Bronze, Text, and State
Creating the Epigraphic Landscape in the Emerging Chinese Empire
2019–2025
RFB06
Both the urban and natural landscapes of imperial China were renowned for a dense concentration of writing, epitomised by stone stelae, wooden signboards and monumental rock inscriptions. Much of this legacy remains visible today and continues to imbue China’s public spaces with a distinct visual character. Yet, for more than a thousand years after the invention of Chinese script, the epigraphic landscape of Chinese settlements was shaped by a different medium: artefacts made of bronze. But while the context of their use in c. 700 BCE was predominantly family-based or, at most, communal, half a millennium later they permeated public spaces as state-building instruments of an early empire. How did this transition come about, and what factors and practices stimulated it? Confronted with the dearth of transmitted sources for this formative period of Chinese history, this project took inscribed bronze artefacts as its point of departure to explore their value for understanding this major shift in communication paradigm. By triangulating epigraphic, manuscript and archaeological evidence, the project highlighted the pivotal role of legal and religious practices as arenas through which the state to inserted itself into the epigraphic landscape, offering novel insights into developments in state administration, standardisation, unification, workshop organisation, production techniques, the transmission of know-how, literacy and religious performance. The examples below illustrate the project’s principal approaches and contributions.
According to transmitted sources, the earliest public inscriptions in Early China belonged to the realms of law and ritual performance. As in ancient Rome, penal codes were allegedly cast in bronze and displayed publicly in some Chinese states during the late sixth century BCE. In the state of Qin, large stone artefacts inscribed with royal prayers for divine aid were presented to deities during public ritual performances in the fourth century BCE. Although none of these artefacts survive, this project examined the practice of inscribing law and prayers on a wide range of early written artefacts to shed new light on their ritual and sociopolitical functions. This included an in-depth study of two recently discovered bamboo-slip manuscripts held by Tsinghua University in Beijing. Produced in the state of Chu in the fourth century BCE, they offer fresh insights into manuscript production and textual transmission related to legal thought and religious practice during a period of turbulent sociopolitical change. The findings are presented in my monograph, Four Announcements and Accomplished Man, forthcoming as volume 10 of the international collaborative project Tsinghua University Warring States Bamboo Manuscripts Studies and Translations. In a complementary study, I analysed the physical features of a heavily fragmented bamboo-slip prayer manuscript unearthed in 1994 at Geling, Henan Province, and proposed a reconstruction of its original size, slip sequence and folding pattern, thereby revealing aspects of its use in ritual.
The gradual diffusion of epigraphy into wider strata of society posed new production challenges concerning the transmission of know-how, craftsmen literacy and workshop organisation. A crucial step in appreciating these challenges was determining the technique used to prepare moulds for cast bronze inscriptions, which proved even more intricate then previously assumed, as demonstrated in my article ‘How Were Bronze Inscriptions Cast in Ancient China? New Answers to Old Questions’, accompanied by further in-depth studies in Chinese. In another study, ‘From Royal Court to Ancestral Shrine: Transposition of Command Documents in Early Chinese Epigraphy’, I showed how scribes and commissioners of ritual bronze paraphernalia re-tailored manuscript sources to suit the demands of epigraphic display, arguing that this practice contributed to the growing importance of possessing physical manuscripts for the social standing of their owners.
The surge in the production of inscribed artefacts required more literate craftsmen and more efficient inscription techniques. To meet these needs, bronze workshops devised ingenious strategies, including the mechanical reproduction of writing through reusable inscribed ceramic patterns as early as the late eighth century BCE. Based on a close scrutiny of several garbled inscriptions from the eighth and seventh centuries BCE, I identified another, previously unknown strategy: to facilitate the inscription process, the craftsmen broke the text of the master copy into short passages of a few words, each written on a separate bamboo or wooden tablet. These practical aids enabled even illiterate craftsmen to copy the text onto moulds while avoiding bottlenecks in production.
To explore the text-critical implications of these findings and place them in cross-cultural perspective, I have authored the (forthcoming) conceptual essay ‘Manuscript Models in the Making of Inscriptions: Beyond the Stemmatic Approach’, and edited the volume Inscribed Copies: Manuscript Models in South, Southeast, and East Asian Epigraphy (Brill, forthcoming), arising from a workshop we organised with Peera Panarut.
A close study of the visual organisation of inscriptions cast or chiselled on mass-produced bronze weapons during the third century BCE reveals an extraordinary – and hitherto unimaginable – degree of standardisation, allowing for a reconstruction of the emergence of standards, the process of their gradual refinement and the regulations that underpinned them. This approach is exemplified in my study ‘Where There Is Unity, Order Results: Manufacturers’ Labels and the Creation of Standards in the Late Warring States Period’. Focusing on workshops in the capital of the state of Hán, the study shows how the production units maximised the efficiency of inscription process, quality control and accounting through the use of a stone inscription matrix repeatedly impressed into clay moulds for bronze spearheads and dagger-axes. Remarkably, some matrices featured replaceable stamps for names and year notations, thereby extending their service life.
The watershed moment in the shaping of Chinese epigraphic landscape occurred when the state began to employ objects stationed in public places – such as standard weights and measures – to promote its political ideology. Although this development transpired only in the late third century BCE, it followed three centuries of gradual evolution during which epigraphy was embraced by rulers and state administration to aid the dissemination of legal codes, promulgate standards, enforce accountability and facilitate accounting and supervision procedures. My Artefact of the Month essay ‘Scoop of Filial Piety?’ introduces a bronze measure cast in the state of Qin during the third century BCE that bears witness to both phases of epigraphic practice. Its handle carries a serial number and information about its place of use and volume. On the other side are two imperial edicts engraved in 221 and 209 BCE which, I argue, were primarily intended to propagate imperial ideology and enhanced the public image of the two issuing emperors.
A full list of publications, workshops, conference panels, talks and activities associated with this project is provided below. All have benefited greatly from the collaborative and cross-disciplinary spirit of the CSMC and its members. Among external collaborators, special thanks are due to colleagues at the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe (Hamburg), the Museum für Asiatische Kunst (Berlin) and the National Gallery in Prague for their enduring support.
People
Project lead: Ondřej Škrabal