Some texts wear their interpretations pretty much on their sleeves; it is hard to interpret the “Legalist” Hanfeizi text as a Confucian treatise because of the extent to which it is a criticism thereof, championing a system of regulations and laws that was an anathema to The Master. Most Chinese classical texts are not, however, of this kind, as we should already expect from our earlier discussion about the classical language. They require a good deal of interpretive analysis and evaluation. Almost none of them are pure, the work of a single author and unaffected by the vagaries of history or the ravages of time. They are composites, with fragments of several texts often strung together by we-know-not who, then burned in large quantities during the bibliographic holocaust of 213 BCE and the destruction of the libraries during the civil war that followed soon afterward; with remaining copies re-assembled—again by the nameless—and that is pretty much the way they have come down to us. Greater understanding of several texts has come from unearthing very old copies of them written on bamboo or silk at recently excavated archaeological sites, particularly those at Mawangdui in Hunan and Guodian in Hubei; but it remains that virtually every work we have today is more or less corrupt.