The redoubtable Ying-shih Yü’s most important studies in English have been republished in two volumes as part of the Masters of Chinese Studies series, edited by David Der-wei Wang for Columbia University Press. Because the chapters are sequenced chronologically, the ones that will most interest readers of Early China are in volume I. Volume II stretches from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries.

The collection had apparently been planned for several years, but in late 2014, when Yü’s medical condition prevented him from proofreading the final text, Wang called on Josephine Chiu-Duke and Michael S. Duke to help complete the project (p. xvi). The process of digitally formatting the files had resulted in the loss of significant amounts of text, which Chiu-Duke and Duke restored by referring to the original publications. In addition, they made “a few minor changes” (not further documented) and added some Chinese graphs for the sake of clarity. Since these volumes could not have been published without their painstaking labor, the entire field is in their debt.

The first seven chapters focus on early China: “Between the Heavenly and the Human” (pp. 1–19), “Life and Immortality in the Mind of Han China” (pp. 20–57), “‘O Soul, Come Back!’: A Study in the Changing Conceptions of the Soul and Afterlife in Pre-Buddhist China” (pp. 58–84), “New Evidence on the Early Chinese Conception of the Afterlife” (pp. 85–90), “Food in Chinese Culture: The Han Period (206 B.C.E.–220 C.E.)” (pp. 91–121), “The Seating Order at the Hong Men Banquet” (pp. 122–33), and “Individualism and the Neo-Daoist Movement in Wei-Jin China” (pp. 134–65). The last of these, despite the title, trenchantly discusses Wang Chong 王充 (27–c. 100 c.e.) and his reception in the Six Dynasties, and thus will undoubtedly interest Han specialists.Footnote ¹ The later chapters will be prized by historians as well. For example, “Business Culture and Chinese Traditions: Toward a Study of the Evolution of Merchant Culture in Chinese History” (pp. 222–72) is placed toward the end of the book because most of it deals with the Song dynasty and later, but it includes an insightful survey of earlier economic ideas (pp. 223–37).

Although it is enormously useful to have so much of Yü’s oeuvre reproduced in a single publication, more could have been done to contextualize the individual studies, which go all the way back to the 1960s. Chiu-Duke and Duke have supplied an “Editorial Note” (pp. xi–xx) in which they applaud Yü’s distinguished career and attempt to summarize the significance of his scholarship. In their view, one question “that has always dominated his intellectual consciousness” is: “what was China's essential value system that had sustained the life of its culture through ages of tumultuous political changes?” (p. xii). The search for “China's essential value system” is out of step with contemporary methodology; frankly, the phrase does not do justice to the diversity of Yü’s inquiries.

As but one example of the kind of editorial work that might have aided readers in 2016, consider “‘O Soul Come Back,’” where Yü reads the famous T-shaped banner from Mawangdui 馬王堆 Tomb No. 1 as a representation of the fu 復 ritual, which entreated the hun 魂 soul of the deceased to return to the lifeless corpse (pp. 59–71). It would not have diminished Yü’s legacy to point out that this interpretation has been repeatedly challenged since it was first published in 1985. For example, Wu Hung came to a very different conclusion in 1992: the painting “conveys the hope of the living, that after her burial Lady Dai would resume her existence in her underground ‘permanent home’.”Footnote ² Yet more theories have been voiced since then.Footnote ³ Moreover, one rarely acknowledged problem with Yü’s analysis is that not one of the ritual texts describing the fu ceremony associates it with the hun soul. Yü got that idea from “Zhaohun” 招魂 and “Dazhao” 大招, two poems attributed to Qu Yuan 屈原 (d. 278 b.c.e.) and transmitted as part of Chuci 楚辭. While there is a limit to how much of this kind of annotation the editors could have feasibly provided, a paragraph preceding each chapter, outlining its main arguments and its reception since publication, would have been helpful.

Nevertheless, scholars and students will surely welcome this collection of a lifetime's worth of research and reflection by one of the leading Chinese historians of the twentieth century. Rereading these studies has been a joy.