Technical Arts in the Han Histories

Description

While cultural literacy in early China was grounded in learning the Classics, basic competence in official life was generally predicated on acquiring several forms of technical knowledge. Recent archaeological finds have brought renewed attention to the use of technical manuals and mantic techniques within a huge range of discrete contexts, pushing historians to move beyond the generalities offered by past scholarship. To explore these uses, Technical Arts in the Han Histories delves deeply into the rarely studied "Treatises" and "Tables" compiled for the first two standard histories, the Shiji (Historical Records) and Hanshu (History of Han), important supplements to the better-known biographical chapters, and models for the inclusion of technical subjects in the twenty-three later "Standard Histories" of imperial China. Indeed, for a great many aspects of life in early imperial society, they constitute our best primary sources for understanding complex realities and perceptions. The essays in this volume seek to explain how different social groups thought of, disseminated, and withheld technical knowledge relating to the body, body politic, and cosmos, in the process of detailing the preoccupations of successive courts from Qin through Eastern Han in administering the localities, the frontier zones, and their numerous subjects (at the time, roughly one-quarter of the world's population).
Acknowledgments

Introduction
Michael Nylan 戴梅可 and Mark Csikszentmihalyi 齊思敏

1. Land Tenure and the Decline of Imperial Government in Eastern Han
Michael Loewe 魯惟一

2. Water Control and Policy-Making in the Shiji and Hanshu
Luke Habberstad 何祿凱

3. The Hanshu Geographic Treatise on the Eastern Capital
Lee Chi-hsiang 李紀祥

4. Celestial Signs in Three Historical Treatises
Jesse J. Chapman 柴傑思

5. On Hanshu "Wuxing zhi" 五行志 and Ban Gu's Project
Michael Nylan 戴梅可

6. Western Han Sacrifices to Taiyi
Tian Tian 田天

7. Writing Abstractly in Mathematical Texts from Early Imperial China
Karine Chemla 林力娜

8. Commentarial Episodes in Early Chinese Medicine: An Experiment in Decentering the Standard Histories
Miranda Brown 董慕達

9. Narratives of Decline and Fragmentation, and the Hanshu Bibliographic Taxonomies of Technical Arts
Mark Csikszentmihalyi 齊思敏 and Zheng Yifan 鄭伊凡

Contributors
Index

Sujets

• China
• History of Asia
• History of science
• Ancient history
• Archaeology
• Ancient World

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 01 novembre 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781438485447
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 7 Mo

Extrait

Technical Arts
in the
Han Histories
SUNY series in Chinese Philosophy and Culture

