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| Bamboo and Wood Slips |
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In museums of ancient history one often sees bamboo or wood strips
written with characters by the writing brush. These slips are called
jian, the earliest form of books in China.
The practice of writing on slips began probably during the Shang
Dynasty (c. 16th-11th century B. C.) and lasted till the Eastern
Han (AI) 25-220), extending over a period of 1,600 - 1,700 years.
The historical Records, the first monumental general history written
by the great historian Sima Qian (c. 110 B.C. - ?), consisting
of 520,000 characters in 130 chapters and covering a period of
3,000 years from the legendary Yellow Emperor to Emperor Wudi
of the Han, was written on slips. So were other well known works
of ancient China, including the Book of Songs (the earliest Chinese
anthology of poems and songs from 11th century to about 600 B.
C.) and Jiazhang Suanshu (Mathematics in Nine Chapters completed
in the 1st century AD, the earliest book on mathematics in the
country).
Excavations in 1972 in an ancient tomb of the Western Han Dynasty
(206 B. C. -A. D. 24) at Yinque Mountain, Linyi, Shandong Province
brought to light 4,924 bamboo slips. They turned out to be hand-written,
though incomplete, copies of two of China's earliest books on
military strategy and tactics The Art of War by Sun Zi and The
Art of War by Sun Bin. The latter had been missing for at least
1,400 years.
To write on bamboo or wood slips was no easy task. Take bamboo
slips for example. Bamboos were first cut into sections and then
into strips. These were dried by fire to be drained of the moisture
of the natural plant to prevent rotting and worm- eating in future.
The finished bamboo slips run from 20 to 70 cm in length. Judging
from those unearthed from ancient tombs, royal decrees and statutes
were written on slips 68 cm long, texts of the classics on 56-cm-long
slips, and private letters on 23 cm ones. The brush was used in
writing and, in case of mistakes, the wrong characters would be
scraped off by means of a small knife to allow the correct ones
to be filled in. The knife played the same role as the rubber
eraser today.
Writing on bamboo or wood slips was done from top to bottom,
with each line comprising from 10 to at most 40 characters. To
write a work of some length, one would need thousands of slips.
The written slips would then be bound together with strips into
a book. Some books were so heavy that they had to be carried in
carts. In some cases the blank slips were first bound into books
before they were written on.
An unofficial story tells about Dongfang Shuo (154-93 B. C.),
a courtier and humorist, who wrote a 30,000 -character memorial
to the Western Han Emperor Wudi, using more than 3,000 slips.
These had to be carried by two men to the audience hall.
Legend also extols the hard work of the First Emperor of the
Qin of 2,200 years ago by telling that he had to peruse and comment
on 60 kilograms of official documents every day. This may not
be so astonishing as at first hearing, when one recalls that the
passages were written on wood or bamboo slips.
Heavy and clumsy as they were, ancient books of bamboo and wood
played an important part in the dissemination of knowledge in
various fields. They were in circulation over a long period until
gradually replaced by paper which was invented in the Eastern
Han Dynasty (AD 23-220). |
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