Titel Balanced Discourses
Original Titel: 中论
Author: Xu Gan 徐干 (Eastern Han-Dynasty)
Translator: John Makeham
Introductions by Dan Shengyuan and John Makeham 
ISBN: 7-119-03234-8
Publisher: Foreign Languages Press (外文出版社), Yale University Press
Series: The Culture & Civilization of China series
Languages: An English-Chinese Bilingual Edition
Year of Publication: 2003
Number of pages: 366
Dimensions: 20 x 12,3 cm
Weight: 383 Gramm



Written by the Han philosopher Xu Gan (A.D. 170–217), Balanced Discourses is an inquiry into the causes of political breakdown. It provides a unique contemporary account of the social, intellectual, and cosmological factors that Xu Gan identified as having precipitated the demise of the Han order. This edition of Zhonglun (or Balanced Discourses) contains the original Chinese text with annotations and, on facing pages, an English translation also accompanied by annotations.

This collection of essays spans a range of topics, from Confucian cultivation to calendrical calculation. Xu’s perspectives are of not only historical but also philosophical interest, for they reveal his belief in a special correlative bond that should exist between names and actualities and his understanding of what happens when that bond is broken. The translator, John Makeham, argues in his introduction that the essays display the same quality of balance that Xu Gan sees as essential to social and political equilibrium.



John Makeham is senior lecturer in Chinese, University of Adelaide. Dang Shengyuan is a senior Chinese scholar.


“A judicious and eminently readable translation of an important work.”—Wai-yee Li, Harvard University


Order No.: 62.0002