Spring and Autumn

I am building timelines for the major states of the Spring & Autumn period as I work through the excellent new translation of the Zuozhuan from Durrant, Li, and Schaberg. I intend to continue building timelines for the other major states, including, CHU, JIN, QI, LU, QIN, and SONG.

Since Sun Tzu is traditionally thought to have supported King Helu of Wu (r. 514 - 496 BCE) during his invasion of Chu in 506 BCE, it is important to understand the trajectory of the dramatic rise and fall of the State of Wu in Chinese history. This timeline is derived from information found in the Zuozhuan. I will supplement this timeline with the verses found in both the Zuozhuan and Sima Qian's Shiji in the near future.

This is an early draft of a summary I am working on to cover all years of the Zuozhuan text (722-468 BCE) using the 2016 English translation completed by Durrant, Schaberg, and Li. The purpose of the summary is to assist students in more easily finding relevant verses, help logically piece together the fractured narratives found in the work, and to visualize patterns of interaction between the various states through a simple system of color coding for most of the major, and many of the smaller states and tribes. In the next update I will include a more detailed description of this purpose. Note that the acronym M.A. stands for "Military Actions" and identifies verses in the text referring to this topic.

Out of the 584 inter-state military actions described in the Zuozhuan, only 31 are classified formally as battles (戰). This report includes the text from the Zuozhuan describing these 31 battles. All entries from the Zuozhuan are derived from the translation by Durrant, Li, and Schaberg (2016).

”The Warring States and Monetizing Economies: An Analogical Research on the Causal Relationships between Geopolitics, Economics, and the Emergence of the Round Coinage of China” is a master’s thesis of archaeology at the University of Helsinki in Finland, published in 2018. The thesis is written in English. In the thesis it is researched why the Chinese began to use round bronze coins alongside the other types of currencies during the Eastern Zhou period (770 - c. 256 B.C.). Back in those days China was still divided into multiple independent states that fought against one another on a frequent basis. The thesis shows that the primary function of the round was to facilitate the daily and local level commerce that the subjects of these states practiced. The daily and local level commerce, in its turn, had a major impact on the creation and maintenance of the economic affluence and self-sustainability of the local economies. The local economies’ economic affluence was necessary for the state, for that impacted how large amounts of tax revenues it could collect from its subjects. The tax revenues were necessary in terms of keeping up a proper army, upon which the state’s survival depended on.
        The importance of the adoption of the round coinage in the implementation of the above-mentioned economic and societal factors is approached from three different research aspects. The first aspect pertains to the differences between the various types of currencies that were in use during the Eastern Zhou period. It is shown that the round bronze coins were in general smaller and lighter than the other commonly used bronze currency types. Additionally, the round coins circulated only within the borders of the state where they had been manufactured. It is stated that the larger size and weight as well as the international area of circulation of the other typical types of bronze currencies refers to that the round coins were adopted especially in order to bolster the affluence as well as to facilitate the commercial functions within the local economies. The second aspect relates to the inception of the Chinese round coinage. That happened during the warlike latter half of the Eastern Zhou period, known as the Warring States period (475 - 221 B.C.). It is shown that the adoption of the round coinage is closely tied to the states’ growing urgencies to gather large tax revenues to be utilized for the upkeep of the large armies. This aspect is approached by studying historical texts and modern research literature, as well as by making use of archaeological methods. The third aspect is an analogical study between the Warring States period and the Ming dynasty (1368 - 1644). It is performed in order to find new information pertaining to the functions of the round coinage during the Warring States period. The analogy is conducted between the monetary economic factors that were present during the Warring States period and the drastic monetary and other economic reforms that took place during the Ming dynasty. Additionally, the above-mentioned eras are approached by finding analogies between their sociopolitical and geopolitical factors. Analogies are also found between the changes those factors went through alongside the monetary economic reforms. The method is utilized due to the scarcity of relevant information that most of the other commonly utilized research methods can provide about the research topic.
        The aforementioned research aspects are utilized to demonstrate that in China the round coinage was adopted to fulfill the function of an article of exchange that was adequate for the functions in the daily and local commerce. It is also shown that the existence of the round coins was necessary in term of increasing the affluence and self-sustainability of the local economies. That, in its turn, was a necessary process in terms of the states being able to gather sufficient amounts of tax funds to be used for the upkeep of their armies. As the state’s survival depended on the size, quality, and competence of its army, the above-mentioned economic factors played the most decisive role when it came to the monetary economic, geopolitical, and sociopolitical policy-making during the Eastern Zhou period, being especially pertinent to the Warring States period politics. All in all, the adoption of the round coinage was one of the most focal innovations that were made during the ancient monetization process of China.

