The present article on the recently excavated neolithic painted pottery fron Ta-ti-wan, Kansu, is intended as a follow-up to a comprehensive treatment of neolithic pottery published in the BMFEA 1981 and is written in light of a re-assessment by some Chinese scholars of the relationships between the Kansu and Central Plains styles. According to the view offered here, the Miao-ti-kou style is seen in its nascent phase at Ta-ti-wan and is explained as having developed from a combination of elements from the Pan-p'o and Wei River styles. The Wei River style is perceived to derive from Ma-chia-yao, although the later stages of Ma-chia-yao may have been coeval with the florescence of Miao-ti-kou.

Scholars trained in Taiwan tend to read the oracle-bone crack notation as shang chi, “highly auspicious”; scholars in the People's Republic read the same graphs as erh kao,“two reports.” In the first part of this article, a reexamination of the evidence, which was significantly assisted by Ho Hou-hsüan's presence at Berkeley, leads me to conclude that, contrary to what I wrote in Sources of Shang History, erh kao is the correct reading. The second part of the article considers the possible meaning of various kao crack notations, how certain strategic period II inscriptions might be punctuated and translated, and how we can explain the disappearance of kao and the appearance of chi, “auspicious,” as a crack notation in period III and later; some account of the discussions at the Berkeley “Workshop on Divination and Portent Interpretation in China” is provided. Finally, I suggest that kao, “report,” may have referred to the sounds produced by the cracking, but it is clear that we need to know more about the technical aspects of crack production. The comments of five scholars on the hypotheses proposed are given at the end of the article, together with my reply.

The “Duo You ding,” discovered in 1980 in Chang'an county, Shaanxi, contains a 270-graph inscription recording a major battle between Zhou and Xianyun chariotry. In addition to presenting a complete translation of the inscription, this paper attempts to specify the date of the events narrated. The argument is developed along three lines of inquiry. First, it is shown that personal names mentioned in the inscription require that the events took place shortly after the tenth year of King Xuan's reign (i.e., 818 B.C.). Second, evidence from other bronze inscriptions is adduced to show that there was fighting between the Zhou and Xianyun in the years 816-15, suggesting that the battle described in the “Duo You ding” may have been part of this larger warfare. Third, comparison of internal calendrical notations in the inscription with other evidence for the calendrical significance of Zhou victory celebrations not only confirms the first two conclusions but also allows the date to be specified as the tenth month of 816 B.C. Finally, all of this information is correlated to give a rough outline of the Zhou-Xianyun war and to suggest some of its historical significance.

The old accepted theories concerning the direction of cultural influence between China and the Eurasian steppes during the Eastern Zhou period need to be reassessed in the light of recent archaeological discoveries. The pictorial scenes on the “Hunting Hu,” the trend toward naturalism, the long sword and scabbard slide, all credited at one time or another to northern barbarian influence, can now be shown to reflect Chinese innovations instead. A Shang priority can be recognized for the coiled feline, which was to become a leitmotif of the steppe “Animal Style” world. In the future, extreme caution is suggested when attempting to identify the ultimate cultural source for any unusual steppe or Chinese feature that seems exotic.

The hypothesis presented here is that in Classical Chinese syntax, nouns and noun phrases show signs of being, like verbs, capable of functioning as main predications. A definition of the noun and verb in Classical Chinese is offered, based on analysis of passages from pre-Han and Han texts, and it is argued that Classical Chinese can be more precisely understood by application of the principles of formal logic to the study of quantification, negation, conditionals, and pronominalization. This approach contrasts with approaches based on more traditional phonological, etymological, or philological methods.

One of the chief aims of my recently completed intellectual biography of Wang Kuo-wei (1877-1927) is to provide a critical account of the evolution of that scholar's ideas in, and the substance of his contribution to, the disciplines of philosophy, literature, and history. Because Wang Kuo-wei: An Intellectual Biography will not be published until 1986 (Harvard University Press, Harvard East Asian Series 101), I have drawn on those pages of my manuscript that bear most closely on the interests of Early China readers to provide the following research note regarding the claim of Li Chi, Fu Ssu-nien, Kuo Mo-jo, P'u-i, and others that Lo Chen-yü's major works on oracle-bone inscriptions were, in fact, plagiarized.

