Abstract
<title>Abstract</title> <p>Excavated bamboo slips are a primary written record of early China, but reach conservators as thousands of fragments whose grouping into slips is lost, and rejoining them must precede reading, dating or display. Computational matchers return ranked candidate lists that a specialist still resolves by hand. This study treats reassembly as one constrained optimisation over a whole corpus, carrying slip length, width and scribal hand as latent properties of the slip rather than as pairwise features. Applied to a corpus scaled to the Shuihudi Qin find of 3253 fragments, the framework recovered 33.4% of multi fragment slips intact where maximum weight bipartite matching recovered 0.5%, and reduced joins that fuse two different slips from 2122 to 380. Results reveal that excavation context is the most valuable of five evidence sources tested, yet no published system uses it. The approach enables corpus scale reassembly from evidence excavations already record.</p>