In Our Time - Sources of Early Chinese History

Episode Date: January 23, 2014

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the sources for early Chinese history. The first attempts to make a record of historical events in China date from the Shang dynasty of the second millennium BC. The earliest surviving records were inscribed on bones or tortoise shells; in later centuries, chroniclers left detailed accounts on paper or silk. In the last hundred years, archaeologists have discovered a wealth of new materials, including a cache of previously unknown texts which were found in a sealed cave on the edge of the Gobi Desert. Such sources are are shedding new light on Chinese history, although interpreting ancient sources from the period before the invention of printing presents a number of challenges.With:Roel Sterckx Joseph Needham Professor of Chinese History at the University of CambridgeTim Barrett Professor of East Asian History at SOAS, University of LondonHilde de Weerdt Professor of Chinese History at Leiden UniversityProducer: Thomas Morris.

Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio 4. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello, in 1900, a Taoist monk was exploring a cave complex on the edge of the Gobi Desert in northwest China. He discovered a sealed chamber which had laid undisturbed for ever 900 years. When it was open, this small room turned out to contain thousands

of previously unknown Chinese manuscripts. This treasure trove of material is making historians revise their view of early China. Previously, our knowledge of the country's early history is based on long-established texts, some of which are thought to be almost 3,000 years old. Many of these are official histories, written by court officials, and based on the administrative records of previous royal dynastas. These works amount to one of the most detailed historical records for any ancient civilization. But what do they record?

What are their shortcomings, and how a recent discovery altering our view of China's early history? With me to discuss the sources of early Chinese history are Ruhl Sturkes, Joseph Needam Professor of Chinese History at the University of Cambridge, Tim Barrett, former professor of East Asian history at Soas University of London, and Hilda de Viette, Professor of Chinese History at Leiden University. Rul Sturkes, can you tell us about the earliest known examples of the Chinese making a record of their significant events? The earliest written records that have, quote-unquote, historiographical value

in China would be the so-called Oracle bone inscriptions of the Shang dynasty. The Shang Apology, which was there from 1700 onwards, 1700 BC onwards, but the written record really sort of 1,200 as a starting point. These are inscriptions that are written on shoulder blades of oxen and on turtle shells, and they are, in essence, divination records

in which the Shang king consults the royal ancestors about his daily doing. What happens on those particular records is that a particular charge, a question would be put to the royal ancestors, which would be written on this particular bone. A priest would then take a hot poker crack the bone and would write down a prognostication. For example, will the king become ill this month? Then he will read the cracks on these bones and interpret this as the answer of the royal ancestors. And a verification would then be written on those bones as well. For example, this would say if the king doesn't engage in battle this year, he won't be ill.

And so it was. Now, these are records of which, God, we have about 200,000 fragments of these scattered around collections in the world. We have about 800 of them in the Cambridge University Library. They're useful in a sense that they allow us to sort of puzzle together the movements of, you know, the Shang royal family, what they did. we have divinations about topics such as childbirth, we have divinations about a toothache, but they're of course also very biased because a divine or a priest will never disagree with the Shang King,

and of course the Shang King will never disagree with the verdict or the advice of the Shang ancestors or the royal ancestors. What materials did they move on to after the shoulder blade of oxes and shells? The next stage would be bronze, and so from about 150 BC, we do increasingly see inscriptions cast in bronze vessels.

This was done mostly by the Joe people. And these inscriptions, again, would record transactions of lands, appointments, military campaigns, and so on. Ranging from inscriptions as short as 40 characters to inscriptions, I think the longest ones we have are just under 500 characters. What is interesting about those is that here and there we do find for the first time snippets, of opinion. In other words, we see that in those inscriptions a judgment is being pronounced on the previous dynasty, the Shang dynasty.

And they move to bamboo where they can get more on and then eventually to paper. That's right. How much useful information are these early sources, say the first, just let's take the first millennium. How much useful information are they giving us for your purposes of interpreting

and extrapolating? They're very useful in the sense that they obviously include a lot of factual information and that physically they can be tied to a specific place and to a specific time. They become more useful, of course, if we can corroborate what's in them with later textual evidence. And then we can obviously sort of test whether opinion in later times reflects, you know, what might have happened, you know, in the earliest days.

