“Someone spoke to the King in Zheng”: using high tech methods to solve an ancient Chinese mystery

Mon, 22 Feb 2021 00:00:00 +0800

TL;DR

Opens from a genuine historical puzzle in the Han Feizi: Han Fei delivers a speech to King Zheng of Qin that appears to betray his own state, then argues the opposite position soon after, is denounced by rival minister Li Si, and dies via a diplomatic mission to Han that seems designed to fail - leaving open why he acted as he did and why Han refused to receive Li Si’s embassy.
Proposes to resolve part of this by testing, with computational text analysis, whether an anonymous chapter called “Speaking to the King in Zheng” in the separately compiled Stratagems of the Warring States is actually a missing Han Fei speech that supplies the missing backstory.
Builds a qualitative case first: the chapter shares Han Fei’s stylistic hallmarks, but more tellingly shares his documented lack of self-preservation instinct - insulting people capable of having him killed - which the piece argues is far harder for a later imitator to fake than surface stylistic tics.
Runs cosine-similarity comparisons, with and without punctuation, showing the chapter sits closer to the Han Feizi corpus than to any section of the Stratagems, including other Han-related chapters, and that including it in the Han Feizi group barely dents that group’s internal consistency while including it in the Stratagems group dents that group’s consistency far more.
Repeats the comparison against several unrelated classical texts and, separately, controls for shared topic vocabulary by clustering on the full text and then again on only the words common to every text - the chapter stays closer to the Han Feizi corpus under every version of the test.
Concludes that if the chapter is a displaced Han Fei speech, it supplies the historical background explaining his apparently contradictory behaviour: not betrayal, but a calculated, ultimately failed attempt to position himself as a bridge between Han and Qin, undone by Li Si’s personal rivalry and deliberately aggressive diplomacy toward Han.

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“Someone spoke to the King in Zheng”: using high tech methods to solve an ancient Chinese mystery