The Commentarial Transformation of the Spring and Autumn (SUNY Press, 2016).
TOC & Introduction
http://www.sunypress.edu/p-6311-the-commentarial-transformation.aspx

The Spring and Autumn is among the earliest surviving Chinese historical records, covering the period 722–479 BCE. It is a curious text: the canonical interpretation claims that it was composed by Confucius and embodies his moral judgments, but this view appears to be contradicted by the brief and dispassionate records themselves. Newell Ann Van Auken addresses this puzzling discrepancy through an examination of early interpretations of the Spring and Autumn, and uncovers a crucial missing link in two sets of commentarial remarks embedded in the Zuo Tradition. These embedded commentaries do not seek moral judgments in the Spring and Autumn, but instead interpret its records as produced by a historiographical tradition that was governed by rules related to hierarchy and ritual practice. Van Auken’s exploration of the Zuo Tradition and other early commentaries sheds light on the transformation of the Spring and Autumn from a simple, non-narrative historical record into a Confucian classic.

According to the Zuǒ zhuàn, in 607 BCE Zhào Chuān murdered Lord Líng of Jìn, but the Spring and Autumn ascribes the assassination to Zhào Dùn, senior member of the Zhào lineage and chief minister of Jìn. Remarks attributed to Confucius defend the ascription to Zhào Dùn, stating that had he fled across the border, he would have avoided blame. That Zhào Dùn was assigned responsibility for a crime he did not commit has been a source of much discussion and has been described as “false” or “inaccurate.” An overview of flights into exile (bēn 奔) in Spring and Autumn-period China indicates that although flight sometimes provided a practical mechanism for escaping difficulties, crossing the border without official sanction had substantial political and religious ramifications, including loss of position in the ancestral temple. Confucius’s remark may be understood as framing Zhào Dùn’s failure to flee across the border in terms of ritual or legal rules, implying that crossing the border would have removed him from a position of responsibility. Later versions of the story do not mention border crossing, focusing instead on moral responsibility, and their explanations of why blame was assigned to Zhào Dùn were attempts to rationalize recording practices that were based on earlier, Spring and Autumn-period norms, which no longer made sense in later times.

Van Auken, Newell Ann. “What If Zhào Dùn Had Fled? Border Crossing and Flight into Exile in Early China.” JAOS 139. 3 (2019): 569 – 90.

The mischaracterization of Sun Tzu as a metonymy for all Chinese strategic wisdom, past, present, and future, grossly distorts the text’s importance and provides unrealistic expectations of what The Art of War can reasonably offer the modern strategist. Moreover, it leads to a myopic view of current Chinese strategic thinking

