This article explores the dating of the Book of Lord Shang (Shangjunshu 商君書). Despite the importance of this text as one of major ideological products of the Warring States period (453–221 b.c.e.), it remained largely ignored in mainstream Western Sinology, in part because of the confusion about the dates of its composition. The article analyzes different criteria employed by earlier scholars to ascertain the dates of individual chapters of the Book of Lord Shang and investigates the relative weight of each of these criteria. This results in a methodologically transparent discussion, which not only advances our understanding of the complex textual history of the Book of Lord Shang but also makes a step toward establishment of a commonly acceptable set of dating determinants which may be employed in investigating the dates of other pre-imperial (i.e. pre-221 b.c.e.) texts.

The mythical origins of the Chinese qin have been forged by ancient literature ever since the age of Confucius, nevertheless, very little is known about the morphology of the ancient qin and its embodied symbolism. This article, by analyzing a most recently discovered ancient qin found in a fourth-century b.c.e. tomb in Jiuliandun, Zaoyang city, Hubei province, in 2002, will explore the relief carving and lacquered drawings found on the instrument itself and their symbolic significance as a representation of the worldview and philosophical state of mind of the Warring States period. I will suggest that a qin contemporaneous to Confucius and played by him looks distinctly different from the version produced by the fertile imagination of the medieval Chinese; instead, it was divided into five registers, and it is this segmented subdivision which defines the ancient qin and differentiates it fundamentally from its classical counterpart. Strikingly, the symbolic depictions in which it was clad represent not only the fertile imagination of the Chu aristocracy, but also include portrayal of the more menial tasks of the ordinary Chu farmer and herdsman as he proceeds through the cycle of the agricultural year, and thus provide the modern scholar with an extraordinarily vivid insight into contemporary Chu life.