The Qin dynasty (221–207 b.c.e.) was the first imperial dynasty in China and it remains among the best known and least understood dynasties. Beginning in the Han period (206/2 b.c.e.–220 c.e.), historians, essayists, and statesmen wrote frequently of the Qin. But they painted the dynasty in broad strokes that made it the prototype of improper rulership, with the First Emperor of Qin (Qin Shihuang 秦始皇, r. 221–210 b.c.e.) as its leading symbol and embodiment of all its supposed negative traits. This picture displaced nearly all real information about the Qin, leaving few reliable details for later historians.
This situation changed only with the advent of modern archaeology in the twentieth century. Already in the 1970s, archaeologists provided a variety of new information about the Qin dynasty from finds like the eye-catching terra-cotta army and legal documents from Shuihudi 睡虎地 (Hubei). In the succeeding decades, new finds and publications have continued to improve our knowledge of the Qin.
Local religion in early imperial China generally is poorly understood.Footnote 1 Glimpses of local life emerging from paleographic records are beginning to fill in our understanding, providing tantalizing details about religious beliefs and practices during the enigmatic Qin period. In Han times, critics of the Qin asserted that they had “discarded and destroyed ritual and duty” 棄捐禮誼 and “cut off the sacrifices” 絕祀.Footnote 2 But as Tian Xudong 田旭東 has noted, new evidence from archaeological sites at Liye 里耶 and Zhoujiatai 周家台 shows scholars must discard the old notion that the Qin dynasty destroyed the ritual system.Footnote 3 As I will demonstrate—and as one would expect—Qin practices in many respects accorded with broader ritual norms.
In this article I present paleographic evidence from Liye and Zhoujiatai reflecting local-level religious practice during the Qin dynasty. In each case, I translate documents and discuss their contents with particular attention to the ways that the practices recorded connect to received accounts of ritual. My consideration includes extended discussion of what exactly the materials represent and touches upon contentious issues, in particular the question of what kind of sacrifice the Liye documents record. This article begins with consideration of the previously-available information about Qin religious practice and background information on Xiannong 先農, the First Farmer, an agricultural spirit that appears in the materials that form the focus of this article.
Previous Understandings of Qin Religious Ritual
The received history of the Qin dynasty (221–207 b.c.e.), primarily Sima Qian's 司馬遷 (d. c. 100 b.c.e.) Shi ji 史記, is replete with descriptions of and narratives concerning religious ritual and observance. Like so much transmitted history in China, these concentrate on the top of the socio-political structure, above all on the First Emperor's activities and the ceremonies that occurred at his command. While many details are missing, there is no dearth of references.
According to Shi ji and Han shu 漢書, innumerable sacrifices to heaven, earth, mountains, rivers, and spirits existed in pre-imperial China. Then, after unification in 221 b.c.e., the Qin dynasty commanded the officials in charge of offerings to record and organize all such observances that they could locate. The Qin subsequently offered sacrifices of dried meat and beer in spring and autumn.Footnote 4 Received history contains many references to the First Emperor's offerings on, beside, and/or to mountains around the realm. Oftentimes these occurred in conjunction with sacrifices to rivers, and sometimes he made sacrifices to the semi-mythological rulers of high antiquity in a similar context.Footnote 5 The First Emperor offered to the Eight Spirits (Bashen 八神)—the Lord of Heaven (Tianzhu 天主), Lord of Earth (Dizhu 地主), Lord of Armies (Bingzhu 兵主), Lord of Yin (Yinzhu 陰主), Lord of Yang (Yangzhu 陽主), Lord of the Moon (Yuezhu 月主), and the Lord of the Sun (Rizhu 日主)—at mountains, altars in swamps, and other designated sites, either himself or by proxy.Footnote 6 Such was the First Emperor's dedication to these practices that when he fell sick with the illness that would kill him, he deputed a general to pray to mountains and rivers on his behalf.Footnote 7
Lineage temples were an important part of early Chinese ritual in general. The First Emperor of Qin credited his success in achieving unification to the spirits of his ancestors, and expressed this using what became a formulaic expression of a ruler's filial piety: “Relying on the numinous [spirits] of the lineage temple…” (lai zongmiao zhi ling 賴宗廟之靈).Footnote 8 He constructed his own temple already in 220 b.c.e.Footnote 9 Then, during the reign of the Second Emperor, the temple dedicated to the First Emperor became the “ancestral temple of emperors” (dizhe zumiao 帝者祖廟) and received more sacrifices than previous temples.Footnote 10 The Second Emperor continued ritual offerings to mountains and rivers, and ordered their number increased.Footnote 11
In contrast to accounts of high-level practices and events, a frustrating paucity and vagueness characterize references to local-level religious activities during the Qin dynasty. One of the few passages in the early histories addressing these matters says, “At offerings to spirits in the commanderies, prefectures, and in distant places, the people themselves made the offering, and were not led by the Son of Heaven's official supplicator” 郡縣遠方神祠者, 民各自奉祠, 不領於天子之祝官.Footnote 12 In a number of instances, Shi ji and Han shu record that the Qin populace made offerings to the spirits of deceased officials and others.Footnote 13 But nowhere is there information concerning the components or methods of offerings in the localities.Footnote 14
The legal documents recovered at Shuihudi in the 1970s provided a few hints about local practices during the Qin dynasty, as Roel Sterckx has discussed.Footnote 15 They show that one basic form of the sacrifice included placing ritual vessels containing offerings before the spirit and the burial of other offerings. According to the Shuihudi records, an animal sacrifice included the heart, kidneys, and four limbs; presumably other portions of the corpse were also used. Legal statutes provided special protection for items that were part of a sacrifice, including those buried as part of a “royal offering” (wangshi ci 王室祠).Footnote 16 Although there is no information about what rituals constituted the observances, the summary of one Qin legal case recovered at Shuihudi indicates that village offerings were occasions of communal feasting for residents.Footnote 17
Further information concerning religious practices in the lower strata of Qin society has been lacking. This left many basic facts about local religious practices under the Qin unknown, including the animals sacrificed, the spirits that received the sacrifices, and the forms and verbal formulae used. The materials from Liye and Zhoujiatai record just these things, making them invaluable for the study of Qin religion and its integration with bureaucracy.
Paleographical materials are of course far from transparent. They bring many difficulties with them, and important questions remain about the processes and purposes of their creation.Footnote 18 Yet because of their archaeological provenance, the Liye documents and the Zhoujiatai text come to us without the distorting influence of transmission over intervening centuries, lending them a special reliability.
