A Book That Explains Its Own Design

The compilation closes with a chapter summarising every chapter before it and stating why each was included and how the whole fits together. That is rare in early Chinese literature and it changes how the book should be read: this is not an anthology that accumulated, it is a work designed as a complete curriculum, and the design is on the record. The claim is that a ruler who has understood the whole will need nothing else, because the book covers the pattern of heaven, the shape of earth, the seasons, the conduct of the self, military affairs and the arts of rule.

The chapters were written by a group of scholars gathered at the court of Huainan, working to a plan rather than each pursuing a subject, and the voice is consequently more consistent than a court anthology would be. Its intellectual position is the synthesis usually called Huang-Lao, which takes the Daoist account of the way as its ground and builds a practical statecraft on it, absorbing correlative cosmology and the five phases as the mechanism linking the ruler's conduct to the working of the world. The book is the fullest surviving statement of a position that was influential at the start of the Han and lost afterwards.