The Tsinghua Slips - Axial Age China Lives Again

[WhiskeySykes]

For over 2000 years, we've only known about 3 of the "100 Schools of Thought," but the recovery of nearly 2400 bamboo slips is changing that. Though the vast majority of these slips remain to decipher, a diversity of thought is emerging. Western skepticism over the antiquity of key texts in China's received canon has also lost a foothold. There's even an exchange between Confucius and one of his disciples, wherein Confucius, counter to all we've known of him, embraces the roles of magic and spiritualism. The importance of the find won't be understood for decades, but the Tsinghua slips join two previous recoveries of China's past from Qin Shi Huang's purges. This was the most recent article I've found. Here's an extract:

The newly discovered texts challenge long-held certainties about this era. Chinese political thought as exemplified by Confucius allowed for meritocracy among officials, eventually leading to the famous examination system on which China’s imperial bureaucracy was founded. But the texts show that some philosophers believed that rulers should also be chosen on merit, not birth—radically different from the hereditary dynasties that came to dominate Chinese history. The texts also show a world in which magic and divination, even in the supposedly secular world of Confucius, played a much larger part than has been realized. And instead of an age in which sages neatly espoused discrete schools of philosophy, we now see a more fluid, dynamic world of vigorously competing views—the sort of robust exchange of ideas rarely prominent in subsequent eras.

[Roma_Victrix]

You should mention a few more critical details in your OP, WhiskeySykes. The Tsinghua Bamboo Slips are really fascinating, not least because it contains to this date the oldest known decimal multiplication table, predating the oldest surviving Greek examples from the 1st century AD onward (although the ancient Babylonians had multiplication tables utilizing a base of 60 instead of 10). It's just a shame that their origins are so hazy and poorly understood due to being donated in 2008 to the Tsinghua University (by a donor who wishes to remain anonymous) instead of being excavated directly from a tomb by credited archaeologists. They suffered damage from mold as a result, but thankfully a crack team of conservationists at the university have kept the remaining strips intact and well preserved. Carbon dating of the box that came with them yields a date of roughly 305 BC (give or take 30 years) and the style of the texts indicates that they came from the State of Chu (centered in what is now China's Hubei and Hunan provinces).

[Cyclops]

Notice to see more of the Hundred Schools come into clearer focus.

[hellheaven1987]

To clear misunderstanding, "Hundred Schools" are merely a term to describe there were many organized school of ideas during Warring States, including (not just) science and military school of thoughts. In fact, there was a school of agricultural science during Warring States that devoted on the agricultural technique.

[WhiskeySykes]

To clear misunderstanding, "Hundred Schools" are merely a term to describe there were many organized school of ideas during Warring States, including (not just) science and military school of thoughts. In fact, there was a school of agricultural science during Warring States that devoted on the agricultural technique.

Correct, the "100 Schools of Thought" is just to say there were too many to count. There were not literally 100, there were shades of thought, possibly 1000's of competing ideas in 100's of disciplines. Qin's purge was less about a despot destroying the schools, more about the Qin scholars establishing a new convention. This was the strategy of the scholar class behind Qin's power all along. With the flux of ideas finally ebbed, and who they assumed a complicit, if volatile, patron in the ascent, the Legalists could perpetuate a system that ensured their families' influence for millennia.