Reading from, Reading into: The Challenge of the Bamboo Odes

One of the great fascinations of excavated Chinese texts is the promise of recovering the formative stage of works that later became classics: we might then learn what later editors and interpreters have done to them, and rewrite the intellectual history of early China. But little is inevitable in the history of texts. This paper takes a single short poem from the Anhui Shying manuscript and reads it both with and against the transmitted Mao edition, using it to imagine various scenarios for the "wonderful life" (Gould) of early Chinese literature.