above translated as “to put at rest”, is versatile, encompassing the ideas of both ease and death. By shifting the focus of his response to the state of Chu rather than the king himself, and by evoking the independent standard of “ritual propriety”, the Duke of Chen on the one hand dodges the king's question while on the other hand clearly implying that the King's actions and his usurpation of the throne by killing his nephew were not in accordance with ritual propriety – giving ample licence to have fought him to the death. Judging from the Zuozhuan sequence immediately following, in which the Marquis of Jin and a functionary discuss whether Chen will soon meet its doom, early readers would have viewed the potential consequences of the Duke of Chen's frankness as quite serious.Footnote 51
With careful choice of words, then, this relatively brief dialogue captures in a few short lines the spirit, if not the details, of the backbiting political situation that supposedly held sway at the Chu royal court in the post-King Gong generations. The overall sense is of a pair of erstwhile enemies reaching a begrudging, precarious, yet mutual detente, in which a self-serving yet wily minister negotiates an image-conscious ruler's requests for personal loyalty.
The anecdotes in intertextual context
As typical for anecdotes, both passages start out with a defining event as a frame for the story – the completion of the wuyi bell and the capture of Huangjie at Lishu, respectively. In doing so they situate the encounters they describe in the historical consciousness of the Warring States elite. The few details provided about each event spell out its implications for the central theme the anecdotes explore. In the former anecdote, King Zhuang himself suggests that he has met the expectations for a ruler and steers the central question to the future of his house and his legacy. The latter has the narrator relate an encounter subsequent to the battle of the frame, to emphasize the potential for animosity between King Ling and the Duke of Chen. Such a set-up is fairly standard across early anecdotes, whether in the Hanfeizi 韓非子, the Shuoyuan 說苑, or the *Baoxun 保訓.Footnote 52
The dialogues that follow, however, develop the central problem in a cryptic and character-focused direction. The answers of the ministers to their kings (四與五之間乎; 臣將或致焉) share a sense that ambiguity is necessary in order to avoid offence and build up tension. In this sense, these anecdotes share the Zuozhuan's predilection for ambiguous language, prompting the reader to guess at the true motives, intentions, and inner emotional depth of the characters involved.Footnote 53 But where the Zuozhuan as a unit contains earlier and later material that provides the clues to the answers – and sometimes renders them explicit through prophecy and judgement – these anecdotes provide no such framework in their own right, and it seems that each one relied more on information beyond the text itself (including both the other anecdote on the manuscript and the reader's assumed broader knowledge of Chunqiu history) to get its message across.
The Zuozhuan itself comprises one body of such knowledge, and some readers of the manuscript may have been familiar with the Zuo formulation of the events discussed here – if not necessarily in its final form.Footnote 54 However, recent manuscript finds have made it increasingly clear that various interpretations of events from the Chunqiu period circulated among the Warring States, the Zuozhuan presenting only one perspective among many.Footnote 55 The Zhuangwang ji Cheng manuscript, we hold, proposes another such perspective, sharing some of its specific motifs and allusions with the Zuo and other works but integrating them into its own interpretive frame that plays with their inherent ambiguity to enhance the reading experience. Rather than viewing them as equations to be solved with the help of external knowledge, we hold, the manuscript deploys these allusions to bolster its critique of the teleological assumption of history as hermeneutics.Footnote 56
Concretely, the theme of the wuyi bell, for example, is used in the Zuozhuan as a means to fault the later King Jing of Zhou for his excess and overreach in a time of destitution, a theme that is reinforced by similar anecdotes regarding his excess and later specification of his downfall. In narratives such as the Cao Mo zhi Zhen and the fragment from the Shenzi, the same trope is attributed to Duke Zhuang of Lu 魯莊公 (r. 693–662), but likewise used to indicate that the Duke should be cultivating his virtue and taking care of his people instead of spending resources on big bells. In the Cao Mo zhi Zhen narrative, the act of casting has not yet taken place, and the Duke is persuaded to destroy the mould of the bronze. In the current anecdote, however, King Zhuang is instead credited with the actual completion of the bell (over a hundred years before King Jing of Zhou and 30 years after Duke Zhuang of Lu). He managed where others failed, and it is against this backdrop that the bell signifies both his ambition and hegemony. The reader cannot, however, forget all the other encounters wherein the casting of such bells reflected badly on the ruler and his future. The underlying question that the text tries to answer is thus not, as in the Zuozhuan and Guoyu, how King Zhuang managed to transform himself from a lazy and seemingly incompetent ruler to a hegemon, but rather: did he foresee the eventual destruction of his legacy?
