ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Number and Color in the Formation of Correlative Thought in Ancient China

• In Event: GRAPHICS AND TEXT TWENTY YEAR LATER-1: Patterns, Charts And Maps For The State

English Abstract

Excavated manuscripts provide new evidence for the formation of correlative thought in China in the fourth to third centuries BCE. One manuscript text from the looted bamboo-slip manuscripts acquired by Tsinghua University, assigned the title Wuji (Five regulators), details a number-based correlative cosmology that encompasses the natural, human, social, and political worlds. This paper focuses on a passage in Wuji that treats the zhang “blazons,” the system of combining colors in patterns that had material applications in insignia and garments used in everyday life as well as in religious and political activities. Correlating the numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 with the colors green, white, black, red, and yellow, respectively, the passage identifies the blazon system with Wuji’s five-fold correlative cosmology. The blazon-system passage is one among many passages in Wuji that substantiate Marcel Granet’s ideas about the qualitative significance of numbers in Chinese thought and demonstrate the need for a sociologically oriented study of numbers in the formation of correlative thought in ancient China

Author

• Donald Harper, University of Chicago