This paper aims to implement the TEI-Guidelines on early Chinese excavated administrative documents. As the handling of these documents stretches over the academic fields of both Chinese paleography and paleo-diplomatics, the respective traditional descriptive tools of these two fields need to be reflected. Being still at a preliminary stage, this paper focuses on the paleographic features only, which early Chinese excavated administrative documents share with excavated literature.

In praxis, Chinese paleography is the art of transcribing and collating early Chinese manuscripts. In order to store information about the transcribers’ understanding of the original text within the modern transcriptions, Chinese paleography has developed a peculiar markup language. Interestingly, this traditional markup language can be easily translated into existing TEI elements and attributes. In this regard, this paper proves the high sophistication of the TEI-Guidelines rather than adding something new to them.

By contrast, a more theoretical branch of Chinese paleography, which is occupied with linguistic issues like the changes in character usage over time and in space, poses more complex semantic challenges. Basically, the paleographic understanding of Chinese characters differs hugely from that of the Unicode standard, which ultimately represents a compromise to meet multifold diverging practical demands. This gap leads to the necessity of redefining characters even in cases where Unicode seemingly provides clearly distinguishable “ideographs”. For this redefinition, this paper attempts to change the semantic meaning of <g>(gaiji) elements, linking them to paleographic character definitions within the <charDecl> element in the TEI header or in a stand-off data format.

Classically, a Chinese character is understood as the combination of form, reading, and meaning. Studies indicate stable links between reading and meaning, whereas form frequently undergoes quicker, seemingly arbitrary alterations. Certain Chinese linguists suggest concentrating on reading and meaning units as a more suitable tool for linguistic analysis of changes in character usage. Shào Yǒnghǎi邵永海 calls these units “character positions (zì wèi字位)”, the concept of “position” referring to a relatively fixed position in the semantic space in contrast to the easily changing forms of characters. This paper supports this more historical approach to Chinese characters and attempts to realize it by separating the description of “character positions” from “character forms” in the <char> and <glyph> elements within the <charDecl> element respectively.

In practical application, this redefinition of the <g> element results in all characters in the main body and the attached apparatuses being turned into <g> elements, using @ref and @ana attributes to associate them with the corresponding form and character position definitions in the <glyph> and <char> elements. This has the beneficial side effect of eliminating arbitrary text and element node mixing, converting text into homogeneous sequences of <g> elements. Combined with stand-off solutions for annotations and strict stratification of different layers of annotation, this furthermore facilitates automated collation of encoded text and complex arrangements of overlapping annotations as will be shown by means of a simple example from excavated literature.