Abstract
During the Warring States period and Western Han dynasty, it was common to see tags tied to grave goods in tombs in southern China. The main feature of the tags, on which the item, quantity, and/or name of the conferrer were written, is that the lower end has been carved with one or two notches or sharpened. The present article divides their forms into five types, describing their evolution over time. Tags were typically fixed to bamboo baskets, ceramic jars, or bags whose contents could not be viewed, as well as objects given by others. The practice of using tags gradually declined after the Western Han, ultimately disappearing in the Eastern Han, likely because the contents were instead written on tallies, clay seal blocks, sealing strips, or even the objects themselves.
Most of the tags unearthed at Liye, Hunan province, have been sharpened at the end, while the upper and lower ends of the remaining others are level. The sealing method can be inferred through marks on the back of the clay seals and from handed-down ancient texts: the tags with a sharp end were tied to documents with straw rope, and the clay seals were pressed directly onto the tags and then sealed with cord; those with level ends were likely used for “two-sided seamless” document bags; and clay seal blocks were applied to block bottom bags. With these forms in mind, this article explores the methods of packaging documents that developed from the Qin and Han dynasties. Furthermore, tags with the same features have been found at the Niya archaeological site in Xinjiang, as well as in Korea and Japan, reflecting a similar social lifestyle within the broader cultural sphere of East Asian wooden slips and thus being a new example of cultural dissemination.
Keywords
sealing method; method of packaging documents; document bag; packing documents with bulrush; tally
Cite
Citations are generated automatically from bibliographic data as a convenience, and may not be complete or accurate.