But they're also biased because, of course, they are being composed, put together under the patronage of, you know, a king, a court. The quote-unquote scribe or historiographer, if you like, is, you know, sort of in the service, you know, of a rule. ruler, which means that, of course, dissent, alternative interpretation of events are relatively rare, and if they are, they would be put in rather veiled and indirect ways. But what we're talking about, Hilda Burt, is already a civilisation, the Chinese civilization, which uses writing intensively, a very small circle and so on, but it's

using it intensively for recording its own existence. the first one of the earliest books is the book of documents. Can you give us a date for that and tell us why that is significant? Okay. Well, to start with the date, it's quite difficult to date that because unlike the Oracle bones or the bronzes where we can verify, we have the original, so we can use oftentimes scientific methods to date them accurately. This is far more difficult to do for texts that have come down to us

through various hands over a long period of time. and we only have the current editions, really, to work with. But by and large now, there is agreement that some of the earliest portions of the book of documents goes back to roughly the same period as the Oracle Bowens. So 1,200 BCE for some of the earliest and more likely 11th 10th century, some of the early Joe records are most likely authentic speeches. And that's what these texts mostly are. As the title itself suggests, it's a collection of documents,

documents that mostly report speeches either by the kings or by their ministers. Can you give some idea of the nature of these speeches? What are they talking about? They're talking about roughly the same topics that were covered in the Oracle bones and the bronzes. Bronzes were usually very short texts where somebody would be infested with certain responsibilities and tasks. We find the same sorts of speeches recorded in the book of documents. They also include speeches by kings that are addressed to a larger group of people in which they tell them what they think good government should be.

There are also speeches by ministers, where they give advice to the king as to what to do. And this is what we tend to see this as one of the earliest histories. And in some sense, that is the case. They're the earliest written records that have come down to us. Continuously, they record the earliest history from roughly 2,500 BCE to 500 BCE. But that was not necessarily their intent. Because their speeches, their documents, They're sort of precedence for good government.

And that's how they've been interpreted. So they're about government. Are they about going to war or the economy or the population growth or decline or plagues and that sort of stuff? We can distill information from these records that would help us understand those questions. But those were not the questions that they were working with. The question that probably was in the mind of those who were maintaining these records, either through oral tradition or written tradition, was what were the first kings, these mythological gangs who had designed civilization, how did they think about good

government? How did they treat the people? How did they deal with their ministers? And there are various models in there. There is not one answer because it covers such a large period of time. So it rests on the mythologies, they build from the mythologies and do they keep referring back to the mythological beginnings of the civilization and test themselves against it? That is indeed the case. And because the record is very thin, from that period, there's a lot of re-myphologising. That means that because it is an ideal in the far past, it is, by definition, very valuable,

but we can fill it out with whatever content we think is important, and that that happens throughout Chinese history. Another significant historical work in that early period is called Spring and Autumn Annals, which gains some of its luster by its traditional association with Confucius. Indeed. Well, to give first of all a little bit of, of an idea of what this text is about.

It is a chronicle, a very thin chronicle about what sorts of events either happened at the court of Loo, one of the states that was around the time between, say, roughly the 8th century to the 5th century. BC, B.C.E. Indeed. And it records the same sorts of events again, who comes to court, what wars does the court engaged, who is it investing with powers. It became associated with Confucius because the idea was that this was not just a record of events. The way in which these events were recorded also implied an evaluation of the events themselves, the characters that were involved, the behaviors that

were on display. So it became a guide as to how to interpret history from a moral perspective. Is there only hard evidence that he had anything whatsoever to do with it? All evidence suggests that he probably didn't have much to do with it. You're still saving your... You're still keeping a little toe in that water, are you? Didn't have much, but they might be a little... Well, I think we should respect the fact that for many Chinese, throughout history, there was a vested belief in the fact that he was the offer of it.

