The King Who Presented It and What Became of Him

The book was presented to the young emperor by Liu An, king of Huainan and a member of the imperial house, and the presentation was a political act as well as a literary one: it offered the throne a complete theory of government from a regional king with a claim to intellectual authority. Within two decades Liu An was accused of plotting rebellion and died by his own hand, his court was broken up and his kingdom abolished. The intellectual climate moved against the book as well.

The court settled on a Confucian orthodoxy with its own canon and its own examination of officials, and the syncretic position this work represents ceased to be a live option at the centre. The text survived, but as a compendium to be quarried rather than a programme to be followed. That quarrying is how most readers meet it. It preserves early versions of stories that are now the standard forms of Chinese myth, among them the goddess who repairs the broken sky and the archer who shoots down the excess suns, and it is a principal source for early Chinese astronomy, calendrics and correlative thought. The atlas records it as a coherent argument first and a storehouse second, because the second is how it is usually cited and the first is what it was for.