239 BCE: A Forgotten Turning Point in the History of the Chinese Classics

Abstract:

Qin is traditionally seen as a tyrannical state devoid of any cultural achievement. The First Emperor’s draconian measures—most notably burning books and banning private teaching in 213 BCE, followed by executing scholars in 212 BCE—solidified this stereotype. Beginning in the Han dynasty, historians blamed Qin for the collapse of classical learning and the disruption of textual transmission. Recent scholarship, however, has shown that the First Emperor of Qin actually played a key role in the formation of the “Confucian” canon. He appointed scholars as court erudites (boshi 博士) to oversee the teaching, application, redaction, and anthologization of classical texts, particularly the Poetry (Shi) and the Documents (Shu). This revisionist view further suggests that imperial Qin’s patronage and institutionalization of classical scholarship did not mark a radical rupture with its pre-imperial past; rather, it grew out of Qin’s longstanding traditionalism, continuous adherence to the Zhou paradigm, and stable institutions of ritual learning dating back to the seventh century BCE.

This paper complicates this narrative of continuity by identifying an overlooked turning point that transformed Qin from a passive follower of the Zhou tradition into an active, assertive architect of classical learning. In 249 BCE, both Zhou and Lu—the political, cultural, and moral pillars of ancient China—fell. Soon after, Qin chancellor Lü Buwei 呂不韋 gathered thousands of scholars from across the realm to produce arguably the first big book in China: The Spring and Autumn Annals of Master Lü (Lüshi Chunqiu 呂氏春秋; 239 BCE). The work’s title and timing suggest an explicit attempt to supersede the Spring and Autumn Annals of the state of Lu: While Confucius had putatively edited the Lu Annals to rhetorically restore the Zhou order, the text lost much of its relevance once both Zhou and Lu were gone. By commissioning a new Annals for Qin, Lü Buwei proclaimed the demise of the old order while framing Qin as the legitimate successor to Zhou. Importantly, Lü's big book project absorbed nearly the entire available pool of non-Qin textual experts—some of whom would later became erudites under the First Emperor; established the organizational model for state-sponsored collaborative scholarship; and, above all, inaugurated a bookish, systematic, competitive, monopolistic, forward-looking, and mythical mode of classicism that came to characterize classical studies in early imperial China. In this sense, Lü may arguably be regarded, alongside Confucius, as a founding figure of the Chinese classical tradition.

Bio:

Peter Tsung Kei Wong is an assistant professor in the Department of Chinese and History at City University of Hong Kong and a Junior Research Fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge. His research interests lie in early Chinese literature, intellectual history, and classical scholarship from the fifth century BCE to the second century CE. He is currently working on his first monograph, tentatively titled The Big Book Theory: The Unlikely Rise of Long Books and Its Consequences in Ancient China. Recent publications include “Was It Easy to Create the First Big Bamboo Book?” (2026), “Inventing the Spring and Autumn Period: How Numerology Shaped History and Historiography in Ancient China" (2024), and “The Soundscape of the Huainanzi: Poetry, Performance, Philosophy, and Praxis in Early China” (2022). He received his PhD from Princeton University and his MPhil and BA from The Chinese University of Hong Kong.