East Asian manuscript and canonical transmission

Keeping meticulous records of your own library can cut both ways: it also lets later readers see exactly how much of that library is now gone. China, Korea, and Japan ran manuscript cultures bigger and more thoroughly catalogued than anywhere else in the pre-print world, and it is precisely those record-keeping habits -- a Han-dynasty imperial reading list naming hundreds of works, whole palace libraries known to have gone up in flames at dynastic turning points, sprawling compilations such as the Yongle Encyclopedia that today survive mainly as quotations from books otherwise lost completely -- that make the scale of the loss unusually easy to measure. The conjectures gathered here read this region's own archives, and the rare accidents that cracked them open, such as the sealed Dunhuang manuscript cave, for what they reveal about administration, divination, and everyday writing rather than for their literary content alone.

Managed randomness at Anyang and Dating divination by its odds both test whether early Chinese divination practice, down to the oracle bones at Anyang, encodes a genuinely managed process rather than a random one, and whether it can be dated by its own statistical signature. Jinshi quota kinks and The gimei premium look at the civil-service examination system as an economic institution with quota effects and status premiums of its own. The ever-normal fractile tests whether a granary price-stabilization policy behaves the way modern buffer-stock economics would predict, using dynastic administrative records as the evidence.