Xiannong, the First Farmer
An unexpected presence among the Liye and Zhoujiatai materials is that of Xiannong, the First Farmer. Like many figures of Chinese religion and myth, Xiannong has been variously identified. In Xiannong's case the situation is especially complicated because ancient and modern writers have often equated him with Shennong 神農, the Divine Farmer, who is also thought to be the same as Yandi 炎帝, the Blazing Thearch. This increased the number of possible connections but not their reliability.
Shennong emerged relatively late in history; A.C. Graham dates his appearance in transmitted texts to the fourth or third centuries b.c.e.Footnote 19 Mark Edward Lewis has written about the implications of the figure Shennong and worship of it. He argues that this agricultural deity and his worship represented a mode of living that was without violence, which contrasted with life based on hunting or warfare.Footnote 20
Writing in the second century c.e., Cai Yong 蔡雝 (133–92) explained that, “Xiannong is probably the spirit Shennong” 先農者, 蓋神農之神.Footnote 21 According to Robert G. Henricks, “The names ‘Shen Nung’ [Shennong] and ‘Hsien Nung’ [Xiannong] were used interchangeably during the Han.”Footnote 22 Whatever the situation in the Han was, there were many differently-named agricultural spirits in early China, no few of which have been deemed to be the same as Shennong.Footnote 23 Yet to equate Xiannong with some other figure on the basis of later writings is doubtful. There is no certain evidence supporting this identification for the Qin period, and in the absence of such evidence, it is more appropriate to preserve the distinction between Xiannong and other spirits.
The name Xiannong does not occur in any received pre-Qin or Qin text, nor does Shi ji or Han shu include it. The earliest putative instance of the name in a transmitted text is a quotation attributed to Liu Xiang's 劉向 (c. 77–c. 6 B.C.) Wujing yaoyi 五經要義: “They build an altar in the fields, at which they sacrifice to Xiannong as at a tutelary altar” 壇於田以祀先農如社. Wujing yaoyi is no longer extant and this line exists only as a citation in the eleventh-century Xin Tang shu 新唐書.Footnote 24 Another early instance comes in a commentary on the Hou Han shu 後漢書, which cites lines referring to official sacrifices to Xiannong. There the following lines are said come from Wei Hong's 衛宏 (first-century c.e.) Han jiu yi 漢舊儀, a text that exists today only in fragments: “Xiannong is Shennong, [also called] Yandi. The offering is a tailao 太牢, and the many officials all join in” 先農, 即神農炎帝也. 祠以太牢, 百官皆從.Footnote 25 If reliable, this is the earliest transmitted source to identify Xiannong with the other spirits and to make him the recipient of a tailao.
The Eastern Han writer Wang Chong 王充 (27–97 c.e.) mentions Xiannong in a manner that indicates official sacrifices to the First Farmer continued in the first century c.e.Footnote 26 Indeed, the purported originators of many vocations were objects of veneration in early China:Footnote 27 For example, Xianmu 先牧, the First Herdsman, appears in Zhou li 周禮 in that role.Footnote 28 The “Jiao te sheng” 郊特牲 chapter of Li ji 禮記 mentions Xianse 先嗇, the First Harvester, whom some equate with Shennong and Xiannong.Footnote 29 And Ban Biao 班彪 (3–54) related that in the first century c.e., the Han made offerings to Xiancan 先蠶, the First Sericulturist, using a shaolao 少牢 sacrifice.Footnote 30 Yet the earliest reported instance of the name Xiannong is from the first century b.c.e. and it appears in reliable texts even later.Footnote 31
The occurrence of the name Xiannong in the Liye and Zhoujiatai materials leaves no doubt that this figure was an object of sacrifice in the late third-century b.c.e. Legal scholar Cao Lüning 曹旅寧 argues the Liye documents reflect official activities that were prescribed by law.Footnote 32 Worshipping Xiannong was thus a formal part of Qin governance. As I will show, the instructions for praying to Xiannong recovered from Zhoujiatai appear to direct an individual farmer in how to go about requesting and requiting Xiannong's agricultural aid. The fact that archaeologists recovered that text from the tomb of an official raises questions about whether the prayer was for his own use or part of his duties. But the phrasing is unambiguously individual, demonstrating that offerings to Xiannong occurred in both official and private modes.
There is at present no conclusive explanation for Xiannong's late appearance in the received historical record. Perhaps the systematic Han dynasty derogation of their Qin predecessors resulted not only in the end of practices linked to Qin governance but also in a kind of historiographical aphasia concerning them: Xiannong's presence in the newly-discovered materials and the absence of the name in traditional sources may both stem from its links with Qin dynasty praxis. Or perhaps, as in the case of other everyday matters from the time that we now know only from archaeology, the contemporary banality of devotions to Xiannong forestalled their inclusion in early history. Whatever this gap's etiology, paleographic texts have now begun to fill it in.
Bureaucratic Records from Liye
Liye is the modern name for the place where archaeologists found the remains of a Qin-era town and prefectural administrative center. Since its discovery as part of the archaeological survey that took place in preparation for a hydroelectric project in 2002, the Liye site has received considerable attention from scholars within China and internationally. More important than the ancient town itself are the thousands of bureaucratic documents and fragments recovered from the site, primarily from a well, which was full of Qin-era refuse.Footnote 33 Among the many types of records found there are some that concern religious sacrifices.
Zhang Chunlong 張春龍 first made public the bureaucratic records of official religious activities recovered from the well at a conference in 2005 and published additional transcriptions in 2007, for a total of fifty-two documents and fragments.Footnote 34 The first volume of the complete Liye transcriptions, published in 2012, presents texts from archaeological layers five through eight, and includes records of religious activity from those.Footnote 35 In the discussion here I focus on two sets of documents, which record sacrifices on two specific dates in 215 and 212 b.c.e.Footnote 36 Both groups come from the time when the First Emperor was ruling the unified realm. They thus date to the high point of the Qin dynasty and provide detailed information about Qin official sacrifices at the local level and the associated bureaucracy that has been unavailable since early times.
