In 2008, Tsinghua University of Beijing acquired a corpus of manuscripts written on bamboo slips from China's Warring States period (c. 300 BCE) and established the Research and Conservation Center for Unearthed Texts directed by renowned scholar Li Xueqin 李學勤(1933–2019) to edit and publish them. A panel of experts convened to evaluate the manuscripts said of them:

These Warring States bamboo slips are tremendously valuable historical artifacts, whose contents speak to the very core of traditional Chinese culture. This is an unprecedented discovery, one which will inevitably attract the attention of scholars both here and abroad. It promises to have a lasting impact in many different disciplines, including but not limited to Chinese history, archaeology, paleography and philology.

The main content of this book is the English translation and background introduction of the Tsinghua Bamboo Slips Shifa (Methods of Divination) and its related texts (Biegua [Separated Trigrams], Zhuci [Prayer Texts], Liangchen [Good Ministers], Daoci [Prayer Incantations]). It interprets the characteristics and connotations of divination and technical texts from the pre-Qin period, and demonstrates the diversity of scribal culture during the Warring States Period.

Research and Conservation Center for Unearthed Texts, a Key Humanities Research Institute at Tsinghua University, has been successively designated as a MOE Key Research Base for Humanities and Social Sciences and the Lead Institution of the National Collaborative Innovation Center.