The underlying principle behind the interest of traditional Chinese scholars towards ancient character forms was the desire to restore the pre-Qin texts into their original form. Ever since the fall of the Qin (206 BC), the official and literary elite defined themselves through their cultural heritage, which in turn was largely based on the text of the classics.
Moreover, the central administration chose people for office based on the same criteria. The knowledge of the old texts did not simply mean that a person was well-read and possessed literary knowledge. It signified the person's loyalty to the Han empire and this in turn enabled a bureaucratic carrier. The practice of placing so much emphasis on texts was in sharp contrast not only with the Qin but also with Warring States (479-221 BC) customs.
Once the old texts were institutionalized and established as a requirement for advancing in government service, they ceased to be records of the teachings of ancient philosophers and transformed into tools of political power. This in turn also ensured their wide circulation and transmission. Every single person in the Han administration had to go through the same exams and study the same books to be able to hold an office.
The internalization of texts within the language of the elite guaranteed the fundamental skills necessary for bureaucrats of a centralized government. The first such basic skill was linguistic proficiency and literacy. As I attempt to demonstrate in this study, writing in China at this time was not that uniform and the ability to write in the same way as all other office holders was a skill that had to be learned. Learning to read and write in China could never be imagined without the use of concrete document which the students memorized and copied. Students in early China did not construct sentences for hypothetical situations, first they copied the standard books of minor learning to learn the necessary amount of characters and then they copied and memorized the classics to construct their own literary language. The necessity of internalizing pre-existing texts was especially useful in a culture, as it was the case already in the Han, where written communication was based on a language no longer spoken. "If you do not study the Shijing, you will have nothing to talk with," says Confucius, showing that even the same method of recycling strings of text was used for educated discussion too.
The second skill was the ideological unity with the central power. Much the same way as acquiring literary skills, with the study of the texts students also developed an ideological mind frame prescribed by the Han government. The reality of this ideological education can be witnessed in the fact that the classics were never studied by themselves but always together with their official commentaries. The official reading of the texts was also thoroughly tested at the examinations, precluding the possibility of heterodox interpretations. From an administrative point of view, the benefits of having a single set of ethical and intellectual doctrines in an a bureaucracy are obvious and the standardization of texts and character forms played a key role in achieving this unity. In this respect, the Han followed closely in the footsteps of the Qin, restricting access to advancement to anyone who did not wish to learn the rules of the game.
Because of the political weight of texts, the problems surrounding their textual and orthographic accuracy also received special attention. Just like in the New Testament studies in medieval Europe, the study of the classics was highly sensitive and always involved non-philological considerations. From one point of view, without having reliable manuscripts, it was impossible to know what the Master really said, hence there was a strong motivation to restore the texts into their original form. On the other hand, by the time the texts became influential enough to warrant serious scholarly scrutiny, there were already existing institutions established on the basis of the transmitted versions of these texts. Needless to say that these institutions did not welcome any results that might have jeopardize their authority.
Because the classics were written before the development of the clerical script and the standardization of writing, paleography played an important role in their study. An undeniable fact was that in the course of their transmission, all texts at one time had also gone through the process of transcription into modern character forms. Even copying from one script to the other could involve challenges, but the difficulties were much more serious in case of transcribing texts written in obsolete texts. Stories like that of Fu Sheng, a ninety-year-old scholar, who was the only person at the time of Emperor Wen (179-156 BC) able to put the Shangshu in order, imply that the knowledge of ancient character forms was lost within a few decades after the rise of the Qin.
When we analyze later views on the Qin reforms, we must bear in mind that these views are more than records of events in the past. The results of research always include the perspective of the narrator and the, sometimes implicit, goals behind his research. In case of traditional scholarship separated from us by almost two millennia, the scholarship that survived for us to see also incorporates the views of intermediate generations by the sheer fact that they were continuously transmitted. Since the transmission of many works was discontinued at one point or another in history, therefore the works that we see today are privileged in terms of their continuous transmission through the entire period of their existence.
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