Chu Silk Manuscripts from Zidanku, Changsha (Hunan Province) Volume II

This book is the second in a two-volume monograph on the Zidanku Silk Manuscripts. Looted in 1942 from the Warring States-period Chu tomb at Zidanku, Changsha, the manuscripts date to the turn from the 4th to the 3rd centuries BCE and are the only pre-Imperial Chinese manuscripts on silk found to-date. The monograph represents the culmination of almost four decades of research by Professor Li Ling of Peking University. Volume One addresses the circumstances of the discovery of the Zidanku Silk Manuscripts and the subsequent provenance history in China and the United States.

Volume Two provides the first complete transcription of the Zidanku Silk Manuscripts in their entirety together with reproductions of the original manuscripts. The transcription is accompanied by comprehensive annotations, with full paleographic and philological analysis of the texts. An English translation of the texts has been added by Professor Donald Harper. For the first time, the Zidanku Silk Manuscripts can be read as a single corpus, constituting a unique source of information that complements and goes beyond what is known from transmitted texts. The Zidanku Silk Manuscripts reveal a range of cosmological and religious ideas, and shed new light on the formation of correlative thought in the Warring States period.

Li Ling is a distinguished Chinese historian, a towering figure in the study of classical Chinese civilization. He is Chair Professor of Humanities in the Department of Chinese Language and Literature at Peking University and has published prolifically in the areas of Chinese archaeology, paleography, classical philology, intellectual history, historical geography, the history of science and technology, as well as material culture and art history (with special emphasis on Chinese bronzes). He is especially interested in the connections between China and other parts of Eurasia in antiquity. He was named Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences (AAAS) in 2016, and received the 28th I. R. Iran’s World Book Award in 2021 and the Léon Vandermeersch Prize of Chinese Studies in 2023.

Donald Harper is the Centennial Professor of Chinese Studies at the University of Chicago. His research and publications focus on newly discovered manuscripts and their significance for the history of religion, science and technology, and medicine in early China.