In ancient China, the preparation of food and the offering up of food as a religious sacrifice were intimately connected with models of sagehood and ideas of self-cultivation and morality. Drawing on ...received and newly excavated written sources, Roel Sterckx's book explores how this vibrant culture influenced the ways in which the early Chinese explained the workings of the human senses, and the role of sensory experience in communicating with the spirit world. The book, which begins with a survey of dietary culture from the Zhou to the Han, offers intriguing insights into the ritual preparation of food - some butchers and cooks were highly regarded and would rise to positions of influence as a result of their culinary skills - and the sacrificial ceremony itself. As a major contribution to the study of early China and to the development of philosophical thought, the book will be essential reading for students of the period, and for anyone interested in ritual and religion in the ancient world.
This volume opens a door into the rich history of animals in China. As environmental historians turn their attention to expanded chronologies of natural change, something new can be said about human ...history through animals and about the globally diverse cultural and historical dynamics that have led to perceptions of animals as wild or cultures as civilized. This innovative collection of essays spanning Chinese history reveals how relations between past and present, lived and literary reality, have been central to how information about animals and the natural world has been processed and evaluated in China. Drawing on an extensive array of primary sources, ranging from ritual texts to poetry to veterinary science, this volume explores developments in the human-animal relationship through Chinese history and the ways in which the Chinese have thought about the world with and through animals. This title is also available as Open Access.
Abstract
This paper questions the conventional scholarly view that early Chinese economic thought simply conceived of farming and commerce as mutually opposing forces. It argues that during Western ...Han times there existed a significant distance between court rhetoric and economic reality and suggests that, in reading official discourse, one should be cautious not to emphasize the economic over the political. The paper re-examines a series of well-known court memorials and concludes that few questioned the ethics of how wealth should be generated as long as political control could be maintained and the Han court was on the receiving end of it.
Early Chinese texts frequently link the origins of ritual, play, dance, and music to patterns of behavior observed in the nonhuman animal world. Moralizing readings of animal behavior proliferate in ...texts and iconography from the classical age of the Warring States and early empires (fifth century bc to first century ad), when China's masters of philosophy were drawing up the contours of their ethical theories. The animal world inspired models for human ritualized conduct that became codified in the classicist (Confucian) ritual canon. This paper examines representative examples of this and tries to identify some of the conceptual schemes used in early China to subsume the animal world into moral frameworks that were meant to guide human conduct.
This article examines the moral ambiguity that surrounded alcohol consumption in early China and the ways in which the use and abuse of alcohol served as a measure to judge the past. Rule-guided ...drinking was part of social life but, importantly, it was also a cornerstone in sacrificial ritual and therefore an important measure to please the spirit world. In assessing the past, early Chinese writers often judged rulers and their regimes based on the way they handled alcohol and ritualized drinking. Moderation or excess in drinking was seen as a key indicator in a regime's health: bad and overindulgent rulers were pitched against sages, who were portrayed as masters in the art of moderate consumption. These judgments run as a red thread through the written record, from Zhou bronze inscriptions to Han memorials.
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