Books on bamboo
Bamboo scolls. Before paper, Chinese books were written on silk, bamboo, or strips of wood. The constraints of writing on long strips of bamboo appear to have given the Chinese book its traditional format. The bamboo strips were arranged vertically, with characters written from top to bottom. Once the first strip was full of characters, the series continued on the second strip, which was placed to its left. The series of bamboo strips was then tied together with string. The series of vertical strips could then be extended to the left as long as needed. Since the writing was on only one side of the bamboo strips, the entire series can be stretched out, laid flat, and read continuously from right to left. Once finished, the entire series could be rolled up like a scroll: in that case, a fabric cover would be fitted to the right of the first bamboo strip, to be wrapped around the closed scroll and tied with a ribbon. In essence, this process established the format of a scroll on silk or (later) paper as well: characters written in vertical columns arranged from right to left, rolled leftward while reading, and protected by a wrap at the righthand end of the roll.
Bamboo books. In the example illustrated above, however, the strips are clustered together in groups of fourteen, with a bit of space left between these groups to allow them to fold back on one another like an accordion. This creates something more like a codex, or modern book consisting of printed leaves, than a scroll.
The specific example illustrated is a copy of The Art of War (on the cover, "孫子兵法") now part of the collection at the University of California, Riverside. The cover also reads "乾隆御書", meaning it was either commissioned or transcribed by the Qianlong Emperor (1711–1799), a voracious collector. The Art of War, written by Sun Tzu in roughly the fifth century BCE, is a great classic: the most influential text on military strategy in the whole of East Asia, it has been studied, revised, updated, illustrated, and republished throughout Chinese history. It is doubtless in view of its great antiquity that the Quianlong Emperor had this eighteenth-century copy made in the form of a book from the pre-paper era. An early printed edition (from 1190-93 CE) can be found on the website of the Library of Congress.
Image 1 depicts the front cover of the book. In Image 2, this cover hinges and opens to the right, revealing the beginning of the text on the left. Image 3 shows the method of binding the bamboo strips together; Image 4 shows how the groups of strips stack up vertically; and Image 5 shows how multiple clusters can be laid flat and read together. Image 6 shows the final set of bamboo strips with the back cover hinged to the left.
Source: UC Riverside Books, an album on flikr by ‘vlasta2’ (CC BY 2.0).
Literature: Tsuen-Hsuin Tsien, Written on Bamboo and Silk: The Beginnings of Chinese Books and Inscriptions, 2nd ed., with an Afterword by Edward L. Shaughnessy (Chicago, 2004).
Credit: Howard Hotson (April 2019)