Literary Information in China: A History 9780231551373

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L I T E R A RY I N F OR M AT ION I N C H I NA

L I T E R A RY I N F OR M AT ION I N C H I NA A History

EDITED BY JACK W. CHEN, ANATOLY DET WYLER, XIAO LIU, CHRISTOPHER M. B. NUGENT, AND BRUCE RUSK

Columbia University Press New York

Columbia University Press wishes to express its appreciation for assistance given by the following organizations in the publication of this book: Henry Luce Foundation/ACLS Program in Chinese Studies: Collaborative Reading-Workshop Grant; Pennsylvania State University Center for Humanities and Information; Jamie H. T. McConnell III Fund from the University of Virginia Department of East Asian Languages, Literatures, and Cultures; Columbia University Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures; Weatherhead East Asian Institute; China and Inner Asia Council Small Grants Program (Association of Asian Studies); University of Virginia Humanities Informatics Lab (Institute of the Humanities and Global Culture); Scholarly Publication Fund of the University of British Columbia; Williams College; T’ang Studies Society

Columbia University Press Publishers Since 1893 New York Chichester, West Sussex cup.columbia.edu Copyright © 2021 Columbia University Press All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Chen, Jack Wei, editor. | Detwyler, Anatoly, editor. | Liu, Xiao, (Professor of East Asian studies), editor. | Nugent, Christopher M. B., 1969– editor. | Rusk, Bruce, 1972– editor. Title: Literary information in China : a history / edited by Jack W. Chen, Anatoly Detwyler, Xiao Liu, Christopher M.B. Nugent, and Bruce Rusk. Description: New York : Columbia University Press, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020035177 (print) | LCCN 2020035178 (ebook) | ISBN 9780231195522 (hardback) | ISBN 9780231551373 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Information resources—China—History. | Information organization—China—History. | Chinese literature—History and criticism. Classification: LCC ZA3072.C45 L58 2021 (print) | LCC ZA3072.C45 (ebook) | DDC 020.951–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020035177 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020035178

Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper. Printed in the United States of America

CONTENTS

A Note to Readers xi Chronology xiii Foreword xv ANN M. BLAIR

Introduction

xxi

JAC K W. C H E N , A NAT O LY D E T W Y L E R , X IAO L I U, C H R I S T O P H E R M . B . N U G E N T, A N D B RU C E RU S K

