“XI SHUAI” 蟋蟀 (“CRICKET”) AND ITS CONSEQUENCES: ISSUES IN EARLY CHINESE POETRY AND TEXTUAL STUDIES

I thank Paul W. Kroll, Paul R. Goldin, and Yuri Pines for many helpful thoughts and timely corrections on the penultimate version of the present essay. I further thank Scott Cook and another, anonymous, reviewer for their valuable suggestions toward the final revision.

The Case of “Xi shuai” 蟋蟀 (“Cricket”)

The widely discussed corpus of looted bamboo manuscripts now in the possession of Tsinghua University (Beijing) contains a short text of fourteen bamboo slips—five of them broken and incomplete—that on the back of its final slip is named Qi ye 耆夜,¹ a title that appears to refer to a banquet in celebration of a military victory over the state of Qi in the initial years of the Western Zhou dynasty (1046–771 b.c.e.). The manuscript, written in the Warring States period script of the southern state of Chu and believed to come from a southern tomb, has been tentatively dated to around 300 b.c.e.² The brief manuscript text narrates the process of a drinking ritual, in which first King Wu 武王 and then his brother the Duke of Zhou 周公 each present two toasts, each toast accompanied by the performance of a short song. The narrative ends with the text of the Duke's second poem, titled “Xi shuai” 蟋蟀 (“Cricket”), a poem that the Duke either extemporized or sang from memory.³

This poem in three stanzas is very closely related to a poem of the same title (Mao shi 114) in the “Tang feng” 唐風 section of the Mao shi 毛詩, the received version of the ancient anthology of the Classic of Poetry. According to Han sources, the anthology was compiled by Confucius when he reduced a corpus of “more than 3,000 pieces” (sanqian yu pian 三千餘篇) by “removing duplicates” (qu qi chong 去其重) to just 305, all of which he sang to string tunes (jie xian ge zhi 皆弦歌之).⁴ If the manuscript is authentic, then it represents one of only two cases in early Chinese literature (the other one also in the Tsinghua manuscripts)⁵ where a multi-stanza poem (or some version thereof) from the Poetry appears in full outside the anthology itself. While the various received texts from early Chinese literature—both historiographic...