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TL;DR: The essay "Wen wang Guan ren" is a text on official recruitment in ancient China. It has been studied for its psychological insights into qualifications for officials. The text appears in two slightly different versions in two different transmitted works. Form criticism was used to explore how the differences between the two versions reflect different editorial contexts.

Abstract: In 2000, Matthias Richter completed a doctoral dissertation entitled “Guan ren: Texte der altchinesischen Literatur zur Charakterkunde und Beamtenrekrutierung” (Guan ren: Texts of ancient Chinese literature concerning the art of character and the recruiting of officials), in which he studied an early Chinese essay variously entitled “Wen wang Guan ren” 文王官人 (Officials of King Wen) or simply “Guan ren” 官人 (Officials). The essay itself is not uninteresting for the psychological insight it brings to the qualifications to be sought in the recruitment of officials, but what particularly attracted Richter’s attention was that it appears in two only slightly different versions in two different transmitted works, one the Da Dai Li ji 大戴禮記 (Dai the Elder’s Record of Ritual) and the other the Yi Zhou shu 逸周書 (Remainder of Zhou Documents). Comparison of these two versions allowed Richter to employ a methodology known in Biblical studies as form criticism to explore how the differences between the two versions of the text reflect different editorial contexts and to discuss how these differences may have come about and what they might mean about the purposes of the different editors. As the reference to form criticism might suggest, Richter’s dissertation was within the grand tradition of German textual criticism. It was a superb case study in how China’s ancient literary heritage had been transmitted over the last two thousand years. However, in the year that it was completed, something happened in Chinese textual criticism that would have a profound effect on his future research: in that year the Shanghai Museum manuscripts of Warring States texts were first introduced to the scholarly world. This is a very rich corpus of texts from about 300 b.c., which is