A Study On The Writing Of Imperial Edicts On Copper Plates And Weights And Measures In Qin Dynasty And Related Issues

At the beginning of Qin Dynasty,in order to maintain political rule and social stability,the emperor ordered the unification of writing and weights and measures,and both the First Emperor and the Second Emperor made official bronze plate and weights and measures inscribed with the edict of unification of weights and measures to show the policy to the world.The imperial edict on the Qin Dynasty copper plates and weights and measures is not only a direct physical evidence of Qin’s policy of unification of weights and measures,but also preserves a part of the natural form of Qin gold and stone cast inscriptions,which is an indispensable documentary material for the study of Qin writing.After determining the title of the paper,on the basis of comprehensive collection of this kind of material information,the inscription topos and pictures of the actual artifact text that could be seen were cut and processed to focus on the analysis of the imperial edict text forms.The significance of this paper lies not only in its ability to comprehensively and concretely grasp the character features of the writing on such artifacts,supplementing the writing characteristics and characterization of the official Qin Dynasty gold and stone artifacts,and demonstrating the actual effects of the Qin unified writing policy,but also,and more importantly,in its innovative practice of using imperial edicts to identify forgeries.This paper contains three parts: the introduction,the main text,and the appendix.The introductory section defines the object and scope of the study,explains the reason for the selection of this paper,and introduces the research methods used and the significance of the study.The main text is divided into three chapters.The first of which is an overview of the discovery and study of the Qin Dynasty copper plates and weights and measures.In the first section,the discovery and documentation of the artifacts are organized in chronological order,and finally,the documentation information of the artifacts is comprehensively compared,combined with the scattered discoveries that have not been included,and the artifact documentation table is presented in the appendix.The second section reviews the study of on the Qin Dynasty copper plates and weights and measures with imperial edicts,and collates previous interpretations of their contents and analysis of their textual forms.This chapter provides a solid foundation of background material for further research in this paper.Chapter 2 focuses on a systematic discussion of the text of the Qin imperial the text of the Qin Dynasty copper plates and weights and measures with imperial edicts.The first section deals with the production of inscriptions in terms of text arrangement and casting,analyzing their text arrangement characteristics and exploring their production techniques in relation to the vessel type and materials.The second section focuses on the morphological analysis of the text,firstly,it provides a comprehensive list of the single-character analogous glyphs of the Qin imperial texts,analyzing their morphological basis and rationality one by one,and then collates and analyzes the overall characteristics of their writing units,analyzing the specificity of their textual forms and their causes.The third chapter is a discussion of the identification of the Qin Dynasty copper plates and weights and measures with imperial edicts,which is also the innovation of this paper.The first section summarizes the experience of previous generations in identifying forgeries.The second section starts with the vessel types and briefly lists and discusses some of the special forged vessel types we can see at present.The third section focuses on the above analysis of the imperial edicts combined with previous experience in identifying forgeries,starting with both the content of the edicts and the form of the texts,and discussing the identification of the imperial edicts for some of the doubtful artifacts recorded by previous authors and currently available,in an attempt to establish a theoretical framework for the identification of the texts of such artifacts.The final appendices include: A table corresponding to the full name of the book and its abbreviations,Comparison table of full names and short names of Silk scrolls of Bamboo Slips,A table summarizing the bibliographic records,a table corresponding to the size and lineage of the Qin imperial edict plates and weights and measures,a table of the records of no clear excavation information,a table of the records of objects excavated after 1949 and we have added a few images that we have collected that are either unrecorded or more clearly recorded than the previous ones.The summary of this information not only provides a solid material support for this paper,but also hopefully facilitates the search for such artifacts for future scholars.