Compiled around 300 BCE, Zuozhuan is an annalistic history of interactions within and among Chinese states during the years 722 – 463 BCE. It offers a wealth of detail on political, ritual, and military events of these centuries and on the people involved. The text’s style of presentation, however, can make it challenging to follow the careers even of individuals, let alone long family lines, and much scholarly work has gone into reconstructing the basic facts of genealogy for the leading lineages of major states. This talk builds upon previous scholarship and provisionally isolates individual lineage narratives in Zuozhuan, supplementing that selection of material with evidence from other sources. I then read each account in a coherent and integrated manner, exploring both the generic features that lineage histories have in common and the distinctive themes and aims of specific lineages’ accounts. This approach presents and clarifies the complicated long-term dynamics of lineage and court politics in the period’s network of regional powers and city-states. In philological and historiographical terms, too, comparing the narratives of different lineages in Zuozhuan may help us understand how Zuozhuan’s omnibus account relates to others that were no doubt transmitted within the lineages themselves. Of special interest are narratives reflecting lineages’ success in a court context notionally governed by rules of “ritual discipline” (li). For the purposes of this presentation, I offer examples from the Shusun lineage, one of three closely related lineages whose rivalry defined the history of Lu, Confucius’s home state, over two centuries. For the Shusun lineage heads, who were survivors and victims in a court that periodically fell apart, appetite and starvation were distinctive themes.

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