Over the past several decades, the origins and formation of the Laozi have come into sharper relief through the discovery of early manuscript witnesses to the text, including those of the Warring-States–era Chu-tomb Bamboo Manuscripts of Guodian 郭店楚墓竹簡 and the Han-era Mawangdui silk manuscripts 馬王堆漢墓帛書 and “Beijing University” bamboo manuscripts 北京大學藏西漢竹書. This chapter takes the reader through the nature and importance of those manuscripts, both from the standpoint of textual formation and the philosophical implications they hold by way of ideologically significant textual variants. It asks, and attempts to provide preliminary answers for, such questions as what kind of relationship the earliest manuscripts might have to the received 81–chapter work we now know as the Daodejing; under what circumstances and for what purposes might intentional alterations have been introduced into the text; how might certain graphic variations point toward a different, and in some cases even improved reading of the text; how might certain passages have been divided or combined differently in earlier versions of the text; and at what point did the work come to achieve its final and definitive form.