In 1930, the
Sino-Swedish Expedition excavated ten sites in the
Juyan Lake Basin and unearthed a total of 10,200 wooden slips dating to the
Western Han, a cache that came to be known as the "old Juyan texts". In 1937, after the
Second Sino-Japanese War began,
Chung-Chang Shen transported these wooden slips from Beijing to the
University of Hong Kong. Another 20,237 slips were excavated between 1972 and 1976 by the Juyan Archaeological Team, Gansu. These slips are held by the Provincial Museum of Gansu and came to be known as the "new Juyan texts". The Shanghai Museum corpus was purchased in Hong Kong the year after the Guodian tomb was excavated, and is believed to have been taken by graverobbers from a tomb in the same area. The
Tsinghua collection was donated by an alumnus who purchased it through auction, with no indication of its origin. The
Anhui University corpus was also purchased by Anhui University after the strips surfaced in the antiquity market. The others were archaeologically excavated. ==Accoutrements==