Tang Center Inaugural Speech
The Importance of Early China and the Indispensable Role
Of Western Institutions in Its Studies
Li Feng
(Professor of Early Chinese History and Archaeology, Columbia University)
October 2, 2015
Dear Mr. Prime Minister, Dear Mr. Provost,
Dear Mr. Tang and Dr. Tang,
My Colleagues, and Friends,
It gives me great pleasure to deliver this keynote lecture for today’s Inaugural Ceremony of the Tang Center for Early China. I must say that it is quite challenging to give a lecture at such a high level, that I hope I will make a good and clear point within the next 30-40 minutes. I think I will begin by telling you what “Early China” is all about, and then, I will try to explain to you why the establishment of this Center to study Early China is so important.
What is Early China?
Many of you must be wondering, with the invitation to today’s inaugural ceremony in your hands: what is this “Early China”? How early is it? Or perhaps how late it is that can still be considered “Early”? These are legitimate questions. I can tell you straightforwardly that “Early China” is truly Early, starting at a time when homo erectus first appeared on the horizon of East Asia some 500,000 years ago. But “Early China” as a field of humanities combined with social science, is normally thought to start at about 10,000 years ago, when an agricultural way of life first appeared in China. By scholarly conventions, “Early China” would end at 220 AD when the Han Dynasty came to an end. In other words, Early China, refers to the long time-span before the coming of Buddhism to China, which gave new dimensions to Chinese civilization and reoriented the course of its future. By contrast, “Early China” was the time when civilizations in China emerged and evolved largely on indigenous ideas about society and politics, most importantly on a world view that was quintessentially characteristic of East Asia. Although this division was initially conceived of from the standpoint of intellectual history, it does correspond well with one major breakpoint in Chinese history – the collapse of the early Chinese Empires (Qin and Han); it also parallels roughly the change from the Ancient to the Medieval period in Western history. This was a critical period in which essential features of Chinese civilization were developed and matured, many of which still influence the world today. It was a civilization close to its root.
Early China as a Critical Part of the Broad Human Experience
In the second millennium BC, China was one of the very few places on the earth where human experience was distilled in the written records, the others being Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Greece. These are the oracle-bone inscriptions of the Shang Dynasty (1554-1046 BC), and the bronze inscriptions of the Zhou Dynasty (1045-256 BC). The Shang people invented a mature system of writing that they used to record royal divination about various aspects of social life, such as warfare, hunting, sacrifice to the ancestors and deities, agriculture, natural disasters, foreign tributes, illness, and so on. Under the Western Zhou (1045-771 BC), because of the expansion of the royal state and the rise of bureaucracy, an elite culture was developed that fully utilized the value of writing, and produced thousands of bronze vessels with long texts that detail government practice, military affairs, marriage and lineage relations, sales of property, legal procedures and settlements, and diplomacy. Further on to the 5th century BC, during the Warring States period (480-221 BC), a special intellectual class emerged in China, composed of thinkers and writers who searched for and debated ways to achieve social order and human happiness both for the rulers and for the ruled. Standing at the forefront of these thinkers are great philosophers like Confucius, Mencius, Zhuangzi, Xunzi, and Hanfeizi, whose works were widely read and much respected through the history of East Asia. These Masters created a whole world of philosophy and high intellectual culture that paralleled Classical Greece in all dimensions.
This brings up a question I would like to pose to the audience: What is the possibility of discovering a new manuscript that was written by Socrates (470-399 BC), Plato (428-348 BC), or even by any of their close disciples? I would say that there is no chance to have such nearly original manuscripts to be rediscovered from ancient Greek sites. But in China, this is not only possible; this is what has been going in the past thirty years. So, what is the feeling of excavating a tomb buried 2,300 years ago that is filled with ancient books? This was what the archaeologists saw in 1993, when a small tomb was excavated near a village called Guodian, in Hubei, which yielded 16 manuscript texts datable to the middle of 4th century BC (when Plato was still alive). Among these new manuscripts, at least 2 are clearly identified with a philosopher named Zi Si (the other 3-4 are likely to have originated from him as well), who we know was Confucius’ grandson, and teacher to Mencius’ teacher, based on the transmitted genealogy of the Confucian school. This discovery was soon followed by the identification of more than 60 new manuscript texts among the bamboo strips (some 1,200 pieces) acquired by the Shanghai Museum and published between 2001-2012, in nine huge volumes. Most of these texts were works by the first or second generation of Confucius’ disciplines, and in fact they actually talk about Confucius or cite Confucius as an authority, including even one rare text that is composed on Confucius’ comments of the Book of Poetry, the earliest anthology of poetry in the world. Soon after this discovery, however, the zeal over the Shanghai manuscripts was replaced by interest in an even newer manuscript acquired and published by the Qinghua University in Beijing between 2010 and 2014.
