The Stele Inscriptions of Ch'in Shih-huang: Text and Ritual in Early Chinese Imperial Representation (review)

Martin Kern's study of the seven Qin stele inscriptions and of the ideology of the imperial Qin court is an excellent example of recent radical reinterpretations of early China's historical record. Unlike with many of these, however, in this case it is not new archeological finds (although some of the recent finds are used to support the conclusions) but rather a careful reexamination of these long-known inscriptions that drives the argument by paying particularly detailed attention to their poetic diction and structure, and setting them in a fresh context.

In the course of this work, Kern argues that the Qin should not be seen as "Legalist" and antitraditional, as had been the characterization since the Han. This is partially a product of his joining with many students of early China who have become increasingly aware of the need to avoid assigning the anachronistic and otherwise inappropriate terms "Legalism," "Daoism," and "Confucianism" that have pervaded scholarship on Warring States and early imperial topics. This is more than a change in vocabulary. It is a product of the deeper reading being done in this period's history, independent of the Han (largely influenced by Sima Qian) and post-Han categories and polemic. These attempts to avoid using inappropriate terms leave us, however, with new choices to make and a new framework to construct, necessitating the substitution of more appropriate and ideally more intuitively meaningful and accurate language and rethinking the implications of these changes. The recent increased self-consciousness of the awkward and misleading use of "Confucian" has led to a virtual flood of substitutions for "ru." For Kern, the ru of the Warring States and early imperial times "were essentially professionals in the ritual and textual tradition" (p. 9), and, with this understanding, he argues that the inscriptions and rituals of the stelae are acts of ru. But the varied use of the term "ru" in early imperial texts, the broadness of the category "ru," and the change in meaning over time, along with the dearth of information on the role of these particular rituals in Qin intellectual history, preclude any clear inference of what it means for these inscriptions to have been skillfully composed by ru-ist authors and presented in a set of precisely constructed ritual acts.

These terminological issues are significant and often continue to obfuscate and cloud otherwise extremely clear and precise scholarship examining Eastern Zhou and early imperial sources. If the Qin are not simply "Legalist" and are not antitraditional, then they are something else. It is here that we run up against finding the right language. Kern's powerful analysis of the subject matter of his book compels us to accept that the received interpretation of the Qin has serious flaws. Where we go from here remains a more intractable issue.

The seven Qin stele inscriptions, eulogies originally carved in stone, but now, except for a few fragments, only found in textual records, have long been known. The stones were originally erected on mountains and other high locations as Qin Shihuang traveled through the eastern commanderies of the newly unified empire between 219 and 210 B.C.E. Sima Qian preserved the text of six of the seven in his Shi ji. The seventh stele inscription has been available in other sources and is analyzed by Kern together with the Shi ji's six. For Kern these are "a series of variations of what might be considered one basic text," set in a continuous tradition from the pre-imperial Qin era, designed with intentional repetition that served to endow it with "an aura of being . . . normative" as the Qin proclaimed the legitimacy of their conquest to the conquered people (p. 119). Kern argues that they are "almost certainly" composed by the officially appointed erudites at the imperial...