DPhil candidate, Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies
I am a fourth-year DPhil student in Oriental Studies. I pursued a BA (2013) and a MA (2017) in Oriental Languages and Civilisations at ‘La Sapienza’ University of Rome. Before obtaining my degrees, I spent long periods of time in China studying modern Chinese at Beijing Foreign Studies University and Beijing Language and Culture University (2012‒2014), and classical Chinese at Peking University (2015‒2016). I spent the fall semester of 2016 as a visiting student at Ca’ Foscari, University of Venice, attending a course in Chinese palaeography, before arriving in Oxford in 2018, where I am currently conducting my research on Yijing-related excavated manuscripts.
DPhil topic
A palaeographical study of the shuzi gua traditions
This project is a reassessment of the large shuzi gua manuscript corpus. Examples of shuzi gua have been found on a series of different objects - oracle bones, pottery, bronzes and bamboo manuscripts ‒ which date from the Neolithic Cultures to the late Warring States. Visually, they are sequences of numbers (‘one’, ‘four’, ‘five’, ‘six’, ‘seven’, ‘eight’ and ‘nine’), written in all sorts of size, directions and mise-en-page.
Due to the presence of numbers and their peculiar layout, shuzi gua are usually regarded as the written instantionation of a divination practice allegedly related to the Yi (Changes) tradition. Based on a close reading of the primary sources, this study explores the following research questions: What is the nature and meaning of shuzi gua and how can we define them? What are the features that bring them together under the same category? What kind of relationship can be assumed with the Yi tradition and on what basis?
To address these questions, I have developed a threefold ‘analytical map’ consisting of the material, visual, linguistic criteria. Each criterion is a filter which casts light on a specific aspect of each item included in the shuzi gua corpus. The core contribution of this project is establishing a new methodological approach which will be the starting point for a more nuanced narrative about the shuzi gua material avoiding anachronistic relations with later traditions.
