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"Bamboo and wood were the earliest materials used for books and documents in China and had a strong and far-reaching impact on Chinese culture...all the essentials of Chinese civilization were originally recorded on these hard-surfaced materials" (96).

No surviving bamboo or wood books exists before the Warring States period (468-221 B.C.) but evidence in texts indicates that they were in use during the Shang dynasty (97).

While there is considerable overlap, writing in books can be divided into three successive stages: bamboo till the fourth century A.D., silk through the sixth century A.D., and paper to the present (98).

Important findings containing laws and statutes of the Qin dynasty, dated 306-207 B.C., are the only legal and historical records of this era (103).

The standardized practice of writing from top to bottom is believed to be due to the narrow bamboo, where only one character could be written and the fibers of bamboo which make downward strokes easier.

Writing on bamboo was often done in lampblack ink with brushes, unlike the carving and inscriptions of harder surfaces.

Bamboo had to be prepared for a writing surface : "Writings were not made on the outer cuticle of the stem but rather on the under surface after the green skin was scrped off, although sometimes the inner side of the stem was also used for writing" (114). Bamboo was also valuable because writing could be scraped off and the tablets could be used again, much like a palimpsest.