letters and epistolary culture in early medieval china

7/30/2019 Letters and Epistolary Culture in Early Medieval China

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Letters &Epistolary Culture


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Letters and Epistolary Culture

in Early Medieval China


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Antje Richter

A China Program Book

u n i v e r s i t y o f wa s h i n g t o n p r e s s Seattle and London


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this book is made possible by a collaborative grant

from the andrew w. mellon foundation.

This book was supported in part by the ChinaStudies Program, a division o the Henry M. JacksonSchool o International Studies at the University oWashington.

2013 by the University o Washington Press1716151413 54321

All rights reserved. No part o this publication

may be reproduced or transmitted in any orm orby any means, electronic or mechanical, includingphotocopy, recording, or any inormation storage orretrieval system, without permission in writing romthe publisher.

University o Washington PressPO Box 50096, Seattle, WA 98145, USAwww.washington.edu/uwpress

Library o Congress Cataloging-in-Publication DataRichter, Antje.Letters and epistolary culture in early medieval China

/ Antje Richter.pages cmA China Program book.Includes bibliographical reerences and index.ISBN 978-0-295-99277-8 (hardback : alk. paper)ISBN 978-0-295-99278-5 (pbk. : alk. paper)1. Letter writing, Chinese. 2. ChineselettersHistory and criticism. 3. Chineseliterature220589History and criticism. I. Title.PL2400.R532013808.60951dc23 2012046994

The paper used in this publication is acid-ree andmeets the minimum requirements o AmericanNational Standard or Inormation SciencesPermanence o Paper or Printed Library Materials,ANSI Z39.481984.


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Whats your guess? Can I still get a letter by Sunday? It should be

possible. But its crazy, this passion or letters. Isnt a single onesucient? Isnt knowing once sucient? Certainly, its sucient,

but nevertheless one leans ar back and drinks in the letters and

is aware o nothing but that one doesnt want to stop drinking.

f r a n z k a f k a , letter to Milena Jesensk, May 29, 1920


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c o n t e n t s

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction 3

Epistolary Research in Chinese Studies and Beyond 5

Textual Sources o Early Medieval Chinese Letter Writing 7

The Organization o This Book 10

Remarks on Translation 12

part one

Materials and Concepts o Letter Writing

1. Materiality and Terminology 17

The Spread o Paper 17

Calligraphy and Letter Writing 23

Writers and Transporters o Letters 26

Terminology 34

The Genre o Personal Letters 37

2. Letters and Literary Thought 44

Cao Pis Disquisitions on Literature on Letters as a Genre 45

The Absence o Letters in Lu Jis Rhapsody on Literature 48

Liu Xies The Literary Mind and the Carving

o Dragons on Letters 49

Letters in Xiao Tongs Selections o Refned Literature 63

Letters about Literary Thought 64


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Contentsviii

part two

Epistolary Conventions and Literary Individuality

3. Structures and Phrases 75Letter Opening 76

Letter Body 93

Letter Closing 101

Terms o Address and Sel-Designation 110

4. Topoi 117

Lamenting Separation 119

Letters as Substitutes or Face-to-Face Conversation 127The Limits o Writing and Language 134

5. Normativity and Authenticity 139

Letter-Writing Guides 139

Expressing Individuality within the Bounds o Convention 145

Conclusion 151

Notes 155Bibliography 197

Glossary-Index 219


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a c k n o w l e d g m e n t s

This book has been in the making or more than a decade, but thedebts I have accumulated while reading and writing about personal

letters rom early medieval China go back even urther. My awareness

o the genre and its literary and intellectual riches was raised during

my studies in Munich (198998), where letters rst turned up in Wol-

gang Bauers seminars on Chinese autobiographical literature. This

teacher remains an enduring inspiration or me, well beyond Chinese

Studies and well beyond his untimely death. It was several years later,

ater I had moved on to Kiel (19982006), that I started to ocus myown research on Chinese epistolary literature and culture. Since then,

I have beneted rom countless conversations and correspondences

with riends, colleagues, and students during my time in Kiel and

Freiburg in Germany, and, ater I came to the United States in 2007,

in Boulder, Colorado. Among those who provided assistance, inspi-

ration, criticism, and perspective, I would like to mention, in loose

chronological order, Thomas Jansen, Franz Xaver Peintinger, Sabine

Dabringhaus, Roland Winkler, Christian Soel, Anja and ChristophZuncke, Jerey Grossman, Gudula Linck, Christoph Harbsmeier,

