History of Chinese Literature/Chapter 2

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Chapter 2: Before Writing — Oral Traditions, Myth, and Ritual Origins (远古–约前1200)

1. Introduction: The Prehistory of Literature

Every literate civilization rests upon a substratum of oral culture. Before the Chinese script was invented — before the first marks were scratched into turtle shells and animal bones during the Shang dynasty — Chinese civilization already possessed a rich repertoire of myths, legends, songs, incantations, and ritual narratives transmitted from generation to generation through the spoken and sung word. This oral heritage, though largely irrecoverable in its original form, left deep traces in the earliest written texts and continues to resonate through the entire history of Chinese literature.

The study of Chinese oral traditions and myths presents formidable methodological challenges. Unlike the Homeric epics, which were transcribed from oral performance at a relatively early stage and have been transmitted in more or less continuous textual traditions ever since, the Chinese myths were never collected into a single comprehensive narrative. Instead, they survive as fragments scattered across texts of very different dates, genres, and purposes: cosmological treatises, geographical compendia, ritual handbooks, philosophical dialogues, and historical annals. The Shanhai jing (山海经, Classic of Mountains and Seas), the Chuci (楚辞, Elegies of Chu), the Huainanzi (淮南子), the Liezi (列子), and various chapters of the Zhuangzi (庄子) all contain mythological material, but none of them constitutes a systematic mythology comparable to Hesiod's Theogony or the Indian Puranas.

This absence of a comprehensive Chinese mythology has puzzled scholars since at least the early twentieth century. The historian Mao Dun (茅盾), writing under the pen name Xuan Zhu (玄珠), published the first systematic study of Chinese mythology in 1929 (Zhongguo shenhua yanjiu 中国神话研究), arguing that Chinese myths had been "historicized" — transformed from supernatural narratives into pseudo-historical accounts of sage-kings and culture heroes — by Confucian rationalism. This "euhemerization thesis" has been enormously influential, though more recent scholarship has complicated it significantly.

2. Creation Myths: Pangu, Nuwa, and the Ordering of the Cosmos

The most widely known Chinese creation myth is the story of Pangu (盘古), the primordial giant who emerged from the cosmic egg and separated heaven and earth. In its earliest recorded version, found in the third-century CE text Sanwu liji (三五历纪, Historical Records of the Three Sovereign Divinities and the Five Gods) attributed to Xu Zheng (徐整), the myth describes how, before heaven and earth existed, the universe was an undifferentiated chaos (混沌, hundun) shaped like a hen's egg. Pangu was born within this egg. After eighteen thousand years, heaven and earth separated: the light and pure elements (yang) rose to form heaven, while the heavy and turbid elements (yin) sank to form earth. Pangu stood between them, growing taller each day, pushing heaven and earth further apart. After another eighteen thousand years, heaven was immeasurably high, earth immeasurably deep, and Pangu immeasurably tall. When he died, his breath became the wind and clouds, his voice became thunder, his left eye became the sun and his right eye the moon, his limbs became the four quarters of the earth, his blood became the rivers, his veins became the roads, his flesh became the fields, his hair became the stars, his skin and body hair became the plants and trees, his teeth and bones became metals and stones, his marrow became pearls and jade, and his sweat became rain.

The Pangu myth is a classic example of what scholars of comparative mythology call the "cosmic man" or "world-body" motif — the idea that the physical universe was formed from the body of a primordial being. Close parallels exist in the Vedic myth of Purusha (whose dismembered body became the world, as described in the Rigveda 10.90), the Norse myth of Ymir (from whose body Odin and his brothers fashioned the world), and the Babylonian myth of Tiamat (whose body was split by Marduk to form heaven and earth). The widespread distribution of this motif has prompted extensive debate about whether it reflects independent invention, shared cognitive structures, or ancient cultural diffusion along the Eurasian steppe and the Silk Roads.

The Pangu myth is relatively late in its textual attestation (third century CE), and some scholars have argued that it was not part of the indigenous Chinese mythological tradition but was borrowed from Southeast Asian or Central Asian sources. The sinologist Derk Bodde argued that the name "Pangu" may derive from a non-Chinese language, possibly a Miao or Yao creation myth. More recently, scholars have suggested connections with the cosmogonies of the Austroasiatic and Austronesian peoples of southern China and mainland Southeast Asia. The question remains unresolved.

