Fragments Workshop. Interacting with Text in Early Imperial China and Beyond.

This seminar will feature commentators Varuni Bhatia (Asian Languages & Cultures) and Roger Bagnall (ISAW).

Archaeological finds in China during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have added unprecedented depth and detail to our understanding of premodern Chinese history. This paper synthesizes recovered manuscript materials from Gansu and Inner Mongolia to argue that the soldiers in the northwest border area during the Han dynasty constituted a literate community of commoners linked to the broader textual culture of the empire. I bring in a new interpretive framework, incorporate new sources, and reconsider previously known materials to challenge common assumptions about textual culture in early China. The implications of my study undermine received understandings of power in early society. Where scholars have often viewed text and the power associated with it as the exclusive province of elites, I demonstrate that these capabilities existed throughout society.