Robert Gassmann, Paul W. Kroll, Terry Kleeman, David R. Knech-

tges, Martin Kern, R. Joe Cutter, Ronald C. Egan, Robert E. Har-

rist, Annette Kieser, Nathan Sivin, Ute Engelhardt, Michael Nylan,

Y. Edmund Lien, Enno Giele, Lai Guolong, Zhang Junmin, Chen

Sougchang, and Joe P. McDermott. I am also truly appreciative o all

the valuable comments rom colleagues on the many occasions that I

presented portions o this book at various conerences since 2002. I

regret that I cannot name all o them. I owe special thanks to the two

readers or the University o Washington Press, Tian Xiaoei and Cyn-

thia Chennault, as well as to Matthew Wells, Kay Duy, and Charles


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Acknowledgmentsx

Chace, who read the manuscript in various earlier versions and gen-

erously shared their perceptive comments and suggestions with me.

Without them, this would be an even more fawed book. O course, I

am responsible or all the imperections that remain.I am grateul to the University o Colorado at Boulder or two

semesters o leave in 2009 and 2010, which were a great help in

bringing this project to completion. I would also like to acknowledge

nancial support or the preparation o the manuscript rom the Cen-

ter or Asian Studies at the University o Colorado at Boulder. My

thanks moreover go to the editors o the Journal o the American

Oriental Society in which an earlier version o the third part o this

books chapter 2 was published in 2007.I also want to express my sincere gratitude to the team at the Uni-

versity o Washington Press and the Modern Language Initiative, who

guided me gently and most eectively through the process o turning

the manuscript into a book, in particular, Lorri Hagman, Tim Zim-

mermann, Laura Iwasaki, and Tim Roberts.

Finally, I thank Matthias, whose letters and messages I enjoy more

than anybody elsesalthough not as much as his company.


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3

Introduction

Voices a myriad o years old are presented,

responses rom a thousand o miles away are incited.

l i u x i e , The Literary Mind and the Carving o Dragons (Wenxin diaolong)

Having grown up in the 1960s and 1970s, in a country where tele-

phones were rare, I learned to consider mail as something that may

hold great importance or my lie. I vividly recall letters I received

longed or or arriving out o the blueas well as letters I wrote

mysel, whether eortlessly or taking great pains. Unlike the e-mails

and text messages that have come to replace this orm o written

communication since the early 1990s, letters are rst o all mate-

rial objects o a distinctive character and with a distinctive trans-

portation history, having passed through many hands. We may old

and unold them, fatten them and turn them over; we may crumple

them or tear them up but also bundle and keep them. Messages that

reach us electronically travel with great speed across great distances,

although a certain characteristic time lag remains. Easy enough

to read and answer, they are cumbersome to collect and store. Tosearch through them in a le ater a ew years have passed is much

less satisying than to rummage through stacks o envelopes and

sheets o rustling paper in dierent textures, sizes, and colors, bear-

ing dierent handwritings in all kinds o tints, along with sketches,

scrawls, stickers, and stamps. I they are old enough, letters may

be aded, smell unny, and easily all apart, stimulating our memo-

ries and imaginations through all the senses. So even i, in a way,

we keep on writing letters and receiving mail, probably withgreater requency than ever beore in human history, it is not sur-

prising that we preer to call these electronic and largely demateri-

alized pieces o writing texts and messages, thus emphasizing


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Introduction4

a dierence between two orms o written communication that we

obviously eel to be signicant.

This most recent media change and its cultural implications have

been studied extensively during the past two decades. Depending ona scholars general outlook, the appraisals o this transormation di-

er widely: it may be either characterized dismissively as a cultural

decline or embraced as a promising new development.1 Whatever

stand one may take on this issue, it is beyond doubt that the decits o

the new means o written communicationespecially the loss o the

material and sensual dimension o a letter but also the neglect o tra-

ditional epistolary conventionsare counterbalanced by considerable

gains. Among these are the enhanced inormality and dialogicity owritten communication, which appear chiefy to be unctions o the

