Sometimes it feels like I’m reading a foreign language, these first two sentences especially:
“The extension of roles of the inner court staff to include numerous functions was duplicated repeatedly in the history of the imperial Chinese court. The growth of the authority of the inner court emerged in the Chou period…. [T]he royal secretariat was gradually organized to include the scribes of both categories, and the group was so sizable that it required a supervisor of its own. Ch'en Meng-chia thought that the nei-shih (internal scribes) took over the role of issuing royal decrees after the mid-Chou reigns and the yin (chief of staff) appeared only in the late reigns. The distinction probably reveals the change in the royal power from that sanctioned through ritual to one that institutionalized the king's authority by organizing an inner court that helped exercise the power. The growth and differentiation of the inner court, of course, were one more example of bureaucratization. In spite of institutionalization, royal authority was final; the king could alter the decree as he wished even after a written document had been read aloud by his scribal staff.”
David Novak Reads Poetry
Sometimes it feels like I’m reading a foreign language, these first two sentences especially:
“The extension of roles of the inner court staff to include numerous functions was duplicated repeatedly in the history of the imperial Chinese court. The growth of the authority of the inner court emerged in the Chou period…. [T]he royal secretariat was gradually organized to include the scribes of both categories, and the group was so sizable that it required a supervisor of its own. Ch'en Meng-chia thought that the nei-shih (internal scribes) took over the role of issuing royal decrees after the mid-Chou reigns and the yin (chief of staff) appeared only in the late reigns. The distinction probably reveals the change in the royal power from that sanctioned through ritual to one that institutionalized the king's authority by organizing an inner court that helped exercise the power. The growth and differentiation of the inner court, of course, were one more example of bureaucratization. In spite of institutionalization, royal authority was final; the king could alter the decree as he wished even after a written document had been read aloud by his scribal staff.”
Hsu & Linduff
2 days ago | [YT] | 0