The second anecdote, for its part, explores an encounter familiar from Zuozhuan in a completely different way. Whereas the Zuozhuan presents the Duke of Chen as straightforward, non-fawning, and honour-bound to violent intent, the anecdote here has him answer in a roundabout manner, fully submitting to the king's authority and disavowing any hostile ambitions. The Zuozhuan episode does not have this coda. Instead, it shifts the focus outside of the immediate encounter into foreknowledge by having the Marquis of Jin ask whether or not the house of Chen is bound to perish, and the audience is left wondering how the threat in the specific exchange was neutralized, a question answered in the anecdote here.Footnote 57
While the main events and important encounters of the anecdotes have already been established by tradition then, the combined framing of the anecdotes offers readers a distinct hermeneutic coding built around those events, encouraging them to explore alternative readings, ambiguities, and resolutions.Footnote 58 Read together, they provide a parallel tradition, interacting in complex ways with other texts and filling in empty spaces with a (re-)imagination of how the characters would have phrased questions, mitigated power dynamics, and explored the fragile future.
The futility of foreknowledge
Rhetorically, each anecdote relies on a constructed gap in time between its setting and an event or action that the characters discuss, though the chronological directions of those gaps are precise opposites. The conversation between King Zhuang and the Deputy of Shen occupies the “now” in the narrative of the first anecdote, but the topic of conversation, the preservation of the house of Mi's recently consolidated legacy, lies in the narrative's future. King Ling and the Duke of Chen, on the other hand, “reminisce” back to their earlier altercation during the Battle of Chengjun, now in the reasonably distant past. The opposite directionality of these constructed gaps creates an inward-directed framing for the combined text, enhancing its readability as a cohesive unit.
Time skips can serve a variety of rhetorical purposes in the construction of literary character – to allow narrative room for character development, for example, or, inversely, to highlight the unchanging nature of the individual character.Footnote 59 In the anecdotes examined in this paper, the implications of the time gaps are epistemological. Each gap in time justifies a corresponding gap in the knowledge of the characters, which in turn drives the emotional import of the anecdote. In the “Zhuangwang ji cheng” anecdote, King Zhuang's imperfect knowledge of Chu's future, as known to both the reader and in some form to the Deputy of Shen, drives a dramatically ironic appreciation of his futile attempt to interpret the Deputy's prophecy. In “Chengong chen Lingwang”, on the other hand, the characters reflect back on their prior lack of foreknowledge, and the interpretation of this gap in knowledge becomes the stage on which the present relationship between king and duke plays out.
The Deputy of Shen's prophecy in the first anecdote, if taken independently, presents a fine example of the uncertainty in interpretation of prophecy as a narrative conceit – the ambiguity of the prophecy does not lead King Zhuang to a resolution of his inquiries. However, juxtaposing the anecdotes suggests a broader statement on the nature of prophecy and the value of foreknowledge. In the “Chengong chen Lingwang” anecdote, Chengong expresses, if not regret exactly, at least a frank assessment that advance knowledge of the present situation would have led him to act differently. Thanks to his earlier limited horizons, however, not only is King Ling left free to assume the throne, but Chengong himself attains his lordship. Moreover, the process of accounting for their prior misunderstanding is precisely what allows King Ling to display his forbearance, allowing the Duke of Chen, in turn, to accept his offer of patronage with his head held high. The lack of past foreknowledge to which King Ling draws attention thus produces a favourable result – at least in the present of the anecdote – for both of the major characters involved. Foreknowledge, however, offers no help in the context of the King Zhuang anecdote. As a reader familiar with the history of Chu would know, even hearing the Deputy of Shen's prophecy does not empower King Zhuang to save his posterity from hardship. In fact, as discussed above, his limited understanding of the prophecy may represent the exact opposite of the eventual form of its fulfilment.