Yeah, but belief is in evidence, is it? And that it is belief. I would say, no, there is no evidence to suggest that. But the hard question is why would somebody who is such a sage person who's a philosopher write down a very dry record? I mean, to give you an idea that the sort of history you get there is on this day, this year, this person assassinated this other person. Sounds like a diary. It's a lot of words to make something out of it. Tim Barrett, but nevertheless the spring and autumn annals were supplemented by a number of commentaries afterwards, which were, according to all three of you, which are much more interesting.

because they bring a lot more history and judgment to bear. Cut out the more interesting and let's talk about these commentaries. Some bring history to bear, some bring judgment to bear, as it were. There are three commentaries that are early. And one at least seems to have been initially an entirely independent work, the commentary of a man named Zor, whose identity we're not clear about at all. But it seems to have been much for the sort of history

that you wish the spring and autumn annals had been. It's not focused on one particular state in China. It takes the whole Chinese world into its view, and it tells you in more detail about battles and about who was assassinating, who and to some extent why and occasionally whoever compiled

it could have been more than one person will reflect on events and say what they thought the meaning was or what this tells us. Can you give us any idea

what sort of reflect? What were the main sort of reflections? Okay. The main sort of reflections tend to be moral. such and such an event shows that if you allow women and influence in politics, then everything goes downhill. That would be an absolutely standard reflection on history that sounds a note that rings through the next few thousand years and indeed explains why for the most part

Chinese historical sources are not a good place to look for information about women. And is it true that one, as it were, dynasty after another, it's almost an obligation to rubbish the previous dynasty? Well, it's obviously a good political way to legitimate your own rule by saying that the dynasty started very well, but then it went downhill. What were the reasons given for it going downhill? Okay. What were the usual reasons? The usual reasons are the later rulers having been brought up in the palace

and not knowing about real life, took to debauchery, women had too much influence. Eventually, eunuchs had too much influence, and they then became lax in their defence of the empire. Foreigners started to kick the Chinese around. That would be a theme that certainly for the period I'm most familiar with in the first millennium AD, And that's recurring.

It's not only in China that recurs, is it? Not only. But the most important, one of the most important, the most important of these early documents is the records of the grand historian written, I think, around 100 BC. Can you tell us about, first of all, the circumstances in which that was written? Circumstances are very interesting. They are compiled by two people.

They're under the name of the... the second of them, a man called Sima Tien, who says that he was working on this vast project to synthesize all that was known about earlier Chinese history, because his father had started it and had died before he could complete it, so it was an act of deep filial piety. When you say vast, can you give us some idea? Are we talking about as long as the Bible or as long as old and New Testaments together? Okay, put it this way. It's very very... hard to estimate. I mean, there's over

half a million Chinese characters in it, but how does that equate into anything we would recognize? Well, you're the one to tell us that. Okay, I'll try. When the missionaries started to translate the Bible into Chinese in the 19th century, they did try to translate it to something approximating the very dense literary style of classical Chinese. And they found that, well, if you look at the whole of the old text,

It's certainly shorter than this one work of Chinese history. And so that was written there, and this man was trying to, his name, Sumatian. I'm glad you pronounced it. And he was the son of the man who'd started it. Can we stay there for a while, which Dux? Because it gives us something to hold on to. He's in a sense of foundation book, isn't it? It is foundation because it is the first sort of world history, or at least the first history that claims to be history of the world until the time of Samatian himself.

So he starts in the legendary time of the Yellow Emperor and then writes up to his own lifetime. And that is about 100 BC. That's about 100 BC. What's really important about this text is that the format of it will influence the formats of standard dynastic histories for centuries to come. What Samadas is he departs from simply including dry turts, records of the kind that Hilda was just talking about in the springs and autumns. And he includes five parts in this major work, which consists of 130 chapters.

One is a series of basic annals, so he still has a date-by-date account of what happens during the various reigns. He has chronological tables in which he lists various feudal laws of various regions before unification. And then interestingly, he includes treatises. And these treatises are on subjects such as the economy, on subjects such as astronomy, on subjects such as the rivers, the territory of the empire. So this is much more than historical judgment. This is an all-inclusive sort of cosmology of the world at large. And another part which is very important then is he talks about hereditary families in a biographical way and a final set of standard ingredients in a history since Samarthean would then be the biography, in other words, notable people,

because it is notable people who make history. And in Sumatian's case, these are not simply biographies of people at the court or people involved in policymaking, but he includes biographies, for example, of gestures, of clowns, of wandering nights, of what he calls harsh officials.

