Michael Nylan
Biographic Data
| ID | 705771 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Michael Nylan |
| GIVEN NAMES | Michael |
| FAMILY NAME | Nylan |
| SIGNATURE | NYLAN M |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of California, Berkeley |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-9577-097X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 46 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 14 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 43 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 3 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1993 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
The Common Good in Early China in Context
On Divination in the Xunzi and Beyond: A Brief Note with Implications for the Modern Couplings of Secular vs. Sacred, the Personal vs. the Communal, and Monarchical and Autocratic
Human beings’ brains are hardwired to see the world in binaries, such as “rational” vs. “superstitious” or “credulous,” “secular” vs. “sacred,” and in concept clusters, such as “monarchical” and “autocratic.” This essay argues that many binaries we have applied to divination theories and practices in the early empires in China contradict the worldviews expressed in the texts from that period, which presumed an extended community composed of the l…
All about the Rites: From Canonised Ritual to Ritualised Society
This third volume of the “Myriades d’Asies” series is the result of an international conference which was held at the Collège de France in 2018, and published in book form by Hémisphères Editions in 2021, the present digital edition being a revised and improved version of the printed edition. It intends to look afresh at the way ancient China progressively evolved into a ritualistic society, that is a world in which social interactions in times o…
Eloge: Nathan Sivin (1931-2022)
Kuaiji’s 會稽 ‘Forgotten Century’, the Cult of Yu 大禹, and Kuaiji Today
This study on Mount Kuaiji, just southeast of Shaoxing in Zhejiang province, consists of two parts: Part I, with its focus on the Qin and two Han dynasties and particularly Kuaiji's 'forgotten century' (roughly 50-150), excavates the literary traditions ascribed to this center of southern learning, while demonstrating the site's importance in southern communications and in local industries.Its aim is to complicate the usual story of center and pe…
Western Han Noble Burials: A View From Zhang Anshi's 張安世 Tomb
The family cemetery of Zhang Anshi was the first cemetery for nobles to be discovered in which the tomb occupants, dating, and gravesite orientation was so clear to investigators. As such, the site is of enormous historical significance. This essay introduces the entire site to readers and extrapolates aspects of the Western Han mourning regulations from the evidence presented by the jade suits, carriage and horse sets, tomb figurines, shrine, an…
Michael Loewe, a Model for the Ages
Soon to celebrate his centennial year, Michael Loewe is certainly the most eminent Han historian today. Without his numerous publications—including not only such foundational reference works as The Biographical Dictionary of Qin and Western Han and Early Chinese Texts but also a wide range of more specialized studies—it is hard to imagine how the once-neglected field of Han history could have garnered such respect among scholars in allied fields …
The Chu Silk Manuscripts from Zidanku, Changsha (Hunan Province). Volume 1: Discovery and Transmission
There is much to love in this volume, and much to remark upon, even if it is passing strange to be reviewing a book that is in some sense the prelude to the more important volume, which will show and translate the Zidanku 子彈庫 materials, also known as the Chu Silk Manuscripts. As Li Ling remarks, the Zidanku discovery was important for several reasons: (a) it supplied the first corpus of late Zhanguo 趙國 writings discovered in the twentieth century…
The Chinese Pleasure Book
Technical Arts in the Han Histories: Tables and Treatises in the Shiji and Hanshu
Boundaries and Justice: Diverse Ethical Perspectives
Circle of Fear in Early China
Montesquieu wrote that "China is a despotic state whose principle is fear". And indeed, in the early modern context in China, fear and despotism, on the one hand, were opposed to ziyou 自由 ("freedom"), on the other. These constructs created a discursive space in which theorists of the nation-state felt the need to articulate the complex relations binding despotism to fear. By contrast, during the early empires in China a different set of relations…
Historians Writing about Historians: Fan Ye (398–446), Liu Zhiji (661–721), and Ban Gu (32–92)
This article takes three famous historians writing about historians and history-writing as its subject, considering Fan Ye’s work in light of Liu Zhiji’s understanding of history and Fan Ye’s writing on Ban Gu. It seeks to discover in Liu Zhiji’s work the principles for writing a guoshi 國史 (court history), reading Liu Zhiji’s principles in relation to Liu’s assessment of Fan Ye’s Hou Hanshu (History of the Later Han) in general, and, it provides,…
Humans as Animals and Things in Pre-Buddhist China
This paper examines the way thinkers in the pre-Buddhist world in China viewed the animal-human divide. It argues that the boundaries between humans and animals were porous. The only unique capacities that human beings are credited with were first (widely) the ability to develop their unique potentials (chengren 成人), and, second (in a very few texts), the capacity to respond with greater sensitivity to the resonant world around them. In both cont…