What about Daoism, the other great philosophical tradition in Early China? We used to have two Han Dynasty silk manuscripts of the Classic of Way and Virtue from the Mawangdui tomb, dating to the 2 century BC; but now we have three new Warring States bamboo manuscripts from Guodian, dating back to the middle of the 4th century BC. Surprisingly accompanying them was even a proto-Daoist text titled “The Great One Gives Birth to Water,” that may be even earlier and can explain the origin of the Classic of Way and Virtue. Through his analysis of the text, Professor Donald Harper at Chicago reached the following three conclusions:
- It is impossible to study Warring States philosophy in isolation from the concurrent religious ideas;
- The text is certainly relevant to identifying Warring States antecedents of the religious Daoism;
- I marvel at the fortune of being alive to see texts like this from underground!
Such is indeed the marvel that many of us have experienced in the field of Early China. And we are indeed a very lucky generation to be living in this current time and to see text that people have not seen for the past 2000 years. In fact, much of the work that has been done over the last thirty years are directly driven by such intellectual surprises.
My next question is: what will happen when/if a Geek manuscript of such an early date were discovered? Any connection to any known Greek philosopher would assure it “headlines” in Western newspapers, since so far scholars have had to access Greek philosophers only through transmitted medieval manuscripts, in addition to a few papyrus fragments of the Hellenistic or Roman times (no manuscripts of Plato or Aristotle’s works date before AD 9th century). In China, due to the special natural environment that favorably preserves such perishable materials, we have a huge inventory of literature that was produced and buried in a time when Plato (423 –347 BC) and Aristotle (384 – 322 BC) were still alive and teaching, now freshly excavated, and put in front of us. But this huge inventory of intellectual wealth remains largely unknown to Western audiences.
Highlighted above are a few examples of recent discoveries of ancient manuscripts, but on an even larger scale are the discoveries of government documents of legal and administrative nature from the broad Qin and Han Empires and before. This includes about 36,000 wooden tablets from an ancient wall in Liye in Hunan dating to 209 BC, about 3 years before the collapse of the Qin Empire. Traditionally we had nothing passed down from the Qin Empire, but we are suddenly confronted by a whole archive of material that gives detail about the administration of the empire.
On the ancient frontier of science, for instance, a text composed of 74 mathematical questions was excavated from a tomb dating to the early 2nd century BC. In the field of medicine, only two years ago, three new medical texts totaling 900 bamboo strips were excavated from a large tomb in Chengdu, Sichuan, including one that is composed of prescriptions for 60 different illnesses and even one text that detailed ways to treat sick horses, dated to 1st century BC.
All of these have become part of the overall picture of the richness of Early China, which is positioned temporally during the earliest stages of human experience, and we simply don’t see such a great intellectual wealth being excavated in other parts of the world from such an early time. The new materials offer endless opportunities for research, which will doubtlessly expand our knowledge of the human past. We need the collaboration of not only Chinese and Western scholars, but participation of both social scientists and scientists to fully maximize the contributions of these materials. This great new cultural and intellectual wealth does not just belong to China; it belongs to the whole world. For a fuller understanding of the human past, we simply cannot afford to ignore this whole world of Early China that has suddenly opened to us.
