New Archival Sources from Early Imperial China

The field of early Chinese history is being transformed by a wealth of new sources, including archaeologically discovered texts. Texts written on bamboo, wood, or silk that date to early imperial period (4^th century BCE to 3^rd century CE) were unearthed since the beginning of the early twentieth century, but with a marked acceleration since the reform period. The texts have brought into much sharper focus the social, material, and political conditions that governed the production and preservation of texts in early imperial China. As such, they stand shoulder to shoulder with the oracle bones and bronze inscriptions that have shed light on an even earlier period of Chinese history (1200 – 400 BCE).

Newly discovered texts of the early imperial period go through lengthy processes in which they are preserved, photographed, transcribed, analyzed, and published. Much of that work is now coordinated at specialized centers within Chinese academic institutions. Scholars compete via short articles on the readings and meanings of characters which they largely publish in online venues.

This paper asks to what extent these new textual corpora qualify as archives. Documents retrieved from ancient wells present the most clear-cut case: they are local archives discarded into wells that paradoxically were preserved for millennia in their watery environment. Documents retrieved from the desert sands of northwestern China are of a different nature: they contain the remnants of all sorts of texts written by inhabitants of the heavily fortified frontier. Lastly, many texts were found in a funerary context, intentionally placed there as part of elaborate ego-displays, but nonetheless containing a wealth of information on how the empire was run and constituted. In their different ways, the newly discovered textual corpora raise questions about the cultural embeddedness and the historical contingency of archives tout court.