9 May 215 b.c.e.
The documents forming the core of the first set are dated “Thirty-second year, third month, which had dingchou as its first day, on the bingshen day” 卅二年三月丁丑朔丙申, which was 9 May 215 b.c.e.Footnote 37 Some of them record the preparations for sacrifices to Xiannong and others the sale of leftover edibles afterwards. Both types provide important new information about local government rituals under the Qin. Since those from before and after share important details—they have the same date, feature officials with the same names, and specify that the sacrifices were to Xiannong—they appear to be before and after records of the same sacrifice or set of sacrifices.
PROVISIONS FOR THE OFFERINGS
The first type of document records three kinds of items that officials supplied from government stores for sacrifice. One of these items was a sheep:
卅二年三月丁丑朔丙申, 倉是佐狗出牂[一]以祠先辳.
Thirty-second year, third month, which had dingchou as its first day, on the bingshen day (9 May 215 b.c.e.), granary officialFootnote 38 Shi and aide Gou distributed [one] ewe for sacrifice to Xiannong.Footnote 39
This document demonstrates the basic form that these records follow: it contains a date, the names and posts of the officials involved, and the item and the purpose for which it was distributed, here a ewe for sacrifice to Xiannong. The sheep together with the ox, pig, dog, and fowl, formed the “five sacrificial beasts” (wusheng 五牲) that appear in ritual texts.Footnote 40 The presence of the sheep here hints at a theme that will appear again in subsequent discussion: the Qin ritual system had a high degree of compatibility with broader norms.
The Liye documents also record that officials dispersed millet for use in the same sacrifices:
卅二年三月丁丑朔丙申, 倉是佐狗出黍米四斗以祠先辳.
Thirty-second year, third month, which had dingchou as its first day, on the bingshen day (9 May 215 b.c.e.), granary official Shi and aide Gou distributed four dou of processed millet for sacrifice to Xiannong.Footnote 41
The term for millet here is shumi 黍米, “processed millet,” glutinous millet that had been crushed to extract the grains. According to the sixth century agricultural manual Qimin yaoshu 齊民要術, this was both more expensive and more difficult to obtain than ordinary millet.Footnote 42 Another Liye fragment refers to “four dou of millet,” which may be an abbreviated reference to shumi or it could be ordinary, “unprocessed” millet, hinting that four dou may have been a standard quantity for this sort of sacrifice.Footnote 43 Ritual texts assert that “Mutton goes properly with millet” 羊宜黍.Footnote 44 Hence the pairing in this sacrifice was probably not random, and indeed probably indicates another aspect in which Qin ceremonies were in line with ritual standards.
A third item that official stores provided for the sacrifices was salt. Although none of the fragments containing these records has a date, they came from the same layers as the others and the salt is explicitly intended for sacrifice to Xiannong. The name of the official Gou also appears in one of them. It is therefore reasonable to group these documents with the records of sheep and millet.Footnote 45
[/]鹽四分升一以祠先辳
[/] one quarter sheng salt for sacrifice to Xiannong.Footnote 46
[/]□Footnote 47狗出鹽四分升一以祠[/]
[/] Gou distributed one quarter sheng salt for sacrifice [to Xiannong].Footnote 48
Canonical texts record the use of salt in sacrificial rituals. Zhou li, for example, says that the “salter” (yanren 鹽人) would “provide coarse salt and fine salt for ceremonial offerings” 祭祀共其苦鹽散鹽.Footnote 49Yi li 儀禮 depicts one form this type of sacrifice may have taken when it describes an offering of liver accompanied by salt.Footnote 50 Given the importance of salt in early China, its inclusion in sacrificial rites seems natural. The fact that the Qin also sacrificed salt is another instance in which the Liye documents indicate concord between Qin rituals and broader practice.
THE SALE OF THE LEFTOVERS
The published materials contain no indication of the sacrificial rituals that occurred on 9 May 215 b.c.e. The documents do, however, record that after completion of the ritual or rituals, officials sold the remaining food, and the records of those transactions give still more information about the items included. The process for carrying out the sale was complicated and involved at least three officials, one more than participated in issuing the items beforehand. The involved nature of these processes is striking considering the relatively small amounts of money that were involved. The following is one of the most complete records:
卅二年三月丁丑朔丙申, 倉是佐狗雜出祠先辳餘徹酒一斗半斗賣于城旦冣, 所取錢一. 率Footnote 51之斗半斗一錢. 令史尚視平. 狗手.
Thirty-second year, third month, which had dingchou as its first day, on the bingshen day (9 May 215 b.c.e.), granary official Shi and aide Gou together distributed leftovers from the sacrifices to Xiannong: one and one half dou of beer, sold to penal laborer Ju.Footnote 52 Received: one cash. Calculation: one and one half dou, one cash. Foreman clerk Shang oversaw fairness. Written by Gou.Footnote 53
The document records what was sold, to whom, in what quantity, at what price, and the basis of the calculation. It also names the three officials who were involved, including one whose task was to “oversee fairness” (shiping 視平), a previously unknown duty that appears with some frequency in the Liye documents. In some examples it might seem that this duty meant to “oversee the levelness” of the scale. Alternately, it might seem to have meant “oversee the weighing,” taking ping 平, “flat, level, fair,” as a graphic variant of cheng 秤, “to weigh on a scale.” However, as the next example shows, there are recorded instances in which the official performing this task supervised the sale of items that were counted, and not weighed or otherwise measured. This suggests that the best understanding of ping is a more general “fairness.” Jiang Feifei 蔣菲菲 has proposed that the purpose of shiping was specifically to verify that fair market prices (pingjia 平價) were paid.Footnote 54 Hers is a reasonable suggestion, but the small quantities of cash involved leave me skeptical that these were in fact normal market prices; there is also the instance I discuss below, in which an official apparently carried out the same duty and it is described without reference to anything that could be understood as price. Hence I think a general reading, as “fairness,” is best.
The inclusion of the price calculation on these documents appears to have been a requirement. The wording in the previous example suggests a post hoc breakdown rather than the application of standard rates, as listing the basis of the calculation entailed nothing more than restating the price. In other documents, the calculation is given as price per unit of reckoning—be it by unit of weight or by sheep's head or foot.Footnote 55 The following two fragments together constitute a single example in which the latter is the case:
卅二年三月丁丑朔丙申, 倉是佐狗雜出祠先辳餘徹羊頭一足四賣于城旦赫, 所取錢四 [/]
Thirty-second year, third month, which had dingchou as its first day, on the bingshen day (9 May 215 b.c.e.), granary official Shi and aide Gou together distributed leftovers from the sacrifices to Xiannong,Footnote 56 one sheep's head and four feet. These were sold to penal laborer He, four cash were received [/]Footnote 57
[/]頭一足四賣于城旦赫, 所取錢四. 率之頭一二錢, 四足□錢. 令史尚視平.
