This book presents itself as a “systematic study” (p. 1) of the Zuozhuan, “a heterogeneous and layered text that took shape over a long period of accretion” (p. 29) and is accepted by the author as deriving from around 400 bce (p. 33). Two terms used in the title are essential to the book's project. One is “the past,” in the sense of events that occurred earlier than some reference point, which would appear to be unproblematic and has an early Chinese counterpart, gu. The second term is “historiography,” which seems to be taken in both a straightforward sense of writing about history (hence implying a straightforward sense for the term “readability” in the book's title), and also a larger meta-sense of writing about the writing of history, which hints at a larger meaning for “readability.” Neither sense of “historiography” has an obvious early Chinese counterpart.

A third term, “history,” which I understand in the restricted sense of written knowledge about past events construed to have significance, is described at the end of the introduction by the author: “If one can speak of an emergent sense of history embodied by the text [i.e., the Zuozhuan], it would lie precisely at the intersection of varying conceptions of interpretation and rhetoric brought to bear [presumably when the Zuozhuan was compiled?] on the past within a larger context of competing solutions to the crisis of instability and disintegration represented through the events of the 255 years covered by Zuozhuan” (p. 27). This would seem to give any history in the Zuozhuan a specific political purpose at the time when it was compiled and later when it was read. But, importantly, no obvious early Chinese counterpart existed for the term “history” in my sense, or in the sense implied here in the author's hypothetical statement and in other places in the book. Readers might ask how, or even whether, the compilers of the Zuozhuan wrote “history” based on a certain set of records concerning past events.

In the first chapter, the author rejects the efforts of many commentators to show that the Zuozhuan has a homogenous, moralistic message by their emphasis on the moral meanings conveyed in its concerns for “an idealized Zhou political order and conceptions of moral government” (p. 58). To illustrate her point, the author translates and considers the account of Lord Zhuang of Zheng associated with the Chunqiu entry “The Elder of Zheng Overcame Duan at Yan” (p. 63). Her exposition shows the difficulty of getting a moral fix on the people or their conduct, and it explores the complexity of later commentators' handling of the passage. Nevertheless, the author declares that “to understand Zuozhuan, it is necessary to unravel its different strands and show how they are connected. To return to Lord Zhuang of Zheng, I will hazard a few final observations that will have broad reverberations for the whole text” (p. 83). In the next five sentences, her “final observations” are so qualified by the words “suggests,” “discrepancy,” “probably,” “perhaps,” and “alternatively” that the reader is left to infer that there is no way “to understand Zuozhuan.” This raises a bigger issue about the “unreadability” of past events. The author concludes chapter 1 with her approach to a perennial historiographical (in the larger sense) problem: “The question of the readability of the past thus devolves to a question of the uses of the past” (p. 84).

Any historiographical invocation of the “uses of the past” would seem to require that “meaning” is latent in records of past events or can be imputed to them. Having rejected simplistic moral readings in the first chapter, in the second chapter, the author seeks to show that meanings are presented in the Zuozhuan in a three-part nexus of “signs” that prefigure events yet to occur, “causes” (an explanatory concept involving different types of connection or linkage between an earlier sign and a subsequent, and consequent, outcome), and “events” themselves, something that happened in the past. This nexus serves as the “history” that the author finds in the Zuozhuan. The author's identification of “signs” as critical in the narratives undermines readers' confidence that the Zuozhuan is a “truthful record (shilu)” (p. 2). Chapter 3 deals with reading signs, chapter 4 addresses the manipulation of signs, and chapter 5 focuses on the anxiety over reading signs within the Zuozhuan. These “signs” would seem to be not in past events themselves, but in the narratives about past events.

The examples, for which the author provides full translations, and her discussion of signs and causality, both demonstrate that the “uses of the past” in the Zuozhuan narrative involve planting prefiguring clues that lead to a known outcome. “Instead of linear flow, suspense, or climax [all literary tropes?], we find repeated intimations of the end, causes and signs tirelessly articulated and explained” (p. 161). In this regard, the obvious admonitory function in the information set forth in the Zuozhuan overwhelms any “truth” function. The twisty inquiry in this book suits the Zuozhuan, but it does not tell us about the “Birth of Historiography” (p. 411).