'Age Inflation and Deflation' in Medieval China.

• Author: Chen, Sanping
• Position: Essay

Using the twelve-year animal cycle, this paper uncovers and examines the dual phenomena of "age inflation" and "age deflation" in medieval China. While the first part raises serious doubt on the accuracy of the conventional method for calculating birth year in premodern China, the second section examining the deflation phenomenon provides yet another proof of the omnipotent law of economic rationality.

1. "AGE INFLATION"

   The crown jewel of classic Chinese historiography is no doubt the vast volumes of official and private records on major historical events and personalities, most of them clearly dated. As a result and helped by derivation described below, from the two Han dynasties (206 B.C.E.-220 C.E.) the majority of Chinese personages have had their exact dates known, providing a clear timeline of these historical players. Or so think modern historians. This can be readily seen from a cursory look at the ever-growing number of handbooks, dictionaries, "who's who" volumes, and encyclopedias of historical figures and historical subjects, with a great majority of entries listed with the exact dates in the Julian/Gregorian calendar.

   Though quite different from the modern Western notion of official birth certificate, there is ample indication that detailed private birth records, down to the hour of the day, were kept assiduously by parents in premodern China, not the least for the purpose of future matchmaking, when such records would be presented and exchanged for finding the most suitable mates. However, no such direct records seem to have been made available to historians, neither ancient nor modern. It was not until the Southern Song dynasty that we begin to see exact birth years sporadically recorded in local gazettes, family pedigrees, civil service examination dossiers, etc., often with questionable reliability. Consequently, nearly all birth dates in modern references are derived from a combination of the recorded date of death and age at death of these ancient figures. While we may have reasonable confidence in the date of death, the first half of this paper raises serious doubt on the accuracy of the standard interpretation of the recorded age at death.

   This interpretation is based on the Chinese notion that, at birth, a person is already one sui old. So if he or she died in, say, year 345 C.E. at age 50 sui, then the person was born in year 345 - (50 - 1) = 296 C.E. In other words, we have a general formula:

   Birth year= death year - (age in sui - 1).(1)

   The roughly one month's difference in the new year's day between the Chinese lunar calendar and Julian/Gregorian solar calendar notwithstanding, (1) the above formula is the basis for calculating tens of thousands of birth dates in Chinese history, in what can only be characterized as blind faith. Indeed, without premodern birth records, there hardly seems to be any way to verify or corroborate the accuracy of the above formula (1).

   But is there?

   It is indeed very rare to see an exact birth year recorded in premodern Chinese sources, particularly before the Ming dynasty. But starting in early medieval China, there emerged the folk custom of relating a person to his/her Chinese "zodiac" sign, namely the animal corresponding to the person's birth year in the twelve-year animal cycle. This folk tradition has spread to many other cultures and has lasted to this very day. While the recently unearthed Zoumalou bamboo strips of the Later Han to the Three Kingdoms era provide solid evidence of the onomastic use of the animal cycle, (2) the late Peter Boodberg was the first modern scholar to recognize this relationship in Chinese nomenclature. In two papers he identified a number of Chinese personalities whose "zodiac" signs were revealed by their names or epithets.3 Several years ago I used the same relationship to correct the dates of Yuan Hong, the Eastern Jin dynasty author of the chronicle Hou Han ji . (4)

   The current paper applies Boodberg's idea in reverse. Because a person's animal sign was determined a priori by the Almighty at one's very birth with unimpeachable exactness, the relationship can be used to check the accuracy of the above unchallenged universal formula for calculating a person's birth year by modern historians. Even today, the animal sign is often the more truthful indicator of a person's birth year than other records. (5)

   As suggested by the considerable uncertainties or "margins of error" in Boodberg's studies, another major contributor to the corruption, either random or deliberate, of the ancient dates is the numerous scribal, editorial, and printing errors accumulated in millennia of repeated history writing and rewriting. In fact, in the popular punctuated edition of the standard histories published by Zhonghua shuju in Beijing, the emendation of recorded age at death represents one of the most common categories of editorial notes.

   I was therefore led to a much more faithful source of contemporary data, namely tomb inscriptions. It is fortunate that the most prominent realm and period of onomastic use of the animal cycle, namely northern China during the Northern Dynasties, also bequeathed...