Bamboo Slips and Wooden Tablets: The Writing System from the Han to Early Jin Dynasties

Abstract

From the Han to early Jin dynasties, compositions are all written on bamboo slips and wooden tablets and restricted by their dimensions and shapes. These slips and tablets featured distinctive writing patterns, literary genres, and text structures that are different from those of later paper books, becoming a unique writing system known as the bamboo slips and wooden tablets system. This writing system, formed based on the use of bamboo slips and wooden tablets, is characterized by its inclination to compose short essays in a range of practical genres. These essays are inscribed on small tablets, making them easy to carry and read. Despite their short length, typically composed of only a few dozen to a hundred characters, they are concise in language and full of meanings. There are more than ten genres, including imperial edicts and orders, argumentative essays, letters and correspondences, odes and panegyrics, exhortations and inscriptions, condolences and elegies, proclamations, rhymed proses, and rhapsodies. Due to their relatively low writing requirements and easyto-master nature, this form of writing quickly gains favor among literati and scholars and develops rapidly. Consequently, a literary landscape emerges where short works are popular and long works are neglected. As a result, most literati and scholars excel at writing short works but struggle with long ones. The emergence of this writing system and the associated writing skills is closely related to the limited writing capacity of bamboo slips and wooden tablets, as well as the different application scenarios of bamboo slips and wooden tablets. During the Eastern Jin Dynasty and the Southern Dynasties, with the widespread use of paper, books are then made of paper in scrolls that allow for continuous writing. This removes the constraints previously imposed by bamboo slips and wooden tablets on essay writing, enabling literati and scholars to focus more on structure, layout, and language organization during their writing. However, the concise writing style established in earlier generations has already been deeply entrenched, becoming a norm and a constraint for the writing of later literati and scholars. The bamboo slips and wooden tablets system, inherited from the Han, Wei, and early Jin dynasties, can still be faintly discerned. The formation of the bamboo slips and wooden tablets system during the Han and Jin dynasties illustrates the interplay between the generation mechanisms of early literary forms and the changes in writing mediums usedand literary styles of that time, which is worthy of depth investigation.

Keywords

the Han Dynasty / the early Jin Dynasty / text / bamboo slips and wooden tablets / writing system

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