PART I: INFORMATION MANAGEMENT AT THE LEVEL OF THE WORD SECTION A: GRAPHS

3

EDITED BY CHRISTOPHER M. B. NUGENT

1. Graphs 5 Z E V HA N D E L

2. Script Reform and Alphabetization YUROU ZHONG

3. Indexing Systems

25

U LU Ğ K U Z U O Ğ LU

4. Character Input 36 THOMAS S. MULL ANEY

SECTION B: LEXICONS E D I T E D B Y B RU C E RU S K

5. Early Lexicons 53 Z E V HA N D E L

49

17

vi

Contents

6. Rime Tables 65 DAV I D P R AG E R B R A N N E R

7. Later Imperial Lexicons

78

NAT HA N V E DA L

8. Early Twentieth-Century Dictionaries

90

YUE MENG AND XI CHEN

9. Post-1949 Dictionaries 96 J E N N I F E R A LT E H E N G E R

10. App-Based and Online Dictionaries

105

M I C HA E L L O V E

SECTION C: TEXT AND TEXTUAL DIVISIONS E D I T E D B Y JAC K W. C H E N

11. Sentences, Paragraphs, and Sections

113

D I R K M E Y E R A N D L I S A I N D R AC C O L O

12. Lines, Couplets, and Stanzas 119 JAC K W. C H E N

13. Premodern Punctuation and Layout

125

IMRE GALAMBOS

14. Modern Punctuation and Layout

135

J O H N C H R I S T O P H E R HA M M

SECTION D: COMMENTARIES

143

E D I T E D B Y B RU C E RU S K

15. Early to Middle Period Classical Commentaries M I C HA E L N Y L A N A N D B RU C E RU S K

16. Poetry Commentaries

158

M I C HA E L A . F U L L E R

17. Fiction Commentaries

169

M A RT I N W. H UA N G

18. Drama Commentaries YUMING HE

19. Reader’s Guides

190

M A R IA F R A N C A S I BAU

178

145

111

Contents

vii

PART II: INFORMATION MANAGEMENT AT THE LEVEL OF THE DOCUMENT SECTION A: ANTHOLOGIES

201

E D I T E D B Y JAC K W. C H E N

20. Early Anthologies 205 M I C HA E L H U N T E R

21. Medieval Literary Anthologies

215

X IAO F E I T IA N

22. Later Imperial Poetry Anthologies

224

G R E G O RY PAT T E R S O N

23. Later Imperial Prose Anthologies

233

TIMOTHY CLIFFORD

24. Religious Literary Anthologies

242

NATA S HA H E L L E R

25. Premodern Fiction and Fiction Collections

249

LING HON LAM

26. Premodern Drama Anthologies

260

A R I E L F OX

27. Modern Literary Anthologies

269

C HA R L E S A . L AU G H L I N

28. Modern Drama Scripts Anthologies 277 TA R RY N L I - M I N C H U N

29. Textbook Anthologies 284 M I C HA E L G I B B S H I L L

SECTION B: ENCYCLOPEDIAS

291

EDITED BY CHRISTOPHER M. B. NUGENT

30. Medieval Encyclopedias

295

CHRISTOPHER M. B. NUGENT

31. Middle Period Imperial Encyclopedias

306

SARAH M. ALLEN

32. Later Imperial Vernacular Encyclopedias

316

C Y N T H IA B R O K AW

33. Qing Dynasty Imperial Encyclopedias S T E FA N O G A N D O L F O

324

viii

Contents

34. Twentieth-Century Vernacular Encyclopedias

334

J OA N J U D G E

35. Online Encyclopedias and Wikis

340

S HAO H UA G U O

SECTION C: HISTORIES

347

E D I T E D B Y A NAT O LY D E T W Y L E R

36. Early Histories 351 G R I E T VA N K E E R B E R G H E N

37. Early Medieval Histories 361 ZEB RAFT

38. Dynastic Histories from Tang to Song

371

A N NA M . S H I E L D S

39. Late Imperial Histories

384

DEVIN FITZGERALD

40. Literary Histories 395 T H E O D O R E D. H U T E R S

PART III: INFORMATION MANAGEMENT AT THE LEVEL OF THE COLLECTION SECTION A: LIBRARIES, MUSEUMS, AND ARCHIVES E D I T E D B Y X IAO L I U

41. Libraries from the Early Period to the Tang

413

M I C HA E L N Y L A N

42. Libraries from Song to Qing

421

R O NA L D C . E G A N

43. Late Imperial Literary Archives 430 KAIJUN CHEN

44. Modern Libraries

437

J I D O N G YA N G

45. Modern Literature Museums and Archives 447 KIRK A. DENTON

46. Document Services 456 X IAO L I U

409

Contents

47. Thematic Research Collections

465

D O NA L D S T U R G E O N

SECTION B: BIBLIOGRAPHIES AND INDICES

475

E D I T E D B Y B RU C E RU S K A N D X IAO L I U

48. Early Bibliographies 477 M I C HA E L N Y L A N

49. Medieval Bibliographies

483

E VA N N I C O L L - J O H N S O N

50. Later Imperial Bibliographies

491

S T E FA N O G A N D O L F O

51. Twentieth-Century Bibliographies

500

A NAT O LY D E T W Y L E R

52. Indices and Concordances

509

D O NA L D S T U R G E O N

SECTION C: SERIAL PUBLICATIONS

519

E D I T E D B Y A NAT O LY D E T W Y L E R A N D X IAO L I U

53. Premodern Literary Collectanea

523

S U YO U N G S O N

54. Modern Literary Collectanea

533

R O B E RT J. C U L P

55. Literary Newspapers and Tabloids

541

ALEXANDER DES FORGES

56. Literary Journals 548 J IA N L I L I

57. Overseas Chinese Newspapers

561

C A R L O S R O JA S

58. Internet Literature

569

JIN FENG

Bibliography 577 Contributors 611 Index of People and Select Institutions 615 Index of Documents, Publications, and Electronic Resources 625

ix

A NOTE TO READERS

R

eferences to titles have been standardized to help readers seeking to locate a given work across the volume. Titles of Chinese publications appear under their pinyin romanized form, with Chinese characters following the first mention, followed parenthetically by the title of the English-language translation in italics (if one has been published) or a non-italicized English gloss of the title. In a small number of cases, we use a gloss translation of the title rather than that of a published translation when the latter differs significantly from the original title’s literal meaning. Names, titles, and phrases are rendered in either traditional or simplified Chinese, according to the individual’s personal conventions, the historical period, and the publication record.

