China is the historical setting through which the book traces the I Ching from an established practice of divination to a layered classical tradition. Its account connects the classic to the feudal states of antiquity, the political crisis associated with King Wen, the survival of the text during the Qin book burning, and centuries of cataloguing, commentary, and imperial editing. It also insists on distinctions that later readers could blur: between divination and prediction, and between the older Text and the Appendixes attributed to Confucius.

Early Use and Circulation

The book describes divination as an old practice in China, attested in accounts of tortoise-shell consultation and, later, the use of stalks to produce lineal figures. In its account of the ancient institution, divination was not a way to know future events with certainty. It was used to assess whether plans under consideration, or particular prospective circumstances, would turn out well or badly. The distinction matters: the practice concerned judgment about a proposed course of action, not unrestricted foreknowledge.

The I Ching was already in circulation well before Confucius. The account cites at least eight narratives of divination between 672 and 564 BC, before his birth, and five further consultations during his lifetime. In these records, the present text is quoted, and the practice appears across the various feudal states. The evidence supports the conclusion that the classic was widely known in the region long before the later association of its Appendixes with Confucius.

The book places yarrow-stalk divination within this longer history. It identifies the plant as Ptarmica Sibirica and notes that it was still cultivated near Confucius’s grave, where the translator had seen it growing. The stalks were not merely incidental equipment: they were the material means by which a consultation generated the lineal figures that could then be interpreted through the classic.

Political Setting and the Figures

The account links the study of the lineal figures with a period of political disorder under the Shang dynasty. A description of the state depicts lawlessness, treachery among officials, and violence among the people; the disorder is compared to a traveler attempting to cross a great stream without finding either ford or bank. The text presents this crisis as a consequence in large part of the monarch’s character and rule.

Against this background, the book describes King Wen as a virtuous and capable ruler in the western principality of Zhou, who exercised authority over a large part of the kingdom but hesitated to attack the tyrant for fear of appearing disloyal. After the Shang ruler’s suspicions rose, King Wen was imprisoned at Youli in 1143 BC, with the possibility of execution hanging over him. The account places his attention to the figures in that confinement, while presenting the explanation for his interest partly as the translator’s conjecture rather than established fact.

The use of trigrams and divination was already familiar in the country, and the translator suggests that the study of the figures might have seemed innocuous to King Wen’s captors. In the book’s reconstruction, King Wen connected each of the 64 hexagrams with a meaning drawn from nature, human society, or the condition and possible future of the kingdom. He gave the figures names and attached exhortations or warnings to them. The translator interprets this work as an effort to bring divination within the bounds of reason, turning its symbolic material toward moral, social, and political reflection.

How Divination Worked

The Appendix’s method, as described in the book, used 49 stalks. Each line required three manipulations, so forming a six-line hexagram required 18 manipulations. Numbers derived from the River Map helped determine the lines: odd numbers produced strong, undivided lines, while even numbers produced weak, divided ones. The emblematic values 9, 8, 7, and 6 also had a role in combining the lines and forming the hexagram.

Once the figure had been produced, the numbers had completed their function. Interpretation relied on King Wen’s judgments and the emblematic sentences of the Duke of Zhou, not on numbers as independent forces that revealed every possible occurrence. The translator explicitly distinguishes this practical role from the Pythagorean idea that Number was the principle and cause of things. Although he recognizes that comparisons between the two systems had been made, he argues that the I Ching’s numbers serve as aids in divination rather than as entities governing material existence.

The Appendix represents the tortoise and the plant as spirit-like objects produced by Heaven and suited to divination. The translator separates that belief from his account of what the procedure accomplished: consultation evaluated the likely auspiciousness of contemplated plans and circumstances. He also notes that the language of the Appendix about knowledge of the future could mislead a cursory reader, but argues that a careful reading does not make the I Ching a means of absolutely foretelling events. The distinction between ritual belief, operational method, and the translator’s judgment of divination’s efficacy remains central to his presentation.

Survival and the Growth of Commentary

In 213 BC, during the Qin book burning, the I Ching escaped destruction because divination was among the subjects exempted from the order to burn old books. The premier Li Si’s memorial made exceptions for works on medicine, divination, and agriculture; as a divination book, the I Ching was preserved. Its survival was therefore tied not only to its status as an ancient text but also to the practical classification under which the authorities spared it.

The work’s history in China is also a history of cataloguing and accumulated interpretation. A catalogue of the imperial library compiled by Liu Xin near the beginning of the Common Era listed works on the I Ching and its Appendixes by thirteen authors or schools, comprising 294 portions of varying size. The imperial edition published in 1715 quoted 218 commentators, whose contributions extended from the second century BC to the seventeenth century. The translator emphasizes that even this large number represents only a fraction of those who tried to interpret the book.

The Kâu Yî Keh Kung, the great imperial edition of the Qing dynasty, first appeared in 1715 and brought together extensive discussions of meaning. The translator credits its editors’ arguments and decisions with helping raise interpretation of the classic toward a science. He also relied on the edition while preparing his own translation, alongside a second-hand copy of the Daily Lectures on the Yî whose former owner had filled it with punctuation, interlinear additions, and marginal notes. These traces of close reading exemplify the continuing labor through which difficult passages were approached.

Text, Appendixes, and Interpretive History

The book treats the Text and the Appendixes as historically distinct. It argues that the Text existed before Confucius, whereas the Appendixes attributed to him belong, if that attribution is accepted at all, to a later period, probably between 450 and 350 BC. The translator estimates that the relevant portions of the Text preceded the possible composition of the Appendixes by centuries. He therefore rejects the idea that the two parts should simply be treated as one homogeneous work: the intervening period could have changed how readers understood the figures and the method of the classic.

The common arrangement of the book contributed, in his view, to confusion by placing five of the Appendixes alongside the Text. He traces this practice to Pi Chi of the early Han dynasty and argues that mixing passages built on different ideas makes it harder for foreign readers to distinguish their meanings. The Kangxi edition, by contrast, printed the Text and Appendixes separately. Native scholars generally recognized the difference in their dates, even though few questioned the assumption that the Appendixes formed a coherent whole or that all were written by Confucius.

The translator does not dismiss Chinese commentary as futile. He rejects the claim that generations of scholars had merely concluded that the book’s full meaning was unknowable, and credits native commentaries with substantial value in clarifying the Text. At the same time, he argues that reverence for Confucius could discourage critics from acknowledging contradictions or unreasonable passages in the Appendixes. China thus appears not just as the setting of the classic’s early use, but as the site of a long interpretive history in which preservation, editorial arrangement, scholarly labor, and inherited assumptions shaped what readers could see in it.