[/] one head and four feet. These were sold to penal laborer He, four cash were received. Calculation: one head, two cash, and … cash for the four feet. Foreman clerk Shang oversaw fairness.Footnote 58
These two fragments overlap considerably: the purchaser's personal name, what he bought, and the amount he paid are all identical. This suggests that they come from two copies of a single transaction record. The sheep's head alone fetched two cash. Four sheep's feet brought two cash, indicating the price was one half cash per foot. Perhaps they were sold only in pairs or fours, which would prevent the need for reckoning with smaller amounts.
By recording that the officials sold a leftover sheep's head and feet, these documents prove that sacrifices to Xiannong included mutton. It is conceivable but not provable that these pieces came from the ewe mentioned in the records above. Other records indicate that officials also offered young pig;Footnote 59 meat of an unspecified type, presumably mutton or pork;Footnote 60 and meat gravy.Footnote 61 Elsewhere comes still another item, called just “food” (shi 食):
卅二年三月丁丑朔丙申, 倉是佐狗出祠先辳餘徹食七斗賣[/]
Thirty-second year, third month, which had dingchou as its first day, on the bingshen day (9 May 215 b.c.e.), granary official Shi and aide Gou distributed leftovers from the sacrifices to Xiannong: seven dou of food. It was sold [/]Footnote 62
The term used for “food” here had a number of potentially viable senses, including simply “edibles.” Shi Zhilong 史志龍 suggests it means cooked grain,Footnote 63 which seems reasonable since other documents specify meat, animal parts, and gravy. Peng Hao 彭浩 goes one step further to surmise it might even be the millet that the officials dispersed before the rite in cooked form.Footnote 64
A final, brief fragment indicates that officials calculated annual total outlays for these observances: “Reckoning: Thirty-second year (215 b.c.e.), for sacrifice to Xiannong…” 計卅二年以祠先辳 [/].Footnote 65 Unfortunately damage to that strip has destroyed all particulars.
EXCURSUS: CLASSIFYING THE SACRIFICES
Scholars who have written about the 215 b.c.e. strips from Liye say that the documents record a shaolao 少牢, or “lesser sacrifice.”Footnote 66 They believe this because the sacrifice consisted of a sheep and a pig, two animals frequently identified as the components of the shaolao. Scholars who make this identification use it to link attested Qin practice to rituals in canonical texts, and to make further inferences about Qin rites. I question the suitability of this identification. Although a matter of semantics, this point is important because calling these records of a shaolao sacrifice without explicit textual support has the potential to obscure the true situation.
Dictionaries and early commentaries provide an ostensibly unambiguous interpretation of the term shaolao and its counterpart, tailao 太牢 (also written dalao 大牢) as sets of animals used in sacrifices.Footnote 67 However, examination of the relevant texts shows the situation is in fact unclear. It follows that the proposed interpretation of the Liye sacrifices as an instance of shaolao is at best uncertain, and in many ways problematic and best avoided.
The basic meaning of the word lao 牢 is “pen, enclosure for animals.” It occurs with this sense in, for example, a line from the Shi jing 詩經 poem “Gong Liu” 公劉 (Mao #250): “[He] grabbed a pig in the pen (lao)” 執豕于牢.Footnote 68 When the word lao appears in the Qin paleographic materials from Shuihudi, it means an enclosure for animals, or it has the closely related sense of a pen for humans: a prison.Footnote 69 This sense persisted into Han times, as seen in Xu Shen's 許慎 (d. c. 120 c.e.) Shuowen jiezi 說文解字, which defines lao as “An enclosure for holding and raising oxen and horses” 閑養牛馬圈也.Footnote 70
The word lao was early on used in another sense, that of an animal offering, both alone and in the binomes shaolao and tailao. Yu Xingwu 于省吾 suggests these terms appear already in oracle bone inscriptions, although their interpretation in that context is a matter of debate among scholars.Footnote 71 Paleographic materials from the Chu region furthermore mention the dalao in the context of a sacrifice.Footnote 72 Yet none of these provide unambiguous evidence concerning the precise meaning of tailao, shaolao, or lao.
These terms occur with some frequency in received textual sources. “Wang zhi” 王制, now part of Li ji, connects them to social hierarchy: “The Son of Heaven [when sacrificing at the] tutelary altars to grain and earth in all cases uses the tailao, while the various lords [at their] tutelary altars to grain and earth in all cases use the shaolao” 天子社稷皆大牢, 諸侯社稷皆少牢.Footnote 73 Other texts, such as Zuo zhuan 左傳, also mention them in passing.Footnote 74
The “pen” and “animal offering” meanings of lao may be related. In his commentary on Yi li, Zheng Xuan 鄭玄 (126–200 c.e.) explains, “According to the rituals, when one is going to offer a sacrifice, one must first select the sacrificial animal, tie it in a pen (lao), and fodder it. A sheep and a pig are called a shaolao” 禮將祭祀必先擇牲繫于牢而芻之, 羊豕曰少牢.Footnote 75 Gao You 高誘 (fl. 205–12) presents the tailao as the counterpart of the shaolao: “The three sacrificial beasts together are called a tailao” 三牲具曰太牢.Footnote 76 The two terms are thus complementary, and some (but not all) commentators juxtapose them. For example, He Xiu 何修 (129–182 c.e.) says, “Ox, sheep, and pig: having the three sacrificial beasts is called a tailao … sheep and pig: having the two sacrificial beasts is called a shaolao” 牛羊豕凡三牲曰大(:太)牢 … 羊豕凡二牲曰少牢.Footnote 77
There are, however, other explanations concerning which beasts comprise the various forms of the lao. For example, in commentary on Zhou li, Zheng Xuan states, “Three sacrificial beasts—ox, sheep, and pig—together constitute one lao” 三牲牛羊豕具為一牢.Footnote 78 This makes lao out to be what is elsewhere tailao. On the other hand, Jia Gongyan 賈公彥 (seventh century) says, “Lao means sheep and pig” 牢謂羊豕也, making it equal to what others deem to be a shaolao.Footnote 79 The term lao can also refer to animals used in rituals that were not offerings to spirits. Guoyu 國語, for example, contains the line, “They feasted [the visitors] with nine lao” 饋九牢”; Wei Zhao 韋昭 (204–273 c.e.) there appends the following scholium: “An ox, a sheep, and a pig constitute a lao” 牛羊豕為一牢.Footnote 80
In all these examples, it is the commentaries alone that provide information about the elements of the lao. The sole early text that explains lao is Da Dai li ji 大戴禮記, which presents still another configuration:
At a lord's offering, the sacrificial beast is an ox; it is called a tailao. At a grandee's offering, the sacrificial beast is a sheep; it is called a shaolao.
