According to Li, the bamboo strips found in China up to now basically include two kinds--books or documents and archives, and the latter occupied the majority of the findings. But what is significant about the bamboo slips donated to Tsinghua is that they are mostly books or documents, of which many are ancient classics that have great importance in studying the history and traditional culture of China.

"They are of high academic value, as they are very important to the archaeology and the research of ancient Chinese characters," Li said at the press conference.

Besides more than 2,100 pieces of bamboo strips, the relic of a wooden, colorfully-painted box that was proved to be used to contain bamboo-strip books was donated at the same time. Li said the box carried the strong design style of the State of Chu, a state of the Warring States Period located in today's Hubei Province.

The sizes of these ancient books are not the same. Li said that some strips were 46 cm long and some were less than 10 cm. "Such short bamboo strips have never been found before," said Li. He also told reporters that the characters written on them are very neat and still clear enough to see.

A few bamboo strips of the Warring States Period were found in the early 1950s. In the 1990s, two bigger finds were made of 800 and 1,000 bamboo strips respectively. The donation to Tsinghua are therefore the largest quantity and the oldest find so far, Li said.

Surprising discoveries

Li said one of the most important contents that experts found is the ancient classic Shangshu, or Book of History, a collection of ancient historical documents said to be mainly compiled by Confucius (551-479 B.C.), one of the greatest philosophers in ancient China and the founder of Confucianism.

It is widely agreed that Shangshu was the earliest collection of essays in China, covering important historical documents of the Shang (17th century-11th century B.C.) and Zhou (1066 -256 B.C.) dynasties.

"It was the most important evidence and material to research the ancient part of China's history," Li said.

According to him, Shangshu included more than 100 articles before the Qin Dynasty (221-206 B.C.), but after the Emperor Qinshihuang ordered the burning of all historical texts except classics of the Legist School, one of the major philosophic and political thoughts in China at that time, most of the articles of the Shangshu were lost.

Shangshu has long been considered to be an ancient classic on politics and philosophy in China. It served as the textbook of Chinese emperors and was one of the required readings of noble family members in the past. Many institutions, political thoughts, cultural beliefs and ideologies of China were written in it.

How to preserve the unearthed bamboo strips is a problem for scientists worldwide. [Photo courtesy of Tsinghua University]

To the surprise of all the scholars who were invited by Tsinghua to study the donated bamboo strips, many articles in the Shangshu found in the Tsinghua collection are new to them, which means that these articles were written before the book-burning incident in the Qin Dynasty and escaped that cultural catastrophe.

"Thus, the significance of these unseen articles written on these bamboo strips is immeasurable to the study of the early part of the history of China ," Li said.

Another important content of these strips is a historic book in the style of annals. According to Li, based on the research of archaeologists and historians, the book recorded the history starting from the early period of the West Zhou Dynasty (1046-771 B.C.) to the early days of the Warring States Period. It has some new contents compared with the famous historic classics that have been passed down, such as Chunqiu, or the Spring and Autumn Annals, the earliest chronicle in China that covers the history from 722 B.C. to 481 B.C., and Shiji, or the Historical Records, China's oldest history book.