Research on Jinwen Temple System

Author: Liu Zheng
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2004-01-01
Features: "Temple System" refers to the various regulations of the "temple halls" used by ancient emperors for sacrificial rites and official meetings. It is a materialized embodiment of the "ritual" that emphasizes hierarchy and strict social order. This book excavates the temple systems of the Shang and Zhou dynasties from ancient bronze inscriptions (jintong), thereby elucidating the corresponding ritual systems. It provides a novel and scientific approach to the study of ancient Chinese history. In the history of ancient Chinese classics, research on the Shang and Zhou temple systems primarily appears in explanatory works on the Three Rites (Sanli). Among these, the most famous specialized work is the Comprehensive Examination of the Rites (Du Li Tong Kao) by the Qing Dynasty ritual scholar Xu Qianxue. This book focuses on annotations of the Three Rites and systematically compiles and analyzes burial systems across dynasties. After him, Zhu Kongyang wrote the Comprehensive Examination of Imperial Tombs Throughout Dynasties. Of course, it also primarily studies the burial and mausoleum systems of ancient China across various dynasties. However, the aforementioned works concentrated on the burial and mausoleum systems of the Qin and Han dynasties, with only brief references to the Ming and Qing dynasties, while falling short of fundamental research on the Shang and Zhou temple systems. In the surviving historical documents of the pre-Qin period, descriptions of the specific construction of Shang and Zhou temple systems are merely a few words at most. For the Western Zhou, works such as the Records of the Grand Historian, the Book of Documents, the Zuo Zhuan, and the Annals of the Bamboo Books also faced the issue of "insufficient documents" and "dared not speak a single word" regarding the topic. How much more so for later scholars? In the study of Western Zhou history, under the condition of "insufficient documents," if we wish to research the history and culture of the Western Zhou, the most direct and credible historical materials we can utilize are the inscriptions on bronze artifacts.