諸侯之祭, 牲牛, 曰太牢. 大夫之祭, 牲羊, 曰少牢. 士之祭, 牲特豕, 曰饋食.Footnote 81
The preceding has shown that definitions and explanations of lao, tailao, and shaolao vary a great deal.Footnote 82 Nearly all available pre-modern opinions on the question come from commentators, with the exception of Da Dai li ji. Qing historian Zhao Yi 趙翼 (1727–1814 c.e.) wrote about the problem of identifying lao, shaolao, and tailao. For him, there was no question that shaolao properly denoted a sheep and a pig, while tailao represented the combination of ox, sheep, and pig. Zhao argued specifically against understanding the word lao alone as a set of animals for sacrifice. Zhao also criticized later usage of tailao and shaolao in Tang and Song sources, where they refer to single sacrificial beasts. He called this an error and blamed it specifically on Guoyu commentator Wei Zhao.Footnote 83
In his study of Chu paleographic texts, Yu Chenglong 于成龍 notes that in those sources the terms shaolao and tailao come alongside references to sheep and oxen. He argues there that at least in those texts shaolao and tailao must not refer to sacrificial beasts alone.Footnote 84 But on the basis of oracle bone inscriptions and other paleographical evidence, Yu Xingwu and others have argued exactly the opposite, that lao referred to animals raised specifically for sacrifice.Footnote 85
Early and medieval commentators on ritual texts explained the terms lao, tailao, and shaolao in ways that cluster around the sense of sacrificial beast or beasts, yet differed concerning precise meaning. Zhao Yi notwithstanding, there are unresolvable differences in understanding among the commentators and a lack of reliable textual sources to clarify the situation. Given this, trying to identify a particular practice reflected in the Liye paleographic sources as a shaolao (or tailao or lao) in the absence of explicit textual support seems to me both questionable and of questionable value.
There is another aspect to the difficulty in calling the Liye sacrificial records those of a shaolao on the basis of the presence of a sheep and a pig alone: many early texts that name sets of sacrificial animals list them without calling them shaolao, tailao, or lao. There are numerous instances of this and a few examples will illustrate the point. “Qu li” 曲禮, now a chapter of Li ji, says, “[In sacrificing,] the Son of Heaven uses a plain-colored ox; a lord uses a pure ox; a grandee uses a select ox; and a gentleman uses a sheep and a pig” 天子以犧牛, 諸侯以肥牛, 大夫以索牛, 士以羊豕.Footnote 86Shi ji and Han shu record an imperial command from 196 b.c.e. that recalls the Liye documents: it ordered prefectural officials to sacrifice “a sheep and a pig”—not a shaolao—at the tutelary altars twice yearly.Footnote 87 And Sima Biao's 司馬彪 (d. c. 306) Xu Han shu 續漢書 recorded that in Han times there were regular offerings to the First Farmer (among others), and that the sacrifice was “a sheep and a pig,” without mentioning the word shaolao.Footnote 88
Given the disparate explanations of shaolao, tailao, and lao and the general reliance on later commentaries for understanding these terms, it seems to me that there are two viable approaches to the question of deciding whether or not to call the sacrifice reflected in the Liye documents a shaolao. Both suggest that, based on present evidence, it is preferable not to take the records in this way. It is of course conceivable that future discoveries or publications could change this.
The first possibility is that shaolao denoted some set of animals—according to some explanations a set consisting of a single animal—without any significant additional connotation. A pig and a sheep, for example, may have been completely synonymous with shaolao. Writers of texts then used either phraseology as they wished, without substantially altering the sense. If this is the case, then deeming the Liye records those of a shaolao does not add to our understanding in a meaningful way, and in fact increases the interpretive difficulty by introducing that term's persistent unclarity. The other possibility is that shaolao had a specific sense, which accounts for why the term occurs in certain cases and not others, even if the evidence is at present insufficient to determine what that exact sense was. If such was the case, then the presence or absence of shaolao in a particular text is significant. It would follow that its absence in these documents is not a lacuna for editors to fill in but rather a characteristic of those texts that forms part of their meaning. The fact that one very brief fragment from another archaeological layer mentions a lao sacrifice specifically shows that the term was available to the bureaucrats at Liye, so there was no apparent reason to not mention it in the documents translated here.Footnote 89 Either way, it is better to not call these records those of a shaolao, but rather just those of a Qin official sacrifice.
25 July 212 b.c.e.
A second group of documents from Liye records another offering, dated “Thirty-fifth year, sixth month, which had wuwu as its first day, on the jisi day” 卅五年六月戊午朔己巳, equivalent to 25 July 212 b.c.e. These records concern sacrifices to a previously unknown spirit, the identification of which is problematic. Zhang Chunlong and others transcribe its designation with the graph 
, and the published photographs of the strips support their reading. Some Unicode character sets include (other, older sets do not), which would seem to suggest that it appears somewhere in transmitted texts, yet I can find no other example.Footnote 90 This presents two immediate, interrelated problems, which must be treated together: pronunciation and interpretation.
It is obviously difficult to determine the pronunciation of an unattested graph. The character comprises just two elements, xue 穴 and yan 言. The graph xue 䛎, “to shout at angrily,” consists of the same elements in another configuration and is attested, albeit apparently only in lexica.Footnote 91 Hence it is a possible pronunciation of the graph in question, although this does not help resolve the issue of interpretation in this context.
