Week 6: First Emperor’s Tomb; Chu culture

Check you have completed your end of week 5 assignments by the start of class on Tue.!

IMPORTANT: PASSWORD ACCESS TO PDFs:

Username and password can be found on the Canvas Homepage

Don’t forget you can use the Pad for all your anonymous questions and concerns.

Tue. Feb. 18: Qin dynasty and the First Emperor’s tomb and terra cotta army
  • Secondary source: Rawson, Jessica. “The First Emperor’s Tomb: The Afterlife Universe”. In The First Emperor, edited by J. Portal, 114-151. Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 2007. (PDF)
          • How does the tomb of the First Emperor fit with the ideas about the afterlife we discussed in Week 4? How does it differ?
  • NOVA. “Emperor’s Ghost Army.” Produced by Ian Bremner. Directed by Lion Television Ltd. Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), 2014. Online Video. (Link)
          • Beware of the dramatizations, but overall this gives a good sense of the tomb’s important features
  • Primary source: Sima Qian, “Basic Annals of Qin”. In Records of the Grand Historian (Shiji), translated by Burton Watson. New York: Renditions-Columbia Univeristy Press, 1993. (Google doc)
          • This short extract describes the tomb of the First Emperor. What do you learn from this description?
  • Slides (Gdrive link) for exercise in class
  • Google doc with instructions for group exercise

Thu Feb. 21: The culture of Chu

  • Background: Ebrey, Patricia Buckley, and Kwang-Ching Liu. The Cambridge Illustrated History of China. Second ed. Cambridge Illustrated History. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2010. (PDF)
          • This excerpt provides some background on the diversity of states and ethnicities in the Warring States Period. That is the same period when the “Tribute of Yu” was composed, but this textbook gives you a few pages of background on the diversity of other cultural developments.
          • What are the two most important things to remember from this excerpt of the textbook, according to you?
  • Primary source: 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. (PDF)
          • This excerpt is the “Heavenly Questions”, a poem that lists questions, but does not provide the answer. It was possibly used in shamanistic rituals, but nobody knows for sure. There are a lot of references to myths and legends; the translator has provided in the notes answers where he can find them- be sure to consult them, but don’t get bogged down by the technical explanations in some of them.
          • The introduction is included as background information, skim it and take note of what you found the most interesting new piece of information you learned here.
          • What differences and/or similarities do you see between the main text of the “Heavenly Questions” and “The Tribute of Yu”?
  • Primary source: Li, Ling and Constance A. Cook, “Appendix: Translation of the Chu Silk Manuscript.” In Defining Chu: Image and Reality in Ancient China, ed. by Constance A. Cook, and John S. Major, 171-176. (PDF)
          • The Chu silk manuscript is housed in the Sackler Gallery in Washington DC, and it dates from around 300 BCE. The introduction explains a bit more about the background of how it was found, and the contents and structure of the text.
          • The text itself has some sections missing, due to damage to the original text, but we can still get a sense of what the people of Chu thought about the movements of the heavenly bodies, various deities, and what influenced one’s fate.
          • What do you find remarkable, strange or interesting about this text and its illustrations?
  • Optional extra: newspaper article on the provenance of the Chu Silk Manuscript: