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One of the most important archaeological finds excavated from the Tianhui Laoguanshan Han tombs in 2012–13 was a manuscript on horse medicine, dated around the third century BCE. Prior to the discovery of this highly specialized veterinary text, only a handful of horse recipes from the Qin and Han periods had been found, and a sixth-century CE agricultural treatise, Essential Techniques for the Common People , was generally regarded as the earliest surviving source of extensive veterinary material, including various medical treatments for horses. Although the Laoguanshan manuscript – given the modern title Book of Treating Horses by the Team for Collating the Medical Bamboo Slips Excavated from the Han Tombs in Tianhui Town, Chengdu – has suffered significant damage, it nevertheless gives us an insight into the knowledge and treatments for horses during the Qin and early Han periods. A variety of ways of treating horses are recorded in Treating Horses , including herbal remedies, piercing, cauterization, hot packs, bandages, massage, and bathing. The use of gold needles is also mentioned in this text, echoing the gold and silver sewing needles excavated from Liu Sheng's (d. 113 BCE) tomb in Mancheng, Hebei Province. This paper offers a short introduction to this valuable text on horse medicine by examining the content of its fragments, including names of ailments, symptoms of certain diseases, etiologies, and treatment methods. The discovery of Treating Horses challenges the established view that horse treatment methods in ancient China were predominantly herbal and that techniques of bleeding and cauterization recorded in Essential Techniques were brought to China from elsewhere, together with the introduction of Buddhism. The paper argues that the "foreign influence" had already occurred at a much earlier date, in the form of interactions with nomadic tribes such as the Scythians, the horsemen par excellence of classical antiquity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The name Bian Que, like that of the Yellow Emperor (Huangdi), has reverberated through the development of Chinese medicine since the time of the Warring States. The discovery of a human figurine showing channels and strategic points, together with a number of medical texts, during the excavation of the Laoguanshan Han tomb in Chengdu, Sichuan, in 2012–13 has reignited controversies about whether it is correct to speak of a specific Bian Que school, or whether, as this paper argues, these texts were written by the Han physicians who used Bian Que as a mouthpiece to record their own medical expositions. The paper begins by examining the main characteristics of the Laoguanshan human figurine and discusses what this excavated artifact reveals about the early history of Chinese medicine. It questions the existence of the so-called Bian Que school and, obliquely, the suggested relationships between the school and the figurine and between the school and medical texts found in the same tomb. The paper shows how diverse the disjointed knowledge of medicine was and that the idea of a "school" does not accurately reflect what was happening in the transmission of medical knowledge during the Warring States, Qin, and Han periods (475 BCE–220 CE). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The text discussed in this paper is part of the collection of bamboo slip medical manuscripts excavated from the Laoguanshan Han tomb outside of Chengdu, Sichuan Province, China, in 2012. We have given it the title Piercing Methods based on its contents. This text provides invaluable new material for understanding the historical development of Chinese medicine and acupuncture over the course of the Han dynasty (202 BCE–220 CE). We combine analyses of excavated manuscripts, received texts, and excavated artifacts to reconstruct the piercing methods from the early Han presented in this text. Three primary sets of techniques and associated piercing tools have been identified: mai piercing, division piercing, and piercing water (swelling), although only the first technique that concerns treating the mai is dealt with comprehensively in this article. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The New Life Movement is remembered in Chinese history primarily as the movement which Chiang Kai-shek launched in Jiangxi province in 1934 to change Chinese people's habits. This paper makes a different case: it argues that the New Life Movement and its organisations were central into the Nationalist Government's wartime mobilisation, and that the involvement of the civil servants through the NLM prevented the disintegration of society and administrative institutions under the impact of the war. This paper focuses on Chongqing and Chengdu between 1938 and 1942 and draws on archival materials and official reports to assess the scope of the Nationalists' wartime mobilisation. It analyses the involvement of the NLM organisations in the fundraising effort, in the mobilisation of women civil servants, and in the organisation of relief work in the first phase of the war and challenge the long-held view that the Nationalists' wartime mobilisation was insubstantial. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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For the first half of the first millennium Bc, the most notable find of elite artifacts in the Chengdu Plain is a pair of hoards of bronzes found at Zhuwajie in Pengxian (now Pengzhou City) in 1959 and 1980. The present paper is a comprehensive study examining and discussing the circumstances and the date of the burials, the styles and the dates of the bronzes, and their casting technology and likely place of manufacture. It also situates the Zhuwajie bronzes in the context of the bronze cultures in the Chengdu Plain as well as the general historical background of the Western Zhou period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From 2006 to 2008, Peter J. Vernezze served as a Peace Corps volunteer at Sichuan Normal University in Chengdu, taking a two-year leave of absence from his regular job as a philosophy professor. During this time he facilitated a film series for his Chinese undergraduate students which showed classic and contemporary American films - everything from Casablanca to the Marx brothers to Brokeback Mountain. The goal of the series was "to use film in order to shed light on and increase the understanding of American culture and values." This essay is a personal account of the discussions which took place after the screenings and what this American and these Chinese students may or may not have learned from each other about universalities and differences in cultures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Baoduncun Culture, named after prehistoric walled settlements in the Chengdu Plain, was a regional archaeological culture distributed in the western part of the Sichuan Basin along the upper reaches of the Yangzi River and centered in the Chengdu Plain. Dating from the Late Neolithic (or Chalcolithic) and contemporaneous with the Long-shan cultures of northern China, its recent discovery constitutes a major achievement in the clarification of the pre-Qin archaeological sequences in southwestern China. The Baoduncun Culture, like the Sanxingdui Culture that followed it, is highly instructive demonstrating the special status that the Sichuan Basin, particularly its western portion, holds as a place of origin and a center of development of ancient civilization in the upper Yangzi River valley. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An idiosyncratic Bronze Age culture, thought to be roughly contemporaneous with the Late Shang (ca. 1300–1050 BC) in the Yellow River Basin, has recently been discovered in the Chengdu Plain. The large walled settlement at the type site of Sanxingdui, Guanghan (Sichuan) and its highly developed bronze and jade manufacturing traditions indicate the presence of state-level civilization. This article attempts to clarify some of the relationships to the Sanxingdui culture to earlier, contemporaneous, and later archaeological cultures in the surrounding areas. Objects from the so-called "sacrificial pits" at Sanxingdui and at the slightly later site of Jinsha, Chengdu (Sichuan) are compared to archaeological finds from other parts of China, revealing significant connections to Neolithic and Early Bronze Age cultures along the Middle and Lower Yangzi as well as in the Central Plain, and showing that, for all its unusual features, Bronze Age Sichuan was by no means isolated in the cultural interaction sphere of mainland East Asia. Moreover, it can now be shown that Sanxingdui traits survived in later archaeological contexts, mainly in Southwest China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Sanxingdui site is a Neolithic and early Bronze Age site in the Chengdu Plain in Sichuan Province, southwest China. Over the years, as archaeological fieldwork at the site has progressed, the understanding of the site and its culture has changed gradually. This article discusses the stratigraphy, pottery typology, periodization, and absolute dating of Sanxingdui, aiming to evaluate major periodization schemes and different definitions of the Sanxingdui Culture, which the site typifies. It is argued that the Sanxingdui Culture encompasses Phase II through Phase IV of the four-phase periodization scheme for the Sanxingdui site and that the earliest remains at the Shi'erqiao site in nearby Chengdu, contemporary with the Phase IV remains at Sanxingdui, should be included in the spatial and temporal dimensions of the Sanxingdui Culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]