Well-known readers of the Liye strips have offered two explanations. Zhang Chunlong suggests the graph may be equivalent to yin 窨, “underground storehouse,” in context referring to the spirit of the storehouse.Footnote 92 Although Zhang cites no other example of this usage, I believe his hypothesis is reasonable and I tentatively follow him. The first ground for my decision concerns the graphic constituents of the character , in which yan 言 appears to be the phonetic element and xue 穴 the semantic. Yin 窨 consists of xue combined with phonetic element yin 音. It seems possible that either the pronunciations or the written forms of the phonetic elements—or perhaps a combination of these two factors—resulted in enough indeterminacy that the graphs and 窨 may have been exchanged in at least some contexts.Footnote 93
Additional, indirect support for Zhang's hypothesis comes in the form of other sacrifices made to inanimate objects, which were in fact directed to the spirits occupying those objects. These are well-known from received sources, which record offerings to doors (men 門), stoves (zao 灶 and cuan 爨), gutters (liu 霤), and so on.Footnote 94 There is also evidence for this sort of practice in paleographical sources. Tian Xudong has gathered a number of examples from recovered Qin texts, above all from “day books” (rishu 日書), reflecting offerings to doors and other abodes of spirits.Footnote 95 Another strip from Liye records the disposal of offerings to an armory,Footnote 96 and a major feature of the Zhoujiatai prayer is a sacrifice to Xiannong performed in front of a granary (see below). I therefore believe Zhang's reading is reasonable, and I provisionally transliterate the graph as yin, understanding it as an underground storage building, in which one or more spirits resided.
Peng Hao has offered another suggestion, which is conceptually similar to Zhang's, although differing in detail. Peng believes that yin may be read as an 岸, “shore, bank(s).” Peng points to the topography of the Liye area, which lies in a basin and is susceptible to seasonal flooding. He suggests that the high banks would have protected against flooding and so deserved reverence.Footnote 97
THE SALE OF LEFTOVERS
Documents like the following record the sale of items that had featured in official offerings on 25 July 212 b.c.e.:
卅五年六月戊午朔己巳, 庫建佐般出賣祠餘徹脯一朐Footnote 98于□□□, 所取錢一.
令史
監. 般手
Thirty-fifth year, sixth month, which had wuwu as its first day, on the jisi day (25 July 212 b.c.e.), armory official Jian and aide Ban sold off leftovers from the offerings to the underground storage building, one roll of dried meat, to … Received: one cash. Foreman Clerk Zu supervising.Footnote 99
Written by Ban.Footnote 100
This bears an obvious similarity to the records of sacrifices to Xiannong from 9 May 215 b.c.e.. The basic form of the document is identical, and again includes the date, the fact of the selling of the object(s) and a brief description of them, the names of the officials involved and the purchaser, and the price. There are small changes in wording, as in the appearance of “sold off” (chumai 出賣) rather than simply “sold.” And in place of an official “overseeing fairness” (shiping), as above, here the foreman clerk is “supervising” (jian 監). These minor departures make little appreciable difference in the sense of the texts and seem to indicate that some variation in wording was permitted. This implies that bureaucratic regulations determined the substantive content of these documents but did not establish the precise expressions.Footnote 101
The offering in this case was dried meat (fu 脯), which also features in received accounts of ritual, a point I will return to below. Another Liye document from the same day records the sale of leftover beer:
卅五年六月戊午朔己巳, 庫建佐般出賣祠餘徹酒二斗八升于□ [/]
率之斗二錢. 令史監. [/]
Thirty-fifth year, sixth month, which had wuwu as its first day, on the jisi day (25 July 212 b.c.e.), armory official Jian and aide Ban sold off leftovers from the offerings to the underground storage building, two dou and eight sheng of beer, to [/]
Calculation: two cash per dou. Foreman Clerk Zu supervising. [/]Footnote 102
Although the purchaser's identifying information is absent from this fragment, there is another fragment that matches word-for-word the item sold, quantity, and price, and so appears to be from the same sale; it records that the purchaser was a slave, although his name is lost there, too.Footnote 103 Still another fragment tells us that “food” (shi) also featured in the offerings on this day.Footnote 104
Both dried meat and beer come in offerings recorded in ritual texts, sometimes together. Yi li, for example, speaks of these two as part of the ceremony for formal visits.Footnote 105 Accounts in Shi ji and Han shu mention that the two together featured in spring offerings during early imperial times.Footnote 106 These records do not tally perfectly with the Liye documents: the context in Shi ji and Han shu is that of a seasonal offering, like that of the Liye materials, but from a different season; the Yili case is another sort of ritual entirely. Nevertheless these citations support the impression that dried meat and beer had a ceremonial affinity. In the Shuihudi documents, this same pair appears as the reward for successful officials.Footnote 107 This may indicate that such rewards had a ritual component, or that the compatibility of beer and dried meat extended into other aspects of life.
CHARACTERIZING THE SALE OF THE LEFTOVERS
Zhang Chunlong has asserted that the sale of leftovers was a form of the ritual practice of fenzuo 分祚 (more often written 分胙), a formal distribution of remaining viands after an offering.Footnote 108 Tian Xudong says the same, and adds that the distribution required evincing both hierarchy and fairness. He points to the presence of those who “oversee fairness” as evidence for this.Footnote 109
Peng Hao argues against this interpretation, pointing out that selling things is distinct from ritual gift-giving. He stresses the hierarchical nature of the proceedings, arguing that the low status of the convict laborers who bought the leftovers prevented their participation in the actual rituals and receipt of the leftovers.Footnote 110 Shi Zhilong amplifies this refutation, citing examples of distributed sacrifices in received and recovered texts. He says that such gifts were the province of the aristocracy and commoners, while convict laborers were excluded.Footnote 111
Peng Hao and Shi Zhilong are doubtless correct to note the fundamental difference between post-ritual gifts of food and items sold. Subsequent publications of Liye documents have shown that, contra Tian Xudong, the presence of an official performing the task of shiping was not connected to fairness in the sense of ritual distribution but rather was a bureaucratic supervision of funds or goods changing hands in connection with official business, as examples without connection to religious ritual also exist.Footnote 112
The records translated here reflect not the distribution of meat as a ceremonial gift, but rather the integration of religious practice into the same bureaucracy that regulated other aspects of Qin society. There is no indication that the government storehouse, for example, that held the three kinds of offerings was distinct from those that housed other goods, or that the officials involved were in any way special. The Liye records confirm the integration of at least these sacrifices with the regular bureaucracy, reflecting the overlap of secular and religious matters.
Authorized Sacrifices under the Qin
The fact that the documents name Xiannong specifically as the object of the observances indicates official sanction of his worship. This begins to fill in a gap that legal materials on the regulation of offerings had left. For among the materials from Shuihudi comes the following question and answer:
擅興奇祠, 貲二甲. 可[ : 何]如爲奇. 王室所當祠固有矣, 擅有鬼立[ : 位]殹, 爲奇, 它不爲.
