Content area
Full text
(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)
Li Feng : Early China: A Social and Cultural History . (New Approaches to Asian History.) xxi, 346 pp. New York : Cambridge University Press , 2013. £18.99. ISBN 978 0 521 71981 0 .
Reviews: East Asia
For more than a decade, students of early China have been well served by the Cambridge History of Ancient China, edited by Edward L. Shaughnessy and Michael Loewe (Cambridge University Press, 1999). The enormity of this encyclopaedic handbook, whose scope ranges from prehistorical times up to the Warring States period, can have a daunting effect, as Li Feng rightly points out in the preface to his new textbook (p. xvii), which covers the same period plus the Han. For this reason, a slimmer, more accessible introduction will undoubtedly be welcomed by many readers.
An additional feature of the Cambridge History, which may trip up novice users, is that it reflects a methodological bifurcation that requires a constant epistemological doublethink. In recent decades the burgeoning field of Chinese archaeology has brought to light a cornucopia of new data and artefacts, both inscribed and uninscribed. This embarrassment of riches has augmented the historiographical tradition in unforeseen ways, at times modifying and correcting it, at others corroborating it in stunning detail. In a slightly ironic twist, it has undermined belief in the validity of the sweeping scepticism towards the veracity of the received tradition espoused by Chinese historians of the 1920s and 30s. At least temporarily, these momentous shifts in the...