Important Discoveries and Bad Mistakes

Important Discoveries and Bad Mistakes Discoveries: Pre-Xia: 2353 (Huang Di 50)–453 (Defeat of Zhi Bo) = 100 zhang; 2145–625 = 1 ji. Xia: 2029–1953 = 1 bu; use of intercalation cycle; gan-names of kings; Jie (Di Gui) is fiction. Shang: Yi Yin a villain; fraternal succession; Pan Geng a usurper; reversal of Tai Wu and Yong Ji explained; Western Zhou: 24 qijie oriented to correct Xia Zhi and Qiu Fen but Dong Zhi is 2 days late. The result: Qing Ming day was conquest day (1040). Mistakes: Post-Mu deletions of mournings should include Yi Wang but not You Wang (as I thought at first): dates of last four kings had to be corrected, and some bronze inscriptions re- dated. Guoyu in the Shiji: Error in Guwenzi Yanjiu article. At first I accepted 1045 as conquest date, then quickly changed, to 1040 eventually; Wen-Wu continuing calendar problem in the Shiji. Discoveries 1. My enabling discovery is in my HJAS article in 1983 (that the Bamboo Annals (BA) had a historical basis): This was seeing that to make a Wang Guowei analy- sis of lunar phase terms work for Western Zhou qingtongqi mingwen, I had to assume that some inscriptions used a second yuan counted from completion of mourning. (I could have done nothing with the BA, or with recovering Three Dynasties chronology, without that.) E. L. Shaughnessy accepted this at once, and added the observation that the second yuan was used only late in a reign, and normally for all dates late in a reign. (How late was of course a problem.) The king’s death was the most important event late in a reign, so this implied that a king’s reign-of-record was normally counted from the second yuan, omitting initial mourning years. I then added the suggestion that the shift to use of the post-mourning yuan was probably prompted by the death of the preceding king’s chief minister. This seems to be true for the Xuan Wang reign. The change occurs in the middle of 809, after the end of mourning for Gong He. (Here I must assume that the Shiji and Sima Qian, ignorant of the explanation of the name “Gong He interreg- num,” mixes up the names of brothers Gong He and Gong Yu.) It follows that when the unexpressed mourning years are forgotten (or edit- ed out) but the dates of the beginning and end of the dynasty are still known, Open Access. © 2018 Nivison/JAS, published by De Gruyter. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 3.0 License. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501505393-023 Discoveries 0 the remaining reigns-of-record cluster toward the beginning and end, and a reign in the middle is enlarged. For Shang this reign is the reign of Tai Wu, the main sequence king in the fifth generation, whose reign is stretched from 3 + 60 years to 75 years. The Shang story is complicated: Tai Wu and his successor Yong Ji are actually reversed. (Otherwise, deleting mournings would have bro- ken the 100-year rule for Tai Wu.) For Western Zhou, the stretched reign is that of the fifth king Mu Wang, whose reign is stretched from 2 + 37 years to 55 years. (Xia is unaffected in this way, because mourning intervals become “no king” intervals.) The post-Mu Wang story is also complicated. At some time Xuan Wang was given his full succession years 827–782; and the immediate post-Mu reigns were overwritten to avoid recognizing overlapping claims of Xiao Wang and Yi Wang to the four years 867–864: These years were given to Yi Wang, and Xiao Wang was given four extra years, pushing dates back through Gong Wang, who loses four years (2 + 16 years reduced to 12 years). 2. The Gong Wang reign (917/915–900) is noteworthy for having two bronze texts both naming Gong Wang as reigning king, one requiring 917 as yuan, the other requiring 915. (Or, if one insists on a one-yuan only theory rather than the two-yuan theory, one is pushed into rejecting Wang Guowei’s lunar quarters interpretation of lunar phase terms—the course chosen by Xu Fengxian, who thinks she has thus shown Wang’s theory to be “utterly without foundation”—a neat if unwitting demonstration of the principle that there is no pure given in experience. Everything from the beginning is theory-laden. (Xu refuses to con- sider the two-yuan theory because it is only a theory. See my review of Xu’s article in this book.) Also in the Gong Wang reign is what I think is a major discovery: The fa- mous Mao Gong ding inscription—the longest known—is a copy, not 19th