Product Review

First published in 1985, W. Allyn Rickett`s authoritative translation of the first 33 essays of Guanzi (or Kuan tzu) performs an inestimable service to the field of China studies. The product of nearly 40 years of careful, committed scholarship, it includes generous annotations and is the standard English edition of this work. The Guanzi, named for the famous minister of state Guan Zhong (d. 645 B.C.), was put together in its present form circa 26 B.C. by the Han dynasty scholar Liu Xiang. The surviving text consists of some 70 essays by anonymous writers dating from the fifth century B.C. to about the time of Liu Xiang himself in the first century B.C. Most noted amongst these essays is material concerning early Chinese economic and political theory, especially the concept of qing zhong, perhaps the world's earliest statement of the quantitative theory of money. The text also includes information on such topics as early Chinese social structure and practices, military organization and theory, early historical romance literature, and early Chinese thought, including Taoism, naturalistic theory, and the amalgam of Taoist and Legalist thought known as Huang-Loa.