Lcttcrs & pistolary Culturc

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Letters and Epistolary Culture
in Early Medieval China
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Letters and Epistolary Culture
in Early Medieval China
Antje Richter
A China Program Book
u ni v e r s i t y of wa s hi ngt on 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 China
Studies Program, a division of the Henry M. Jackson
School of International Studies at the University of
Washington.

2013 by the University of Washington Press
17 16 15 14 13 5 4 3 2 1
All rights reserved. No part of this publication
may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or
by any means, electronic or mechanical, including
photocopy, recording, or any information storage or
retrieval system, without permission in writing from
the publisher.
University of Washington Press
PO Box 50096, Seattle, WA 98145, USA
www.washington.edu/uwpress
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Richter, Antje.
Letters and epistolary culture in early medieval China
/ Antje Richter.
pages cm
A China Program book.
Includes bibliographical references 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. Chinese
lettersHistory and criticism. 3. Chinese
literature220589History and criticism. I. Title.
PL2400.R53 2013
808.60951dc23 2012046994
The paper used in this publication is acid-free and
meets the minimum requirements of American
National Standard for Information Sciences
Permanence of Paper for 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 for letters. Isnt a single one
suffcient? Isnt knowing once suffcient? Certainly, its suffcient,
but nevertheless one leans far back and drinks in the letters and
is aware of nothing but that one doesnt want to stop drinking.
franz kafka, letter to Milena Jesensk, May 29, 1920
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con t e n t s
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction 3
Epistolary Research in Chinese Studies and Beyond 5
Textual Sources of Early Medieval Chinese Letter Writing 7
The Organization of This Book 10
Remarks on Translation 12
part one
Materials and Concepts of Letter Writing
1. Materiality and Terminology 17
The Spread of Paper 17
Calligraphy and Letter Writing 23
Writers and Transporters of Letters 26
Terminology 34
The Genre of Personal Letters 37
2. Letters and Literary Thought 44
Cao Pis Disquisitions on Literature on Letters as a Genre 45
The Absence of Letters in Lu Jis Rhapsody on Literature 48
Liu Xies The Literary Mind and the Carving
of Dragons on Letters 49
Letters in Xiao Tongs Selections of Refned Literature 63
Letters about Literary Thought 64
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Contents viii
part two
Epistolary Conventions and Literary Individuality
3. Structures and Phrases 75
Letter Opening 76
Letter Body 93
Letter Closing 101
Terms of Address and Self-Designation 110
4. Topoi 117
Lamenting Separation 119
Letters as Substitutes for Face-to-Face Conversation 127
The Limits of Writing and Language 134
5. Normativity and Authenticity 139
Letter-Writing Guides 139
Expressing Individuality within the Bounds of Convention 145
Conclusion 151
Notes 155
Bibliography 197
Glossary-Index 219
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ack nowl e dgme n t s
This book has been in the making for more than a decade, but the
debts I have accumulated while reading and writing about personal
letters from early medieval China go back even further. My awareness
of the genre and its literary and intellectual riches was raised during
my studies in Munich (198998), where letters frst turned up in Wolf-
gang Bauers seminars on Chinese autobiographical literature. This
teacher remains an enduring inspiration for me, well beyond Chinese
Studies and well beyond his untimely death. It was several years later,
after I had moved on to Kiel (19982006), that I started to focus my
own research on Chinese epistolary literature and culture. Since then,
I have benefted from countless conversations and correspondences
with friends, colleagues, and students during my time in Kiel and
Freiburg in Germany, and, after 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 Soffel, Anja and Christoph
Zuncke, Jeffrey 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 of all
the valuable comments from colleagues on the many occasions that I
presented portions of this book at various conferences since 2002. I
regret that I cannot name all of them. I owe special thanks to the two
readers for the University of Washington Press, Tian Xiaofei and Cyn-
thia Chennault, as well as to Matthew Wells, Kay Duffy, and Charles
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Acknowledgments x
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. Of course, I
am responsible for all the imperfections that remain.
I am grateful to the University of Colorado at Boulder for two
semesters of leave in 2009 and 2010, which were a great help in
bringing this project to completion. I would also like to acknowledge
fnancial support for the preparation of the manuscript from the Cen-
ter for Asian Studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder. My
thanks moreover go to the editors of the Journal of the American
Oriental Society in which an earlier version of the third part of this
books chapter 2 was published in 2007.
I also want to express my sincere gratitude to the team at the Uni-
versity of Washington Press and the Modern Language Initiative, who
guided me gently and most effectively through the process of 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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Letters and Epistolary Culture
in Early Medieval China
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3
Introduction
Voices a myriad of years old are presented,
responses from a thousand of miles away are incited.
l i u x i e , The Literary Mind and the Carving of 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 for my life. I vividly recall letters I received
longed for or arriving out of the blueas well as letters I wrote
myself, whether effortlessly or taking great pains. Unlike the e-mails
and text messages that have come to replace this form of written
communication since the early 1990s, letters are frst of all mate-
rial objects of a distinctive character and with a distinctive trans-
portation history, having passed through many hands. We may fold
and unfold 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. To
search through them in a fle after a few years have passed is much
less satisfying than to rummage through stacks of envelopes and
sheets of rustling paper in different textures, sizes, and colors, bear-
ing different handwritings in all kinds of tints, along with sketches,
scrawls, stickers, and stamps. If they are old enough, letters may
be faded, smell funny, and easily fall apart, stimulating our memo-
ries and imaginations through all the senses. So even if, in a way,
we keep on writing letters and receiving mail, probably with
greater frequency than ever before in human history, it is not sur-
prising that we prefer to call these electronic and largely demateri-
alized pieces of writing texts and messages, thus emphasizing
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Introduction 4
a difference between two forms of written communication that we
obviously feel to be signifcant.
This most recent media change and its cultural implications have
been studied extensively during the past two decades. Depending on
a scholars general outlook, the appraisals of this transformation dif-
fer 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 defcits of
the new means of written communicationespecially the loss of the
material and sensual dimension of a letter but also the neglect of tra-
ditional epistolary conventionsare counterbalanced by considerable
gains. Among these are the enhanced informality and dialogicity of
written communication, which appear chiefy to be functions of the
greater speed of transmission, as well as the development of a whole
new world of words, phrases, complex symbols (such as emoticons),
and distinct conventions that are peculiar to e-mails, text messages,
and other forms of electronic communication.
2