If Pangu is the creator through self-sacrifice, Nuwa (女娲) is the creator through artisanal labor. In the earliest accounts, Nuwa is a goddess with a human head and a serpent's body who created human beings from yellow earth (黄土). The Fengsu tongyi (风俗通义, Comprehensive Meaning of Customs and Habits), a second-century CE text attributed to Ying Shao (应劭), records that Nuwa fashioned the first humans from yellow earth, shaping them individually with her hands. But this was slow work. Growing tired, she dipped a rope in mud and flicked it, and the drops that fell became human beings. Those she had shaped by hand became the nobles and the rich; those formed from the mud drops became the poor and the lowly. This etiological detail — the myth's explanation of social inequality as originating in the very act of creation — is characteristic of Chinese mythological thinking, which tends to anchor social structures in cosmological origins.

Nuwa also figures prominently in a repair myth. The Huainanzi (second century BCE) records that in a primordial catastrophe, the pillars supporting heaven broke and the earth cracked open. Fires blazed, floods raged, and fierce beasts devoured the people. Nuwa smelted five-colored stones to mend the sky, cut off the legs of a giant turtle to prop up the four corners of heaven, killed a black dragon to save the people of the Central Plain, and piled up ashes from burned reeds to dam the floodwaters. The image of Nuwa mending the sky with five-colored stones would reverberate through Chinese literature for millennia; most famously, it provides the framing narrative of Cao Xueqin's Hongloumeng (红楼梦, Dream of the Red Chamber), where the protagonist Jia Baoyu is one of the stones left over from Nuwa's repair of the sky.

The figure of Fuxi (伏羲), often paired with Nuwa as her brother or consort, represents a different mythological function: the culture hero who brings the gifts of civilization. Fuxi is credited with inventing the eight trigrams (八卦, bagua) — the foundational symbols of the Yijing (易经, Book of Changes) — by observing the patterns of heaven and earth. He also taught humanity to fish, to hunt, to cook with fire, and to rear domesticated animals. In Han dynasty art, Fuxi and Nuwa are frequently depicted as intertwined serpent-bodied figures holding a carpenter's square (矩, Fuxi) and a compass (规, Nuwa) — symbols of the cosmic order they established.

3. Flood Myths and Cross-Cultural Parallels

The Chinese flood myth centers on two figures: Gun (鲧) and his son Yu (禹). The story, preserved in the Shanhai jing and in early historical texts such as the Shujing (书经, Book of Documents) and the Shiji (史记, Records of the Grand Historian), tells how a great flood inundated the world. The sage-emperor Yao commissioned Gun to control the waters. Gun attempted to stem the flood by building dams and embankments, using a magical self-expanding earth called xirang (息壤) that he stole from the Supreme Deity (上帝, Shangdi). After nine years of failure, Gun was executed (or, in some versions, banished) by Yao's successor Shun. From Gun's belly — miraculously preserved after his death — his son Yu was born. Yu succeeded where his father had failed, not by blocking the waters but by channeling them: he dredged rivers, cut through mountains, and directed the floodwaters to the sea. After thirteen years of heroic labor, during which he passed his own doorstep three times without entering, Yu subdued the flood and made the land habitable. In gratitude, Shun ceded the throne to him, and Yu became the founder of the Xia dynasty — the first dynasty in the traditional Chinese historical narrative.

The Yu flood myth is one of the most politically charged narratives in the Chinese tradition. It serves as the foundational charter myth of the Chinese state, establishing the principle that legitimate rulership is earned through meritorious service to the people rather than through hereditary right (Yao and Shun chose their successors on the basis of virtue, not lineage — the ideal of shanrang 禅让, "abdication"). It also establishes the model of the ideal ruler as one who tames nature through tireless labor and self-sacrifice, subordinating personal comfort to the public good. For over two thousand years, Chinese political discourse has invoked the example of Yu to praise or criticize contemporary rulers.

Flood myths are found in nearly every culture around the world — from the biblical story of Noah and the Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh to the Greek myth of Deucalion and Pyrrha, the Hindu story of Manu, and the flood narratives of indigenous peoples in the Americas, Oceania, and Africa. The ubiquity of flood myths has prompted extensive scholarly debate. Some scholars, following the comparative mythologist James George Frazer, have argued that flood myths reflect actual memories of catastrophic flooding events — a hypothesis that has gained renewed plausibility with geological evidence for massive floods in many parts of the world at the end of the last Ice Age. Others, following structural and psychological approaches, argue that flood myths express universal anxieties about the fragility of the cosmic and social order.