In the first anecdote, then, prophecy fails to lead to foreknowledge and prevent a bad result, while in the second, the lack of foreknowledge leads to a good situation for both of the major characters. The combined result is a critique of the very value of foreknowledge and its relationship to wellbeing. By itself, the anecdote of the cart and boats reads as ambiguous prophecy, but in conjunction with the second anecdote's positive vision of the lack of foreknowledge, it instead calls into question not the accuracy of prophecy, but the possibility of acting on it to better one's lot. Though somewhat at odds with the standard Zuozhuan model of prophecy as an ex post facto indicator of the moral right, the idea that prophecy has only limited power to change events has precedent elsewhere in the ancient world. Morson, for example, considers it fundamental to Herodotus's approach to history and takes it as an example of a genre construct he calls the “prosaic aphorism, which postulates that the complexity of phenomenal affairs exceeds humanity's capacity to understand”.Footnote 60
Conclusions
In this article, we have explored what happens when two stories written on the same manuscript are read together. We have argued that the physical proximity, formal similarity, and related content of the stories invite reading their key elements in light of each other, and doing so produces an extended level of historiographical meaning. Nuanced dialogues and charged allusions in the individual anecdotes explore questions of complex power dynamics and etiquette, while their common deployment of foreknowledge invites the reader to interpret the past with the added value of hindsight. The juxtaposition of these elements evokes broader questions of historiographical import: can we as readers see the inkling of what was to come in a simple encounter? And can we link such encounters to the reader's present and extrapolate larger, more stable truths from the stream of tradition? In other words, can the writing of history transform past experience into present and future wisdom?
Historiographers, and philosophers of history, have long puzzled over the relative value of identification with the immediate experience of past actors versus a hindsight-informed retrospective – what Grethlein has recently referred to as “experience” vs. “teleology” – as modes of engaging with the past.Footnote 61 The historiographical perspective constructed by the “Zhuangwang ji cheng” anecdote, with its ambiguous deployment of shared motifs and implicit critique of the efficacy of foreknowledge, seems to critique the latter, if not to favour the former. Yet the complex, composite narrative structure of the manuscript's texts in combination allows both modes to co-exist under the same umbrella. Prophecy capitalizes on the tension between these experiential and teleological historiographical motives. Past actors imagined as such cannot know the end results of their choices;Footnote 62 the reader of Zhuangwang ji Cheng is invited to share this sense of indeterminacy through the ambiguity in the presentation of narrated and prophesied events in the stories. The manuscript's first anecdote relies on prophecy for its import, while highlighting the difficulty of interpreting it and thereby the degree of ambiguity that foreknowledge can accommodate. The composite reading created by linking it with the second anecdote introduces a critical appraisal in hindsight of the value of foreknowledge and, by extension, critiques the teleological model of historiographical depiction that prophecy facilitates.