Since April 1982, Professor Dr. Ulrich Unger (Ostasiatisches Seminar der Universitat Münster, 4400 Münster, Prinzipalmarkt 3811, West Germany) has been circulating a series of research notes in German under the title “Hao Ku : Sinologische Rundbriefe.” The following brief English abstracts have been prepared by Lisbeth Egerod Hubbard of the Department of Oriental Languages, University of California, Berkeley. Interested scholars may obtain copies of the German originals by writing Unger directly.

In a previous article in these pages (EC 7.1981-82:2-37) I reported on the discovery in the jinben version of the Bamboo Annals of verifiable records of the planetary conjunctions of 1576 and 1059 B.C. I argued that literary and chronological evidence drawn from a variety of Zhou and Han sources indicates that the two celestial events were taken at the time to signal Heaven's conferral of legitimate right to rule on the new dynasty, first Shang and then Zhou.

If this view is correct, the discoveries not only establish the historicity, and indeed the great antiquity, of certain chronological and atronomical records in the Bamboo Annals, they also prove that a concept akin to the Zhou “Mandate of Heaven” must have existed as early as the founding of the Shang in the midsecond millennium B.C., just as implied in the Shangshu. Equally noteworthy is the finding that numerous Zhou and Han works, including those of a notoriously “soft” variety such as the apocryphal “weft” commentaries of mid-Han date, contain mythicized though recognizable accounts of the same celestial phenomena.

One of the characteristic forms of the Shih Chi taken over by Pan Ku in his Han Shu is the short passage of critical appraisal appended to each chapter. Both Pan Ku and Ssu-ma Ch'ien felt free to use these passages to express their personal opinions--sometimes directly and sometimes with subtle indirection—not only on the facts presented in the preceding chapter but also on pressing issues of their own day. Students of the Han Shu refer to these passages as tsan, after the phrase with which they are introduced in that work, tsan yüeh (“In appraisal we say”). These tsan vary in length from a few lines to several pages.

One of the most highly developed of all Pan Ku's tsan is that appended to Han Shu 94, the “Memoir on the Hsiung-nu.” It is a substantial, well-written essay and at over one thousand characters in length, by far the longest in the entire Han Shu. It reveals much about Pan Ku's historical method and also provides us with the key to his attitude toward barbarian management in his own day. Without the understanding provided by the tsan, it is not possible to appreciate fully the implications of the form and organization of the “Memoir on the Hsiung-nu” itself.

The term k'an-yü, which is seen in various texts from the Huai-nan-tzu (completed by 139 B.C.) onwards, has been subject to various attempts at explanation, and it is possible that its original meaning may have become forgotten at a comparatively early stage. It will be noted below that fromnthe third or fourth century commentators were explaining k'an-yü as referring to heaven and earth, but apparently without a clear comprehension of the term. In much more recent times, k'an-yü-chia has been used as a synonym for feng-shui-chia, meaning, specifically, experts in geomancy whose aim lay in ensuring that a site on earth would be auspicious, either for occupation or for burial.

The following letter, received on 25 March 1985, was written by Dr. Michael Friedrich and Dr. Michael Lackner. Further correspondence may be addressed to them at the Institut für Ostasienkunde – Sinologie, Universität München, Trautenwolfstrasse 3, 8000 München 40, Federal Republic of Germany.

We submit the following as a belated addendum to the debate on the concept of wu-hsing in Early China 2 (1976) and 3 (1977).

First, we should like to point out that the whole debate is obviously based on a narrowly modern conception of “element,” which only covers one tenth of the history of the term. The following passages should help to remedy this regrettable neglect of the broader and chronologically more significant meaning of the concept. They are drawn directly from original sources rather than from works such as Needham's, which has already been overworked for this purpose.