Was it really so, royal uncles?

Shu 書 historical documents lie at the center of longstanding debates about textual authenticity in China. The Shang shu 尚書 (Venerated Documents) canon, allegedly compiled by Confucius, comes in “standard script” 今文 and “archaic script” 古文versions. Proponents of each version were locked in a tug of war for roughly two millennia. Another shu collection, the Yi Zhou shu 逸周書 languished in the dustbin of “assorted histories” 雜史 after becoming known as the Leftover Documents—chaff cast off when Confucius compiled the Shang shu. During the Qing dynasty. However, some scholars reclassified two avuncular remonstrations preserved in the Yi Zhou shu—the “Rui Liangfu” 芮良夫 and “Zhai Gong” 祭公 chapters—as lost texts of the Shang shu. In 2008, Tsinghua University obtained Warring States bamboo manuscript versions of “Zhai Gong” and a previously unknown text attributed to Rui Liangfu. The manuscript corpus from which these two documents derives functions to further dissolve the boundary between “venerated” and “leftover” shu documents that began to weaken in the Qing. And yet, the same manuscripts, presumably robbed from a grave, present new problems of authentication. This paper sketches an historical arc of claims and doubts, asking what priorities and judgments lie behind changing notions of authenticity in shu documents. One tentative conclusion is that in light of new manuscript evidence, and in spite of the problems of manuscript authentication, it is impossible to return to prior methods that assume linguistic features of transmitted texts to be static. A second conclusion is that the identification of genre as a field of known textual features plays an integral role in both confounding and untangling the problems of textual reconstruction, recreation, and forgery