[The statute says,] “Carrying out abnormal sacrifices on one's own accord is fined two suits of armor.” What constitutes “abnormal?” [Answer:] Those [spirits] to which the royal house should sacrifice are set. If one sets up an altar to [another] spirit of one's own accord, that is “abnormal.” Other things are not.Footnote 113
This statute seems to be the legal form of a precept that occurs in the ritual text Li ji as follows:
非其所祭而祭之名曰淫祀淫祀無福.
When [a spirit] is not that to which one should make an offering, yet one makes an offering to it, that is called a “heterodox sacrifice.” Heterodox sacrifices bring no blessing.Footnote 114
The existence of acceptable and unacceptable sacrifices was part of law and ritual. Robin d. s. Yates has linked these distinctions to notions of purity in early Chinese society, which saw illegitimate offerings as a source of impure and disordering influence.Footnote 115 Yet neither transmitted historical records of Qin dynasty history nor the Shuihudi materials indicated what kinds of local sacrifices had state approval. On the basis of the Liye records, it is now clear that offerings to the First Farmer and to spirits residing in storehouses had official support, and the sacrifices included mutton, pork, millet, and beer.
Due to the nature of the Liye find, it is natural that its contents relate to official tasks. The information they provide is a significant contribution to our understanding of Qin religious and official practice. Thanks to the materials from Zhoujiatai, the subject of the following discussion, we also have for the first time paleographical evidence about an apparent individual offering in Qin times.
The Zhoujiatai Prayer
Archaeologists recovered bamboo strips containing a prayer to Xiannong from a Qin grave at the Zhoujiatai site, located in a northwestern suburb of Jingzhou, Hubei. Archaeologists excavated forty-two Qin and Han graves there between late October 1992 and December 1993. Grave no. 30, which produced the prayer, contained a heavily decomposed and incomplete male skeleton; based on tooth wear patterns, the deceased is estimated to have been between thirty and forty years old at the time of death. The grave contained lacquer ware and objects of wood, bamboo, pottery, bronze, and cloth, as well as writing implements and writing strips. Among the strips are written materials bearing dates from 211 and 209 b.c.e. 209 b.c.e., the first year of the Second Emperor's reign, is thus the terminus post quem for the find, and the archaeologists believe it to come from around the end of the Qin period. There is no indication of the man's name, nor is there explicit reference to his rank. Based on the brief entries concerning official duties in a chronology from the grave, the report authors deduce that he was probably a commandery-level official, and comparison with the grave at Shuihudi suggests he was of relatively low status.Footnote 116
The archaeologists found three hundred and eighty nine bamboo strips in a bamboo box which was wrapped in a mat and placed between the inner and outer coffins. The 5,302 characters on the strips were for the most part legible at the time of excavation, with only a small portion blurred. The strips contain chronological, calendrical, and mantic materials, and divide into three sets according to size and other physical characteristics. The prayer is in the third group, which also includes medical texts.Footnote 117
The directions for carrying out the prayer apparently guide the actions of a single individual (with the help of a female assistant at one point). The agricultural nature of the prayer is evident both from its target—Xiannong—and the mention of fields and seed selection in the text. Its content seems to suggest something for the use of an individual farmer. However, the deceased's status as an official raises other possibilities: He may well have been both official and farmer, or he may have used these materials to direct the actions of others, or perhaps his duties required him to disseminate this kind of information rather than use it himself. The content of the directions seems to argue against the latter alternatives. But in the end we simply do not know why this text was included in this grave, and what if any purpose it served in the life of the dead man.Footnote 118 Nevertheless, in the forms, sacrifices, and individual focus of the directions, these strips provide new information about religion during the Qin dynasty. The prayer is brief, and comprises three sections, which I will translate in sequence. They describe actions in three different locations and prescribe three distinct forms of interaction with Xiannong.
Part One
The text begins with the preparations for and description of the first set of offerings.
先農: 以臘日, 令女子之市買牛胙、市酒. 過街, 即行
（拜）言曰: 人皆祠泰父, 我獨祠先農. 到囷下, 為一席, 東鄉（向）, 三腏, 以酒沃. 祝曰: 某以壺露、牛胙, 為先農除舍. 先農笱（苟）令某禾多一邑, 先農㮓（恒）先泰父食.
For the First Farmer (Xiannong): On the La day, send a girl to the market to buy sacrificial beef and market beer.Footnote 119 [When she] has passed through the streets [and returned], make an obeisance, saying, “Other people all offer to the ancestors; I alone offer to the First Farmer.”Footnote 120 Go to the silo,Footnote 121 lay out a mat, face east, sacrificeFootnote 122 three timesFootnote 123 and offer libations of beer. Pray, saying, “So-and-so [i.e., the one making the sacrifice], with a pot of dew [i.e., beer]Footnote 124 and offerings of beef, prepares a placeFootnote 125 for the First Farmer. If only the First Farmer will permit So-and-so's grain to be the most plentiful in the entire settlement, the First Farmer will always precede the ancestors in eating.”Footnote 126
Many questions exist concerning the La festival, the date upon which this sacrifice was to begin. According to Derk Bodde, the La day was the early imperial New Year, and a time of offerings to spirits and communal celebration.Footnote 127 A different manuscript recovered from the same grave records calendar information for the first year of the Second Emperor's reign. According to it, the La day that year occurred on the wuxu 戊戌 day of the twelfth month that year, equivalent to 9 February 209 b.c.e.Footnote 128
It is interesting to note in the prayer text the presence of the apparently untrue claim, “I alone offer to the First Farmer.” As the first section of this paper has shown, Qin officials sacrificed to the First Farmer, in all likelihood on a regular basis; hence no one could be really “alone” in making such offerings.