To say just one more thing before moving onto the next topic, I still remember what my former student in Arkansas told me. He was a reserved army officer who had come back from the 1st Iraq War. I remember his saying: “I don’t know anything about China, but I know Sunzi, ‘The Art of War,’ very well because it was my textbook in West Point.” “The Art of War” is the earliest military text in the world. In fact, you can easily find dozens of English translations of the Sunzi in bookstores and libraries in this country. What you might not know is that two different editions of the Sunzi were excavated in a tomb dating to the 2nd century BC. When the second volume on the tomb was published in 2012, we were just surprised to find as many as 20 other military texts from the same tomb. The Sunzi was only a corner of the iceberg of the military culture that once flourished in Early China.
Early China is also the period in which we see the largest cluster of World Heritage Sites in China, for instance, the cave site of Peking Man (1987), the Shang Dynasty capital Anyang (2006), the Terra-cotta Warriors in Xi’an (1987), and the Qin irrigation site of Dujiangyan in Sichuan (2000). I would also like mention that the ancient city site of Liangzhu will be applying for the UNESCO World Heritage Site status in the next two years. If any of you are involved in the selection process, please support it! It is really a great site and great project – as you will see tomorrow.
Formation of the Early China Field in the West
Next, I will present a short history of the field of Early China Studies as it was developed in the West. Works produced by the Jesuits in the 16th-17th centuries included translations of the most outstanding transmitted texts from Early China, such as the Analects in 1539 (Matteo Ricci) and 1687 (Philippe Couplet & Prosper Interocetta), Laozi in 1729 (Francois Noel), Book of Changes in 1734 (Gaubil), Shangshu in 1770 (Gaubil). In this way, the Jesuits can by all means be considered the first Sinologists. The translation of The Grand Historian’s Records by Edouard Chavannes (1965-1918) at the turn of the 20th century and the subsequent works by him and his students made the real foundation of Western Sinology.
Americans came late to this field of knowledge compared to early Italian and French scholars. If we want to find a starting point of American studies of Early China, it must be Herrlee G. Creel’s arrival in Beijing in 1931. His The Birth of China published 1937 provided the first American version of Early Chinese history. To get a sense about the early stage of this field in America, let me just quote a few lines from Professor David N. Keightley, the first true American scholar of oracle-bone inscriptions and a Columbia graduate (Class of 1969). Writing in 1976 in the “Editorial” of the newly founded journal of Early China, Keightley says:
The contribution that the study of early China can make to our society involves research and publication on the one hand, and teaching on the other. The first flourished, the second does not. Some of our colleagues have lost or are losing teaching positions; others cannot find them…….If modern China is to be understood in sympathy and in depth, its ancient history cannot be ignored. The study of early China has a legitimate place in modern curriculums; we must ensure that its value is appreciated.
After this, Keightley says directly in Chinese, with considerable anger:
德不孤，必有鄰
“Those who possess virtue will not dwell in isolation — they are bound to have neighbors!”
These lines were written in a time when the country was facing one of the worst recessions in her recent history when unemployment rate came to the highest point after WWII (9%). The “field” at that time was formed by only a small group of not more than 10 scholars, including Herrlee Creel (Chicago), Derk Bodde (Upenn), David Nivison (Stanford), Hans Bielenstein (Columbia), and scholars like K. C. Chang (Yale), Cho-yun Hsu (Pittsburgh); David Keightley himself (UC Berkeley) was a part of the younger generation of that time.
Since coming to this field, American scholars have kept great sensitivity and vigilance, and with the cultural and economic resources that this great country was able to provide, we have soon become the leading force of Early China Studies in the West, or probably of Sinology in general. By the year 2000, most top American research universities had established at least two, in some schools three, professorships in Early China Studies. As far as the broad discipline of history is concerned, it is fair to say that historians of China are concentrated in two large periods–Early China, and Song through the Modern period. Particularly in the past twenty years, American scholars have made great contributions to expanding the horizon of this research. In fact, the concept of “Early China” (that is to treat the study of China before 220 AD as one field) was an American invention that was re-introduced to China in the 1990s, and has now become widely accepted, along with a large number of American works translated and published in China over the past 10 years.
