"Venerated Documents": What are "shu", and What is at Stake?

The  Shangshu  尚書  (Venerated Documents) is a self-styled primary historical source; it is made up of shu  書  (documents, writings) corresponding to speeches and ritualised activities traditionally attributed to mythical and legendary political heroes of the Xia  夏  (c. 2070–c. 1600 BC), Shang  商  (c. 1600–1046 BC), and Western Zhou  周  (c. 1045–771 BC) dynasties. 

Throughout every epoch of Chinese civilisation across the past two millennia, the Shangshu has been called upon as a font of ancient axiomatic wisdom, particularly regarding the fundamentals of governance, in which capacity it has been used to legitimate numerous political projects. However, in tension with  Shangshu's role as a foundational authority, the larger of its two principal existing texts versions, used and relied upon for the last two-thousand-odd years, was discredited over recent centuries by the “revelation” that it was in fact compiled only during the fourth century AD, from older text fragments. The ensuing (and ongoing) debate surrounding the so-called Old Text (guwen 古文) Shangshu  – a set of texts that correspond to pre-historical nebulous literary compositions with no author, no origin, and no “original” to which authenticators can make recourse – throws into sharp relief the epistemological limits of concepts of “authenticity” (zheng  證). 

This paper reanimates the Old Text authenticity debates, asking where and how, in such strained empirical conditions, its participants nevertheless found grounds to declare (in)authenticity with such decisiveness. Following scholars such as Michael Nylan and Benjamin Elman, the paper adopts the view of the intellectual historian to reconsider these debates, suggesting that, perhaps, its overtures say as much as about the contingent intellectual and political milieus of its participants as it does about a hypothetical lost “truth” of the text's nature. 

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