According to the text, “everyone else” sacrifices to taifu 泰父. The editors of the volume gloss taifu as dafu 大父, “grandfather”—in context meaning more generally “ancestors”—without further explanation.Footnote 129 The word taifu 太父, with the same meanings, also exists.Footnote 130 The graphic alternation of the three characters (泰, 太, 大) is well known, which may be why the editors thought no further explanation was necessary.Footnote 131 Wang Guiyuan 王貴元 also understands taifu as “ancestors,” and adds reference to the “Yueling” 月令 chapter of Li ji and its commentary, which speaks of the Son of Heaven's offerings to ancestors in the first month of winter.Footnote 132 However, Chen Sipeng 陳斯鵬 disagrees with this interpretation for two reasons. First, Chen thinks the status of taifu in the text is incompatible with that of the ancestors. And, he says, no ci 祠 offering to ancestors existed, making that reading impossible. Chen suggests instead that this is an alternate form of Futai 父太, in context denoting the spirit Taiyi 太一.Footnote 133
I believe that taifu should in fact be understood as “ancestors,” nothing else. The graphic alternation between forms of tai in the word taifu is so well known that to take it otherwise here would require evidence stronger than what Chen Sipeng provides. There is furthermore an important piece of information supporting this reading that previous researchers have not noted. One of the most remarkable documents discovered at Liye is a board containing a list of changes to vocabulary, which specifies words no longer to be used and their replacements. Taifu occurs in that list as the new term to be used in place of wangfu 王父, and wangfu is attested with the sense of “ancestor(s)” in multiple early texts.Footnote 134 The Zhoujiatai prayer text reflects the implementation of the new vocabulary in the Qin realm and leaves little room for doubt that ancestors is the proper understanding here. The picture that emerges from this section of the prayer is of a society in which ancestral offerings are the norm.
Part Two
The next section of the prayer directions does not specify when it is to take place, saying only that that it is to occur at the time of selecting seeds:
到明出種, 即 □ 邑最富者, 與皆出種. 即已, 禹步三, 出種所. 曰: 臣非異也, 農夫事也. 即名富者名, 曰: 某不能腸(傷)其富, 農夫使其徒來代之.
When you next select seeds, then [go to] the wealthiest man in the settlement, and select seeds together with him.Footnote 135 When that is complete, make three paces of Yu,Footnote 136 then leave the place of selecting. Say, “I am no different: I work for the Farmer.”Footnote 137 Then name the wealthy one's name, and say, “So-and-so (I) cannot harm his wealth—may the Farmer cause his follower (me) to succeed to it.”Footnote 138
This assumes the acquiescence of a wealthy neighbor in the ritual selection of seed. Beyond any perceived supernatural efficacy, this may have helped the one performing the prayer by acquainting him with techniques for selecting seeds. The entreaty to permit the supplicant to succeed to his neighbor's wealth without doing injury seems like an attempt to strike a balance between self-interest and neighborly spirit. Unlike the first and third sections of the text, the prayer here offers no explicit quid pro quo to the spirit; instead there is a general plea to assist an adherent. However, the presence of sacrificial beef here is implied in the following section, and means such inducements were probably not entirely lacking.
The presence of the “pace of Yu” links these practices with what Donald Harper has called the “Warring States occult tradition which made [it] a popular magico-ritual step.” This step supposedly mimicked the limping gait of the mythological sage ruler Yu, and appears in variety of contexts related to religion and magic, including calendrical texts from Shuihudi and Fangmatan 放馬灘, and medical texts from Mawangdui 馬王堆.Footnote 139
Part Three
The prayer ends with a return to the place for storing grain:
即取腏以歸. 到囷下, 先侍豚. 即言囷下曰: “某為農夫畜，農夫笱（苟）如 □ □, 歲歸其禱.” 即斬豚耳, 與腏以並塗囷廥下. 恒以臘日塞禱如故.
Then take the sacrificial meat and return. Go to the silo. First prepare a pig.Footnote 140 Then speak before the silo, saying, “So-and-so raised [this pig] for the Farmer. If the Farmer will merely …, at the harvest I will repay [your response to my] prayer.”Footnote 141 Then cut off the pig's ear, and, together with the sacrificial meat,Footnote 142 scatter it before the silo.Footnote 143 Always repay the answer to your prayer on the La day,Footnote 144 as [promised] in the sacrifice.Footnote 145
The beginning of this section implies that the supplicant brought the meat that was mentioned in the first section to the observances in the place of seed selection, then back with him here. The directions then introduce an additional sacrifice in the form of a pig, incorporated into the offering by means of its severed ear. As Wang Guiyuan points out, this recollects pre-imperial covenant ceremonies in canonical texts. There the severed ear of an ox signified the blood sacrifice that sealed the covenant.Footnote 146 The directions here end with an enjoinder to the one who carries out the sacrifice to reciprocate blessings received as stipulated in the prayer.
The Prayer Instructions Considered
The overwhelming impression the Zhoujiatai prayer directions leave is the sense of religious practice that treats relations with spirits as relationships of exchange, in which the one performing the prayer offers blandishments to entice the support of an agricultural deity. This is to be expected: K.E. Brashier has discussed at length the exchange-focused nature of offerings to ancestors, who were expected to provide their descendants with long life and prosperity in return.Footnote 147
The locations of the observances that the Zhoujiatai text describes are also worthy of note, for they are distinctly ordinary. Unlike offerings in lineage temples or before altars to tutelary or other spirits, which appear commonly in received accounts of early religious spirits, the observances here occur in places dedicated to mundane tasks connected with growing and storing grain. This underscores Yates' point that the salient division in early imperial religious praxis was not between pure and impure, sacred and not. Rather the acceptability of a given sacrifice derived from its sanctioned status, in contrast to the unauthorized and unacceptable.Footnote 148 The spirit named in this prayer is Xiannong, whom, as we know from the Liye documents, was officially approved for worship. The Zhoujiatai and Liye materials together leave no doubt that Xiannong was an approved object of both official and personal sacrifice in Qin times.
Conclusion
One of the major themes of Brashier's Ancestral Memory in Early China is the degree to which historical records of ancestor worship and other ceremonies could differ from the forms found in ritual texts. He cites many examples of cases when reality and instructions were at odds.Footnote 149
One aspect of the picture that emerges from the Qin paleographic materials that I have examined here is that the Qin system had significant overlap with the prescriptions of ritual texts. A clear example of this is the sacrificial items listed in the Liye documents: the combination of sheep and pig, for example, features prominently there and also occurs in both historical accounts of ceremonies and in ritual texts. And the exchange focus of the Zhoujiatai puts it in line with what Brashier tells us concerning religious rituals more broadly, which posited relationships with supernatural entities as functioning through trade.
The new evidence does not show Qin practices to have matched any extant canonical prescription. But in addition to providing new information about Qin praxis, these materials reflect a substantial degree of concord with broader ritual norms. And they record sacrifices to the First Farmer, whom Wang Chong says still received offerings under the Han in the first century c.e. In place of old pictures that portrayed the Qin as separate from the Chinese ritual tradition, the Liye and Zhoujiatai materials show them to have been very much a part of it.
