The Chu Silk Manuscripts from Zidanku, Changsha (Hunan Province)

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.