Cosmos, Spirits, and Chu · HIST 270 Background Essays

Central interpretation

The last pages of Ebrey’s Chapter 2 make two arguments that are easy to miss because they come after the famous philosophers. The first is that late Zhou thinking about nature did not replace thinking about spirits; it lived beside it. Natural philosophers explained day and night, the seasons and illness through yin, yang and qi, yet the same elites who read such theories had their diviners ask why they were sick, blamed spirits and demons, and paid for sacrifices and exorcisms, and the same tombs hold both kinds of text. The second is that the Zhou world grew by drawing in its periphery without erasing it. Chu absorbed dozens of states, invented the county, and joined the interstate alliances, but its lacquer, its silks, its tombs and its shamanic poetry stayed unmistakably southern, and northern thinkers still called its people barbarians.

The story in three segments, matching Review Questions 10–11

Reading Nature (Q10, slides E–L): the natural philosophers, the concept of yin, yang and qi, the cycles of day and season, Physician He’s six qi, the star-painted lacquer chest from the tomb of Marquis Yi of Zeng, Zou Yan and the Five Phases, and a self-check.
The World of Spirits (Q10, slides M–V): why spirits persisted, the concept of magico-religious practice, the Baoshan official’s sacrifices, Taiyi the Grand One, demon spells, the travelers’ ritual at the city gate, the two ways of knowing side by side, a self-check and the Q10 checkpoint.
Chu, Inside and Apart (Q11, slides W–AG): the concept of core and periphery, Chu’s expansion and its counties, the northern “barbarian” label, wet tombs, lacquer, the Baoshan tomb, Qu Yuan and the Songs of Chu, the “Lord of the Yellow River” as a primary source, a self-check and the Q11 checkpoint.

The cold open (slide B) is the dying Chu official of 316 BCE and his diviners; slide AC reveals that his tomb is the Baoshan tomb of the textbook’s next page, and the closing slide (AI) returns to that tomb as it is opened in 1987, with both worlds of the lecture inside it. Slide AH is the chapter-wide synthesis (“How much did China change?”) and links back to the roadmaps of Lectures 1–3. The Pierian Spring (AJ–AN) carries Xu Xing and the agriculturalists, the Chu Silk Manuscript, the king of Chu’s question about the Zhou cauldrons, and the Dragon Boat legend.

Act I: Reading Nature (Review Question 10)

Textbook anchor: Ebrey, Chapter 2, “Yin and Yang” (p. 32). The Reading Guide anchors Q10 on p. 32 with the sentence beginning “Yin and yang…”: they are complementary poles rather than distinct entities or opposing forces.

The section opens with the textbook’s reminder that the “Hundred Schools” included much more than Confucians, Daoists and Legalists: logicians, hedonists, utopians, hermits, agriculturalists, and natural philosophers who studied astronomy, medicine, music and calendrical calculation (p. 32). Slide F teaches the natural philosophers; the agriculturalists go to the Pierian Spring (AK). Slide G is the core concept. The textbook’s two lists of qualities (yin feminine, dark, receptive, yielding, negative, weak; yang masculine, bright, assertive, creative, positive, strong) invite students to read the pair as a hierarchy or a battle. The key sentence says the opposite: they are complementary poles, and change happens as one waxes and the other wanes. Instructors may want to add that the words originally meant the shady and sunny sides of a hill, which is why slide H shows a valley at sunset; that etymology is outside the textbook. Qi is introduced through the textbook’s gloss, “vapors, forms of energy.”

Slide I is the textbook’s Physician He passage. In the Zuo zhuan (Duke Zhao, year 1, 541 BCE) the Duke of Jin falls ill; his diviners blame two spirits, and the visiting Qin physician He declares that the illness comes “not from ghosts, not from food” but from excess and the imbalance of the six qi, which divide into the four seasons, radiate as the five colors and five sounds, and in excess produce the six illnesses (p. 32). The scene is a gift for Q10, because naturalistic and spiritual diagnoses sit in one room, and the deck stages it that way. Slide J adds a famous object from outside the textbook: the lacquered clothes chest from the tomb of Marquis Yi of Zeng (Suizhou, Hubei; buried ca. 433 BCE, excavated 1978), whose lid shows a green dragon and a white tiger flanking the names of the twenty-eight lunar lodges around a central character for the Dipper. The same tomb held the 65-bell set mentioned in the notes, tying astronomy and music, two of the textbook’s four fields, to one southern lord.

Slide K covers the Five Phases (wuxing: wood, fire, earth, metal, water) and Zou Yan of Qi (ca. 305–240 BCE). Ebrey’s Chapter 2 does not mention them; Chapter 3 introduces correlative cosmology in its Han material. The deck adds them here because students meet “five colors and five sounds” in the Physician He passage and will meet the Five Phases again within days, and it links forward to Chapter 3. Zou Yan’s writings are lost; what we know of his theory of phases succeeding one another in dynastic history comes mostly from Shiji 74 and later texts. The concept slide calls them phases rather than “elements” on purpose, since they are stages of change rather than substances.