Columbia University has certainly participated in this trend. Columbia’s early contribution to this field is represented by the works of Burton Watson who translated numerous Classical Chinese texts, and by Hans Bielenstein’s work on the Han Dynasty (206 BC-AD 220), which is still held in high esteem by scholars in this field. In recent years, Columbia’s Early China Seminar has attracted hundreds of scholars to campus to discuss their research on various topics within the Early China field, and Columbia’s archaeological project in Shandong in China (conducted in collaboration with the Institute of Archaeology of CASS) was one of the first archaeological field projects to be carried out in China by a Western institution. The establishment of the Tang Center reaffirms Columbia’s commitment to this fast-growing field of knowledge.
I think that what I am really trying to say is that, this is not something we just started last year; the West has been on this matter for the past two hundred years. But clearly we need new initiatives and new investments in the face of a huge inventory of new materials that have suddenly became available to us.
The Indispensable Role of Western Institutions in the Study of Early China
In commenting on the founding of the Tang Center for Early China, President Lee Bollinger offered us the following lines, I quote:
“When discoveries made possible by modern archaeology open new frontiers of knowledge, we are obligated to seize the opportunity to learn all that we can.” —Lee Bollinger, March 2015.
I found these are very powerful words. Such obligation does not come from casual engagement with Early China or in any belief that such a time period is simply and “exotic” curiosity, but is deeply rooted in the indispensable responsibility of a great university like Columbia for the future of the human kind, on the basis of a serious interest in understanding its past. Therefore, what we do about Early China is not something that we do for China, but for ourselves to fulfill the indispensable role of a leading institution, situated in the intellectual soil of this most advanced quarter of human society. Today we may no longer need to do this out of sympathy, as Professor Keightley advised 30 years ago, because China has now re-emerged on the international stage as an economic giant. But we should not fail to appreciate the values of historical lessons that Early China can offer as a part of the common human experience. Social scientists can test their models of social development against new understandings of the formation of states and civilizations in China, which is now richly documented in archaeology. Scholars of art and literature can use these new sources from Early China to develop new interpretations of the early development of art forms and literature in global contexts. And scientists can find new interests in the scientific texts from Early China to study differences in scientific thoughts and traditions in comparative frameworks, thus opening up a whole range of questions about ancient mathematics, astronomy, and medicine, and so on. In all these regards, Early China poses a new frontier, and it is still largely unexplored!
Secondly, we are not only obligated to learn about Early China; in doing so, we are actually continuing a long tradition that has already been made an integral part of the Western academic life. The West presents one of the three great traditions of Sinology, the other two being the native Chinese tradition and the Japanese tradition. The study of Early China has been an international enterprise from the beginning of its rise as a modern academic discipline. In some areas, for instance, religious studies, intellectual history, historical linguistics, and history of science, the West not only produced the earliest works, but has also produced a long list of excellent scholars who came on equal terms with their Chinese or Japanese counterparts, if not necessarily more accomplished.
Thirdly, there are unique ways in which Western institutions can contribute to the knowledge of Early China. Operating in Western academia, there are a number of methodological advantages that we can bring to our studies of Early China. The first is a “Critical approach” to sources, owing to the general atmosphere of Western academia that turned overall in favor of critical views after the 1970s. This allows us to be able to remit some of the problems or traps in traditional historiography by seeing not only what the sources say, but also how the sources were formed, questions that are often overlooked by native Chinese or Japanese scholars. The second is a multidisciplinary approach that is especially helpful to the study of early China. Western scholars are in the best position to utilize new theoretical tools developed in social sciences and humanities to interpret data from Early China. By studying Early China, we can also enrich Western theories of social development. Thirdly, most Western scholars have research experience or at least some knowledge of “another civilization,” and are ready to bring comparative methods to the study of Chinese history. I have myself always believed that “the best way to understand China’s history is to study it as a part of the common human experience in a comparative framework. Only when we do so can our knowledge of China’s past, together with her distinctive cultural and intellectual inheritance, enrich our understanding of the world we live in at present.” In other words, we are obligated to put our penny in the same basket, and the result will be great for all of us!
