In just a little more than two decades, from 1994 to 2015, seven public institutions in China acquired considerable numbers of unprovenanced bamboo-slip manuscripts. Following the economic upsurge the country experienced during this period, the art and antique market expanded rapidly. The artefacts that appeared on it did not always have a flawless history, though; some of them came from a flourishing industry producing and selling fakes, or even worse, from looted tombs. In the light of this development, it comes as no surprise that the authenticity of many of these manuscripts has been questioned. In order to understand how exactly judgements on the authenticity of these manuscripts were passed, it is necessary to go back to ancient and medieval ideas and practices. Traditional attitudes towards written artefacts are identified as determining modern approaches assessing and appreciating manuscripts from ancient China. […] calligraphy, valued for its capacity to embody in brushwork the mind and character of the individual artist, was more amenable to accurate and efficient replication than any other form of art. 1 Robert E. Harrist Jr. Manuscripts from ancient and medieval China have only been excavated in large quantities since the twentieth century. They are invaluable sources of information for scholars, and in collectors' eyes they are precious artefacts-if they 1 Harrist 2004, 32. Note: I am grateful to Thies Staack for drawing my attention to Hu (2010) and to further relevant literature as well as for critically commenting on a draft of this article. Thanks to Xiaomeng He for providing a collection of early Chinese legal stipulations related to faking and forging, from which I have drawn below. For simplicity's sake, I have used traditional characters here, even in cases where the source was produced in simplified characters.