Act II: The World of Spirits (Review Question 10)

Textbook anchor: “The World of Spirits” (p. 32), from “The development of rationalistic and naturalistic ways of thinking…” to the sentence on occult texts transmitted in writing.

The textbook’s first sentence is the thesis of Act II: naturalistic thinking did not end interest in spirits (p. 32). Slide N teaches it with recap links to Chapter 1’s spirit world and oracle bones and to Lecture 2’s Confucian attitude to spirits. Slide O defines “magico-religious practice” as an umbrella for divination, sacrifice, exorcism, spells and protective rites, and notes the useful but loose distinction between persuading spirits (religion) and compelling hidden forces (magic); the textbook uses the compound term without defining it.

Slides B and P use the Baoshan divination and prayer records. The official “who died in 316” (p. 32) is Shao Tuo, Chief Minister on the Left (zuoyin) of Chu. His diviners consulted turtle shell and milfoil repeatedly during 318–316 BCE, first about his service and then about his illness; when the results were bad they identified spirits to blame, including deceased kin and Chu ancestors, and proposed sacrifices and exorcisms to resolve them. The textbook names Taiyi as the recipient (p. 32). Slide Q explains Taiyi as both an astral god linked to the pole star and, in the Guodian text Taiyi sheng shui (“The Grand One Gave Birth to Water,” ca. 300 BCE), the source of the cosmos; that cosmogony is outside the textbook. Slide R covers spells against demons. The textbook does not name a source; the best-known example is the “Spellbinding” (Jie) section of the Qin daybook (Rishu) from Shuihudi tomb 11, which tells householders how to identify and expel dozens of demons, often with peach wood, reed arrows or loud noise. Slide S is the travelers’ ritual exactly as the textbook gives it: call on Yu, draw five lines, put soil from the lines in the robe at the bosom (p. 32). The Shuihudi daybook version adds the “Pace of Yu,” a ritual step associated with the flood-taming sage, which the notes mention.

Slide T teaches the textbook’s last sentence: excavated texts on occult and magico-religious subjects were transmitted in writing, just like philosophy (p. 32). The point is that these were not illiterate folk survivals. The same literate officials who owned philosophical texts owned daybooks, and the Baoshan records were written by professional diviners for a minister of state.

Act III: Chu, Inside and Apart (Review Question 11)

Textbook anchor: “Warring States Literature and Art: The Case of Chu” and the Material Culture box on lacquer (pp. 32–34). The Reading Guide anchors Q11 on p. 33 with the sentence beginning “Chu also was…”: Chu was the first to form counties out of annexed land.

Slide X introduces core and periphery, the frame of the textbook’s opening paragraph: peoples on the periphery were drawn into the Zhou world without all cultural differences being eliminated, a pattern already visible in Shang-era southern bronzes (p. 32, with a recap link to Chapter 1’s middle Yangzi). Slide Y teaches Chu’s rise: fifty or more small states absorbed, the 548 BCE survey, the first counties under appointed officials instead of hereditary lords, the conquest of Yue in 334 BCE, and full participation in third-century alliances (pp. 32–33). Slide Z teaches the limits of acceptance: northerners still regarded Chu as alien. The deck illustrates this with Mencius 3A.4, where Mencius calls the Chu agriculturalist Xu Xing a “shrike-tongued southern barbarian” and scolds Chen Xiang for following him; the passage is outside the textbook.

Slides AA–AC teach material culture: why Chu’s waterlogged, sealed tombs preserved silk and lacquer that perished elsewhere; how lacquer is made from tree sap, heated and purified, applied in many layers over a wooden core, and colored with cinnabar and carbon (Material Culture box, p. 33, with the Mashan tomb 1 cup with two large birds); and the Baoshan tomb itself, excavated in 1986–1987, with four chambers of ritual vessels, furniture, fans, mirrors, boxes, weapons, chariot fittings and books, including local government reports, divination texts and a tomb inventory (p. 34). Slide AD introduces the Songs of Chu and Qu Yuan (ca. 340–278 BCE), the “Encountering Sorrow” (Li sao) as a shamanic spirit quest, and its contrast with the Book of Poetry (p. 34). Slide AE gives the textbook’s full Stephen Owen translation of the “Lord of the Yellow River” (Hebo), one of the Nine Songs, as a primary source for students to read for spirit journey, water deities and southern imagery.