greater speed o transmission, as well as the development o a whole

new world o words, phrases, complex symbols (such as emoticons),

and distinct conventions that are peculiar to e-mails, text messages,

and other orms o electronic communication.2

This media change is part o a longer process that has led to the

almost complete abandonment o letters, one o the earliest-known

types o written communication. In the West, the process started

in the second hal o the nineteenth century, when the typewriter,

the telegraph, and the telephone dealt severe blows to the use o

handwriting and all written communication.3 From the beginning,

this change triggered not only general concern about the supposed

decline o letter writing as a key constituent o any societys com-

municative practice and literary culture but also scholarly interest o

a rather nostalgic turn, oten triggered by the particular materiality

o traditional letters, which carry a broad spectrum o personal and

historical marks, rom the individuality o the handwriting to thevarious traces let by postal transmission. Just as letters themselves

live on a handul o topoilamenting separation, concern or the

recipient, letters as insucient substitutes or ace-to-ace conversa-

tion, and so orthso apparently does Western epistolary research,

whose most conspicuous common topos is the decline o letter writ-

ing. The end o epistolary culture has long been predicted and has

been rediscovered and rearmed time and again. One o the ear-

liest such voices in Europe was that o Georg Steinhausen who in1889 already assumed the end o epistolary history. In 1962, The-

odor W. Adorno declared, in a preace to a letter collection origi-

nally edited by Walter Benjamin in 1936, that history had passed its


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Introduction 5

judgment on letters as a literary orm and that those who can still

practice it possess archaic abilities.4 However, the denial o this

variety o cultural pessimism is another common topos o epistolary

research. In 1990, when a special edition o the journal World Lit-erature Today pursued the question in The Letter: A Dying Art?

most authors readily admitted to a decline in letter writing but, at

the same time, were reluctant to speak o its demise, pointing out

that we are witnessing a magnicent autumnal fowering o letter

writing and suspecting that perhaps, who knows, one day it may

rise again rom the tomb.5 The list o autumn fowers is impres-

sive indeed, given the corpora o letters that came to light during

the past century. Some o them are gigantic in size, or instance,the 250,000 preserved letters and postcards by George Bernhard

Shaw alone.6 Others are ascinating because o their literary powers

and startling rankness, such as the letters o Franz Kaka, Virginia

Wool, and many other prominent writers. Outside o the literary

world, a crucial development in terms o epistolary research was the

discovery, exploration, and publication o enormous collections o

personal letters that were never meant to be publishedsuch as war

letters, immigrants letters, womens lettersand yet have come to

be appreciated as invaluable primary sources o history, language,

and the culture o everyday lie.7

epistolary research in chinese studiesand beyond

In the West, research on epistolary cultures o the ancient and medi-

eval world has been a thriving eld or more than a century. Com-

prehensive and detailed studies on letter writing in Mesopotamia,Egypt, Greece, Rome, and medieval Europe have illuminated the un-

damental questions o written communication in dierent societies

and have made translations o letters rom these cultures available to

a wide audience.8 In addition to these general studies, a great number

o works have been published that are dedicated to specialized areas

o investigation, rom epistolary subgenres, letter-writing manuals,

specic ormal eatures o letters, letters written by specic groups o

people (such as women or merchants) to letters by individual authorsand epistolary ction.9 Letter writing in the early modern and modern

periods has received even more scholarly attention, resulting in a rich

body o secondary literature that provides ascinating insights into a


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Introduction6

broad range o elds, rom history to literature to sociology, to name

but a ew.10

The same cannot be said o Chinese studies. In Sinology, scholars

are not only a long way rom the abundance and diversity o special-ized research, as it is known rom the West and Near East, but also

lack basic studies. Western secondary literature on personal letter

writing or Chinas entire imperial period (221bce1911ce) con-

sists o no more than three unpublished dissertations,11 a textbook on

late imperial epistolary language,12 and about three dozen articles,13

(much less than has been written on the letters o Cicero or Pliny

alone) and is utterly insucient to do justice to more than two millen-

nia o vibrant Chinese letter writing. Translations o Chinese lettersinto Western languages are also scarce. One o the most prolic trans-

lators o premodern Chinese letters remains Erwin von Zach (1872

1942), whose translations rom Selections o Refned Literature (Wen

xuan) into German include many ocial and personal letters.14 So ar

there is only one publication that presents a sizable selection o Chi-

nese epistolary literature through the ages, the 1994 edition o the

Hong Kong journal Renditions, a collection o about orty amous

letters in excellent English translations along with short commentar-

ies. All in all, Chinese epistolary literature and culture are seriously

underrepresented areas in Chinese studies that denitely deserve to be

made visible, both within Chinese studies and or a wider audience in

the humanities and beyond.