Roger T. Ames, editor
Technical Arts
in the
Han Histories
Tables and Treatises in the Shiji and Hanshu
Edited by
Mark Csikszentmihalyi and Michael Nylan
Cover: Bronze oil lamp from the tomb of Liu He, the Marquis of Haihun, ca. 64 BCE. On the side is inscribed: “Changyi Eunuch Imperial Messenger [regulation] ding-style lamp, weighing six jin ten liang, made in the second year.” Photograph by Mark Csikszentmihalyi.
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2021 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY
www.sunypress.edu
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Csikszentmihalyi, Mark, editor. | Nylan, Michael, editor.
Title: Technical arts in the Han histories : tables and treatises in the Shiji and Hanshu / Mark Csikszentmihalyi and Michael Nylan.
Description: Albany : State University of New York Press, [2021] | Series: SUNY series in Chinese Philosophy and Cultyure | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: ISBN 9781438485430 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781438485447 (ebook)
Further information is available at the Library of Congress.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
To Michael Loewe
by unanimous vote of the contributors, with deep respect
Tamdiu discendum est quemadmodum vivas, quamdiu vivas. — Seneca, Letters As long as you live, keep learning how to live.
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Michael Nylan 戴梅可 and Mark Csikszentmihalyi 齊思敏
1 Land Tenure and the Decline of Imperial Government in Eastern Han
Michael Loewe 魯惟一
2 Water Control and Policy-Making in the Shiji and Hanshu
Luke Habberstad 何祿凱
3 The Hanshu Geographic Treatise on the Eastern Capital
Lee Chi-hsiang 李紀祥
4 Celestial Signs in Three Historical Treatises
Jesse J. Chapman 柴傑思
5 On Hanshu “Wuxing zhi” 五行志 and Ban Gu’s Project
Michael Nylan 戴梅可
6 Western Han Sacrifices to Taiyi
Tian Tian 田天
7 Writing Abstractly in Mathematical Texts from Early Imperial China
Karine Chemla 林力娜
8 Commentarial Episodes in Early Chinese Medicine: An Experiment in Decentering the Standard Histories
Miranda Brown 董慕達
9 Narratives of Decline and Fragmentation, and the Hanshu Bibliographic Taxonomies of Technical Arts
Mark Csikszentmihalyi 齊思敏 and Zheng Yifan 鄭伊凡
Contributors
Index
Acknowledgments
In writing a book, especially an edited book, one always incurs many debts, and it is a pleasure to acknowledge them in due time. This book came into being to address some of the needs of our graduate students and best undergraduates to show them how scholars young and old tackle the technical issues, partly by doing and partly by watching other experts in the field discuss their own research projects. We editors were aware that the fields of Classics and the history of science were doing innovative work on the technical arts in antiquity, pushing the boundaries in ways that remained largely closed to those of us working in Early China studies, so we decided to take the plunge.
Of course, we must begin with the chief dedication of the volume, supported unanimously by the contributors, all of whom were canvassed through emails along with other routine inquiries, until it became clear that we had to stop emailing the probable object of the dedication himself. For each and every person save Michael Loewe put Michael at the top of the list of people we wanted to see honored for contributions to the field of Han history in general, and the technical arts in particular. As it would take far too long to list Michael’s virtues as a scholar, colleague, teacher, and human being, suffice it to say that his Chinese name says it all: he is 鲁惟一 , “the only one,” that is, “peerless.”
All the contributors would like to thank Nathan Sivin, who commented on all the papers in various stages, sometimes more than once. Originally, the editors had planned to invite Professor Sivin to contribute his own chapter for the volume, which would describe where the history of the technical arts has been and is likely going in Chinese studies. Then, because of circumstances beyond everyone’s control (but common, alas, in academia), a few chapters did not appear on time for the volume, at which point it seemed unfair to ask Professor Sivin to plough through every chapter all over again and produce his own in short order. That said, a number of contributors consulted him via email about their chapters, and we have predictably benefited from those exchanges, we believe.
As a student, Csikszentmihalyi’s mentors in the technical arts were Sally Church, Robin Yates, Lothar von Falkenhausen, and Albert Dien. Since coming to Berkeley, he has been fortunate to learn from his students, Michael Nylan, and her students.
Nylan’s work on the technical arts began with study of the Taixuan jing under Nathan Sivin, proceeded with Paul Serruys and linguistics, and took an unexpected turn with early optics, with medicine and with manuscript culture, rooted always in history undergirded by archaeology. In matters archaeological, she has often benefitted from the superb guidance of Robert Bagley, her teacher, friend, and colleague, as well as from Michael Loewe.
A great many contributors commented on each other’s papers (as, for example, Luke Habberstad and Jesse Chapman read for Michael Nylan and each other). This has been an incredibly collegial bunch of people to work with: mostly on time with deadlines, endlessly patient in response to queries large and small, alert to the ways that they would like the papers to articulate with one another, despite the separate fields they largely represent. Besides this, we would like to thank the librarians at UC-Berkeley (Jianye He, Peter Zhou, Bruce Williams, and Deborah Rudolph especially) for their tireless work on behalf of faculty and students. Charles Aylmer, in the Cambridge University Library, hunted down materials for Michael Loewe.
At UC-Berkeley, the editors moreover had the help and support of the Taiwan–United States Alliance (TUSA), which funded our initial meeting for potential contributors to plan such a volume late in 2014. We owe thanks to the Institute for East Asian Studies (then under Martin Backstrom’s leadership). Our respective departments (East Asian Languages and Cultures; History) gave the editors additional material and logistical support for the initial meeting with contributors. Finally, the Marjorie Meyer Eliaser Chair in International Studies provided support for the project at several key junctures.
Editors and contributors would like to thank Christopher Ahn for his encouragement early on with the project. We owe thanks to James Peltz and Roger T. Ames for their unfailing kindness and clear directions while shepherding the co-editors through the volume’s final stages. We were fortunate enough to have the invaluable editorial assist from Vanessa Davies, an Egyptologist, whose steady intelligence, good cheer, and superb sense of the English language relieved the editors of considerable stress and gave us a “good read” on how best to convey some technical points to non-specialists. As Nylan was concurrently dealing with a less capable copy editor at another press, she was supremely mindful of what all academics owe to good editors at every stage of the complex process. The editors would also like to proffer warm thanks to Diane Ganeles at SUNY Press, and to Laura Tendler, for help during the final editing process.
Introduction
M ICHAEL N YLAN 戴梅可 AND M ARK C SIKSZENTMIHALYI 齊思敏
A good singer makes people follow his notes. A skilled builder inspires others to take up his work. Fitting the wheel of a cart requires a trained apprentice. Zhou’s perfections were the artifact of Zhougong’s efforts.
夫善歌者使人續其聲。 善作者使人紹其功。 推 / 椎車之蟬攫 , 負子之教也。 周道之成 , 周公之力也。
Yantie lun , juan 2, pian 7
For more than a decade now, we two editors of this volume have been teaching our students at the University of California at Berkeley about the more technical aspects of the Shiji and Hanshu , not to mention how those Han histories relate in turn to the fifth-century Hou Hanshu and Liu Zhiji’s assessment in the early eighth century, in an attempt to correlate our readings in the standard histories with the growing body of archaeological evidence at hand (much of it not yet adequately tabulated, let alone parsed). Too often, essa