Riddle of Bamboo Annals

Last month Gang and I went to visit our old housemate, David Nivison, Professor of Chinese Studies in Stanford University. We lived in his house for about ten months until Gang ended his term at Stanford. I helped him translate his latest work on the Bamboo Annals (BA), a book written on bamboos thousands of years ago and the research on which provoked huge controversy in Chinese academy, and finished most of the work before I left the bay area. During the last two years, new evidence was found regarding to ancient calenders and military records in Shang and Zhou Dynasty, and induced further revisions to his original draft. David explained to me about his updates in the book, and told me he had difficulties in finding people to translate the updates. I offered temporary help until his assistant is back to work on account of all the joys I've had when translating this book two years ago.

It was the most challenging translation I've ever done. David's book, The Riddle of Bamboo Annals summarized his main discoveries on BA since 1979, when he started to look into the history of BA, recoverd the full picture of BA, explained the differences in stories recorded in BA and other annals, finding out the true date of historical memorabilia, and more importantly, revealed some unknown political systems and culture in ancient China from that. To find out the reasons behind the differences, he studied astronomical records, calendars, sacrifice ceremonies, paleography and even ancient literature, searching for the true meanings of BA's records and historical changes that had happened to it. As a result, I had to understand all these to translate his book. I had new learning experiences everyday. We talked about fantastic legends recorded in oracles on shells or inscriptions on bronze wares, and how different calendars pointed to the same day for sacrifice after magic astronomical phenomenon happened. It was fascinating.

When I started to translate BA, I came to understand why David got obsessed with it. It recorded many stories before Zhou Dynasty which are quite different (sometimes even opposite) from general knowledge. Especially, it has many contradictory records to Shih Chi, the first comprehensive biographical history by chronology written in Han Dynasty, hundreds of years after BA was written if we adopt David's conclusion on the completing time of BA. Most of my knowledge about history is from Shih Chi and other historic records kept after Shih Chi's completion, therefore it was pretty shocking reading BA. For example, there is a less-than-50-word story about Yiyin, a famous chancellor in early Shang Dynasty who was said to change the king from a fatuous ruler to a virtuous one and flourished the country in most historical records. However, BA said Yiyin expelled the king who slunk back seven years later and killed Yiyin. If BA is right, then why later histories ignored its records and made up a different story; and if Shih Chi is right, then why BA lied? Assumptions are raised to address the controversy, but more solid evidence remains to be found in the future. In any case, no one knows what really happened more than three thousand years ago, but it's good to have different records and become suspicious of historical stories we've read.

Our posterity may get better ideas about our lives than us to our ancestors given the rapid development of technologies, but they may lack the joy of uncovering historical myths from a few relics and rotten pieces. Bold imagination and rigorous proof make archaeology so beautiful.

 (Source: http://goo.gl/DfnKp ; Picture unrelated to the text)