Table Of ContentcoNQUer
ANd
goverN
EARLY CHINESE MILITARY TEXTS
FROM THE YIZHOU SHU
Conquer and Govern
Conquer and Govern
Early Chinese Military Texts
from the Yi Zhou shu
Robin McNeal
University of Hawai‘i Press
Honolulu
Publication of this volume was aided by a grant from the
Hull Memorial Publication Fund of Cornell University.
© 2012 University of Hawai‘i Press
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
17 16 15 14 13 12 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
McNeal, Robin.
Conquer and govern : early Chinese military texts from the
Yi Zhou shu / Robin McNeal.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8248-3120-2 (hardcover : alk. paper)
1. Yi Zhou shu. 2. China—History, Military—To 221 B.C.
3. China—History—Zhou dynasty, 1122–221 B.C. I. Yi Zhou shu.
English. Selections. II. Title.
DS747.I25M35 2012
355—dc23
2011052152
University of Hawai‘i Press books are printed on acid-free
paper and meet the guidelines for permanence and
durability of the Council on Library Resources.
Designed by Josie Herr
Printed by Sheridan Books, Inc.
Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction 1
Part I
Use the Martial to Dispel Calamity and the Civil to Bring Order
Chapter 1 Conquer and Govern: Wen and Wu as a
Conceptual Pair in Classical Chinese Thought 13
Chapter 2 Righteous Warfare: Laying Siege to an
Enemy in Disorder 40
Part II
Military Chapters of the Yi Zhou shu
Chapter 3 Introduction to the Yi Zhou shu:
Its Transmission and Reception 73
Chapter 4 Translation and Study of the Military
Chapters of the Yi Zhou shu 97
Chapter 5 Dating and Language of the Military
Chapters of the Yi Zhou shu 136
Appendix 161
Notes 169
Bibliography 231
Index 243
v
Acknowledgments
Any first book is a testament to the many people who stood behind
the author and made the work involved possible—the teachers, the col-
leagues, the students, the libraries, and other institutions. The list for
this book is long. As early as 1994, as a graduate student at the Uni-
versity of Washington in Seattle, I had discussions with my advisor, the
late Jack Dull, about my sense that there was a great deal to be learned
from studying the Yi Zhou shu. He did not live to see me complete any
substantive work on this text, but more than any other single person
he taught me how to be a historian. I did not turn serious attention
to the Yi Zhou shu until 1996 and 1997, when a fellowship from the
Committee for Scholarly Communication with China allowed me to
spend a year at Peking University. Over the years that followed, I wrote
a dissertation that drew on material from the text, albeit without first
attending to issues of its authenticity. That dissertation was generously
supported by a grant from the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation and vari-
ous fellowships and stipends offered by the University of Washington.
During those years, in the absence of Jack Dull, many people graciously
stepped in to mentor and guide me. Bill Boltz taught me the philologi-
cal skills I needed to do the sort of work that is now found in this book,
and Kent Guy helped keep me on track as a historian. I spent a year
at UCLA, working with Lothar von Falkenhausen, who has for more
than a decade been extraordinarily generous and supportive of me.
Bob Bagley, too, became a mentor to me and has offered immeasurable
insight and encouragement over the years.
The year in Beijing, however, was unquestionably the most formative
for me. My relationship with Li Ling, who served as my faculty advi-
sor there but soon became one of my closest friends, has continued to
enrich and influence me to this day. From Li Ling’s example, I have
learned what I consider to be the most important lesson of all my years
vii
viii Acknowledgments
of study: a joyful love for the process of inquiry and discovery. I have
been fortunate beyond my own expectations to have benefited from the
guidance and support of this distinguished list of teachers, and many
more whom I have not mentioned. This book is but the beginning of a
tribute to their generosity.
The institutions mentioned above all left their mark on me and my
work as well, but this book did not begin in earnest until my arrival at
Cornell in 2000. Soon after, I decided to set my dissertation aside and
focus on the Yi Zhou shu itself; this book is the first fruit of that decision.
I started over, translating anew those portions of the text I had drawn on
during work on the dissertation, and moving substantially beyond that
body of materials. A fellowship from the American Council of Learned
Societies allowed me to turn a semester’s study leave into an invaluable
full year devoted to the research and writing of the manuscript. Both
the Department of Asian Studies and the East Asia Program at Cornell
University provided additional funding to support first, in 2002, a trip
to Hunan, where a cache of tomb manuscripts including material per-
tinent to the study of the Yi Zhou shu are housed, and then, in 2007, a
small conference held here to study these manuscripts. Several scholars
at the Hunan Provincial Institute for Cultural Relics and Archaeology,
in particular Zhang Chunlong, have been extremely helpful, providing
access to the still-unpublished cache of manuscript materials and pre-
liminary transcriptions of their contents. The conference was made pos-
sible by additional support from the Einaudi Center for International
Studies and the LT Lam Fund for East Asian Studies. Working carefully
through those manuscript materials slowed completion of this book
considerably, and waiting for their eventual publication would unneces-
sarily slow it even more. To all the people and institutions named above,
I owe a debt of gratitude, and seeing this book through to publication is
probably the best thanks I can offer for all the friendship, insight, and
support I have received over the years.
Only one thing remains to be said about the topic of this book. It is
an attempt to write an intellectual history based primarily on military
texts. No one should make the mistake of imagining that there is any-
thing the least bit appealing to me about war. Nothing could be further
from the truth.
Introduction
Your servant respectfully maintains that an enlightened ruler must have
substantive accomplishments. And what are the accomplishments of an
enlightened ruler? I say: if the state is small, he is able to enlarge it; if
it is weak, he is able to strengthen it; he {Ө Ө} yet is capable of making
others revere him. These are the substantive accomplishments of an
enlightened ruler.
Through what achievements is the ruler revered? When battles in the
field are won, the ruler is revered. When territory is acquired through
siege, the ruler is revered. Now the means of winning battles in the field
and acquiring territory through siege lie with devoting one’s energy to
siege and battle, and that is enough. For this reason, worthy officers and
enlightened rulers know to preserve the tactics of siege and battle.1
The sentiments expressed in this brief passage, which opens a manu-
script found in 1973 in a tomb near Changsha, Hunan, in central
China, may strike many readers familiar with early Chinese thought as
somehow atypical of that time and place.2 This impression could not be
more wrong. It grows out of a vision of early Chinese intellectual history
that has been overdetermined by late imperial ideology and a particular
strain of Confucianism. This vision of early China’s philosophical legacy
needs little elaboration here, for in its outline form it is both eminently
recognizable and obviously anachronistic. The standard line goes some-
thing like this: Early Chinese thought was dominated by Confucianism,
which was above all a humanistic and civilian political philosophy that
rejected violence and warfare and embraced pacifism and harmony.3
Even a casual familiarity with historical events, written sources, or the
material record of the fifth through first centuries BCE—the classi-
cal era proper and the focus of this book—will shatter this vision of a
1