The Chinese flood myth is distinctive in several respects. Unlike the biblical and Mesopotamian flood narratives, in which the flood is sent by God (or the gods) as punishment for human wickedness, the Chinese flood has no clear moral cause — it is presented as a natural catastrophe, not a divine judgment. Unlike Noah, who saves himself and his family by building an ark and passively riding out the flood, Yu actively conquers the flood through engineering and labor. The Chinese myth is, in essence, a myth of human mastery over nature through collective effort and rational technique — a narrative that reflects and reinforces the deep-rooted Chinese emphasis on human agency and practical wisdom.

Recent archaeological discoveries have lent new credibility to the hypothesis that the Yu flood myth preserves a memory of actual events. In 2016, a team of geologists and archaeologists led by Wu Qinglong published evidence in Science of a catastrophic outburst flood on the Yellow River, caused by the breaching of a landslide dam at Jishi Gorge in what is now Qinghai province, around 1920 BCE. The flood released an estimated 12–16 cubic kilometers of water, one of the largest freshwater floods of the Holocene. The researchers argued that this event may have been the historical kernel behind the Yu flood myth and that its aftermath may have been connected to the founding of the Xia dynasty.

4. Shamanic Songs and Ritual Incantations

Before Chinese literature was written, it was sung and chanted. The earliest forms of Chinese verbal art were almost certainly connected to religious ritual — specifically, to the practices of shamanism (巫, wu) that appear to have been central to Chinese religion in the Neolithic and early Bronze Age periods.

The Chinese character wu (巫) refers to a ritual specialist — sometimes translated as "shaman," "medium," or "sorcerer" — who communicates with the spirit world through trance, dance, and song. Archaeological evidence suggests that shamanistic practices were widespread in Neolithic China, and textual references to wu are found in the earliest historical sources. The Guoyu (国语, Discourses of the States) contains a famous passage describing the original unity of heaven and earth, when spirits and humans mingled freely, and the subsequent separation effected by the sage-kings Zhuan Xu and Yao, who appointed the wu and the zhu (祝, "invoker") as specialized intermediaries between the human and spirit worlds.

The songs and incantations of the shamans were among the earliest forms of Chinese poetry. We have no direct textual evidence of these songs from the preliterate period, but the Jiuge (九歌, "Nine Songs") section of the Chuci — lyric poems associated with the state of Chu in southern China, traditionally attributed to the poet Qu Yuan (屈原, c. 340–278 BCE) but likely based on much older shamanistic ritual songs — preserves what may be the closest approximation to the voice of ancient Chinese shamanism. The "Nine Songs" are invocations addressed to various deities: the Great Unity (太一, Taiyi), the Lord of the East (东皇太一), the Lord within the Clouds (云中君), the Goddess of the Xiang River (湘夫人), the Lord of Fate (大司命), the Mountain Spirit (山鬼), and others. They describe the shaman's ecstatic journey to the spirit world, the longing for union with the divine, and the sorrow of separation:

With a cascade of stone orchids I have yoked the chariot,
With cassia and pepper I have woven the screen.
By a host of jade-green dragons my phoenix canopy is pulled—
I mount the sudden whirlwind, I soar aloft!

The Jiuge were almost certainly performed as ritual dramas, with costumed dancers impersonating the deities and enacting the mythological narratives. Wang Yi (王逸), the second-century CE commentator on the Chuci, recorded that "the people of the south believe in ghosts and spirits and delight in offerings and sacrifices. When they make offerings, they always use song and dance and drumming to entertain the spirits." This description accords well with what we know of shamanistic ritual in other cultures, and it suggests that the earliest Chinese "literature" was not text at all but performed ritual — a fusion of song, dance, music, and dramatic impersonation that would later differentiate into the separate genres of poetry, drama, and religious liturgy.

The connection between shamanism and the origins of Chinese poetry has been a major theme in modern Chinese literary scholarship. The literary historian Wen Yiduo (闻一多), in a series of influential essays written in the 1940s, argued that the earliest Chinese poetry was inseparable from music and dance and that this tripartite unity reflected the shamanistic origins of Chinese verbal art. More recently, the archaeologist K.C. Chang proposed that shamanism was the defining feature of Chinese civilization in its formative period, arguing that access to the spirit world through shamanistic ritual was the basis of political authority in Shang and early Zhou China.

