Mark Csikszentmihalyi & Michael Nylan 
Technical Arts in the Han Histories 
Tables and Treatises in the Shiji and Hanshu

While cultural literacy in early China was grounded in learning the Classics, basic competence in official life was generally predicated on acquiring several forms of technical knowledge. Recent archaeological finds have brought renewed attention to the use of technical manuals and mantic techniques within a huge range of discrete contexts, pushing historians to move beyond the generalities offered by past scholarship. To explore these uses,
Technical Arts in the Han Histories delves deeply into the rarely studied ‘Treatises’ and ‘Tables’ compiled for the first two standard histories, the
Shiji (Historical Records) and
Hanshu (History of Han), important supplements to the better-known biographical chapters, and models for the inclusion of technical subjects in the twenty-three later ‘Standard Histories’ of imperial China. Indeed, for a great many aspects of life in early imperial society, they constitute our best primary sources for understanding complex realities and perceptions. The essays in this volume seek to explain how different social groups thought of, disseminated, and withheld technical knowledge relating to the body, body politic, and cosmos, in the process of detailing the preoccupations of successive courts from Qin through Eastern Han in administering the localities, the frontier zones, and their numerous subjects (at the time, roughly one-quarter of the world’s population).

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Acknowledgments



Introduction


Michael Nylan 戴梅可 and
Mark Csikszentmihalyi 齊思敏



1. Land Tenure and the Decline of Imperial Government in Eastern Han


Michael Loewe 魯惟一



2. Water Control and Policy-Making in the
Shiji and
Hanshu


Luke Habberstad 何祿凱



3. The
Hanshu Geographic Treatise on the Eastern Capital


Lee Chi-hsiang 李紀祥



4. Celestial Signs in Three Historical Treatises


Jesse J. Chapman 柴傑思



5. On
Hanshu ‘Wuxing zhi’ 五行志 and Ban Gu’s Project


Michael Nylan 戴梅可



6. Western Han Sacrifices to Taiyi


Tian Tian 田天



7. Writing Abstractly in Mathematical Texts from Early Imperial China


Karine Chemla 林力娜



8. Commentarial Episodes in Early Chinese Medicine: An Experiment in Decentering the Standard Histories


Miranda Brown 董慕達



9. Narratives of Decline and Fragmentation, and the
Hanshu Bibliographic Taxonomies of Technical Arts


Mark Csikszentmihalyi 齊思敏 and
Zheng Yifan 鄭伊凡



Contributors

Index

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Mark Csikszentmihalyi is Marjorie Meyer Eliaser Chair of International Studies and Professor of Chinese at the University of California at Berkeley. His books include
Material Virtue: Ethics and the Body in Early China.
Michael Nylan is Sather Professor of History at the University of California at Berkeley. In addition to her works devoted to Han history, she is the translator of several classics of early China, including
The Art of War, ascribed to Sunzi, and Yang Xiong’s
Exemplary Figures and
Canon of Supreme Mystery.