A Bamboo Strip Edition of the Lunyu Excavated at Chŏngbaek-tong in Pyongyang
Details have been made public regarding the discovery of a bamboo strip edition of the Lunyu (Analects of Confucius). Previously, scholars outside of North Korea knew of this discovery only from a brief 1992 report of the excavation of some bamboo strips from a log-chamber tomb in the Nangnang ward of Pyongyang, North Korea.
Prof. Lee Sungsi 李成市, on sabbatical from Waseda University in Japan and presently at the Academy of East Asian Studies at the Sung Kyun Kwan University in Seoul, recently obtained photographs of the bamboo strips from an acquaintance who visited North Korea, and as of November 29th has concluded an analysis of the strips along with Dr. Yoon Yong-gu 尹龍九, a specialist in Lelang history.
The analysis by these two scholars has confirmed that the Lunyu text preserved in the strips represents ink manuscripts of the Xianjin 先進 and Yan Yuan 顔淵 chapters of the Lunyu, as had been previously reported by North Korea.
In a 1992 article titled “Results Attained in the Archaeological Field” in the North Korean journal Chosŏn kogo yŏn’gu (Studies in Korean Archaeology), Ryu Pyŏng-hong reported that early in 1990 a bamboo strip edition of the Lunyu was excavated in the “Nangnang ward” of Pyongyang and included the entire text of the eleventh and twelfth chapters of that work. However, North Korea remained silent on the details, such as exactly how many strips comprised the text of the Lunyu chapters and from which tomb in the Nangnang ward the strips were recovered.
But the two scholars, after closely analyzing the photographs of the strips, have been able to determine that they were excavated from Tomb 364 at Chŏngbaek-tong in the Nangnang ward and that the find consisted of 39 strips. The text of the Xianjin chapter (the eleventh chapter of the Lunyu) consists of 31 strips and 555 characters, and the Yan Yuan chapter (the twelfth chapter) consists of 8 strips and 147 characters, making a total of 702 characters.
The strips revealed traces of having been bound by threads, which divided the surface of the strips into upper, middle and lower portions. As a rule, each strip was comprised of 20 characters. However, some strips were found to contain more than 20 characters in order to record an entire passage on a single strip, in which case characters were written in the blank space at the bottom of the strip.
Analysis of the text recorded on the strips revealed that it is the so-called New Text version of the Lunyu written in the Li calligraphic style used in the Western Han period, rather than the Old Text version based on materials recovered during the demolition of Confucius’ family home during the reign of Emperor Wu (141 B.C. – 87 B.C.).
Tomb 364 at Chŏngbaek-tong, where the strips were recovered, is near the location of the recently-reported discovery of a wood tablet containing a census for Lelang Commandery dated to 45 B.C. According to the contents of the Lelang tablet, in 45 B.C. Lelang Commandery had a population of 280,000 people in 45,000 households.
Finds of bamboo or wood strip texts of the Lunyu in China include bamboo strips recovered in the 1970s from the tomb of the Prince of Zhongshan, Liu Xiu 劉修 (d. 55 B.C.), in Ding County of Hebei Province. This example is dated no more than ten years apart from the Lelang strips now recovered.
(Seoul—Yonhap News) Reported by Kim T’ae-sik.
29 November 2009.
A newspaper article (in Korean) is here.