These are people renowned for implementing the law. And so we have, for the first time, a historiography that is formatted in such a way that the same event, the same story can reoccur either as a very dry record or as an episode as an anecdote as part of a biography.

So when you read this text you know you sometimes lack the same sense of causality that you might have when you read maybe the ancient Greeks where you have a more linear account of history but it is very cleverly put

together in such a way that it is the reader who makes the connections between the events and it's the author who remains hidden, you know, behind, you know, the factual description. There's like, like, not at the same time, but we have been, and there's Heroritus and there's Tacitus. People have foundational histories, and this was the foundational book of Chinese history. Hilda de Viette became part of a composite work known as the 24 histories. There's how soon after the grand history, the 24 history was there in development,

What's moving on then? Very soon after Samatian completed his history, the work must have started circulating. We don't really know exactly what happened immediately after he died. Can I pause you for a second? Sorry. When you say circulating, what would that mean? What is the circulation?

Who is reading? So in order for this book to have the impact that it had, it must have been published in some way, either through people making manuscript copies or through oral transmission, in some way we must be able to ascertain how did other readers get influenced by it? And for the early part, we don't really know very much about that.

But we do know that there was a copy in the family, and his grandson started circulating, that he presented it to court. Other court historians got access to it, may have shared it with others. So that very soon, already done by the first century BCE and the first century and the common era, we see continuations of this and also emendations.

We know that Samatian died in the first century BCE. his work stopped then. A range of people started continuing his work. They wrote chronicles, biographies, the source of parts that he had in his history, but they're following up, they're writing the history of the Han Dynasty. The most famous of these was the work done by the Pan family.

And it's important again that, as was the case for Samatian himself, this was a family history. It was started by his father. The same is true for the Pan family. They saw this as a work to be completed by family. of historians. The father, Pampeyau started it. He did biographies and annals. His son, Panku, more or less completed it. Interestingly, it was actually his daughter who saw it to completion

by adding the treatises and tables. The same story repeats itself. They wrote up to the first part of the Han. There was an interenium roughly between 9 to 23 by Wang Mang. Another set of historians wrote the second part of the Han Dynasty. They adopted that same form in it. It's really that format of having annals, biographies, treaties, as well as tables, that is what we understand by the dynastic history. And that was also the influence of Samantian's model. Perhaps it's worth adding that not necessarily all these four elements are present in all the histories that became part of this. But what is significant is that there were always annals and biographies. For the reason that

rule indicated, the annals can be quite dry, you can fill them out by looking at the life of the people who shaped history most in these. They're now 24, because the dynasties that follow continued in this vein. Very interestingly, it is still ongoing work.

There is still a Qing history being written commissioned by the reigning What do you mean by still today? So yes, there is a draft of the Qing history, but currently there's a commission making a final version of the Qing history. Tim Barrett, what sort of information can you, as a modern historian, get out of these records of grand historian and the subsequent histories? What you do get is a very good view of China from the centre, because although Samachan did include gestures and so forth, as rule said, that really was not.

an innovation that was sustained. That what you mainly get is what the emperor did, you get what the high court officials did, in some detail, dates of their appointments, dates when they were transferred. You get the view of the wider world from the Chinese center, who were the people on China's borders and so forth, and when they attacked China and so forth. you get in the treatises a lot of very solid information on astronomical observances,

economic information, although I'm not sure they had a concept of the economy as such. They knew about prices and distribution of goods. It's all pretty solid stuff. Not alleviated by, as I say, much to do with women, apart from, Imperial Consorts, nothing much about people are far from the centre of power. For those you have to look elsewhere,

religious groups did manage to maintain separate histories, for example. But just staying in there for a moment, well, you take this on for a moment, Tim. What are they saying about we, the Chinese? What are they saying about themselves? At this stage, we're talking about 2,000 years ago, ishe.

