China’s early history before Qin Dynasty (starting from 221 B.C.) may be different from previously thought, said Chinese historians as they decode bamboo slips over 2,000 years old.
The bamboo slips were collected by alumni of China’s top Tsinghua University from overseas, and returned to China in 2008.
Preserved in water when returned, there are 2,388 pieces of bamboo slips, the longest one being 46 centimeters in length. After the initial decoding, scholars at Tsinghua University found ancient classics and history books written on the slips.
Bamboo slips were used in ancient China before paper was invented around 100 A.C. People inscribed classics or documents on bamboo, and made them into scrolls.
The bamboo slips under study were carbon dated to around 305 B.C. a period of the “Warring States”, before China’s first emperor Shi Huang united the nation.
The bamboo slips survived Shi Huang’s “book burning”, said Liu Guozhong, Professor of History at Tsinghua University.
The “book burning” happened in 213 B.C. when Shi Huang cracked down on followers of confucianism by burning a large amount of literature and burying hundreds of confucius scholars alive in an attempt to control the people’s minds.
Many confucius classics were destroyed in the disaster, including “Shangshu”, or “The Book of History”, but its contents were not lost because a Confucius scholar had memorized it and rewrote it after Shi Huang died.
Prof. Liu said at least 20 articles from “The Book of History” were discovered to be written on the bamboo slips.
“As these bamboo slips survived the ‘book burning’, they are more authoritative than those copies of the book rewritten later. What was written on the bamboo slips could help correct mistakes in the Chinese classics and history books,” said Liu.
Liu said, this has been the consensus reached by scholars who have studied the bamboo slips that were unearthed in China’s Hunan and Hubei region.
When the bamboo slips were returned to Tsinghua, they were dipped in water, disintegrated, and some were already decayed.
Scholars did preservation work first, and photographed them. In decoding them , scholars projected pictures of bamboo slips onto the wall, and pieced the pictures together just like doing a puzzle.
One article might be scattered through out different slips, so we have to firstly stitch the slips together, said Liu.
“So far, we’ve only decoded a little bit. Decoding is a gigantic project which might not be finished by this generation,” said Liu.
Tsinghua University will publish the first progress report of the decoding by the end of this year.