In playing both sides of these historiographical issues, the Zhuangwang ji Cheng exemplifies an underappreciated aspect of the creation and reception of the composite texts so important to the manuscript culture of the Warring States.Footnote 63 Composite texts, since they combine discrete textual units with their own internal structures, often accommodate multiple and even conflicting ways of deploying the elements of narrative. Each textual unit can arrange these independently, and thus offer its own vision of the narrative project, while simultaneously forming one facet of the overall framing of the combined text. The very existence of that overarching combination, however, implies an editorial programme and thus encourages one to read the configuration of various narrative elements as an act of meta-commentary. Composite texts are thus eminently suited to using one thing to talk about another, or to using something small to talk about something big. They invite the reader to probe the possible connections between story components and make the leap from individual details to broader context – appreciating overarching historiographical questions through a short anecdote, for example. In this they capture unusually well the commonalities between how human beings synthesize past experiences and how they write about the past.Footnote 64
Readers operating in an environment of composite textual production are primed to decode texts – i.e. to expect to have to draw connections between them in order to reach their full meaning. This process of ligature was not, one would expect, limited to the texts on the bamboo, but would have incorporated a broader range of materials with which the reader was familiar – the text might, in fact, not have its full impact, or not even be intelligible at all, without such connections. And indeed, the Zhuangwang ji Cheng anecdotes gain in dramatic impact when read against the much larger narrative tradition that was part and parcel of life among the Warring States literate elite. Without a general familiarity with the narrative deployment of the wuyi bells, the basic premise of the “Zhuangwang ji cheng” anecdote – the future of Chu's legacy as built by King Zhuang – comes less clearly forward. Appreciating the import of the anecdote's prophecy, and thus the emotional dynamic of the dialogue, also requires a basic familiarity with the subsequent fortunes of the house of Mi. The wuyi bell thus resonates with King Zhuang's hegemonic ambition at the same time that it echoes similar narratives hinting at future downfall. Assuming this degree of background knowledge, the anecdote exploits the disparity between the knowledge of the reader and the characters to provide a satisfying experience of insight, while at the same time subverting standard readings of intertextual tropes. The “Chengong chen Lingwang” anecdote has much clearer stakes, and the Duke of Chen's reply is easier to read, in light of the Zuozhuan account of the original dispute between the future king and duke. Yet it contributes additional meaning by filling in a question left open in the received accounts: how do king and minister negotiate the aftermath of a struggle where one won out and the other is now in mortal danger? Coded language simultaneously invites the reader to decode deliberately vague statements made by ministers avoiding offence, and heightens the sense of dramatic irony when the kings do not, or decide not to, understand the full implications of the ministers’ answers.
Yet even as the anecdotes mine the reader's knowledge for dramatic effect, their combined reading proposes a limit to its value. Together, they critique the efficacy of foreknowledge from two sides, offering examples in which its possession fails to prevent disaster and its lack fails to cause it. Advance knowledge of future events, they suggest, will not necessarily produce a better outcome, as the causal relationship between past, future, and subsequent events is too complicated to understand. Since the resonance of the “Zhuangwang ji cheng” anecdote relies on the disparity of knowledge between characters and reader – a gap reflected in the anecdote in the relationship between King Zhuang and the Deputy of Shen – the king's interpretation of the Deputy's prophecy then comes to echo the reader's encounter with the texts themselves as an exemplar of historical causality. The combined reading then becomes a critique, not just of the efficacy of foreknowledge in general, but of the disparity in knowledge and understanding of causality that allows the first anecdote, in particular, to resonate with the reader – and, by extension, a critique of the value of historiography as a vehicle for understanding and acting upon the world. When these short stories are read against each other, larger historiographical questions, and doubts, thus come to the fore.
The Zhuangwang ji Cheng manuscript is one of several from the Shanghai Museum corpus that carry multiple anecdotes on early Chu kings, their content closely linked in space and time. Reading the anecdotes on each of these manuscripts together, as done here with the Zhuangwang ji Cheng case, creates an interpretive framework that enriches them both as history and entertainment. These manuscripts thus embody the strategy of combined reading, and the precedent they provide suggests that the group as a whole may also be read together as an exploration of themes that bridge the rise and fall of the Chu royal house. It may not be an accident, for example, that “Zhuangwang ji cheng” looks ahead towards the future of the royal family, while “Zhaowang yu Gong zhi Zhui”, part of another such multi-text manuscript that combines two anecdotes about the later King Zhao, is set just after the royal house has been dealt a crippling blow. Read in this way, the texts as a group address not just the accomplishments and shortcomings of the scions of Chu, but also the broader question of how particular objects, events, and people become imbued with historical significance. The details of their layered vision of how the past was written will be the subject of future work.