So what are they saying about themselves? Are they saying we are like this, we are like that, our kingdom is like this, we rule, we're this, what are they saying? Well, they do have the advantage of being the only literate peoples anywhere in their neighborhood. So they don't feel under any real pressure that we can normally detect to justify themselves to anybody else. I think there's just one passage in an early history, if it's not the first of Sumergen, it's the next one that Hilda mentioned,

where it says, if we do this, other countries will laugh at us. But that's just one place where the sense of cultural superiority slips for a moment. For the most part, they're just not concerned with justifying themselves to anybody else. As has been pointed out already, the political justification, is to say that we are better than our predecessors. But can I just persist in that a bit, Roel? Can you give us, is there any way from these records that they're saying more about their nature,

that their characteristics, are they always defining themselves against their predecessors and their ancestors and is that the sort of hermetic land in which we find ourselves? Or are they going out and saying, we are greater warriors than anybody else. We are a warrior state or whatever it is. I think one of the constant threats in these histories is that, first of all,

in order to legitimize, praise, justify or self-existence, you obviously have to point out that the people who proceeded were dysfunctional and that people in the past were making mistakes and therefore you're doing better than your predecessors. However, in the Chinese context, you can never really get rid of the past. And so in order to justify your own legitimacy and to put your own history into the context of the longer duress, you have to hark back even further down in the past, because there will be a model that you can emulate in the distant past and that you can then actually sort of adopt as your own kind of mirror, so to speak.

Before you come into it, is there a double sense here that there's, looking at the past to say they were incompetent, we're not, but they're also looking at the past and seeing inspirational figures in the past. Absolutely. I mean, the whole point of these histories is really the history is driven by personalities, by personalities

and events. That'll surprise people because they think, anyway, never mind, here, that's good. Because I think there's some statistic I got from one of your things that in Anglo-Saxon Chronicles and Development about 3,000 people are named and 33,000, 8,000 in Anglo-Saxon and 33,000 in the books that we're talking about at the moment. That's taken as a silly diversion. Hilda, can we talk about the, you wanted to come in, first of all.

I did want to come in with respect to your question about, is there something in these early records and histories about who we are? And I think part of the reason why it's perhaps less evident in the dynastic histories, That is in some ways that work had been done in the classics that we talked about at the very beginning, the book of documents in particular, where, for example, when we're talking about the geographical characteristics of what are the Chinese territories, there was the tribute of view where one of the mythological heroes goes through the various parts that supposedly were done part of the unified empire. The text was probably written in the second century, when the Chinese empire had been unified, but it projects that idea of a unified empire all the way back to the very beginning of Chinese history.

The same for good government. The idea that the ruler is there to make sure that the people are well fed and well cared for. So these sorts of ideas of who we are and defined both in terms of what the Chinese territories are in a real geographic sense, but also what our good government is like as opposed to that of others is in some ways already there. And it's something that gets built up on in later. histories. There's a book called Historical Perspectives. Can you tell us what that brings to the title? Yes. I think you're referring to Shotongli or Chitis history. The title is actually quite important. It's variously translated as either generalities of history or I would say perhaps better understood

as history understood in depth. It is the first critical assessment of what history does, how it should be written, how it had been written in Chinese history. It was worked on by Leo Chitie, who had a lot of experience. It was done in 710, completed in 710, so 8th century. By that point, a lot of histories had been written. There had been a lot of critical assessments of previous histories. Pampeyar was probably the first one. He was very critical of what Samatian had done,

even though he inherited his work. But what Leo Chitie sets out to do is to, in a variety of ways, think in an abstract manner about how history works. So he tells us about the various genres in which you can write history. the sub-genres, for example, he analyzes in a systematic way dynastic histories and their various parts. He tells us also about historical methods and techniques, how you select material on what criteria should you reject material. If it's not internally consistent,

if it's not consistent with more reliable sources, if it says things that don't make common sense, you reject it. It tells us about the writing of history. What is good writing? And he comes down actually, again, sort of against Samathian on that. who writes very verbose, we like that. Odeotidine doesn't like that. He comes down on the size of concision. Very importantly, I think also,

he tells us about the qualities of the historian. What makes a good historian, a good historian is somebody who tells the truth. And that oftentimes means he speaks truth to power, and he did that himself as well. So coming to that, Roel Sturkes, how objective, it has been mentioned once or twice around the table early on,

that they were serving, the emperor, they were serving the cult. They were there to do that. And from the earliest divinations, they told the emperor what they guessed or the emperor best wanted to know. When did this, there's a suggestion of objectivity coming in here.