This media change is part of a longer process that has led to the
almost complete abandonment of letters, one of the earliest-known
types of written communication. In the West, the process started
in the second half of the nineteenth century, when the typewriter,
the telegraph, and the telephone dealt severe blows to the use of
handwriting and all written communication.
3
From the beginning,
this change triggered not only general concern about the supposed
decline of letter writing as a key constituent of any societys com-
municative practice and literary culture but also scholarly interest of
a rather nostalgic turn, often triggered by the particular materiality
of traditional letters, which carry a broad spectrum of personal and
historical marks, from the individuality of the handwriting to the
various traces left by postal transmission. Just as letters themselves
live on a handful of topoilamenting separation, concern for the
recipient, letters as insuffcient substitutes for face-to-face conversa-
tion, and so forthso apparently does Western epistolary research,
whose most conspicuous common topos is the decline of letter writ-
ing. The end of epistolary culture has long been predicted and has
been rediscovered and reaffrmed time and again. One of the ear-
liest such voices in Europe was that of Georg Steinhausen who in
1889 already assumed the end of epistolary history. In 1962, The-
odor W. Adorno declared, in a preface 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 form and that those who can still
practice it possess archaic abilities.
4
However, the denial of this
variety of cultural pessimism is another common topos of epistolary
research. In 1990, when a special edition of 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 of its demise, pointing out
that we are witnessing a magnifcent autumnal fowering of letter
writing and suspecting that perhaps, who knows, one day it may
rise again from the tomb.
5
The list of autumn fowers is impres-
sive indeed, given the corpora of letters that came to light during
the past century. Some of them are gigantic in size, for instance,
the 250,000 preserved letters and postcards by George Bernhard
Shaw alone.
6
Others are fascinating because of their literary powers
and startling frankness, such as the letters of Franz Kafka, Virginia
Woolf, and many other prominent writers. Outside of the literary
world, a crucial development in terms of epistolary research was the
discovery, exploration, and publication of enormous collections of
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 of history, language,
and the culture of everyday life.
7

