The discovery of early Chinese manuscripts – especially over the past thirty to forty years –has changed the way in which scholars look at the textual record of early China, such as textual culture, textual sequence, organization, authorship, readership, and function of early texts. The discovery in 1993 of the Guodian manuscripts with Laozi counterparts is a particularly prominent example of this development. The present thesis aims to demonstrate the impact of early manuscripts on our view of early Chinese literature by examining one particular case – the Guodian counterparts of Laozi chapter 64.

The introduction of this thesis will first of all, provide the historical context, which transmitted early Chinese literature, stems from. Then it will discuss further how the study of ancient Chinese manuscripts contributes to the development of early Chinese textual culture. The first chapter will give an introduction to the Guodian find and the manuscripts with Laozi counterparts in particular. The second chapter will discuss the fundamental challenges in reading manuscripts. In the third and fourth chapters, this thesis will take the Guodian counterparts of Laozi chapter 64 as an example to discuss problems of the transcription and reading of early Chinese characters as well as the textual analysis in a methodological way. Based on this textual analysis the conclusion demonstrates that the text of this passage, and possibly many early Chinese texts likewise, was in flux and variable.