The Confucian-Legalist State: A New Theory, by Zhao Dingxin
Since the influential television quasi-documentary ‘River Elegy’ (1988), Chinese intellectuals have been fed the story that China, from time immemorial, has been in thrall to a super-stable government with a super-stable ideology, so that ‘China has no [significant or progressive] history’, as Hegel famously put it. (In the popular imagination, the themes of ‘Elegy’ have supplanted the Cultural Revolution ideology casting Confucians and Legalists…
On Libraries and Manuscript Culture in Western Han Chang’an and Alexandria
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The Five "Confucian" Classics
The Five Classics associated with Confucius formed the core curriculum in the education of Chinese literati throughout most of the imperial period. In this book Michael Nylan offers a sweeping assessment of these ancient texts and shows how their influence spread across East Asia. Nylan begins by tracing the formation of the Five Classics canon in the pre-Han and Han periods, 206 B.C.–A.D. 220, revising standard views on the topic. She assesses t…
Zhuangzi: Closet Confucian
Confucius (aka Kongzi) and Zhuangzi are the two most famous thinkers in all of Chinese history, aside from Laozi, the Old Master. They occupy positions in the history of Chinese thinking roughly comparable to those held by Plato and Epicurus in the Western narrative of civilisation, in that they offer visions of the engaged political life and the engaged social self to which later political theorists and ethicists invariably return. For the last …
The Letter to Ren An and Sima Qian’s Legacy
Sima Qian (first century BCE), the author of Record of the Historian (Shiji), is China’s earliest and best-known historian, and his “Letter to Ren An” is the most famous letter in Chinese history. In the letter, Sima Qian explains his decision to finish his life’s work, the first comprehensive history of China, instead of honorably committing suicide following his castration for “deceiving the emperor.” In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries…
Mapping Time in the Shiji and Hanshu Tables 表
This essay considers the achievements, contrasts, and puzzles that bind the Shiji and Hanshu Tables to one another, and to their respective authors’ historical views. Meanwhile, this essay queries the common wisdom that would reduce the Shiji and Hanshu tables to “mere sequence,” as opposed to creative historical writing, while deriding the tables as either “primitive” or “derivative.”
Chang'an 26 BCE: An Augustan Age in China
Manuscript Culture in Late Western Han, and the Implications for Authors and Authority
A long-standing interest in material culture led me to reconstruct the material conditions associated with the massive library project initiated at the late Western court of Han Chengdi (r. 33–7 BC), for which very little material evidence now remains other than two small hills tentatively identified as the former sites of the Tianlu ge and Shiqu ge palace libraries. Research into that library project of 26–6 BC has prompted new insights into man…
On the antique rhetoric of friendship
Rhetorical tropes of intimate friendship ( you 友) employed in the classical era in China present a stark contrast to those that survive in Latin and classical Greek sources. For this ideal form of friendship was described far less often in terms of the material and psychic advantages that can accrue from alliances outside the immediate family circle than in terms of the propensity for true friendships to foster the development of the singular tra…
Exemplary Figures / Fayan法言
Winner of the Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for a Translation of a Scholarly Study of Literature, sponsored by the Modern Language Association Exemplary Figures (sometimes translated as Model Sayings ) is an unabridged, annotated translation of Fayan, one of three major works by the Chinese court poet-philosopher Yang Xiong (53 BCE-18 CE). Yang sought to "renew the old" by patterning these works on earlier classics, drawing inspiration from the…
Talk about "Barbarians" in Antiquity
Talk about "Barbarians" in Antiquity Michael Nylan Rethinking the Other in Antiquity. By Erich S. Gruen. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011. Pp. xiv + 415. A new book in the field of Greek and Roman Classics has important implications for serious students of early and middle-period China as well.1 As its title suggests, Rethinking the Other in Antiquity by Erich S. Gruen calls into question one of the reigning paradigms used by historian…
Zhuangzi: Closet Confucian
Confucius (aka Kongzi) and Zhuangzi are the two most famous thinkers in all of Chinese history, aside from Laozi, the Old Master. They occupy positions in the history of Chinese thinking roughly comparable to those held by Plato and Epicurus in the Western narrative of civilisation, in that they offer visions of the engaged political life and the engaged social self to which later political theorists and ethicists invariably return. For the last …
Manuscript Culture in Late Western Han, and the Implications for Authors and Authority
A long-standing interest in material culture led me to reconstruct the material conditions associated with the massive library project initiated at the late Western court of Han Chengdi (r. 33–7 BC), for which very little material evidence now remains other than two small hills tentatively identified as the former sites of the Tianlu ge and Shiqu ge palace libraries. Research into that library project of 26–6 BC has prompted new insights into man…
