Acknowledgments
This work is based on my book in Chinese published eight years ago, Zhongguo zaoqi minfa de jiangou, with very important and substantial revisions. I would like to take this opportunity to thank all those people and institutes for their invaluable assistance during this four-year-long process of translation and revision.
I thank my wife Gao Yi and my daughter Elaine for their company during the whole process. I thank my parents for their encouragement. I thank all my former advisers and teachers, both in China and the U.S., for the training I have received. I thank the Shanghai Jiaotong University’s School of Humanities for its support. I thank Jiandong Chen and Tony Edwards from Sydney and my student Jenny Chen for their assistance. I would also like to thank the following friends and colleagues: Xing Hang at Brandies University, Ji Li at the University of Hong Kong, Liang Cai at the University of Notre Dame and Junmin Zhang at Gansu Provincial Institute of Artifacts and Archaeology. I thank Professor Tongdong Bai at Fudan University and Professor Zhiping Liang at China Art Research Institute for their inspiring scholarly exchanges with me. In addition, my appreciation goes out to the editorial team of Brill and the anonymous reviewers for taking the time to look over the manuscript and their insightful suggestions.
Zhaoyang Zhang
Shanghai Jiao Tong University