The reason or the lack o critical interest in the epistolary and the

marginality o the genre is certainly not that letters were irrelevant in

this part o the world. The signicance o correspondence in China,

whether ocial or personal, is beyond doubt. Written communica-

tion inormed administrative processes, social and business networks,amily relations, and personal riendships. Thousands o letters o all

kinds became part o the transmitted corpus o Chinese literature.

The neglect o letters and the epistolary sphere in China is due toa

multitude o reasons, among which the absence o two major schol-

arly motivations appears to be oremost. First, letters play no remark-

able role in the Conucian canon, that is to say, there is no Chinese

equivalent to the epistles in the New Testament that were so decisive

in instigating and sustaining research on letter writing in the West.15

I the Conucian canon contained texts in letter orm comparable to

the Epistles o Paul, the genre would have had a very dierent his-

tory in China. Second, scholarly nostalgia or a vanishing mode o


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Introduction 7

communication, a key motivator or research today, is only a recent

phenomenon in China. In the West, concern about the supposed

decline o letter writing emerged at the end o the nineteenth century.

Owing to the peculiarities o the Chinese script (which rendered thetypewriter impractical) and to the sparse distribution o the telephone

in China or the greater part o the twentieth century, personal let-

ter writing was very much alive and taken or granted until about the

mid-1990s, when it abruptly started to be supplanted by new media

such as e-mail, cellular phones, and text messaging.

Since the mid-1990s, interest in Chinese letters has been growing

steadily, in both China and the West. A look at the prestigious Cam-

bridge History o China conrms this rise in interest. While the earlyvolumes o the 1980s do not even list letters, postal service, or

similar subjects in their indexes, the latest volume, published in 1999,

eatures a substantial chapter on the transportation o ocial docu-

ments and private letters via courier and postal systems.16 A number

o ongoing studies pursue promising approaches that either ocus on

letters or take epistolary material into account.17 In China itsel, the

recent growth in epistolary awareness is not only noticeable on the art

market, where handwritten letters can command exorbitant prices; it

has also stimulated moderate scholarly interest.18 The rst and so ar

only book-length survey o Chinese epistolary literature in Chinese

came out in 1999,19 and articles about individual literary letters or

correspondences are published occasionally.20 However, in China, let-

ters are still rarely perceived as a genre that needs and deserves to be

treated on its own in order to realize its potential. Letters are utterly

marginal, and i they are mentioned in more general literary scholar-

ship at all, they are usually noted only because they constitute part o

the literary oeuvre o an author or on account o their subject matter,but there is no refection on the epistolary character o these texts. 21

textual sources of early medievalchinese letter writing

The majority o ancient and medieval Chinese letters have come down

to us because they were considered to be o historical or literary value

and were thus incorporated into other works: standard histories,encyclopedias, anthologies, collections o biographies, and so orth.

We have little inormation about the particulars o this process, espe-

cially its beginning. It is not known, or instance, how personal letters


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Introduction8

achieved wider circulation and thus could be included in a standard

history or any other received text. Did their authors copy them beore

they sent them o? Or did their recipients keep and disseminate them?

Had these letters been published in any other way beore they wereincorporated in a received text?

Certainly letters were subjected to editorial interventions, mostly

abridgments and embellishments, in order to adapt them to the

requirements o their new literary environments.22 While it is impos-

sible to accurately assess the extent o literary enhancement the edi-

tors deemed appropriate, the pruning they eected is clearly evident,

since it concerned mainly the largely ormulaic rame o a letter.

Unortunately, it is precisely the rame that usually contains the mostinteresting inormation about both the particular context o a letter

and contemporaneous epistolary practice, as some o the ew appar-

ently intact letters demonstrate. In beginning and concluding letters,

authors usually mentioned the external and internal circumstances o

their writing, sending, receiving, and reading letters and made reer-

ence to the tangible and emotional importance that these pieces o

personal communication held or them. However, most editors obvi-

ously regarded the rame to be o little signicance compared to the

main text that all too oten bears no trace o originally having been

part o a letter but reads like a treatise instead. O the more than

two thousand extant letters and letter ragments rom early medi-

eval China, only about 10 percent seem to have been received in their

entirety, with prescript and postscript intact; about 30 percent retain

other parts o the epistolary rame, such as the proem or the epilogue.

