Yes, thank you everyone for this warm welcome and good evening.

So I probably should start explaining what this word shoe in the title of my talk means

perhaps for those who are not very familiar with you know ancient Chinese literature literature

of the preaching and the two Han dynasties.

So shoe in these texts basically has the noun true meanings one is in the writings in general

but then there's a particular kind of writing that is also referred to as shoe and of course

it is a big trouble for many scholars to figure out in a particular passage what has now meant

is it true in general or just true in particular what we are going to talk about today is this

particular use of shoe and well these shoe are if we follow you know an easy approach

and just look upon on how these shoe are treated in other texts and how they're talked about

by other you know thinkers writers in ancient China well then from their perspective shoe

are generally you know very important authoritative texts that well are cited a lot are studied

a lot and they are referenced you know when people make speeches and vis-a-vis their ruler

and they make arguments or you know against other rivals as a sort of authority.

So that's sort of the easy definition of what shoe are.

The more problematic and also the more difficult one is you know to focus on actual shoe that

we have accent shoe and derive sort of a definition from them you know what kind of features do

they share and so on and so on and this has been done by Sarah Allen most prominently

more recently by Cheng Hao and so their definitions are essentially you know shoe are typically

speeches that come in different categories so they are ming they are xun they are gao

they are shi etc etc by ancient monarchs and sages and they are typically also written

in sort of an IK that is pre-classical dialect and they use you know certain formulas like

jingzhi cai wuhu wangruo yue etc etc.

So this is the more I would say you know the more difficult way to approach the shoe perhaps

the more illuminating one from our perspective today.

The problem of course is this is based upon the existential that we have and we have to

assume that there are many more written that we also have to assume that they were written

continuously and rewritten and edited and so forth for several centuries probably starting

in the western Zhou period up until the post-Zhan period.

So it stands to reason that you know the conception of what constituted a shoe in fact changed

over time and in my talk I will generally underline the fact by comparing two different

groups of shoe with each other.

So the first group of shoe that I will concentrate on is recently excavated or not really excavated

you could say looted group of shoe that we don't really know where it came from but it

was obtained by the Shinko University in 2008 and it has been dated generally to the year

300 BC so that is sort of a pre-Han corpus of shoe that I will look on or I will look

on on a certain examples and then I will look at the ancient script chapters of the received

Shangshu which is of course also made up of shoe and these ancient chapters I don't know

if you're familiar with them but there are chapters that suddenly well appear in the

fourth century C so in the post-Han period and are claimed to be you know the copies

of ancient manuscripts that had been lost in previous centuries.

They are called ancient script because they are claimed to have been written in Guwen

in an ancient script that is in a pre-Qin pre-Han dynasty script and while for some

amount of time this was accepted by scholars in China at least since the Song dynasty it

has dawned on many that this may not be true but these texts are in fact from the post-Han

period or composed in that area although not probably all parts of them are in fact from

that area and this is you know given away by well first of all the of course the strange

way in how they appear they suddenly reappear the second way their linguistic features they

also various others inconsistencies of these texts that have been studied so on and so

on so the majority of scholars today accept the fact that these are in fact not genuine