Spring and Autumn Use of jí 及 and Its Interpretation in the Gōngyáng and Gǔliáng Commentaries: A note on three listing patterns in the Chūnqiū and their later interpretations
The Chūnqiū 春秋 is a chronological record of events in ancient China from 722-481 BCE, recorded in Lǔ  魯 , home state of Confucius. The records are written in formulaic language and employ grammatical, lexical and stylistic features that elevate Lǔ above other states. Traditional wisdom has it that the Chūnqiū was composed or edited by Confucius, and that special phrasing or terminology was used to convey Confucian moral judgments, and this view is espoused by the earliest complete commentaries, Gōngyáng zhuàn 公羊傳 , and Gǔliáng zhuàn 穀梁傳 . This study focuses on three grammatical patterns used to list participants from multiple states in records of meetings, covenants, or military actions, and contrasts Chūnqiū usage with later Gōngyáng and Gǔliáng interpretations. The basic, unmarked pattern simply lists agents, and is used when Lǔ is not a participant. When a Lǔ agent is involved, one of two marked patterns is used. The Lǔ agent is listed first, and followed by a coverb or preposition, jí 及 (for two or three participants)  or huì 會  (three or more participants) , after which all other participants are listed. These marked patterns apparently serve to elevate Lǔ above other states. Although Chūnqiū usage is regular and unambiguous, Gōngyáng and Gǔliáng commentaries propose a range of explanations that reveal limited or incorrect understanding of the three formulae. What gave rise to the conspicuous discrepancy between actual usage and later Gōngyáng and Gǔliáng interpretations? This study concludes that the three-way distinction so closely observed in the Chūnqiū was no longer a feature of the language of Gōngyáng or Gǔliáng, and therefore it was necessary to find an alternative explanation. Gōngyáng and Gǔliáng were influenced by the view that the Chūnqiū employed special phrasing to convey Confucian judgments, and thus they interpreted this unfamiliar and archaic grammatical pattern as imbued with moral significance.


Newell Ann Van Auken, 2014, Spring and Autumn Use of jí 及 and Its Interpretation in the Gōngyáng and Gǔliáng Commentaries. In Studies in Chinese and Sino-Tibetan Linguistics: Dialect, Phonology, Transcription and Text 漢語與漢藏語研究：方言、音韻與文獻, Language and Linguistics Monograph Series 53, ed. by Richard VanNess Simmons and Newell Ann Van Auken. Taipei: Institute of Linguistics, Academia Sinica, 429–56.

The Spring and Autumn, which covers 722 BCE- 481 BCE, is recognized to have been an official record of the ancient Chinese state of Lǔ. The present study focuses on records of killings and assassinations, and explores the question of the original function of the Spring and Autumn records. The first part of this study focuses on the records themselves, and examines the significance of the regular form of killing and assassination records. The second part explores the records in light of narratives concerning the same events in the Zuǒ zhuàn, finding a regular pattern of discrepancies between the records and the Zuǒ zhuàn accounts that illuminates certain Spring and Autumn recording principles. Killings of noblemen were typically sanctioned responses to wrongdoing, and records of such killings indicated judgment on the victim, whereas killings of rulers and heirs apparent were crimes, and by identifying a killer, the Spring and Autumn labeled him an offender.  The third part is concerned with the practices involved in recording events such as killings, especially the proposed link between reports and records, and considers the possibility that both reports and records may have served to publicize and register judgments within Lǔ and among the ancient Chinese states. This study concludes that Spring and Autumn records of killings were not merely logs of events, and although they did not express Confucian moral judgments, they nevertheless registered judgments on the recorded events, and suggests that this early function may have been the seed of what later developed into the traditional reading of the Spring and Autumn as a work that conveyed the judgments of Confucius.

Newell Ann Van Auken, 2014, Killings and Assassinations in the Spring and Autumn as Records of Judgments. Asia Major (3d series) 27.1: 1–31.

The context provided by the Zuozhuan makes it far more challenging to view The Art of War as the work of a solitary creative genius heralding a bold new conceptualization of war. Rather, it should be seen as a skillful distillation and synthesis of ideas debated widely and experimented with extensively over the preceding centuries of Chinese military history.

On the hillsides of Lauragais, autumn is nearing its end.
At the end of this sunny day, the sky takes on a whitish veil
whose dazzling pallor contrasts with the yellow-scarlet foliage
- a vegetation sometimes persistent, sometimes dispersed by winds ...

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Judgments of the Gentleman:  A new analysis of the place of junzi comments in Zuo zhuan composition history
Newell Ann Van Auken

ABSTRACT: This study examines Zuo zhuan narrative accounts that conclude with evaluations ascribed to the “Gentleman” (junzi 君子). The Zuo zhuan is one of the earliest extant Chinese works of narrative history, and in the past many scholars assumed that narrative accounts formed its core, dismissing subjective evaluations of those accounts, such as the Gentleman’s comments, as secondary, later additions. This study demonstrates that narrative account plus Gentleman judgment function together as a unit, contending that these units were likely introduced into the Zuo zhuan as such. It further proposes that the perception that the Gentleman’s concluding comments were later, independent additions was likely influenced by the practice of capping narrative accounts with quotations borrowed from other sources, and furthermore, suggests that this perception may have led compilers on occasion to insert material between the narrative accounts and the Gentleman’s evaluations of them.