5. Oral Epics of Ethnic Minorities

The literary traditions of China's ethnic minorities add a crucial dimension to the prehistory of Chinese literature. While the Han Chinese literary tradition has been predominantly a written one for over three millennia, many of China's fifty-five officially recognized ethnic minority groups have maintained vigorous oral literary traditions that preserve forms of verbal art — particularly the long narrative epic — that have no counterpart in the Han Chinese tradition.

Three epics stand out for their extraordinary scale and cultural significance:

The Epic of King Gesar (格萨尔王传, Gesaer wang zhuan), also known as Gesar or Geser, is the national epic of the Tibetan people, also cherished by Mongolians, Tu, Naxi, and other peoples of the Tibetan Plateau and Inner Asia. With an estimated one million lines in its most expansive versions, it is widely regarded as the longest epic poem in the world — dwarfing the Iliad (15,693 lines), the Mahabharata (approximately 200,000 lines), and even the Ramayana (approximately 48,000 lines). The epic narrates the adventures of the hero Gesar, a divine being sent to earth to combat demonic forces and establish justice. It is still performed by living bards (sgrung mkhan) in Tibet and surrounding areas, some of whom are illiterate and claim to have received their knowledge of the epic through divine inspiration or dreams. UNESCO inscribed Gesar on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2009.

Jangar (江格尔, Jiangge'er), the Oirat Mongolian epic, narrates the exploits of the hero Jangar and his forty-two warriors in the paradisiacal land of Bumba, where no one ages past twenty-five. The epic, composed of independent but interconnected chapters (bölög), is performed by specialist bards (jangarchi) and has been transmitted orally among the Oirat Mongols of Xinjiang and the Kalmyks of the Volga region. It was first recorded in written form in the eighteenth century, but the oral tradition is much older. Jangar is valued not only as a literary masterpiece but as a repository of Mongolian nomadic culture, cosmology, and ethical values.

Manas (玛纳斯, Manasi), the epic of the Kyrgyz people, tells the story of the hero Manas and his descendants through eight generations. With over 200,000 lines in its most complete versions, it is one of the longest epics in the world. The epic is performed by specialist bards called manaschi, some of whom can recite for days on end. The Kyrgyz community in Xinjiang has maintained a living performance tradition, and several celebrated manaschi — including Jusup Mamay (居素甫·玛玛依, 1918–2014), who could perform all eight parts of the epic — have been the subject of extensive scholarly study. UNESCO inscribed Manas on its Intangible Cultural Heritage list in 2009.

These epics are significant for the history of Chinese literature in several respects. First, they demonstrate that the oral epic — a genre conspicuously absent from the Han Chinese tradition — has flourished within the borders of China among non-Han peoples. The question of why the Han Chinese did not develop a tradition of oral epic poetry comparable to the Homeric, Indian, or Central Asian traditions has long puzzled scholars. Various explanations have been proposed: the early development of writing, which may have preempted the need for extended oral narrative; the Confucian emphasis on history rather than myth as the primary mode of narrative; the fragmentation and "euhemerization" of Chinese mythology that prevented the coalescence of a unified mythological narrative. The existence of magnificent oral epics among China's minority peoples suggests that the absence of epic in the Han tradition reflects specific features of Han Chinese literary culture rather than any inherent Chinese incapacity for epic expression.

Second, these epics raise important questions about the boundaries of "Chinese literature." Are Gesar, Jangar, and Manas works of "Chinese literature"? In the PRC, they are officially classified as part of China's national literary heritage and have been the subject of extensive state-sponsored collection, transcription, and study. But they are also claimed — with equal justice — by Tibet, Mongolia, and Kyrgyzstan as part of their own national literary traditions. The question has no simple answer, and it illustrates the limitations of nation-based definitions of literary tradition.

6. Oracle Bone Inscriptions: The Dawn of Writing

The transition from oral to written culture in China is associated with the oracle bone inscriptions (甲骨文, jiaguwen) of the late Shang dynasty (c. 1250–1046 BCE). Discovered in 1899 near the village of Xiaotun (小屯) in Anyang, Henan province — the site of the last Shang capital, Yin (殷) — the oracle bones are the earliest substantial corpus of Chinese writing. They consist of inscriptions carved on turtle plastrons (the flat underside of the shell) and animal scapulae (shoulder bones), recording the results of divination rituals performed by Shang kings and their diviners.

