On October 15th, the lecture, “Discussion about 'Books' – Archaeological Discoveries and Ancient Chinese Writings, Book Formats and Books, was sponsored by the Propaganda Department of the Party Committee of Tongji University, organized by Wen Xuetang, with Tongji Revival Classical Academy being co-organizer, and held in Yifu Building. Teacher Ge Liang, from the Bronze Research Institute of Shanghai Museum, was invited to give this lecture.

Teacher Ge summarized the history of formation and development of ancient Chinese “Books” from the clerical script in the Western Han Dynasty and found out that the style of Chinese characters did not experience much change. In the end of the Western Han Dynasty, the texts of the books were stable. Until the middle period of the Wei, Jin and Southern & Northern Dynasties, papers began to spread, bamboo and wooden slips and others were withdrawn from the mainstream. Since the Northern Song Dynasty, printing has become popular, and the era of handwriting was gradually gone.
The ancient texts of books during pre-Qin Dynasty experienced several changes and was stabilized in the Han Dynasty. However, the archaeological unearthed data in recent years showed that there were differences between the pre-Qin ancient texts and the current ones of some classics, which has led to changes in interpretation. Mr. Ge took the four editions of Laozi, which were currently unearthed, as examples to show the difference between the texts in the tomb of Guodian in Chu Dynasty and the present ones and the reasons for such changes. For example, the first sentence in Laozi was “The tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao”, but according to the text in Mawangdui, the first sentence turned out to be “The tao that can be told is not the constant Tao”.