The Crafts of the Hidden Hands: Scribal Culture and the Making of Texts in Early China

This talk explpres epistemological practices and writing technologies before the era of paper. Scrutinizing a series of recently unearthed manuscripts from ca. 400 BCE to 300 CE as both cultural documents and material objects, this project investigates how classical texts were produced, organized, edited in early China across various ancient informational media such as bamboo, wooden, and silk. Based on a comprehensive survey of the existing materials, I show how ancient manuscripts are both witnesses to and products of the very processes that brought them into being; they are not merely “the earliest versions” of transmitted classics or of long-lost texts, but also physical, contingent literary objects that were created by and for their own epistemic contexts. Ultimately, this project explores the ordinary people and the actual practices behind the creation of Sinitic classical knowledge and challenges the dichotomy between the “lowly” scribes and the “learned” scholars: the making of written knowledge in Chinese antiquity was inextricably connected to the intellectual agency and executive autonomy of myriad, nameless scribes.

This event is free and open to the public. Please RSVP here.

About the speaker:

Yunxiao Xiao is a postdoctoral fellow in the Center for East Asian Studies at Stanford University. Her scholarship explores the history of the book, reading, and information in ancient China, with a specialization in paleographic, archaeological texts dating from 400 BCE to 300 CE. She is currently work on her first monograph, The Crafts of the Hidden Hands: Scribal Culture and the Making of Texts in Early China, which examines the intricate interplays between knowledge, ancient media, and human agency. Her articles have appeared in Bamboo and Silk, Bulletin of the Jao Tsung-I Academy of Sinology, Chinese Studies in History, etc., as well as in a more public-facing interview.

She is also currently developing a second monograph, Empire of Information: Knowledge Management in Early Imperial China, which investigates how scholarly and administrative information was represented, organized, controlled, and manipulated in the Qin-Han period (221 BCE–220 CE) through the media of wood and bamboo, and how the earliest media technology in East Asia evolved and transformed.