EACS-2016. Book of Abstracts

Premodern History 21st Biennial Conference of the European Association for Chinese Studies 122 Shan Tao 山濤 (205–283) and Wang Rong 王戎 (234–305) witnessed the fall of Cao-Wei 曹魏 state (220–265) and establishment of the Western Jin 西晉 dynasty (265–316) by the Sima 司馬 family. Both reigns raised the question of criteria of dynastic legitimacy. Legitimacy and its justification were also among the main concerns for Emperor Taizong 太宗 (r. 626–649), the second emperor of the Tang dynasty, whose regime followed years of turmoil and disunion. He initiated a massive project of compilation of the earlier dynastic histories. One of them, the Jin shu 晉書 (History of Jin), was completed in just two years, and the emperor personally wrote four sections. Imperial participation in a scholarly compilation implied the importance and specific purpose attached to the work as one of the accounts he wrote was on the famous Emperor Wu of Jin 晉武帝 (r. 266–290). The Jin emperor achieved reunification of the empire but his later policies were the starting point of the north-south division. The Jin shu biographies of Shan Tao and Wang Rong (chapter forty-three), prominent members of the court, were separated from the biographies of the rest of the members of Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove who were not prominent in the political sphere (chapter forty-nine). Chapter forty-three also abounds in the material from the anecdotal collection Shishuo xinyu 世說新語 . The paper will discuss and compare organization, structure, and use of sources in writing of the biographies of Shan Tao and Wang Rong in chapter forty-three and throughout the compilation to reveal potential motives and functions of the Jin shu compilation in the early Tang. Korolkov Maxim (Columbia University and Institute of Oriental Studies, RAS) Economic Exchange Practices in Early China Key words: exchange practices, trade, redistribution, exchange circuits, institutions Karl Polanyi’s famous attempt to classify the practices of exchange in material goods under the modalities of reciprocity, distribution and trade triggered interest in the forms of exchange as a key to understanding the nature of economic systems and motivations of their participants. Scholars have long recognized the importance of various forms of exchange such as trade, tribute extraction, fiscal redistribution, etc., in the formation and development of civilization and statecraft in Early China. Yet, a comprehensive framework of ‘the history of exchange’ that would account for the evolution of modalities, instruments and geogra- phies of exchange and the role of social and political institutions in these transformations still remains to be developed. This panel brings together archaeologists and economic and cultural historians who will address these questions by considering the variety of exchange situations involving material objects, technology and cultural knowledge over the longue durée of three thousand years. In the recent decades, our understanding of economic history of Early China has been greatly affected by the archaeological discoveries that yielded the wealth of material and textual evidence for the study of exchange networks: remains of imported crops and animals; ritual bronzes recovered hundreds of miles away from the production sites and bearing evidence on long-distance ritual exchange; coins; legal statutes prescribing the appropriate locations for markets, setting up quality standards for traded commodities, and specifying tolls and duties to be levied on trans- ported items — to name but a few. In the light of these new sources, we will revisit the existing taxonomies of exchange systems and test the usefulness of influential theories about the role of such systems in the social, cultural, and economic dynamics of pre-modern societies when applied to ancient Chinese material. L'Haridon Béatrice (Université Paris Diderot-Paris VII) The Purpose of Fan Ye’sWriting of Disquisitions and Eulogies (lun zan) Key words: paratext, disquisitions, eulogies, literary style, history as a mirror In his “Letter from prison to my nephews” 獄中與諸甥侄書 , which would later be considered as an auto- biography, Fan Ye, in a strong assertion of his own work, explains that he is particularly proud of his disquisi- tions and eulogies (lun zan 論贊 ). They appear at the end of some chapters and allow the historian to make his personal voice heard and develop a moral and political reflection. Fan Ye innovates by clearly distinguishing the lun, written in prose, from the more concise zan, written in quadrisyllabic verses. By elaborating at a high level this part of historiographical writing, Fan Ye deeply contributes to making it emerge as a mature literary