With Law, State, and Society in Early Imperial China, Anthony J. Barbieri-Low and Robin D. S. Yates have made a signal contribution to the study of early Chinese law and legal practice. This new work combines a complete translation of the early Han legal materials from Zhangjiashan 張家山 tomb no. 247 with an extensive scholarly apparatus and accompanying essays that discuss the texts and what they tell us. Barbieri-Low and Yates's close engagement with their primary source material and extensive research in secondary sources makes this a work that deserves the attention of all scholars interested in early imperial legal history.
The first volume contains essays detailing the background and interpretation of the excavated materials. These include discussions of laws and their creation, as well as an overview of the “Zouyanshu” 奏讞書 case summaries, which Barbieri-Low and Yates translate in the second volume. There is an examination of early penal processes that synthesizes excavated materials from Zhangjiashan and other sites, as well as information from received texts. The resulting picture covers everything from snitching to adjudication and appeal, and finally the variety of penalties that awaited unhappy guilty parties at the end.
Particularly notable and praiseworthy is the attention Barbieri-Low and Yates give to the bamboo writing strips’ archaeological context and circumstances. They provide a long discussion of the Zhangjiashan grave site's archaeology and the recovery and preservation of the strips. They also treat the process of restoring the sequence of the strips, which had become disordered over the course of centuries. In their analysis, both in the prefatory materials and throughout the book, Barbieri-Low and Yates refer to the position of the strips bearing particular content when excavated.
The attention Barbieri-Low and Yates give to the archaeology and the nitty-gritty first steps of paleography accomplishes two things. It first avoids treating paleographic materials as simply another genre of text. Even in a case like Zhangjiashan tomb no. 247, in which archaeologists carried out excavations with great care and published thorough documentation, the arrangement of the writing strips is the product of a complex process and is intrinsically provisional. Barbieri-Low and Yates furthermore demonstrate the value of archaeological provenance data in understanding a text. Not a few texts have come to light in recent years through looting and sale (at high prices) to universities and museums. The scholarly interest of those materials means their study is inevitable. The newness of the materials and the value of the alternate perspectives they record give them the potential not only to revolutionize sinology but also to attract broader interest.Footnote 1 Barbieri-Low and Yates remind us of how very much is lost through looting, even if we set aside questions of damage to the writing media and the potential for forgery.Footnote 2
Barbieri-Low and Yates do not hesitate to offer novel interpretations in their analyses. The authors hypothesize, for instance, that the content of the “Zouyanshu” case summaries served not only to educate the early reader but also to entertain (pp. 98–105). Their arguments are based on the names of parties in the summaries and the characteristics of the narratives. I was frankly skeptical of this reading at first, but the authors’ discussion brings together enough evidence to convince me it is a plausible interpretation of the material.
Perhaps even more important than this, however, is the bare fact of the argument being made. All too often excavated materials are treated as belonging either to philosophy or to institutional history. Intellectual history has benefitted from many finds already. Administrative materials, including legal texts, usually become sources of information concerning processes, offices, statutes, economic transactions, and so on. These details are obviously important and valuable parts of history. Yet it is good to see administrative materials playing a part in making arguments that have other points of engagement. For early China studies to involve legal and administrative documents in broader conversations across disciplines, it will be necessary to go beyond description, cataloging, and translation—as necessary and worthwhile as those things are. Barbieri-Low and Yates have provided an example of this sort of engagement.
A quarter or so of volume one consists of supplementary materials. These include most notably a tabular overview of penal practice in the form of a chart listing punishments, the crimes that earned them, and where each of those punishments appears in the materials and translation. There is a chart listing Barbieri-Low and Yates's translations of official titles, matching them up against those of previous scholars and showing where they appear in the text. Finally, Barbieri-Low and Yates list the toponyms that appear in the translation and provide a map showing where the places are.
The real focus of Barbieri-Low and Yates's work comes in the second, thicker volume, and consists of the extensively annotated translation of all available legal materials from Zhangjiashan tomb no. 247. Barbieri-Low and Yates are not the first to translate materials from this tomb into a western language. As they note, a German translation of the “Zouyanshu” case summaries exists.Footnote 3 But publishing a complete translation of all legal texts from the tomb accomplishes something more than anyone has yet done in the west. By bringing together the entire set of materials, translating them, and using them to shine light upon each other, Barbieri-Low and Yates give the reader the best picture of the multifaceted nature of early imperial legal practice available to date in a western language.
Each section of the translation treats one section of the material, be it a set of statutes from the “Ernian lüling” 二年律令 or a case summary. Every section begins with diagrams showing where the strips comprising the content were in the bundle when excavated. There is also a prefatory discussion of the issues germane to the section. On the page facing the English translation is the Chinese text, with footnotes explaining the repairs, emendations, phonetic alternations, and other factors that condition Barbieri-Low and Yates's readings.
Translation inevitably involves decisions about things like literalness and consistency across contexts. Much depends on one's intended audience and the type of result one hopes to achieve. Barbieri-Low and Yates have opted for strictness and consistency: they stick close to the forms of the original language, and make few alternations in word choice for various contexts, especially when technical terminology is involved.
This approach brings with it a marvelous transparency and enables the reader to readily understand the relationship between the source text and the translators’ reading. Consistency furthermore enables the reader to track concepts and terminology in different contexts. The decision to favor strictness and consistency also frees the translators to delve fully into the details of their subject text and to present their reading in an extremely scrupulous fashion. The result is a translation that lays out a completely comprehensible interpretation of the original, without the easy luxury of fudging anything. This is very much a translation to be studied in conjunction with the original, not simply read, and anyone who does so stands to learn much from Barbieri-Low and Yates's immense labors.
Endnotes to each section justify, support, and explain the manifold choices that went into the translation. Sometimes these notes offer alternative understandings, if another rendering seems worthy of consideration. Elsewhere they address doubts, reject possibilities, or simply detail the process of arriving at the English rendering. The notes add to the transparency of the translation and confirm the translators’ close engagement with secondary scholarship.
Barbieri-Low and Yates have gone to great pains to compile a bibliography of relevant materials in the languages of international Sinology; I noticed Chinese, Japanese, English, German, French, Korean, and Russian. This book has the most extensive bibliography I have encountered on the topic of early imperial legal practice. The advent of computerized databases means that searches are often the most effective use of time. For advanced research, however, there is no substitute for consulting a really thorough specialist bibliography, and that is what this book provides.
Barbieri-Low and Yates's work will be of great use to anyone interested in serious research on the topics of legal history or manuscript studies in China. Specialists will inevitably find many points to ponder in the proposed translations of technical terms, just as scholars of literature may wish to reconsider the relationship of legal text to other forms of textual culture. Anyone who has worked with these or similar materials will recognize the combination of effort and erudition that went into creating this translation.