This means that in the process o reducing them to their perceived

relevant core, most early medieval letters were practically de-epis-

tolarized and turned into much less genre-specic vignettes. Thiseditorial practice continues even today, despite a general awareness o

the importance o genre or the appropriate understanding o a text.23

A second route o transmission, particularly relevant or early

medieval China, is the collection and subsequent reproduction o let-

ters that were cherished as masterpieces o calligraphy. Since these

letters were transmitted not or literary or historical reasons but

because o their visual appeal, they usually dier in content and char-

acter. Calligraphic letters generally are short, casual, and intimateand seem to represent the more quotidian o written communication.

Although calligraphic letters may initially have been transmitted in

their entirety and not deliberately modied, many o them eventually


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Introduction 9

also suered losses, either rom material damage o the writing sup-

port or rom textual damage o various kindsnot to mention the

problem o orgery. Textual damage could be caused by misrepresen-

tations during the process o transcription or by copying practices,which occasionally interered with the original layout o the source

document, produced only excerpts o a given letter, or combined orig-

inally unrelated texts into one piece.24

Finally, personal letters were and continue to be archaeologically

recovered, albeit on a smaller scale than ocial communication,

which is clearly prevalent among the manuscripts rom early and early

medieval China.25 However, the amount and content o these manu-

scripts are hard to assess, as only the smallest portion o them hasbeen published or is otherwise accessible.26

So even i an ample number o early medieval Chinese letters are

available or scholarly investigation today, we need to be aware o the

problematic nature o this corpus. A minor problem lies in the orm

this corpus takes, consisting mostly o ragmentary texts scattered

all over medieval literature.27 Not only must we accept that many o

the transmitted texts are products o editing, but the composition o

this corpus is also unlikely to be representative o letter writing at the

time, which must have been much more extensive and diverse than

what is known today. Although similar caveats need to be considered

or other literary genres as well, the discrepancy in quantity and qual-

ity between the letters that were written at the time and those that

have survived until today is much larger than in the case o other liter-

ary genres, such as poetry. The main reason or this dierence is that

no other genre was practiced by such a large part o society, including

authors who were untrained amateurs, lacked any kind o literary tal-

ent, and oten enough were not even literate.The philological diculties involved in reading and understand-

ing early medieval letters pose urther challenges. These diculties,

although shared by other genres o the period, are magnied in episto-

lary writings by the problem o contextualization that complicates the

study o any letter. This problem oten remains unresolved, because

it is impossible to reconstruct the original communicative ramework

along with the specic knowledge that allowed the intended reader,

be it the addressee or a wider audience, to understand a letter withall its implications.28 Some o the most eminent Chinese scholars

have remarked upon the complex diculties o reading early medi-

eval letters, among them Luo Zhenyu (18661940) with reerence to


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Introduction10

archaeologically retrieved letters29 and Qian Zhongshu (19101999),

who, writing about the letters o Wang Xizhi, pointed out that the cor-

respondents shared a universe o discourse (yuyan tiandi), which

easily eludes and excludes the noninitiated reader: Trivial amilymatters, scattered words between relatives and riends, casual jot-

tings, rough and careless, but the recipients understood.30 The old-

est personal letter that was transmitted as a calligraphy, today kept in

the Palace Museum in Beijing, illustrates the diculties o decipher-

ing early medieval letters very well. Although Letter on recovering

rom illness (Pingu tie) by Lu Ji (261303) received a air amount

o scholarly attention, not only as a revered example o early medi-

eval calligraphy, but also because it was written by one o the greatestpoets o Chinese history, there is little agreement about the content

o this brie and humble letter (g. I.1). Even transcriptions dier

considerably, by more than a third o the characters, let alone inter-

pretations.31 The challenges posed by letters such as Lu Jis Letter

on recovering rom illness undeniably complicate the exploration o

early medieval epistolary literature and culture, but these challenges

are more than compensated by the potential o this rich and promis-

ing eld.