The divination process was itself a form of communication with the spirit world. The diviner would inscribe a "charge" (命辞, mingci) — a statement or question addressed to the ancestral spirits or to the supreme deity Shangdi (上帝) — on the bone, then apply heat to produce cracks. The pattern of the cracks was interpreted as the spirits' response, and the result was sometimes recorded on the bone along with the original charge and, occasionally, a "verification" (验辞, yanci) noting whether the predicted event actually occurred.

The oracle bone inscriptions are not "literature" in any conventional sense. They are ritual records, administrative documents, and divinatory archives. Yet they are significant for literary history in several ways. First, they demonstrate that by the late Shang period, the Chinese script was already a mature and sophisticated writing system, capable of recording a wide range of subjects: warfare, agriculture, hunting, weather, illness, childbirth, sacrificial rituals, astronomical phenomena, and royal activities. The approximately 4,500 distinct characters identified in the oracle bone corpus include many that are recognizable ancestors of modern Chinese characters, establishing a continuity of script that stretches over three millennia — the longest unbroken tradition of writing in the world.

Second, some oracle bone inscriptions display qualities that might be called proto-literary: conciseness, parallelism, rhythmic patterning, and a concern with the aesthetic arrangement of characters on the bone surface. The Shang diviners were not merely recording information; they were creating inscriptions that were meant to be read — by the spirits, if not by human readers. The care with which the characters were carved, and the attention to the visual layout of the inscriptions, suggest an awareness of writing as a form of wen (pattern) that went beyond mere utility.

Third, the oracle bones provide invaluable evidence about the beliefs, values, and social structures that would shape later Chinese literature. The Shang concern with ancestral worship, the belief in a supreme deity, the practice of divination, the intimate connection between political authority and ritual performance — all of these themes recur throughout Chinese literary history, from the Shijing and the Chuci to the great novels of the Ming and Qing dynasties.

7. Bronze Inscriptions: From Ritual Record to Literary Expression

The bronze inscriptions (金文, jinwen), cast or incised on ritual bronze vessels from the late Shang through the Western Zhou period (c. 1046–771 BCE), represent the next stage in the development of Chinese writing and, arguably, the first stirrings of genuine literary expression.

The earliest bronze inscriptions, from the late Shang period, are brief — often consisting of no more than a clan emblem or a few characters recording the maker's name and the occasion for casting the vessel. But during the Western Zhou period, bronze inscriptions became progressively longer and more elaborate, developing into formal compositions that displayed a high degree of literary artistry.

The most important genre of Western Zhou bronze inscription is the commemorative inscription recording a royal appointment, land grant, or military victory. A typical inscription follows a standard format: the date and place of the event; the king's command or conferral of gifts; the recipient's expression of gratitude; and a concluding formula dedicating the vessel to the recipient's ancestors. The language is formal and formulaic, employing set phrases and rhetorical patterns that recur across many inscriptions. Yet within this formulaic framework, individual inscriptions display considerable variation in length, detail, and rhetorical skill.

The Da Yu ding (大盂鼎, "Great Yu Tripod"), cast in the reign of King Kang of Zhou (r. c. 1005–978 BCE), bears an inscription of 291 characters recording a royal audience in which King Kang instructed the nobleman Yu on the lessons of history, praised his grandfather's service, and conferred lands and people upon him. The inscription includes a remarkable passage in which the king reflects on the fall of the Shang dynasty:

The Shang lost their mandate and their people because they were dissolute and intemperate, because their officials abandoned virtue and indulged in drunkenness, because their governance was disordered and the spirits of grain and soil were neglected.

This passage exemplifies a theme — the Mandate of Heaven (天命, tianming), the belief that a dynasty rules by divine sanction that can be withdrawn if the ruler fails in virtue — that would become central to Chinese political thought and literary culture. The bronze inscriptions are among our earliest witnesses to this concept, which is developed more fully in the Shujing (Book of Documents) and the Shijing (Book of Songs).

The literary significance of the bronze inscriptions lies not only in their content but in their form. The longer Western Zhou inscriptions display features that would become hallmarks of Chinese literary prose: parallel construction, rhythmic patterning, the use of historical allusion, and a concern with moral and political exemplarity. They also exhibit an awareness of the power of the written word to confer permanence and authority — the vessel and its inscription were meant to last forever, preserving the memory of the event and the honor of the family for all time. The formulaic closing of many inscriptions — "May sons and grandsons forever treasure and use this vessel" (子子孙孙永宝用) — expresses this aspiration with lapidary conciseness.

