indicating orthographic rather than semantic variation. An example is Hexagram 33, Dun, which is 遯 in the received version, but in Shanghai Museum an archaic character, also containing the pig radi- cal. In contrast, in Mawangdui the tag is 掾 Yuan, translated by Shaughnessy as “wielding,” and clearly a different word. One of the clearest Hexagrams is #4, 蒙 Meng, familiar in the Wilhelm-Baynes rendering as “Youthful Folly.” Based on an unsupported suggestion of Arthur Waley, Kunst and Rutt render the tag as “Dodder,” thus removing the sense of the text. In the Shanghai Museum version the tag becomes, somewhat amusingly, 尨 meng, “Shaggy Dog.” Shaughnessy translates the character in the received text as “Shrouded,” which in the context of the rest of his translation of the hexagram, makes better sense than “dodder.” He further notes that meng could also mean stripes of a tiger and concludes, unarguably, that the original meaning is unknowable at this point. Nor is this the only instance in which the excavated version obscures rather than clarifies. If there ever was an Ur-text, the excavated manuscripts do not bring us closer to it. These few examples give a taste of the complexities to be faced when doing textual criticism of the Zhou Yi. While Zhou Yi special- ists will inevitably be interested in the substantive variants, my own take on this is that they are relatively few, suggesting that Changes texts were highly conserved over many centuries. From this it fol- lows that the seemingly fragmentary character of the received text is not due to textual corruption; rather, it is the very nature of the text, in all versions known to date. Those interested in the Changes as an ancient literary work rather than an embodiment of mystical truth will have much fresh material to mull over, thanks to Professor Shaughnessy’s magisterial presen- tation of the most important newly excavated texts, well produced by Columbia University Press, and a veritable bargain in this era of exorbitant book prices. Geoffrey Redmond New York, New York Liang Cai. Witchcraft and the Rise of the First Confucian Empire. (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2014. 288 Pp. ISBN-13: 978-1-4384-4849-7.) In the historiography of the Han dynasty (206 BCE–220 CE), the vic- tory of Confucianism is a familiar thesis. While there is hardly any 110 BOOK REVIEWS