Ritual, Divination and Household Beliefs in Qin China: Guidance for Daily Decisions

Qin daybooks offered advice about when to act and how to guard against danger. A manuscript buried with an official at Shuihudi in 217 BCE describes protective steps before travel, while other entries connect sickness with offerings to deceased parents. These texts place timing, spoken appeals and material objects within decisions made by individuals and families.

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Reading a bamboo daybook

A bamboo manuscript carried writing in ink on narrow strips, which could be bound into a roll. The Qin official Xi was buried at Shuihudi in present-day Hubei around 217 BCE with a collection of legal, administrative and personal writings. These included two versions of a rishu, or daybook, alongside a chronicle of events in his life.

A daybook connected particular activities with a repeating cycle of days. It supplied favourable and unfavourable times rather than simply listing the months of one year. A person considering a journey, building work, marriage or burial could look for a suitable date. The advice made a calendar into a practical tool for decisions involving family members, resources and perceived danger.

Choosing a time to act

The sixty-day cycle combined ten signs called heavenly stems with twelve called earthly branches. Their paired names returned in a fixed sequence. Daybook systems attached different qualities to those named days, relating timing to directions, spirits and expected outcomes.

In a Shuihudi section concerned with travel, the cycle is divided into five groups of twelve days, with a favourable departure time assigned within each group. The user therefore needed both the name of the current day and the relevant entry. Choosing an auspicious time was a particular action in planning the journey, alongside preparing the goods and documents that travel required.

Protection before leaving the city

The travel passage also prescribed a rite at the city gate. The traveller performed the Yubu, or Pace of Yu, three times, advanced and addressed a spirit to request safe passage. Yu was the legendary figure credited with ordering the landscape and controlling floods. Invoking his movement brought that ordering power into the traveller’s departure.

The instructions continued with a physical protective object. The traveller drew five lines on the ground, gathered soil from their centre and carried it against the body. Spoken appeal, movement and a small quantity of earth formed parts of one procedure intended to clear the route and avert harm. The text records what its user was instructed to do before setting out.

Illness and offerings to parents

The Shuihudi daybooks also connected illness with named days and relationships to the dead. One entry interpreted sickness beginning on certain days as a parental curse and prescribed a meat offering presented in a lacquer dish, followed by a thanksgiving sacrifice after recovery. Timing, the direction from which an offering came and the vessel holding it belonged to the same account of the illness.

This was a religious explanation of misfortune. The affected person or family sought to repair a relationship with the parents through an offering, while the calendar supplied an expected course of sickness and recovery. Such instructions place ancestors within practical responses to illness, rather than treating them only as figures honoured at a distant state ceremony.

Burial preparations and the things kept with the dead

Daybook guidance included the selection of times for burial. Families also prepared a physical grave, coffin and accompanying objects. Qin burials at Shuihudi contained wooden or lacquered serving vessels, personal containers and writing equipment as well as manuscripts. The official Xi’s own collection included both administrative texts and divinatory advice.

Placing a person with utensils and valued writings connected burial with the possessions and activities associated with life. A family had to select, provide and arrange those goods, while a daybook could offer guidance about the timing of the burial. The manuscripts and objects preserve these different parts of funerary preparation.

For the wider setting, see Daily Life under Qin Rule: Households, Work and Obligations.