CHRONOLOGY

T

he dates here follow those provided in Michael Loewe and Edward L. Shaughnessy, eds., The Cambridge History of Ancient China: From the Origins of Civilization to 221 B.C. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); and Endymion Wilkinson, Chinese History: A New Manual, 5th ed. (self-pub., 2018). Shang ଚ

ca. 1570–1045 BCE

Zhou ਼

1049/1045–256 BCE

      Western Zhou 㽓਼

1049/1045–771 BCE

      Eastern Zhou ᵅ਼

770–256 BCE

            Spring and Autumn ᯹⾟

770–481 BCE

            Warring States ᠄೟

481–221 BCE

Qin ⾺

221–207 BCE

Han ⓶

206 BCE–220 CE

      Western Han 㽓⓶

202 BCE–8 CE

      Xin ᮄ

9–23

      Eastern Han ᵅ⓶

25–220

Wei 儣

220–265

Three Kingdoms ϝ೟

220–280

xiv Chronology

Jin ᰝ

265–420

      Western Jin 㽓ᰝ

265–316

      Eastern Jin ᵅᰝ

317–420

Southern Dynasties फᳱ

420–579

      (Liu) Song ࡝ᅟ

420–579

      Qi 唞

479–502

      Liang ṕ

502–557

      Chen 䱇

557–589

Northern Dynasties ࣫ᳱ

386–581

      Northern Wei ࣫儣

386–534

      Eastern Wei ᵅ儣

534–550

      Western Wei 㽓儣

535–556

      Northern Qi ࣫唞

550–577

      Northern Zhou ਼࣫

557–581

Sui 䱟

581–618

Tang ૤

618–907

Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms Ѩҷक೟

907–979

Song ᅟ

960–1279

      Northern Song ࣫ᅟ

960–1127

      Southern Song फᅟ

1127–1279

Liao 䙐

916–1125

Jin 䞥

1115–1234

Xi Xia 㽓໣

1038–1227

Yuan ‫ܗ‬

1271–1368

Ming ᯢ

1368–1644

Qing ⏙

1644–1911

Republic of China Ё㧃⇥೟ (mainland)

1912–1949

Republic of China Ё㧃⇥೟ (Taiwan)

1949–present

People’s Republic of China ЁढҎ⇥݅੠೑

1949–present

FOREWORD A N N M. BL AIR

D

iscussions of information have been on a steady rise since the mid-twentieth century across multiple disciplines: in computer science, information theory was inspired by an influential 1948 paper by Claude E. Shannon; American library schools started including information sciences in their purview from the mid-1960s; in 1965, Rowena W. Swanson, head of the Directorate of Information Sciences at the U.S. Air Force, forecast an influential future for this new field.1 In 1971, communications theorist Marshall McLuhan was among the early users of information age to designate an era that he rightly predicted would be transformed by electronic devices. In the intervening fifty years, the references to information have become so numerous and so varied that no single definition could embrace them all.2 But this abundant discussion has for the most part been built on two assumptions—that information is new in the digital age and that it is unique to the Western or westernized world. This volume offers a welcome challenge to both of these. Its authors use information as an illuminating new lens through which to consider a huge range of Chinese textual production across different times, places, and genres. The lens of information opens up new perspectives in multiple ways. The emphasis here is on informational works concerned with literary texts and books, which are themselves in written form. The first innovation in this volume is that it focuses on works that have often been considered derivative or ancillary; they comprise commentaries, anthologies, periodical collectanea, histories, and reference genres—lexicons, bibliographies, and encyclopedias.