KEYWORDS: Zuo zhuan; Chunqiu; commentary; historiography; textual criticism

Van Auken, Newell Ann. “Judgments of the Gentleman: A New Analysis of the Place of Junzi Comments in Zuozhuan Composition History.” MS 64, no. 2 (2016): 277-302.
Copyright agreement with the publisher prohibits authors from posting published articles online. You may have access through your home institution:
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02549948.2016.1259819
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02549948.2016.1259819
If you do not have access and would like an electronic offprint of this paper, please contact me directly and I will be happy to send you one.

This article examines the use of the word rén 人, “person” in Spring and Autumn records and considers related commentarial assertions in the Zuǒ zhuàn, Gōngyáng, and Gǔliáng. It demonstrates that in the Spring and Autumn, rén typically referred to a single unnamed leader, “someone”,  that these unidentified individuals were often lower-ranking nobility or rulers, and their identity was deliberately withheld. Leaders from the margins of the Zhōu culture sphere were typically only referred to as rén when mentioned in conjunction with rulers of Central States. These observations are consistent with claims made in the three commentarial traditions, which assert that rén was employed to withhold recognition, that it was associated with low rank, and that mention of another, higher-ranking person in the same record could affect whether an individual was called rén.  The commentaries also understood rén as signaling moral inferiority, a claim not clearly supported by the Spring and Autumn. This study concludes that although later commentaries were invested with the norms and morals of later times, and were often distorted or inaccurate, their interpretations warrant serious consideration, as language identified by the traditions as conveying judgments may indeed have encoded norms of an earlier era.

Newell Ann Van Auken. 2012. Who is a rén 人? The Use of rén in Spring and Autumn Records and Its Interpretation in the Zuǒ, Gōngyáng and Gǔliáng Commentaries. JAOS 131.4 (Dec. 2011): 555–590.
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/41440512

This is a visual chart keyed to the Zuozhuan, which displays who were the rulers of the main regional domains during each year of the text. Listed rulers include the Zhou kings, as well as rulers for the domains of Lu, Qi, Jin, Chu, Qin, and Zheng.

The Spring and Autumn (Chūnqiū) is a highly formally regular chronicle of apparently objective entries recorded in the state of Lǔ for the period from 722 to 479 (or 481) B.C.E. The present study is a formal analysis of the Spring and Autumn, showing that its records were written in adherence to strict prescriptive rules governing what types of events could be recorded and the form of those records. Entries recording the same type of event were recorded using the same form, including the same degree of specificity in date notation, style of reference to individuals, as well as main verb and sentence pattern. Other variables affecting the form of records included the rank of individuals mentioned in the record and their home state. Regular diachronic changes in form may also be identified, and their presence demonstrates that the Spring and Autumn accrued over time and was not the product of a single author or editor. Classes of records associated with events, persons, or states deemed to be of greater importance were marked by inclusion of more detail such as names or precise dates, or use of special (honorific or euphemistic) verbs. The use of formal marking to indicate the exceptional significance of classes of records apparently extended to individual records, suggesting that the value judgment associated with the class had been applied to an individual event. While the Spring and Autumn contains no explicit value judgments, formal irregularities may indeed have been used to express value judgments on the events recorded in the Spring and Autumn.

Van Auken, Newell Ann. 2010. Could “Subtle Words” Have Conveyed “Praise and Blame”? The Implications of Formal Regularity and Variation in Spring and Autumn (Chūn qiū) Records. Early China 31 (2007), 47–111.
Stable url: http://www.jstor.org/stable/23354212

Barely perceptible in the upper right corner of this photograph, the pale crescent Moon asks himself : « For long, I was the subject of attention from some inhabitants of the Earth : moving from shadow to light, at night, sometimes even on the day, they were watching me, noting the position I occupied on the celestial vault, scrutinizing me through dedicated optics ...  »

Read more : http://www.culturediff.org/english/ocsciences44.htm