The Pierian Spring: Xu Xing, the Chu Silk Manuscript, the Cauldrons, the Dragon Boats

The required independent-study section opens with the course’s standard divider wording and holds four story slides, each ending with a review-question box and a back-link. AK tells the agriculturalist Xu Xing’s visit to Teng from Mencius 3A.4: rulers should plow beside their people and cook their own meals, and Mencius replies with the division of labor between those who work with their minds and those who work with their strength (Q11, and the textbook’s agriculturalists, p. 32). AL introduces the Chu Silk Manuscript from Zidanku near Changsha (looted 1942, ca. 300 BCE), with its twelve monthly figures, four colored corner trees and central texts on the ordering of the cosmos and monthly taboos (Q10). The main sheet remains in a private American foundation collection; two volumes of fragments were returned to China in May 2025. AM tells King Zhuang of Chu asking the Zhou envoy Wangsun Man about the size and weight of the nine cauldrons in 606 BCE (Zuo zhuan, Duke Xuan 3), and the reply that legitimacy lies “in virtue, not in the cauldrons” (Q11). AN follows Qu Yuan’s death into the Dragon Boat Festival legend, with the explicit warning that the link between Qu Yuan and the festival is a later tradition (Q11).

How the Two Questions Connect

The lecture is built around one man. Shao Tuo’s divination records answer Q10, and his tomb answers Q11: a Chu minister of state whose scribes kept government reports, whose diviners blamed ancestors and demons, and whose household paid for sacrifices to Taiyi, buried with the lacquer and silk that make Chu distinctive. The textbook mentions him twice (p. 32 and p. 34) without saying it is the same man; the deck makes the connection explicit (slides B, P, AC, AI). That bookend lets students see that “new thought” and “old religion,” and “Zhou” and “Chu,” are not alternatives but layers in the same life. Slide AH then closes Chapter 2 with the textbook’s summary paragraph on how much changed in five centuries.

Corrections and Cautions

Details that are easy to get wrong

One official, two pages. The official “who died in 316 B.C.E.” whose divination records are cited on p. 32 and the Baoshan tomb occupant on p. 34 are the same man, Shao Tuo (Baoshan tomb 2). The textbook does not connect them; the deck does.
Taiyi in the Baoshan records (p. 32). The Baoshan strips name a deity usually read as Taiyi (written with a variant form), and the identification with the later astral Taiyi rests on scholarly interpretation. Several other deities and ancestors also received offerings. The deck follows the textbook and says so in the notes.
The travelers’ ritual (p. 32). The textbook presents it as Warring States practice; the best-known source is the Qin daybook from Shuihudi tomb 11, closed about 217 BCE, after unification. Similar rites appear in other daybooks.
The 548 BCE “survey of its population” (p. 32). The Zuo zhuan (Duke Xiang 25) describes Wei Yan’s survey of Chu’s lands, by land type, to fix military levies and taxes. It was a land and levy register rather than a census in the modern sense.
“First to form counties” (p. 33). Chu’s early counties are well attested, but the Shiji also records Qin counties in 688 BCE, so priority is contested. The deck keeps the textbook’s wording with a note.
The conquest of Yue in 334 BCE (p. 33). This is the traditional date; some scholars place Chu’s defeat of Yue around 306 BCE.
Qu Yuan’s dates and authorship (p. 34). The dates are traditional, derived from Shiji 84 and the poems themselves. The “Lord of the Yellow River” is one of the Nine Songs; the textbook rightly does not attribute it to Qu Yuan, though tradition does. Students should not assume Qu Yuan wrote the whole anthology, which was compiled by Liu Xiang in the 1st century BCE and annotated by Wang Yi in the 2nd century CE.
The Five Phases. They do not appear in Ebrey’s Chapter 2. Slide K adds them from outside the textbook and points to Chapter 3.
Physician He (p. 32). The Zuo zhuan was compiled long after 541 BCE, probably in the fourth century; its six-qi speech may reflect the medical thought of the compiler’s time more than of 541.
No visible “outside the textbook” tags. Unlike the Lecture 2 and 3 decks, this draft does not put visible tags on slides for material from beyond the textbook; outside sources are named in each slide’s source line, in the notes and on the Sources slide (AO). Steven should confirm this choice.

About the Images

Every image in the deck is an AI-generated illustration in the “cinematic Eastern Zhou tableau” style Steven approved for Lectures 1–3 (painterly mid-shot human action; charcoal, ochre and cream with museum-gold accents; no fake Chinese writing, no seals, no museum cases, no tourist sites). The 28 images were generated on 2026-11-09, each from a caption written first. Each carries the caption “AI-generated interpretation, not a historical record,” and none is a portrait of a real person: Qu Yuan, Mencius and Zou Yan appear as imagined figures. Divination scenes show milfoil stalks only, to avoid images that misread the textbook’s turtle-shell divination as live turtles. The draft awaits Steven’s review; prompt briefs are listed in images/image_sources.md.

Notes

Page references are to the course PDF of Ebrey’s Chapter 2 (pp. 20–35) and may differ slightly from print editions. Everything from the Zuo zhuan beyond the Physician He passage, the Mencius, the Shiji, the Zeng, Guodian, Shuihudi and Zidanku finds, the Five Phases and the Dragon Boat legend comes from beyond the textbook, and the deck names its source in each case.