David S. Nivison（倪德衛）

Born in Maine, U.S.A., in 1923, David Shepherd Nivison was educated at Harvard: AB summa cum laude 1946, PhD 1953. His teachers included J. Robert. Hightower, John K. Fairbank and William Hung (Hong Ye). During the War he served in the Army translating Japanese. From 1948 on, he taught at Stanford University. In the 1950’s he collaborated in publications with Arthur F, Wright. In 1954-55 he was a Fulbright Fellow in Kyoto, Japan. His best known book is The Life and Thought of Chang Hsueh-ch’eng (Zhang Xuecheng), 1966, awarded the Prix Stanislas-Julien in Paris in 1967. His studies of late Shang and early Zhou inscriptions began informally with his friend David N. Keightley (Professor of History, University of California at Berkeley) in 1971. He was a Guggenheim Fellow at Oxford in 1973. In 1980 he was president of the Pacific Division of the American Philosophical Association. Other professional memberships include the Association for Asian Studies, the American Oriental Society (president, Western Branch, 1971-72), the Society for the Study of Early China, and the International Academy of Chinese Culture (Beijing). Nivison retired from Stanford in 1988 as Walter Y. Evans-Wentz Professor of Oriental Philosophies, Religions and Ethics.

Several of his publications have been republished in Chinese: two translations of his book on Zhang Xuecheng (2003), a book of essays on Chinese philosophy (The Ways of Confucianism (1996), in 2006), and a major monograph on chronology (1999, translation by Shao Dongfang, 2002). His students include major scholars in the United States and in the Far East. Nivison has published more than sixty professional papers.

This book is the result of discoveries made by Nivison beginning in 1979, It uses critically (without superseding) his monographs from 1983 through 2002, combined with his discoveries through 2008. Its main thrust is to show that the methods and results of the PRC “Three Dynasties Project” are invalid, and that recovering chronology before 841 BCE can be solved only by using the supposedly spurious Jinben Zhushu Jinian (“Modern Text” Bamboo Annals), combined with hypothesis that reign lengths of record were normally the years after completion of mourning for the preceding king. Part One presents resulting exact dates form the beginning of Xia, confirmed by discoveries in astronomy by D. W. Pankenier and Kevin Pang. Part Two criticizes the Three-years Dynasties Project and argues for the post-mourning hypothesis and the high antiquity of the three-years mourning institution. In Part Three, applying a discovery by E. L. Shaughnessy, the author reconstructs the first 303 bamboo strips of the original Bamboo Annals text (perhaps five-sevenths of the whole). In so doing he shows that the entire chronology in the Zhushu jinian is the product of Warring States manipulation of the true chronology; therefore any attempt to recover accurate dates must begin by analyzing the “Modern” Zhushu jinian – which the Project ignored completely. Appendices present more data and analysis, notably (Appendix 4) pinpointing the source of the Project’s errors in dating late Shang events.