8. The Relationship between Myth and Early Historiography

One of the most distinctive features of the Chinese literary tradition is the intimate relationship between myth and historiography. In most ancient civilizations, myth and history coexisted as separate modes of understanding the past: the Greeks had both Homer and Thucydides, the Indians had both the Puranas and the royal chronicles. In China, however, myth was progressively absorbed into historiography, transformed from sacred narrative into exemplary history.

This process, which the scholar Gu Jiegang (顾颉刚) called the "stratified accumulation of ancient history" (层累地造成的古史, cenglei di zaocheng de gushi), was the central insight of the "Doubting Antiquity" (疑古, yigu) movement that transformed Chinese historical scholarship in the 1920s and 1930s. Gu argued that the Chinese "ancient history" of sage-kings and culture heroes — the Yellow Emperor, Yao, Shun, Yu, and the founders of the Three Dynasties — was not a record of actual events but a layered accumulation of myths, legends, and fabrications that had been progressively "historicized" over the centuries. The earlier the supposed historical figure, the later it had actually been invented: the Yellow Emperor, the most ancient of the sage-kings, was the last to be added to the historical tradition, while Yu, the most recent, was among the first.

Gu's thesis was revolutionary, and it remains controversial. But his fundamental insight — that the boundary between myth and history in early China was far more fluid than traditional scholarship had assumed — has been widely accepted. The Shujing (Book of Documents), one of the Five Classics and ostensibly the oldest historical record in the Chinese tradition, contains speeches and edicts attributed to sage-kings whose historicity is at best uncertain. The Shiji (Records of the Grand Historian) by Sima Qian (司马迁, c. 145–86 BCE), the foundational work of Chinese historiography, begins with the "Basic Annals of the Five Emperors" (五帝本纪) — a chapter that treats mythological figures as historical rulers and integrates mythological narratives into a rational chronological framework.

The "euhemerization" of Chinese myth — the transformation of gods and spirits into human sage-kings and culture heroes — had profound consequences for Chinese literature. On one hand, it meant that the mythological imagination was channeled into historiographical forms: the Chinese equivalent of the Iliad was not an epic poem but the Shiji, a historical narrative that absorbed and transformed the mythological heritage. On the other hand, it meant that Chinese historiography was imbued with a mythological depth and moral seriousness that set it apart from the more prosaic historical writing of other traditions. The Shiji is not merely a record of events; it is a work of moral imagination, in which historical figures are presented as exemplars of virtue and vice and historical events are understood as expressions of cosmic patterns.

The relationship between myth and literature in China is thus more complex than a simple narrative of "myth gives way to literature." Rather, myth was transformed into literature — it became the raw material from which Chinese writers fashioned new genres, new narratives, and new modes of understanding the human condition. The creation myths of Pangu and Nuwa, the flood myth of Yu, the legends of the sage-kings, the stories of culture heroes and divine beings — all of these continued to live in Chinese literature long after they had been rationalized and historicized, resurfacing in poetry, fiction, drama, and philosophical allegory down to the present day.

9. Conclusion: The Oral Foundations of a Written Tradition

This chapter has surveyed the earliest stratum of what would become Chinese literature: the oral traditions of myth, song, and ritual incantation that preceded the invention of writing; the creation myths and flood legends that expressed Chinese civilization's deepest intuitions about the origins of the cosmos and human society; the shamanistic songs and dances that were the first forms of Chinese verbal art; the magnificent oral epics of China's ethnic minorities; and the oracle bone and bronze inscriptions that mark the transition from oral to written culture.

Several themes emerge that will recur throughout this history. The first is the intimate connection between literature and ritual — the idea that verbal art originates in, and derives its power from, the communication between the human and spirit worlds. This connection, established in the shamanistic origins of Chinese poetry, would be maintained in the ritual context of the Shijing, the sacrificial hymns of the imperial court, and the liturgical texts of Buddhism, Daoism, and popular religion. The second is the relationship between myth and history — the transformation of sacred narrative into exemplary history that is one of the distinctive features of Chinese literary culture. The third is the breadth and diversity of the Chinese literary heritage, which includes not only the Han Chinese tradition but the rich oral and written literatures of dozens of other peoples.

With the emergence of the Shang and Zhou writing systems, Chinese literature entered a new phase. The spoken and sung word could now be fixed in permanent form, transmitted across space and time, collected and anthologized, studied and commented upon. The first great monument of this new written literature — the Shijing, the Book of Songs — is the subject of the next chapter.

References

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