Mawangdui

Manuscript discoveries have confirmed this fluidity.

In 1973, two silk copies of the text were found in a tomb at Mawangdui, sealed in 168 BCE, and their chapter order and wording differed meaningfully from the received version.

Then in 1993, bamboo strips excavated from a tomb at Guodian, dated to roughly 300 BCE, contained portions of the text that were different still, shorter and arranged in yet another way.

So we are not dealing with a single author's polished manifesto.

The Tao Te Ching is austere, mysterious, and remarkably brief, only about five thousand characters.

We know from archeological discoveries like the Guodian bamboo slips and the Mawangdui silk texts that it circulated early and was highly fluid before settling into the version we know today.

And its opening line is arguably the most famous in all of Eastern philosophy.

"The way that can be spoken is not the constant way.

And in January of 1972, an official excavation was launched.

The site, called Mawangdui, turned out to be enormous.

As skilled labor was in short supply, local students were drafted to help with the dig.

It took more than 1,500 people four months to fully excavate just one of the three tombs under the mound.

In death, she provides us a window through which we can observe how good life could be if one was fortunate enough to belong to the elite class of an emerging imperial state.

A couple of notes on sources before I hop in here.

Practically everything written on these excavations is in Chinese, but there is an excellent overview by Kyeongmi Ju and Donghoon Shin in Springer Nature's Handbook of Mummy Studies entitled Mummies in China, Mawangdui and Other Related Mummies, as well as Mark Lewis's excellent book, The Early Chinese Empires, Qin and Han.

So let's start by placing Xin Xue in time and space before we discuss the Mawangdui site, the tombs, and the mummy itself.