n8 Field Museum of Natural History — Anth., Vol. X. 



to form a coherent book. In the same manner, also the sacrificial jade 

 slips were covered with only one vertical line of characters and tied 

 together into the appearance of a book. In the year 1747, two boxes 

 of jade were discovered on the summit of the T'ai-shan; one of them 

 was opened and contained seventeen jade slabs dating from the year 

 1008 when the Emperor Chen-tsung celebrated the sacrifice feng, 

 each slab having but one line of writing carved in. A similar find had 

 been made at an earlier date in 1482 (/. c, pp. 55, 56). I do not know 

 if any of these ancient jade slips have been preserved to the present 

 day. The "jade books" in vogue among the emperors of the Manchu 

 dynasty appear as their natural offshoot, with the only distinction that 

 more than one line is engraved on one tablet in which the page of a book 

 printed on paper is imitated. 



Under the present dynasty it was still customary to engrave impor- 

 tant state documents and poetical productions of the emperors on jade 

 slabs of book-size, and to unite these into a so-called jade book (yii shu). 

 The Bishop collection contains such a book consisting of four oblong 

 slabs of nephrite framed in sandal-wood in which a eulogy on the 

 Seven Buddhas composed by the Emperor K'ien-lung (1 736-1 795) is 

 inscribed (Bishop, Vol. II, p. 173, not illustrated). F. W. K. Muller 

 {Zeitschrift fiir Ethnologie, Vol. XXXV, 1903, p. 484) mentions a jade 

 book preserved in the Museum fur Volkerkunde, Berlin, coming down 

 also from the time of K'ien-lung in which the emperor himself is said 

 to have carved a few lines in the summer residence of Jehol. I am in 

 a position to illustrate on Plate XIV the oldest work of this kind from 

 the epoch of the reigning dynasty, originating in the year 1648, four 

 years after the Manchu had taken possession of China. Being written 

 in Manchu and Chinese, this document presents at the same time one 

 of the earliest specimens of the Manchu language in existence. The 

 first literary attempts of the Manchu are the political essays of Nurhaci 

 of the year 1616; their earliest epigraphical record is an inscription of 

 1639 erected in Sam-jon-do, Corea, in commemoration of the subjuga- 

 tion of this country in 1637; their earliest print comes down from the 

 year 1646, being a translation of the Sacred Edicts of the Emperor 

 Hung-wu. Then follows the jade book in question, composed of ten 

 nephrite slabs containing an imperial document of 1648, in which the 

 Emperor Fu-lin (Shun-chih) confers the posthumous honorary name 

 Hing Tsu Chih Huang-ti on his ancestor in the sixth generation, Tu-tu- 

 fu-man by name. It shows in which form the emperors used to bestow 

 honorary titles on .their ancestors. For the sake of reproduction, the 

 ten slabs connected in one row had to be divided, so that the Chinese 

 text arranged on four slabs on the right-hand side appears above and 



