Xiaomeng He Successfully Defends Her PhD Dissertation

8 November 2023

Photo: CSMC

Xiaomeng He has passed her viva voce examination, thus completing her PhD in Sinology.

Congratulations to Xiaomeng He, who defended her PhD dissertation on 8 November 2023! Her thesis on Archiving Early Chinese Law: Studies of Qin and Han Legal Manuscripts was supervised by Michael Friedrich.

The dissertation delves into the study of archiving written laws in China on the lower administrative levels in pre- and early imperial times. Little is known about concrete archiving processes on these levels, although the record-keeping and storing of legal and administrative documents have a long tradition in China.

The corpora were mostly found in ancient tombs of officials in a southern region, far away from the political centre and considered of marginal importance and thus often neglected in historical sources. The research focusses on certain aspects of filing techniques, (re-)organising schemes, and copying procedures as well as the purposes behind them. It adopts a multi-method approach combining codicology, palaeography, and philology in order to assess how the local government organised voluminous and accumulative bodies of legal knowledge, what strategies were developed, and who utilised them in archiving contexts. The project reveals that the archival traces such as ordering systems, checking marks, and filing notes embedded in legal manuscripts mirror a vivid picture of administrative work surrounded by different scribes during the lifetime of the tomb owners.

Xiaomeng He will keep being involved at UWA: Since 2022, she is the Principal Investigator of a research project on ‘Local Archives and Administrative Practices of Eastern Han China: Discarded Documents in Ancient Wells and Storage Pits’ (RFE15), which runs until 2025.