The culture of Chu

• Hawkes, David. The Songs of the South: An Ancient Chinese Anthology of Poems by Qu Yuan and Other Poets. Penguin Classics. Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England: Penguin Books, 1985.
  • • • • • Translations of the Songs of Chu (C. Chuci), with introductions and detailed notes.
• Cook, Constance A, and John S Major. Defining Chu : Image and Reality in Ancient China. Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2004.
  • • • • • Edited volume on the culture, religion, and history of Chu, as well as an exploration of the kingdom’s legacy on the Han dynasty and beyond.
• Johnson, Ian. “How a Chinese Manuscript Written 2,300 Years Ago Ended Up in Washington.” New York Times, June 8, 2018. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/08/world/asia/ancient-chinese-manuscript-sackler.htmlhttps://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/08/world/asia/ancient-chinese-manuscript-sackler.html.
  • • • • • The story of how the manuscript ended up in Washington DC
• Li, Ling, and Lothar von Falkenhausen. The Chu Silk Manuscripts from Zidanku, Changsha (Hunan Province). Vol. Volume One / Li Ling, Translated and Edited by Lothar Von Falkenhausen. Hong Kong: Chinese university press, 2019.
• Li, Ling. “The Zidanku Silk Manuscripts.” In Books of Fate and Popular Culture in Early China: The Daybook Manuscripts of the Warring States, Qin, and Han., edited by Harper, Donald John, and Marc Kalinowski, 249-278. Handbook of Oriental Studies = Handbuch Der Orientalistik. Section 4, China, Volume 33. Leiden: Brill, 2017.
  • • • • • This is an in-depth look at the “Chu Silk Manuscript”, its provenance (origin and transmission history), and a few other fragments that have been found in the same tomb.
• Allan, Sarah. Buried Ideas : Legends of Abdication and Ideal Government in Early Chinese Bamboo-Slip Manuscripts. Suny Series in Chinese Philosophy and Culture. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2015.
  • • • • • Lots of information on excavated texts from the Chu kingdom, incl. materials written on silk and bamboo. These finds, mainly from tombs, have thoroughly changed our outlook on early Chinese thought and philosophy.

The afterlife of the culture of Chu: Mawangdui

• The Hunan Museum website has English language descriptions of the objects found in the tombs of Mawangdui. These appear to be strongly influenced by the culture of Chu, due to its location (and by virtue of being relative far from the political center in the north, in Chang’an (modern Xi’an)