century ce as Barnard wishes, but a late 9th or early 8th century BC copy, not expected to deceive anyone. This explains the late Western Zhou décor, combined with a text very similar to the Shi Hong gui, which must be dated 917. The lost or yet undiscovered original must have celebrated the appointment of Mu Wang gen- eral Mao Qian as first minister in Gong Wang 9 (909, actual first day 15 Decem- ber 910), according to the BA. It has long been noticed, with puzzlement, that the text contains no dedication to an ancestor. Examining the text, one finds that the last two columns of characters are short, only twelve instead of fifteen or sixteen zi, and the characters are stretched to fill up space. So this is where the dedication must have been, in the original. Confucius will centuries later make the point that you must not sacrifice to a spirit who doesn’t belong to you. 0 Important Discoveries and Bad Mistakes So, if he is to make any religious use of his copy, the copier had to omit the dedication. There is also the matter of the name of the person receiving the appointment, as he is addressed by the king in the text. The name used is “Fu Yin.” It ought in some way to echo the sense of Mao Qian’s personal name, and it does, for we find the phrases “de yin” 德音 “echo of virtue” and “qian de” 遷德 ”in- spired virtue” in the Shijing. (Examples: qian ming de, Ode 241.2 “inspire bright virtue”; de yin, Ode 172.3,4 “reputation for virtue.”) 3. Conquest era events are misdated in the BA, and finding out what the correct dates are requires one to show that key dates were two days late (as I will show). I guessed at a reason for this: the Chinese of the time were two days be- hind in observations that would have corrected for precession (which they had not yet grasped, but close observations would have prompted the necessary corrections). I was wrong, but was making a defensible first approximation. My mistake was apparent to me when I worked out carefully the dates in the set of 70 or more jiagu inscriptions in the late Shang Yi Fang campaign. I needed to show that there was an intercalary 9th month at the beginning of the campaign. Showing this required discovering the applicable rule for intra-year intercalation. I guessed (correctly) that the qi-center rule used in early Han would turn out to have been in use already in Shang. The rule: The middle day in a 12-“month” solar calendar counted as a qi- center, the first one in the year being the recognized winter solstice day, and the following ones determined as in the set of twenty-four 15- or 16-day solar sea- sons described in the “Tian Wen” chapter of the Huainanzi. The 16-day ones are arranged so that the spring equinox day, the summer solstice day, and the autumn equinox day are all taken to be qi-center days, and the other qi-center days set accordingly. Any lunar month that did not contain a qi-center so defined must count as intercalary. 4. What I found when I studied the calendar information in the inscriptions for the campaign against the Yi Fang (a Huai Valley “barbarian” people)—the information is rich enough to pin down the exact year, 1077 BC—is that the sus- pected intercalary month was immediately preceded by the qi-center which was the autumn equinox. And the Chinese calendar was exactly right: on that day the sun was at 180 degrees. This meant that my explanation for the two-day discrepancies could not be right. A moment of reflection told me that the trouble must lie in the intercalation system itself: The system is built on an approximate division of the solar year Discoveries 0 into fourths, to the nearest whole number. It therefore doesn’t allow for the fact that the earth moves in its non-circular orbit faster in northern hemisphere winter, when the earth is closer to the sun; the interval from autumn equinox to winter solstice is two days less than a quarter of the solar year, in our part of the 26,000-year precession cycle, and nobody knew this then (nobody: not just the ancient Chinese). Dates I had been checking were in winter and spring. The departure from (Chinese) perfection is absorbed by the time of the summer solstice; the interval from summer solstice to autumn equinox is almost exactly a fourth of the solar year, with the dates for Xia Zhi and Qiu Fen usually correct. 5. This was basic information which led to exciting discoveries in detail.

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