the organization of this book

Given these problems and the limited general knowledge about the

conventions o letter writing in early medieval China, it is not surpris-

ing that only a tiny raction o the extant personal letters rom this

period have been translated or studied so ar.32 This is a great loss,

because we have an abundance o transmitted sources that promise

ascinating insights into personal communicative culture and the his-torical, literary, and intellectual developments related to or expressed

in letters. This book addresses this unsatisactory situation by pro-

viding an introduction to the epistolary literature and culture o early

medieval China. It aims to make the social practice and the existing

textual specimens o personal Chinese letter writing rom this period

ully visible or the rst time, both or the various branches o Chi-

nese studies and or the already well-established epistolary research in

other ancient and modern cultureswhich has, by the way, provideddecisive methodological inspirations or this project. This study also

intends to provide an impetus or urther research and publications

on letter writing in other periods o Chinese history and, in the long


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Introduction 11

run, to encourage a more condent and consistent use o letters as his-

torical and literary sources.While the earliest evidence o diplomatic correspondence in China

dates rom the seventh century bce and personal letter writing

appears in the third century bce, it was only in the Han dynasty (206

bce220ce) that letters began to be viewed as constituting a liter-

ary genre. Especially the letters written during the last decades o the

Han oreshadow the impressive fourishing o letter writing in the

our centuries that ollowed. The early medieval period (ca. 200ca.

600), with its heightened sense o the individuality o authors, art-ists, and members o the elite in general, eatures a mature epistolary

literature and thus lends itsel particularly well to an introduction o

Chinese letter writing. My exploration o the eld, which includes

Figure I.1. Lu Ji (261303), Letter on recovering rom illness (Pingu tie),written in ink on paper, 23.7 x 20.6 cm, Palace Museum Beijing.


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Introduction12

translations, analyses, and appraisals o a large number o representa-

tive letters, covers the ollowing areas.

Part I, Materials and Concepts o Letter Writing, explores basic

circumstances that dened epistolary culture in early medieval China.Chapter 1, Materiality and Terminology, is dedicated to aspects

o material culture that shaped letter writing and letter terminology,

concluding with a denition o the personal letter in early medieval

China, the main subject matter o this book. Chapter 2, Letters and

Literary Thought, discusses the critical and theoretical approach to

letters in Chinese literary history as expressed in a broad spectrum o

early medieval texts about literary thought, including letters that con-

tain sel-refective statements about the genre.Part II, Epistolary Conventions and Literary Individuality,

describes the peculiar language o letters with respect to vocabu-

lary and textual patterns as well as the correlation between topical-

ity and creativity. Chapter 3, Structures and Phrases, introduces

the most common elements o the letter ormula as well as specic

orms o address and sel-designation used in letter writing. Chapter

4, Topoi, expands the exploration o the epistolary language and

communicative intentions o personal letters by investigating princi-

pal topoi. Chapter 5, Normativity and Authenticity, continues this

line o inquiry, exploring the relationship between epistolary norma-

tivity and clich, on the one hand, and authenticity and literary origi-

nality, on the other, which provides an occasion to recapitulate the

major topics addressed earlier in the book.

remarks on translation

All translations are my own, unless otherwise noted. Letters and othersource materials translated in this book are usually ollowed by their

Chinese text. I a text is composed in parallel prose, it is presented in

tabular orm, occasionally with added spaces, to emphasize the par-

allel structure. Letters are usually reerred to by the titles ound in

Yan Kejuns Complete Collection o Prose Literature rom the Three

Dynasties o Remote Antiquity, the Qin, Han, Three Kingdoms, and

Six Dynasties (Quan shanggu Sandai Qin Han Sanguo Liuchao wen).

In my translations o these titles, recipients generally appear with theiramily names and personal names, even i the traditional letter titles

use other designations such as ocial positions (which may be anach-

ronistic). Since the Chinese titles o letters preserved primarily or


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Introduction 13

their calligraphic value rather than or their text are oten taken ran-

domly rom the rst line o a letter, these titles (most o which are o

letters by Wang Xizhi) will be let untranslated. Early medieval litera-

ture is teeming with allusions, although it is oten dicult to decidewhether a phrase is intended as a specic allusion to or even a quo-

tation rom earlier literature or whether it has already become part

o the general vocabulary o educated writers at the time. In order to

reveal as many intertextual reerences as possible in the translations,

potential allusions are indicated by quotation marks, even when it

is probable that they were just part o the common stock o literary

phrases. I highlight the vast variety o words that are translated as

letter by adding transcriptions o the respective Chinese wordsalmost two dozen in this book alonein square brackets (e.g., shu or

bizha), sometimes along with a urther explanation (e.g., gao, note

or ming, directive).

letters and epistolary culture in early medieval china

Documents