epistolary research in chinese studies
and beyond
In the West, research on epistolary cultures of the ancient and medi-
eval world has been a thriving feld for more than a century. Com-
prehensive and detailed studies on letter writing in Mesopotamia,
Egypt, Greece, Rome, and medieval Europe have illuminated the fun-
damental questions of written communication in different societies
and have made translations of letters from these cultures available to
a wide audience.
8
In addition to these general studies, a great number
of works have been published that are dedicated to specialized areas
of investigation, from epistolary subgenres, letter-writing manuals,
specifc formal features of letters, letters written by specifc groups of
people (such as women or merchants) to letters by individual authors
and epistolary fction.
9
Letter writing in the early modern and modern
periods has received even more scholarly attention, resulting in a rich
body of secondary literature that provides fascinating insights into a
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Introduction 6
broad range of felds, from history to literature to sociology, to name
but a few.
10

The same cannot be said of Chinese studies. In Sinology, scholars
are not only a long way from the abundance and diversity of special-
ized research, as it is known from the West and Near East, but also
lack basic studies. Western secondary literature on personal letter
writing for Chinas entire imperial period (221 bce1911 ce) con-
sists of 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 of Cicero or Pliny
alone) and is utterly insuffcient to do justice to more than two millen-
nia of vibrant Chinese letter writing. Translations of Chinese letters
into Western languages are also scarce. One of the most prolifc trans-
lators of premodern Chinese letters remains Erwin von Zach (1872
1942), whose translations from Selections of Refned Literature (Wen
xuan) into German include many offcial and personal letters.
14
So far
there is only one publication that presents a sizable selection of Chi-
nese epistolary literature through the ages, the 1994 edition of the
Hong Kong journal Renditions, a collection of about forty famous
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 defnitely deserve to be
made visible, both within Chinese studies and for a wider audience in
the humanities and beyond.
The reason for the lack of critical interest in the epistolary and the
marginality of the genre is certainly not that letters were irrelevant in
this part of the world. The signifcance of correspondence in China,
whether offcial or personal, is beyond doubt. Written communica-
tion informed administrative processes, social and business networks,
family relations, and personal friendships. Thousands of letters of all
kinds became part of the transmitted corpus of Chinese literature.
The neglect of letters and the epistolary sphere in China is due to a
multitude of reasons, among which the absence of two major schol-
arly motivations appears to be foremost. First, letters play no remark-
able role in the Confucian 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

If the Confucian canon contained texts in letter form comparable to
the Epistles of Paul, the genre would have had a very different his-
tory in China. Second, scholarly nostalgia for a vanishing mode of
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Introduction 7
communication, a key motivator for research today, is only a recent
phenomenon in China. In the West, concern about the supposed
decline of letter writing emerged at the end of the nineteenth century.
Owing to the peculiarities of the Chinese script (which rendered the
typewriter impractical) and to the sparse distribution of the telephone
in China for the greater part of the twentieth century, personal let-
ter writing was very much alive and taken for 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 of China confrms this rise in interest. While the early
volumes of the 1980s do not even list letters, postal service, or
similar subjects in their indexes, the latest volume, published in 1999,
features a substantial chapter on the transportation of offcial docu-
ments and private letters via courier and postal systems.
16
A number
of ongoing studies pursue promising approaches that either focus on
letters or take epistolary material into account.
17
In China itself, 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 frst and so far
only book-length survey of 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 if they are mentioned in more general literary scholar-
ship at all, they are usually noted only because they constitute part of
the literary oeuvre of an author or on account of their subject matter,
but there is no refection on the epistolary character of these texts.
21

