Today I read an article from the New York Times and it talked about how Taoist texts can deepen our understanding of early Chinese history. In the article it said that we can deepen our understanding of early Chinese history by not just looking at official dynastic histories and looking for who is a Taoist, but instead looking at the religious texts in the Taoist canon. People may say that you can't date anything from the religious texts, but this has changed and we now have the date for every document in the Taoist canon and this allows us to write more about the history of the early Chinese since we have dates. Now that we have Taoist texts, it opens up another aspect of Chinese history that aren't just from official histories and things recorded in the emperor's official history. In the article they compared the Taoist texts as being the Gospel because in the Gospel they squeezed out information that are now in our history and the historians also want to do this with the Taoist canon to figure out more about the history of the early Chinese.
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