Talk about "Barbarians" in Antiquity
Talk about "Barbarians" in Antiquity Michael Nylan Rethinking the Other in Antiquity. By Erich S. Gruen. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011. Pp. xiv + 415. A new book in the field of Greek and Roman Classics has important implications for serious students of early and middle-period China as well.1 As its title suggests, Rethinking the Other in Antiquity by Erich S. Gruen calls into question one of the reigning paradigms used by historian…
Ordinary Mysteries: Interpreting the Archaeological Record of Han Sichuan
In this article I present three ideas designed to challenge us to look harder at the riches that the Han tomb tiles and figurines from Sichuan represent. After noting briefly the ways in which the tomb represents a well-protected home, I will argue first that the scenes that now appear most straightforward and easily interpreted may once have communicated far more complex ideas; second, that multiple metaphorical meanings attached to certain imag…
Confucian Piety and Individualism in Han China
Many historians continue to analyze the collapse of Eastern Han rule (A.D. 25-220) in negative language, speaking of the failure of Confucian ethics, while using quite positive terms, such as the growth of individualism, to characterize intellectual life in the following Wei-Chin period (220-420). This essay offers an alternative view : that the breakdown in late Han institutions is ascribable in part to an overemphasis on the two Confucian virtu…
Han Classicists Writing in Dialogue about Their Own Tradition
Comparative Political Philosophy and Liberal Education: Looking for Friends in History
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Style, Patronage, and Confucian Ideals in Han Dynasty Art: Problems in Interpretation
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The Chin Wen/Ku Wen Controversy in Han Times
In late l9th century China, an impassioned debate erupted over the authenticity of entire books included in the Confucian canon. This philological, philosophical, and political fracas has come to be known as the second chin wen/ku wen (usually translated as New Text/Old Text) controversy.l The seeds of the late Ch'ing chin wen/ku wen controversy lay in Yen Jo-ch'u's X (16361704) conclusive demonstration that all the chapters included in the recei…
Comparative Political Philosophy and Liberal Education: Looking for Friends in History
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. As you have access to this content, a full PDF is available via the ‘Save PDF’ action button
The Ku Wen Documents in Han Times
Since at least the 4th c. A.D., students of Han intellectual history have assumed the existence in Han of more than ten' complete chapters of the Documents classic (Shang shu f&&) written in pre-Han script forms (the so-called ku-wen t@; or Archaic Script), in addition to the standard 29 p'ien ffi transmitted from the Ch'in dynasty (221 B.C.-208 B.C.) by Master Fu Sheng XRb. (The latter set of texts is usually identified, somewhat anachronistical…
Confucian Piety and Individualism in Han China
Many historians continue to analyze the collapse of Eastern Han rule (A.D. 25-220) in negative language, speaking of the failure of Confucian ethics, while using quite positive terms, such as the growth of individualism, to characterize intellectual life in the following Wei-Chin period (220-420). This essay offers an alternative view : that the breakdown in late Han institutions is ascribable in part to an overemphasis on the two Confucian virtu…
Monumentality in Early Chinese Art and Architecture
Introduction 1. The age of ritual art 2. Temple, palace, and tomb 3. The monumental city Chang'an 4. Four voices of funerary monuments 5. The transparent stone: the end of an era Illustration credits Notes Works cited Character list Index
From Chronicle to Canon: The Hermeneutics of The Spring and Autumn, According to Tung Chung-shu
Han Classicists Writing in Dialogue about Their Own Tradition
Sima Qian: A True Historian
This essay seeks to argue the merits of one approach to reading the Shiji , which casts the complex text more as a product of contemporary religious beliefs than as the product of either the taishi 's individual genius or desire for historical objectivity. By the religious reading, Sima Qian fulfilled some part of his filial obligations when he honored his father's dying wish to “continue our ancestors” by bringing together the tales they had gat…
Wang Chong (27-97?): Connaissance, Politique et Verite en Chine Ancienne
Le penseur chinois Wang Chong (27-97?) fut volontiers considere comme un auteur heterodoxe, voire anti-confucianiste. La presente etude montre a l'inverse que son oeuvre, le Lunheng (Essais critiques), est tout a fait symptomatique de l'etat d'esprit des lettres-fonctionnaires de l'epoque dans leurs rapports souvent difficiles avec le pouvoir politique. Et meme si Wang Chong attaque certaines de leurs conceptions, c'est sans mettre en cause les f…
Textual Authority in Pre-Han and Han
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The Five "Confucian" Classics
The Five Classics associated with Confucius formed the core curriculum in the education of Chinese literati throughout most of the imperial period. In this book Michael Nylan offers a sweeping assessment of these ancient texts and shows how their influence spread across East Asia."--BOOK JACKET