textual sources of early medieval
chinese letter writing
The majority of ancient and medieval Chinese letters have come down
to us because they were considered to be of historical or literary value
and were thus incorporated into other works: standard histories,
encyclopedias, anthologies, collections of biographies, and so forth.
We have little information about the particulars of this process, espe-
cially its beginning. It is not known, for instance, how personal letters
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Introduction 8
achieved wider circulation and thus could be included in a standard
history or any other received text. Did their authors copy them before
they sent them off? Or did their recipients keep and disseminate them?
Had these letters been published in any other way before they were
incorporated in a received text?
Certainly letters were subjected to editorial interventions, mostly
abridgments and embellishments, in order to adapt them to the
requirements of their new literary environments.
22
While it is impos-
sible to accurately assess the extent of literary enhancement the edi-
tors deemed appropriate, the pruning they effected is clearly evident,
since it concerned mainly the largely formulaic frame of a letter.
Unfortunately, it is precisely the frame that usually contains the most
interesting information about both the particular context of a letter
and contemporaneous epistolary practice, as some of the few appar-
ently intact letters demonstrate. In beginning and concluding letters,
authors usually mentioned the external and internal circumstances of
their writing, sending, receiving, and reading letters and made refer-
ence to the tangible and emotional importance that these pieces of
personal communication held for them. However, most editors obvi-
ously regarded the frame to be of little signifcance compared to the
main text that all too often bears no trace of originally having been
part of a letter but reads like a treatise instead. Of the more than
two thousand extant letters and letter fragments from 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 of the epistolary frame, such as the proem or the epilogue.
This means that in the process of reducing them to their perceived
relevant core, most early medieval letters were practically de-epis-
tolarized and turned into much less genre-specifc vignettes. This
editorial practice continues even today, despite a general awareness of
the importance of genre for the appropriate understanding of a text.
23

A second route of transmission, particularly relevant for early
medieval China, is the collection and subsequent reproduction of let-
ters that were cherished as masterpieces of calligraphy. Since these
letters were transmitted not for literary or historical reasons but
because of their visual appeal, they usually differ in content and char-
acter. Calligraphic letters generally are short, casual, and intimate
and seem to represent the more quotidian of written communication.
Although calligraphic letters may initially have been transmitted in
their entirety and not deliberately modifed, many of them eventually
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Introduction 9
also suffered losses, either from material damage of the writing sup-
port or from textual damage of various kindsnot to mention the
problem of forgery. Textual damage could be caused by misrepresen-
tations during the process of transcription or by copying practices,
which occasionally interfered with the original layout of the source
document, produced only excerpts of 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 offcial communication,
which is clearly prevalent among the manuscripts from early and early
medieval China.
25
However, the amount and content of these manu-
scripts are hard to assess, as only the smallest portion of them has
been published or is otherwise accessible.
26

