Bibliographic Essay

Modern researchers studying violence and warfare in early imperial China are at the mercy of fragments and summaries presented by historians and compilers who usually lacked first-hand experience of combat and reported the topics in stereotypical and schematic ways.

The fundamental and pioneering study of different kinds of sanctioned violence in ancient China down to the first century ce is Mark Edward Lewis, Sanctioned Violence in Early China (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1989). Also useful as an overview of warfare in both the Warring States and Qin-Han periods is Robin D. S. Yates, ‘Early China', in Kurt Raaflaub and Nathan Rosenstein (eds.), War and Society in the Ancient and Medieval Worlds: Asia, the Mediterranean, Europe, and Mesoamerica (Cambridge, MA: Center for Hellenic Studies, Harvard University, 1999), pp. 7-46. For the Period of Disunion, David A. Graffs Medieval Chinese Warfare, 300-900 (London: Routledge, 2002) is the first comprehensive study and a must-read. The anthology Military Culture in Imperial China, edited by Nicola Di Cosmo (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), contains several chapters related to the period under study, while the first volume of B. Meissner et al. (eds.), The Cambridge History of War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020 provides new summaries of the topic.

On the discourse over the legitimate use of violence, besides Mark Edward Lewis's ‘The Just War in Early China', in Torkel Brekke (ed.), The Ethics of War in Asian Civilization - A Comparative Perspective (London: Routledge, 2006), pp. 185-200, a recent discussion of just war in different Chinese intellectual traditions - mainly in the pre-imperial era - can be found in Ping-Cheung Lo and Sumner B. Twiss (eds.), Chinese Just War Ethics: Origin, Development, and Dissent (London: Routledge, 2015). On the real fighting, we are fortunate to have certain details of siege warfare in the Period of Disunion, and Benjamin E. Wallacker has produced a series of articles that are old but still useful: ‘Studies in Medieval Chinese Siegecraft: The Siege of Yu-pi, A.D. 546', Journal of Asian Studies 28 (1969), 789-802; ‘Studies in Medieval Chinese Siegecraft: The Siege of Ying-ch'uan, A.D. 548-549', Journal of Asian Studies 30.3 (1971), 611-22; and ‘Studies in Medieval Chinese Siegecraft: The Siege of Chien-k'ang, A.D. 548-549', Journal of Asian History 5(1971), 35-54.