Speaker: Yunxiao Xiao, University of Washington

This talk explores how written information was organized, edited, and transmitted through the ancient media of bamboo and wood. Drawing on excavated manuscripts from the Warring States through the Han, I examine three practices of bookmaking and information management before the age of paper: 1) designing layouts, 2) editing and updating legal compilations, and 3) transmitting literary texts within local scribal communities.

First, I consider tables and tabular formats, showing how scribes drew on a repertoire of spatial strategies to organize administrative, calendrical, and mathematical information on the two-dimensional writing surface. I then turn to normative legal manuscripts that were physically scraped and rewritten as regulations changed, revealing statutory texts not as finished records but as objects continually maintained and updated in use. Finally, I examine correspondences among scribal hands in manuscripts from different tombs and ask what they might reveal about relationships among otherwise anonymous scribes and the local transmission of literary knowledge.

Together, these cases illuminate the interplay between knowledge and media in early China. What we know about the past depends not only on what was written and happened to survive, but also on how knowledge was materially produced, organized, revised, and transmitted. From legal practice to literary classics, this talk approaches early Chinese manuscripts as evidence for a broader history of ancient media and information.

Yunxiao Xiao (Ch. 肖芸曉) is a scholar of Chinese literature and cultural history specializing in paleographic texts from the late Warring States and Qin–Han periods. With research interests in epistemological practices and information technologies before the age of paper, she explores the interplay between knowledge, people, and historical media. Her first book project, The Crafts of the Hidden Hands: Scribal Culture and the Making of Texts in Early China, examines the ordinary producers and practices behind the formation of Chinese classical knowledge and traces how early written culture in East Asia emerged and evolved. Building on her interest in the history of media, information, and technology, her other projects explore how administrative data and scholarly information were represented, organized, controlled, and manipulated on bamboo and wood in the Qin and Han empires. Before joining the University of Washington, she earned her PhD from Princeton University (2024) and was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford University.