The Unlikely Birth of the First Big Book in China

Abstract

This dissertation is about why there was a massive multi-chapter book in third-century BCE China—and how it was made and what impact it had—when there should really not have been one. By denaturalizing and defamiliarizing every aspect of the creation of the Lüshi Chunqiu—the first big book in Chinese history—in the 240s BCE, this study counters Eurocentric assumptions and hindsight bias prevalent in the studies of ancient textual cultures, cracks open numerous historical and philological questions, and contends that the rise of the big book as a textual form in China, though consequential in fostering a think-big sensibility instrumental to the rise and expansion of the Chinese empire, was neither early nor inevitable. Methodologically, this dissertation offers the first total history of the first Chinese big book, synthesizing data and insights from a range of fields—political history, philology, art and archeology, megaproject management, and the history of ideas, books, mathematics, and technology—and highlighting the interaction and parallel between the global, local, textual, social, ideological, technological, mathematical, and architectural on the eve of Qin’s unification of China.