How objective were there? Because we know that the greatest historian of all when he objected to what, he objected to some military maneuvers and didn't go along with the empire, wasn't poisoned and wasn't executed because he was, but he was something worse, he was castrated,

which meant he could have no progeny, which was the greatest thing. Nevertheless, he went on writing his history. So there were dangers in being a historian there. So can you tell us about the historians, what we know about them, and how objective they could be? It's a difficult question,

because objectivity, of course, assumes that, you know, we would have an archival record against which we could test, you know, the historiographical narrative. I think the best way to put this is that, you know, for some factual information, these particular histories, I mean, including, you know, the historical records are very useful. But one has to qualify, you know, a number of data in them. And we'll be very critical, for example, statistics, the use of numbers is very problematic in histories because they tend to be inflated as they are addressing, obviously, you know, the court.

They are subjective at the same time, but subjective opinion of the historian is not really there as a sustained kind of argument in the kind of eye voice. Samatian will have a little reflection at the end of every chapter, saying this is why I felt it important to talk about these people as part of this work. But what happens much more often, and actually even one of the great commentaries on the springs and autumn's, the commentary by Mr. Tsor, operates in that way, is that you have anecdotes put in. in the mouths of famous protagonists, that would impart indirect opinion or criticism, but that actually sort of not in the voice of the history, but in the voice of a third person. So in a sense, you know, the historian doesn't really see his work

as a mirror of his own opinions, but rather sees, you know, his opinions flowing in between, you know, sort of, is mirroring his putting together of data, really. And I think that in the case of the first great history to historical record, Sumatian, was very conscious that this was not the last opinion on events and that future generations might actually use his work

and disagree with him, which effectively helps. Sounds very much like medieval chronicles' manuscripts in this country, isn't it really? Very similar constraints, very similar objectives, very simpler non-objectivities. Tim Barrett, the status of writing is a history. as a profession changed at the end of the first millennium AD just before printing came

in and they were using paper already. What sort of work was produced then? Well, by this stage what you're getting at the centre is built up since the time of the

book that Hilda's just been talking about is the compilation of official history through successive stages by employees of the state in the imperial bureaucracy. In theory, it's built up from diaries that are kept of everything that is said by the emperor and everything that is said to the emperor. And those records then, at the end of each reign,

consolidated into one record and under the obituary. and under the obituary notices of the prominent ministers, there would be biographical material inserted, then a draft of a total history of the dynasty so far would accumulate all these documents. Is it a high purpose in this, or a main purpose, to teach good government, to say this is what you do to rule properly,

this is what you do to administer properly? Is it a teaching instrument? It has several functions. That is certainly one of them. In a sense, you can look at the accumulation of Chinese history as a wonderful record of policy decisions over hundreds of years that a later ruler or minister can consult on, say, a border question. How do we deal with these nomads?

given their very different lifestyle and the way they're always raiding. Then you've got wonderful record of how previous governments have dealt with this. But at the same time, a more immediate purpose might be to gloss over political mistakes. The historians are under political influence. And so, yes, as we've pointed out several times before, you're also justifying your own actions as well as providing material for future rulers. I've just

looked at the clock and we announced up this programme, these recent massive excavations have produced massive new evidence and it's time we go around to them, rule as Sturkes. Can you just briefly tell us the quantity that's been discovered and then let's talk about the influence that the quality might have

on what you have been talking about? Sure. Well, obviously modernisation in China means road building means turning the soil upside down. and in the last few decades, we've seen a staggering amount of new documents. Unlike anywhere else in the world. Unlike anywhere else in terms of quantity, I think.

