The present work is a study on the formation of the Shih-ching. The author poses the hypothesis that this collection of poems, as the standard music and literature passed down to later generations, initially incorporated different cultural heritages through a process which moved from ritualization to secularization, as well as standardization to localization.
In aiming to find the origins of the division of the Shih-ching into sections and subsections and their titles, as "Nan," "Feng," "Ya," and "Sung," the author employs an interdisciplinary methodology, combining ethno-musicological methods with paleography, philology, and archaeology. He draws on new archaeological data of the past two decades that has shed new light on the Shih-ching.