The Text That Came Up on Bamboo

In 1972 a tomb at Yinqueshan on the edge of Linyi was opened, and inside it, cut on strips of bamboo, was the Sun Tzu's Art of War, found together with other classics written by hand on the same material. The discovery is counted among the ten greatest archaeological finds in China since the founding of the republic. The slips themselves are now on display in the Shandong Provincial Museum. A second place keeps writing in view much closer to where it came out of the ground: near the centre of Linyi there is a museum that houses original bamboo strips of the Warring States period. What both collections share is the material. Text on bamboo is heavy and brittle and survives only where the ground is dry and undisturbed, which is why a hillside at the edge of a city can hold what no library ever printed.

Linyi keeps more than three hundred named sites, and several of them answer to the slips in kind: the former residence of Wang Xizhi, Yan Zhenqing's home village, the city's own Confucius temple, the tomb of Xunzi, tombs cut with Han pictorial stones, Han que, the ancient battlefield of Maling, the Qi Great Wall at Muling Pass, and the old site of the Red Coat Army rising on Maqi Mountain. The city has a recorded history of 2,400 years and counts among the figures connected with it Zhuge Liang and Wang Xizhi, the Eastern Jin calligrapher. Just north of the centre there is a park on the birthplace of Wang Xizhi, and near the centre a museum of bamboo strips: two small places a few streets apart, one keeping a tradition of handwriting and the other keeping what a tomb gave back.