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Foreword

The second is that these texts are studied here less for their explicit messages (e.g., their historical or commentarial spin) than for the ways they present and manage their contents. Furthermore, the scope extends both outside the texts to institutions like libraries, museums, and archives and inside the texts to script, punctuation, and layout. The purpose is to uncover the material, intellectual, and social practices and systems that made it possible to store, retrieve, and transmit textual information. As in other projects in book history and media studies, the methods deployed range from revisiting iconic works like the gigantic eighteenth-century compilation project of the Siku quanshu ಯᑿܼ᳌ (Complete writings of the four repositories) to noticing the “often unprepossessing, partly invisible objects and the processes generated around them that render organization possible,” such as graphemes, sorting mechanisms, and citation practices.3 Information is used in this volume as an etic category—that is, one applied by current scholars to historical contexts where there was no equivalent term or concept. The point is not to seek such equivalents in Chinese language and writing but rather to examine how what we today call information in a demotic, nontechnical sense was stored, sorted, and retrieved in contexts distant from our own, both geographically and chronologically. The assumption here is that “every age is an information age.”4 When computer scientist Anthony G. Oettinger made this observation in 1980, he was pondering the “relation of knowledge to power” in his day and the outlook for the early twenty-first century. Within two decades, this idea started to appeal to historians with a rather different import. The much-repeated notion that the rise of digital technologies constituted a unique “age of information” has inspired historians to challenge that singularity by investigating the ways in which the various past contexts they studied had also been “information ages,” each with distinctive technologies and patterns of behavior.5 Similarly, the widespread shifts we have experienced to new technologies and ways of working have heightened our awareness of “little tools of knowledge,” long ignored because taken for granted but now rendered visible by their decline—among them, for example, handwriting, index cards, and the bound periodical.6 The recent rise of studies in the history of information thus offers a vivid example of the observation of pioneering cultural historian Jacob Burckhardt in the late nineteenth century that “history is on every occasion the record of what one age finds worthy of note in another.”7 At the same time that they knowingly pursue questions prompted by their own time, historians of information, like all good cultural historians, seek answers couched within the terms and values of the contexts they study—in other words, the emic categories present in their sources (i.e., the terms and concepts in use at the time). The crucial method is contextual analysis, including the study of the motives for composing a text and the audience targeted, the sources and models on which the text drew both explicitly and tacitly, the

Foreword

xvii

relationship of the text to the field of other texts circulating at the time, the means chosen and used to disseminate it, and the reception it garnered at the time and, as relevant, in later periods. For example, many genres discussed in this volume involved the compilation of selected texts, either in whole or in part; as scholars in this volume emphasize, the acts of excerpting and collecting, although they do not meet modern criteria of originality, were nonetheless “purposeful and careful” (Detwyler, part II.C on histories). Some were commissioned by the state (that is, by an emperor or a bureaucratic office); others were commercially motivated, promising buyers easier access to authoritative texts or social status; some were personal in origin and disseminated later by others. Through attentive study, the expert contributors to this volume reconstruct the kinds of use and value that the producers expected to provide in these various genres as well as their actual impacts, which did not always match the hopes invested in them. Alongside important works that were hardly used (like the massive Yongle dadian ∌ῖ໻‫[ ݌‬Great compendium of the Yongle reign], composed in 1403–8), some compilations were reedited and reprinted for centuries; whether or not the text changed in the process of transmission, the varied contexts of time and place modified its import and impact. Some collections proved useful in preserving texts that were otherwise lost, although this was not the purpose of their initial composition (see Allen, chapter 31). The informational genres studied here serve as documents of the several contexts in which they were created and activated and of the mental categories of their makers and users. In lived experience, information is received through all five senses—smell, taste, and touch as well as hearing and sight. Notwithstanding recent technologies developed for sound and digital content, writing has been and remains the dominant means of storing, transmitting, and retrieving information. The written record is usually all that remains of the much richer information landscapes of the past, which included words spoken along with gestures and other signals (e.g., clothing, ceremonies, and song), of which we catch glimpses only when they were recorded in texts that have come down to us. The presence of an ambient oral culture seems especially important for ancient Chinese texts, which rarely mentioned textual authorities, presumably because these were well known to any reader (see Nylan and Rusk, chapter 15). As the volume of texts available expanded (by the fourth century CE), abundant bibliographical citation became the norm. The great accumulation and proliferation of texts (notably in imperial and local libraries and, by the sixteenth century, in the marketplace) motivated the production of books about books, as studied in this volume. These offered information useful for navigating not the world itself but the world of texts (drama, fiction, poetry, and the classical canon) and their intertextual allusions and references. The textualization of Chinese culture, whereby more and more information was recorded in written and often