So even if an ample number of early medieval Chinese letters are
available for scholarly investigation today, we need to be aware of the
problematic nature of this corpus. A minor problem lies in the form
this corpus takes, consisting mostly of fragmentary texts scattered
all over medieval literature.
27
Not only must we accept that many of
the transmitted texts are products of editing, but the composition of
this corpus is also unlikely to be representative of 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
for 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 of other liter-
ary genres, such as poetry. The main reason for this difference is that
no other genre was practiced by such a large part of society, including
authors who were untrained amateurs, lacked any kind of literary tal-
ent, and often enough were not even literate.
The philological diffculties involved in reading and understand-
ing early medieval letters pose further challenges. These diffculties,
although shared by other genres of the period, are magnifed in episto-
lary writings by the problem of contextualization that complicates the
study of any letter. This problem often remains unresolved, because
it is impossible to reconstruct the original communicative framework
along with the specifc knowledge that allowed the intended reader,
be it the addressee or a wider audience, to understand a letter with
all its implications.
28
Some of the most eminent Chinese scholars
have remarked upon the complex diffculties of reading early medi-
eval letters, among them Luo Zhenyu (18661940) with reference to
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Introduction 10
archaeologically retrieved letters
29
and Qian Zhongshu (19101999),
who, writing about the letters of Wang Xizhi, pointed out that the cor-
respondents shared a universe of discourse (yuyan tiandi), which
easily eludes and excludes the noninitiated reader: Trivial family
matters, scattered words between relatives and friends, 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 diffculties of decipher-
ing early medieval letters very well. Although Letter on recovering
from illness (Pingfu tie) by Lu Ji (261303) received a fair amount
of scholarly attention, not only as a revered example of early medi-
eval calligraphy, but also because it was written by one of the greatest
poets of Chinese history, there is little agreement about the content
of this brief and humble letter (fg. I.1). Even transcriptions differ
considerably, by more than a third of the characters, let alone inter-
pretations.
31
The challenges posed by letters such as Lu Jis Letter
on recovering from illness undeniably complicate the exploration of
early medieval epistolary literature and culture, but these challenges
are more than compensated by the potential of this rich and promis-
ing feld.
the organization of this book
Given these problems and the limited general knowledge about the
conventions of letter writing in early medieval China, it is not surpris-
ing that only a tiny fraction of the extant personal letters from this
period have been translated or studied so far.
32
This is a great loss,
because we have an abundance of transmitted sources that promise
fascinating insights into personal communicative culture and the his-
torical, literary, and intellectual developments related to or expressed
in letters. This book addresses this unsatisfactory situation by pro-
viding an introduction to the epistolary literature and culture of early
medieval China. It aims to make the social practice and the existing
textual specimens of personal Chinese letter writing from this period
fully visible for the frst time, both for the various branches of Chi-
nese studies and for the already well-established epistolary research in
other ancient and modern cultureswhich has, by the way, provided
decisive methodological inspirations for this project. This study also
intends to provide an impetus for further research and publications
on letter writing in other periods of Chinese history and, in the long
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Introduction 11
run, to encourage a more confdent and consistent use of letters as his-
torical and literary sources.
While the earliest evidence of diplomatic correspondence in China
dates from the seventh century bce and personal letter writing
appears in the third century bce, it was only in the Han dynasty (206
bce220 ce) that letters began to be viewed as constituting a liter-
ary genre. Especially the letters written during the last decades of the
Han foreshadow the impressive fourishing of letter writing in the
four centuries that followed. The early medieval period (ca. 200ca.
600), with its heightened sense of the individuality of authors, art-
ists, and members of the elite in general, features a mature epistolary
literature and thus lends itself particularly well to an introduction of
Chinese letter writing. My exploration of the feld, which includes
Figure I.1. Lu Ji (261303), Letter on recovering from illness (Pingfu tie),
written in ink on paper, 23.7 x 20.6 cm, Palace Museum Beijing.
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Introduction 12
translations, analyses, and appraisals of a large number of representa-
tive letters, covers the following areas.
Part I, Materials and Concepts of Letter Writing, explores basic
circumstances that defned epistolary culture in early medieval China.
Chapter 1, Materiality and Terminology, is dedicated to aspects
of material culture that shaped letter writing and letter terminology,
concluding with a defnition of the personal letter in early medieval
China, the main subject matter of 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 of
early medieval texts about literary thought, including letters that con-
tain self-refective statements about the genre.
Part II, Epistolary Conventions and Literary Individuality,
describes the peculiar language of 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 of the letter formula as well as specifc
forms of address and self-designation used in letter writing. Chapter
4, Topoi, expands the exploration of the epistolary language and
communicative intentions of personal letters by investigating princi-
pal topoi. Chapter 5, Normativity and Authenticity, continues this
line of 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 other
source materials translated in this book are usually followed by their
Chinese text. If a text is composed in parallel prose, it is presented in
tabular form, occasionally with added spaces, to emphasize the par-
allel structure. Letters are usually referred to by the titles found in
Yan Kejuns Complete Collection of Prose Literature from the Three
Dynasties of Remote Antiquity, the Qin, Han, Three Kingdoms, and
Six Dynasties (Quan shanggu Sandai Qin Han Sanguo Liuchao wen).
In my translations of these titles, recipients generally appear with their
family names and personal names, even if the traditional letter titles
use other designations such as offcial positions (which may be anach-
ronistic). Since the Chinese titles of letters preserved primarily for
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Introduction 13
their calligraphic value rather than for their text are often taken ran-
domly from the frst line of a letter, these titles (most of which are of
letters by Wang Xizhi) will be left untranslated. Early medieval litera-
ture is teeming with allusions, although it is often diffcult to decide
whether a phrase is intended as a specifc allusion to or even a quo-
tation from earlier literature or whether it has already become part
of the general vocabulary of educated writers at the time. In order to
reveal as many intertextual references as possible in the translations,
potential allusions are indicated by quotation marks, even when it
is probable that they were just part of the common stock of literary
phrases. I highlight the vast variety of words that are translated as
letter by adding transcriptions of the respective Chinese words
almost two dozen in this book alonein square brackets (e.g., shu or
bizha), sometimes along with a further explanation (e.g., gao, note
or ming, directive).
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