Chinese Character Manipulation in Literature and Divination

Download or read book Chinese Character Manipulation in Literature and Divination written by Anne Kathrin Schmiedl and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-04-06 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Chinese Character Manipulation in Literature and Divination, Anne Schmiedl analyses the little-studied method of Chinese character manipulation as found in imperial sources. Focusing on one of the most famous and important works on this subject, the Zichu by Zhou Lianggong (1612–1672), Schmiedl traces and discusses the historical development and linguistic properties of this method. This book represents the first thorough study of the Zichu and the reader is invited to explore how, on the one hand, the educated elite leveraged character manipulation as a literary play form. On the other hand, as detailed exhaustively by Schmiedl, practitioners of divination also used and altered the visual, phonetic, and semantic structure of Chinese characters to gain insights into events and objects in the material world.