There is much to love in this volume, and much to remark upon, even if it is passing strange to be reviewing a book that is in some sense the prelude to the more important volume, which will show and translate the Zidanku 子彈庫 materials, also known as the Chu Silk Manuscripts. As Li Ling remarks, the Zidanku discovery was important for several reasons: (a) it supplied the first corpus of late Zhanguo 趙國 writings discovered in the twentieth century; (b) these writings were not administrative documents from an archive but fully philosophical writings on silk (the only other examples of which come from the nearby early Western Han tombs at Mawangdui 馬王堆); (c) the discovery prompted the first studies of regional logographic variants from Chu 楚, which in turn spurred work on the regional scripts from Wu 吳 and Yue 越 as well; and (d) the manuscripts join text...
Skip Nav Destination
Article navigation
Book Review|
November 01 2022
The Chu Silk Manuscripts from Zidanku, Changsha (Hunan Province). Volume 1: Discovery and Transmission
Li Ling.
The Chu Silk Manuscripts from Zidanku, Changsha (Hunan Province). Volume 1: Discovery and Transmission
. Translated and edited by Lothar von Falkenhausen. Hong Kong
: Chinese University of Hong Kong
, 2020
. xxvi, 252 pp. ISBN 9789882370975 (hardcover).Journal of Chinese Literature and Culture (2022) 9 (2): 473–475.
Citation
Michael Nylan; The Chu Silk Manuscripts from Zidanku, Changsha (Hunan Province). Volume 1: Discovery and Transmission. Journal of Chinese Literature and Culture 1 November 2022; 9 (2): 473–475. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/23290048-9965710
Download citation file:
Advertisement
299
Views