Constructing Lineages and Inventing Traditions Through Exemplary Figures in Early China
One major obstacle to understanding the early history of China is the still-prevalent notion that discrete schools of thought contended in the Warring States and Han periods, and that these schools of thought were text-centered. 2 A second is the propensity to conflate quite separate accounts of the same events, institutions, concepts, and taxonomies, for the purpose of devising a neater record. Some historians of early China, recognizing these o…
Ordinary Mysteries: Interpreting the Archaeological Record of Han Sichuan
In this article I present three ideas designed to challenge us to look harder at the riches that the Han tomb tiles and figurines from Sichuan represent. After noting briefly the ways in which the tomb represents a well-protected home, I will argue first that the scenes that now appear most straightforward and easily interpreted may once have communicated far more complex ideas; second, that multiple metaphorical meanings attached to certain imag…
Notes on a Case of Illicit Sex from Zhangjiashan: A Translation and Commentary
This essay concerns the single case of illicit sex included in the Zouyan shu excavated at Zhangjiashan. Interest in this particular case has been high, since the case offers indisputable evidence regarding the separation of legal and moral principles in relation to domestic affairs at the time the judgment was rendered. Previous theories about the interpretation of the case have focused upon the quality and timeliness of the evidence brought to …
Gender and Chinese Archaeology
Classics Without Canonization: Learning And Authority In Qin And Han
This chapter advances one view of classical learning that is consistent with the sources now at hand: that there was no of jing , if canonization mandates a stable text and a belief in the inerrancy of a particular jing or corpus of jing . It considers the terms jing and Ru during Qin and Han and then turns to the contexts and expectations for classical learning in general and Five Classics learning in particular. The chapter focuses on the prono…
Naissance du classicisme en Chine
Pr Michael Nylan © P. Imbert, Collège de France Yang Xiong (53 av. J.-C. - 18 ap. J.-C.), sujet de cette conférence, a consacré l’essentiel de son début de carrière à décrire en détail le faste des lieux traversés par la Cour lors des chasses impériales et déplacements en province. Dans ses œuvres de la maturité, il a tourné son attention vers un autre espace de la représentation : les classiques à la fois en tant que refuge pour l’imagination da…
China's early empires: A re-appraisal
Introduction Michael Nylan and Michael Loewe: Part I. Archaeology: 1. Han Dynasty tomb structures and contents Susan N. Erickson 2. Two Eastern Han sites: Mixian and Houshiguo Michele Pirazzoli t'Serstevens 3. Excavated manuscripts: context and methodology Enno Giele 4. The archaeology of the outlying lands Susan Erickson and Michael Nylan 5. Urbanism Michele Pirazzoli t'Serstevens 6. The Eternal City and the City of Eternal Peace T. Corey Brenna…
Maîtres Mots
Toward an Archaeology of Writing: Text, Ritual, and the Culture of Public Display in the Classical Period (475 B.c.E.-210 c.E.)
Talk about "Barbarians" in Antiquity
Talk about "Barbarians" in Antiquity Michael Nylan Rethinking the Other in Antiquity. By Erich S. Gruen. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011. Pp. xiv + 415. A new book in the field of Greek and Roman Classics has important implications for serious students of early and middle-period China as well.1 As its title suggests, Rethinking the Other in Antiquity by Erich S. Gruen calls into question one of the reigning paradigms used by historian…
Exemplary Figures / Fayan法言
Winner of the Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for a Translation of a Scholarly Study of Literature, sponsored by the Modern Language Association Exemplary Figures (sometimes translated as Model Sayings ) is an unabridged, annotated translation of Fayan, one of three major works by the Chinese court poet-philosopher Yang Xiong (53 BCE-18 CE). Yang sought to "renew the old" by patterning these works on earlier classics, drawing inspiration from the…
Manuscript Culture in Late Western Han, and the Implications for Authors and Authority
A long-standing interest in material culture led me to reconstruct the material conditions associated with the massive library project initiated at the late Western court of Han Chengdi (r. 33–7 BC), for which very little material evidence now remains other than two small hills tentatively identified as the former sites of the Tianlu ge and Shiqu ge palace libraries. Research into that library project of 26–6 BC has prompted new insights into man…
On the antique rhetoric of friendship
Rhetorical tropes of intimate friendship ( you 友) employed in the classical era in China present a stark contrast to those that survive in Latin and classical Greek sources. For this ideal form of friendship was described far less often in terms of the material and psychic advantages that can accrue from alliances outside the immediate family circle than in terms of the propensity for true friendships to foster the development of the singular tra…
Chinese history and philosophy (34 works) · History (34 works) · Art (23 works) · Philosophy (23 works) · China (16 works) · Japanese History and Culture (15 works) · Literature (15 works) · Law (14 works) · Political science (14 works) · Sociology (13 works)