Jiaguwen Heji


Jiaguwen Heji, abbreviated Heji or HJ, is the standard comprehensive collection of rubbings of ancient Chinese oracle bone inscriptions.

Compilation

Under the last nine kings of the Shang dynasty, pieces of bone, usually plastrons of tortoises or scapula of oxen, were used in pyromantic divination and then inscribed.
The used oracle bones were deposited in pits at the Shang cult centre now known as Yinxu and forgotten for millennia.
After Wang Yirong discovered in 1899 that ancient bone fragments on sale for medicinal purposes bore an early form of Chinese characters, there was great interest in these bones.
Local farmers dug up at least nine caches containing about 100,000 fragments, which were sold to collectors, both Chinese and foreign.
Scientific excavation of the Yinxu site began in 1928, and about 30,000 more pieces were recovered.
As a result, fragments of the bones were divided between collections across the world and within China.
More than 150 catalogues of different collections were produced, often with ink rubbings of the inscriptions, but sometimes with only line drawings.
Hu Houxuan had worked on oracle bones since the 1930s, and began collecting rubbings from all the collections he visited.
On joining the Institute of History at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in 1956, he submitted a proposal to compile a comprehensive collection of rubbings of these inscriptions.
Beginning in April 1961, a team led by Hu collected rubbings from existing catalogues and made new rubbings of all the bones they could find.
They then classified the 200,000 pieces, eliminating duplicates and fakes and joining fragments that had originally come from the same piece.
The work was interrupted by the Cultural Revolution in 1966, when Hu's team were sent to the countryside, though Hu himself remained in Beijing, where he was required to study Mao Zedong Thought.
Through the intervention of Guo Moruo, head of the academy and a renowned oracle bone scholar, the materials they had collected were hidden in a cave near Xi'an to save them from destruction.
Guo was also instrumental in obtaining permission for Hu to resume the project in 1970, initially in combination with political studies.
Publication of the 13-volume work began with volumes 2 and 3 in 1978 and concluded with volume 1 in 1982.
Guo was credited as and Hu as , both terms meaning 'editor-in-chief'.

Contents

The collection includes only oracle bones recovered from the Yinxu site since 1899, and thus excludes the small number found at other sites.
Small or badly damaged fragments were not included unless they were particularly significant.
In this way, the compilers winnowed their huge collection down to 41,956 items.
The rubbings are grouped first according to Dong Zuobin's oracle bone periods:
  • Period I : volumes 1–6
  • pieces from three diviner groups originally assigned by Dong to period IV but now believed by most scholars to date from late in period I: volume 7
  • Period II : volume 8
  • Period III : volume 9 and part of volume 10
  • Period IV : rest of volumes 10 and volume 11
  • Period V : volume 12
Within each period, rubbings are grouped by subject, with four main sections and 21 subsections:
  • class and state
  • * slaves and commoners
  • * slave-owner lords
  • * officials
  • * army, punishments, prisons
  • * warfare
  • * border states
  • * tribute
  • social production
  • * agriculture
  • * fishing and hunting, livestock
  • * handicraft
  • * commerce, transport
  • intellectual culture
  • * astronomy, calendar
  • * weather
  • * architecture
  • * sickness
  • * childbearing
  • * worship of spirits and gods
  • * sacrifices
  • * good and bad omens
  • * divination
  • * writing
  • miscellaneous
Volume 13 contains hand-drawings of pieces for which no rubbings were available, arranged in the same way as the first 12 volumes.

Auxiliary works

Hu and his team also produced works to facilitate the use and navigation of the Heji:
Transcriptions of all the inscriptions in Heji in conventional Chinese characters with punctuation are provided by:

  • Supplement

Further bones were published in a supplement, abbreviated or HB:
The first four volumes contain 13,450 further pieces from Anyang, grouped in the same way as in Heji.
There are also 316 pieces from other sites grouped by site, 309 of them from the pre-conquest Zhou and 7 from sites in Henan.
The remaining three volumes contain transcriptions of the pieces, source lists, recombining tables and a bibliography.
As well as collating sources published since the Heji, the supplement includes 7000 previously unpublished pieces, most of them small fragments with few characters.
It also corrects a number of errors of periodization and recombination in the Heji.

Works cited

*