While Yuandi's reign is not known as a period of imperial expansion, discussions of the major questions of the concept of imperial government and the administrative problems of the day were to be of long-lasting influence. The views put forward by scholars and officials such as Xiao Wangzhi, Gong Yu, Wei Xuancheng, Kuang Heng, Liu Xiang and Yi Feng led the way to the open adoption of Zhou as the ideal which Wang Mang and subsequent emperors claimed to follow. Yuandi himself played little part in government; his advisors raised matters of religious cults, economic practice, the standards of officials, the extravagance of the palace, relations with non-Han leaders, and the value of holding outlying parts of the empire.

Buddhism, first officially adopted by Tibetan royalty in the seventhcentury, remained confined to court circles and was not widely acceptedduring the reign of the Tibetan kings between the seventh and ninthcenturies. After a dark period of persecution during the late imperialperiod, the so-called “Second Diffusion” of Buddhism in Tibet began towardsthe end of the tenth century.

When Li Xueqin was born in Beijing on 28 March, 1933, the Republic of China was in power, with its capital in Nanjing, and the Japanese occupied Manchuria. On 29 July 1937 Japanese troops invaded Beijing and brought it under control in little more than a week. The occupation of Beijing lasted until the Japanese surrender in August 1945. The People's Liberation Army entered Beijing in the end of January of 1949 and on 1 October 1949, when Li Xueqin was sixteen, Mao Zedong proclaimed the establishment of the People's Republic of China. This period of warfare was followed by periods of political turmoil which often centered around intellectuals—thought reform in the early fifties, the anti-rightest campaigns and the Great Leap Forward of the late fifties and early sixties, the Cultural Revolution from the mid-sixties to the mid-seventies.

The discovery in 1977 at Fuyang (Anhui province) of several mantic instruments dating from the beginning of Western Han (ca. 165 B.C.E.) marked a decisive change in modern studies of early Chinese science, divination, and religion, many of which now regard the shi 式 as the material basis for modes of thought in Warring States, Qin, and Han culture. While the examples of devices discovered to date have provided a valuable interpretative key to early Chinese schematic cosmography, the meaning of the term shi remains a source of perplexity as its connotations are imprecise and can vary from one author to the next. Whether this change is an accurate representation of ideas about the shi in pre-Han and Han is precisely the issue at stake in the present paper. The following conclusions are drawn: (1) the existence during the Han of several instruments of the shi type no longer permits the use of the term to refer to a singular and unique device, even though evidence drawn from the received texts tends to show the contrary; (2) the multiple meanings of the term shi, as well as the gradual shift between its strict sense as mantic device (shipan 式盤) and its broad sense as calendrical astrology (shizhan 式占) give rise to serious misunderstandings when it is used alone; (3) since these mantic devices are primarily offshoots of pre-Han and early Han astrographic and calendrical theories, the patterns and designs that appear on their surface (shitu 式圖) need to be considered within the larger scope of the spatial representations of calendrical time cycles, of which the excavated texts and artifacts now offer numerous examples; (4) the widespread use of the term shi-method (shifa 式法) in modern studies when referring to some mantic techniques described in the manuscripts raises the interesting question of how to delineate boundaries between the early developments in calendrical astrology and the hemerological practices in general.

This article aims at providing a Chinese-English reference source for researchers studying the inscription on a bronze vessel published in 2002, sometimes called the X Gong xu because the name of lord (gong) is transcribed by some scholars as Sui 遂 and by others as Bin 豳. It is a compilation of the transcriptions and interpretations of each character in the inscription by nineteen scholars in the field. It also provides transcriptions and English translations of the inscription in its entirety.

The Asian perfumery legacy has had appeal in the West for many centuries, asthe term ‘perfume’ itself indicates. Based on Latin roots, it means ‘throughsmoke’, in allusion to incense. This genre of aromatic materials, which areburned for the enjoyment of their olfactory qualities, has been important inAsian cultures for over two millennia or even longer. The term as suchhowever, is modern European in origin and arose only at the beginning of thesixteenth century when Westerners became increasingly involved in Asia.Exotic aromatics were a contributing factor in the further exploration andcolonisation of Asia in the following centuries, and make up notable tradegoods to supply the globalising perfume industry to this day. Modernbusiness could develop only thanks to the historical impetus and materialssupplied from Asia. Its economic success finally led to the current interestin the sense of smell among scientists and their findings suggest theexceptional significance of this sense for the human experience. Thus, weneed to assume that an important part of cultural history and understandinghas been so far neglected in scholarly work, as fragrant phenomena havewidely exited academic discussion. Specifically ritual activities often seemto include the use of aromatic substances.