I mean, we have, I mean, if you just want to have a sense of one of the latest more significant finds, that was one that was sort of dug up between 2002 and 2005 in Hunan province, where we found 37,000 bamboo slip records that date to the period of the first emperor, you know, the time of the famous emperor with the terracotta army.

in terms of volume this is thousands and thousands and thousands of bamboo slips and in terms of coverage of subjects it actually offers an entirely new picture that we have of specific, certainly, of the history of early China in that we find medical texts, we find administrative texts, we find legal texts of which there isn't a trace

in the received histories, we find even a cooking book, we find economic Mark Records financial transactions. And so what happens is that gradually, as these new texts are being unveiled, actually the last one just before Christmas, including a manual for horse veterinarians in the hand period. So as all these new materials pop up, actually, we are increasingly able to deconstruct the central narrative in the received histories and test some of those narratives against the date that we find in texts in tombs. How do you see it coming into play?

Well, there's one addition that I would make. This applies in particular to early China, where it's very important given that the transmitted record is relatively small when compared to later history, particularly when the time printing takes off. But the same would apply to 9th, 10th and 11th century history. So as one digs up sides, one also discovers tombs from later, periods that also include text, drama, contracts in particular, which help us understand more about the role of women in the household, their property holding, and so forth. So definitely,

it adds to the picture. It also allows us to perhaps get a different understanding of what the transmitted record has done. But I would add one other observation here. And that's if the history of Chinese historiography teaches us one thing. It is, that history is renewed not only by new sources, but also by new methodologies. One of the most significant innovations in Chinese historiography was indeed collation and philological approaches that allowed them to deconstruct the early history of Chinese texts way before new discoveries were made.

And we'll find ourselves actually in a similar period right now, where, for example, by using digital methods, we could start looking at these texts and also the new texts in ways that allow us to place very small parts and a much larger whole rule. And another consequence of obviously these new refines is that, you know, we have a different geographical perspective. So in Gleesian, this applies to historiography as we speak in China today,

an increasing interest in local history, in actually linking local history to the context of that greater unity called, you know, the Chinese Empire or, you know, the People's Republic of China, if you like, in which basically people are going to remine the received histories for data that they can place to certain localities. So this is quite interesting as a new development. Tim, Tim Barrett, what role is history writing traditionally played

in Chinese culture and the whole of Chinese culture? It's interesting that along with the early text that were deemed to be, as it were, classics, history was an important part of education from very early age. And it must be said that this meant all of Chinese history and outline knowledge of

dynasty after dynasty was being used even at very early stages of education obviously it was no great detail but great... I mean are they immersed in their history are they very proud of their history? Do they bring it to bear it today and so on? Is it the central part of Chinese culture?

Yes it is and certainly in a traditional education, you would simply memorize the history, so no matter whether it's half a million characters or not. And I've known friends who were taught by elderly Chinese educated in the early 20th century who could identify quotations from dynastic histories simply because they had been told to memorize them in their youth. Even today, I think, thank heavens for digitization, so we don't have to adopt that approach.

But you do find that a sense of the heritage of China's past in surveys turns out to be the one thing that gives the Chinese nation a confidence about the future. You know, we have a glorious history, no matter what the Chinese dream may be for the future, we certainly are building on a great past. Perhaps one of the discussions that illustrates at best is discussions amongst contemporary historians about the origins of Chinese civilization and the origins of Chinese writing in which one tries to push back the origins of the Chinese script closer to the Babylonians. sometimes on very, very, very, very questionable evidence, but quite clearly sort of the origin narratives are very much.

They want to be there for them. You want briefly? Yes. One of the things that I think is ongoing is what I would call the archival approach in historical writing, and that's still evident in popular Chinese historiography as well as academic. The idea that if you want to make an argument, it has to be based on the archives,

but on a critical approach to the archives. And that's there since the beginning of Somatian, repeated by Samak Wang, the second major historian and it goes all the way into the present. Well, thank you very much, Hilda Divert, Rule Starks and Tim Barrett. Next week we'll be talking about catastrophism. The idea of the earth has gone through several intervals of rapid change,

of deeply destructive nature. Thank you for listening. There are many more Radio 4 arts and discussion programs to download for free. Find these on the website at BBC.co.uk slash Radio 4.