Inscriptions of Chin and the San-Chin, Chung-Shan, and Yen.

• Author: Cook, Constance A.

Inscriptions of Chin and the San-Chin, Chung-Shan, and Yen [phrase omitted] By NOEL BARNARD. 3 vols. Taipei: SMC PUBLISHING INC., 2018. Pp. cxlvi + 867 (vol. 1), xviii + 997 (vol. 2), xiv + 1092 (vol. 3). NT 15,000.

Published posthumously, this massive set of tomes is the final masterpiece--a self-reflective contribution to the study of artifacts, jinshixue [phrase omitted]by Noel Barnard (1922-2016). It not only documents every scrap of paleographical evidence left by an interconnected set of ancient BC-era polities in northeast China, it documents the very process of documenting. Noel Barnard, proudly born in New Zealand, spent his adult life based in Canberra, at the Australian National University, pursuing the historic quest for scholarly preservation and documentation of ancient documents. Ideally, the process would involve a combined team of museum directors, archaeologists, paleographers, and technical specialists in the material used to thoroughly examine the original material object and make detailed analyses of the crafting and scribal techniques, with help of high-quality photographs, rubbings, and notes. Barnard has played many of those roles. Known initially for his work with the Sackler Gallery on the Chu Silk Manuscript in the late 1960s and early 1970s, his decades of research into metallurgy and inscribed bronzes essentially founded the art of jinshixue in the West. The passion, or perhaps, obsession, of his last decades translated into this multilayered dialog between his various personae and the reader--this three-volume set, published two years after his death. It is a masterful production of "archaeo-documents," but also a conversation; this is Noel Barnard teaching us jinshixue, leaning back from his desk occasionally, with a wink and a long discursive "by-the way." As students and readers, it will take us many decades to comb through these rich sands, embedded as they are with hidden nuggets on myriad topics--these jeweled tangents that readers will stumble upon and realize they need to start part of the journey over again truly to understand his text.

Barnard dedicates this book to two former directors of the Shanghai Museum, Ma Chengyuan [phrase omitted] [phrase omitted] (1927-2004) and Chen Peifen [phrase omitted] (1925-2013), with whom he has had a long and productive friendship. The accomplished scholar Cheung Kwong Yue (Zhang Guangyu [phrase omitted]), his student and collaborator, contributed the preface, and certainly deserves credit for making sure these volumes saw the light.

The work is a rigorous academic study, in which Barnard applies his own high standards recursively upon himself, justifying at every turn how those standards must be defined and applied. He warns potential reviewers that they would "find the task irksome, to say the least" but, he notes, that "the more observant reader will discover, these volumes have developed (stage by stage) into an archival compendium--a venture that had been far from my primary aim, just over a decade ago" (p. cv). He successfully establishes an archive of archaeo-documents to counter "traditional-text data" (p. cxvi) in his notoriously independent manner: intrepidly tracking down the original objects, forming always his own judgments, and in some ways keeping firmly to earlier traditions and selectively hearing the opinions of others. One example is the issue of chronology. He prefers that of Liu Xin [phrase omitted] (ca. 50 BCE-23 CE) over that of any modern scholars--including the recent sandai chronology project in Beijing (p. 2427 in volume three); he also prefers the Wade-Giles romanization system over Pinyin, but does provide conversion charts. Nevertheless, he takes his role as a jinshixue archivist seriously and has produced an invaluable archive of documents linked to the ancient states of Jin [phrase...