What does it mean to produce a scholarly edition of an ancient text? The article approaches the question from a comparative perspective, setting Western and Chinese philological traditions in dialogue on problems they share. Proceeding in three stages, it traces a path from the simplest editorial situation to the most complex, where competing traditions reflect the succes-sive interventions of distinct communities of interpretation. At each stage, it first examines the difficulties that confront editors: attribution and authentic-ity, transcription and translation, the treatment of variants, and, in some cas-es, the progressive dissolution of the notion of a stable original; before brief-ly introducing the methods developed to face these problems. Rather than advocating for a single approach, the article suggests that the tools devel-oped by the history of philology in different fields are valuable but not uni-versally applicable, and that editors might use and adapt them case by case. In conclusion, a scholarly edition may be recognized by the transparency and accountability of the reasoning and sources it makes available to its readers.