The Crafts of the Hidden Hands: Scribal Culture and the Making of Texts in Early China

Abstract

ABSTRACT This dissertation examines epistemological practices and information technologies before the era of paper. Scrutinizing a series of recently unearthed bamboo, wooden, and silk manuscripts from ca. 400 BCE to 300 CE as both cultural documents and material objects, this project explores how classical texts and imperial laws were created, stored, circulated, and organized in early China across various ancient informational media. Negotiating the border between the “lowly” scribes and the “learned” scholars, this project concerns the common people and the actual practices behind the edifice of Sinitic classical knowledge. I propose that knowledge-making in ancient China was inextricably connected to the intellectual agency and executive autonomy of various, myriad, nameless scribes. I integrate methods from various historical disciplines—book history, the history of scholarship, the history of information, along with codicology, paleography, philology, and media studies—and I apply them to a series of newly unearthed archaeological sources. Based on a comprehensive survey of the existing materials, I show how ancient manuscripts are both witnesses to and products of the very processes that brought them into being; they are not merely “the earliest versions” of transmitted classics or of long-lost texts, but also physical, contingent literary objects that were created by and for their own epistemological contexts. Through four chapters (materiality, paratext, orthography, textuality), I reveal 1) the technological affordance and historical importance of various bamboo and wood manuscripts as ancient media, 2) the actual practices and scribal/scholarly methods behind the making of the written objects, 3) continuity and transformation between pre-imperial and early imperial written cultures, and 4) the traces of myriad scribes, the actual people behind the grand enterprise of the classical knowledge and imperial governance. Ultimately, I underscore the interplay between knowledge and media as pertinent to our understanding of every facet of history: from emperor to peasant, from poetry to law—everything we know about the past is contingent upon not only what was written and survived in historical sources but also how such knowledge was produced, practiced, and perpetuated.