Mapping Time in the Shiji and Hanshu Tables 表

This essay considers the achievements, contrasts, and puzzles that bind the Shiji and Hanshu Tables to one another, and to their respective authors’ historical views. Meanwhile, this essay queries the common wisdom that would reduce the Shiji and Hanshu tables to “mere sequence,” as opposed to creative historical writing, while deriding the tables as either “primitive” or “derivative.

On the antique rhetoric of friendship

Rhetorical tropes of intimate friendship (you 友) employed in the classical era in China present a stark contrast to those that survive in Latin and classical Greek sources. For this ideal form of friendship was described far less often in terms of the material and psychic advantages that can accrue from alliances outside the immediate family circle than in terms of the propensity for true friendships to foster the development of the singular traits and potentials of each partner in the intimate friendship. This essay argues, contra many social historians, that moderns cannot extract any underlying social realities from the early discussions of the theme, even if our sources allow us to see how certain social exchanges were construed, valued, and promoted by members of the governing elite

J. Michael Farmer, The Talent of Shu: Qiao Zhou and the Intellectual World of Early Medieval Sichuan. Reviewed by Michael Nylan

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