xviii

Foreword

printed form, was crucial to the survival of so many sources over long stretches of time and geographical distance. Texts were also subject to censorship and destruction under multiple political regimes, and yet they have often survived nonetheless, as in the case of traditional reference works held by families that escaped the book raids of the Cultural Revolution (see Altehenger, chapter 9). The Chinese textual corpus is exceptional for the continuity of its transmission of a classical canon. These texts were long-lived but not “timeless”; we can appreciate them better by understanding the historical contingencies as well as the structures of cultural and political power involved in their survival. Textual transmission over long periods has typically depended on one or both of material and cultural durability. Material durability enables a text to survive even through periods of cultural disinterest. It comprises durability of the medium itself. Inscriptions on stone can last for millennia, but even fragile media like bamboo strips can survive in certain conditions, though few in number and fragmentary, and become known when recovered by archeological research; durability is furthered in another way by the production of abundant copies thanks to printing. Cultural durability results from the desire of successive generations of authors, editors, commentators, and compilers, and their copyists or printers, abetted by readers or commissioners, to make a new copy or imprint of a text, in some cases updated to suit the needs of a later context. Cultural interest was essential to the transmission of texts down to the point at which we have abundant surviving original sources (i.e., the sixteenth century or so). The transmission of information, just like its production, was often commissioned or supported by centers of political or cultural power, including the imperial court or bureaucracy, and by the intellectual values and career ambitions of literati. Even in the absence of active censorship, omitting texts from informational genres or from copying or compiling projects could result in long-term neglect and loss. Historians of information are thus attentive to material forms as well as textual practices; the authors of this volume offer nuanced assessments of the interrelationships between the two. For example, surviving bamboo slips show that early Chinese texts were not laid out to match the material substrate, even in cases where the text could have been laid out accordingly (see Meyer and Indraccolo, chapter 11). Similarly, in ancient Greece and Rome the size of a papyrus roll did not always match the size of the books into which literary works were typically divided—scrolls could fit two or three books of the epic poems of Homer or one book of Thucydides’s History of the Peloponnesian War.8 Material forms create affordances that shape but rarely determine cultural production. The same is true of scripts, as this volume lays to rest any notion that effective or modern information technologies require an alphabetic writing system. Chinese writing operates by the combination of graphical components associated with both sound and meaning; digital techniques have introduced

Foreword

xix

tools that make text input in Chinese as efficient as input in alphabetic scripts (see Mullaney, chapter 4). One noticeable impact of Chinese characters is the profusion of different ways for sorting them in indices or lexica. While alphabetical order has been settled in Europe since antiquity, dozens of different systems have been devised over the centuries for sorting Chinese characters; the topic offers a fascinating opportunity to study the “infrastructural power of an index itself, i.e., its ability to determine the mental and physical habits to search for information, habits that become so ingrained in literary practices that they are hard to abandon even if sociopolitical and technological conditions change significantly” (Kuzuoğlu, chapter 3). Histories of information offer new perspectives on major turning points in technology like the invention and spread of printing, under way centuries earlier in China than in Europe, but they also bring to light the longue durée of material forms and cultural habits and practices that have hardly warranted attention before. This volume, part of a cluster of new reference works on the history of information, is crucial in focusing on a non-Western context.9 Chinese literary information encompasses a huge geographical and chronological range. China was hardly a monolithic cultural entity, and the approach taken by the fifty-six authors (across fifty-eight chapters) is carefully attentive to the specific contexts in which the examples of literary information they study were generated, circulated, and transmitted. Specialists will appreciate the combination of expert syntheses and insightful innovative analyses of information practices. For the nonspecialist reader, the volume offers an engaging introduction to Chinese textual culture, including a limpid discussion of Chinese script and the systematic discussion of informatic modes from the ancient period of unauthored classical texts, through the medieval period (roughly the fourth through the tenth centuries) and the middle (Song-Ming) and later (Qing) imperial periods, to the twentieth century (with a central breakpoint in 1949) and the age of the internet after 2000. The result is a resource that will aid the study and understanding of Chinese texts in any field—not only in the genres studied here but also in scholarship, philosophy, and science. I hope this major contribution to the history of information will facilitate nuanced and well-informed cross-cultural comparisons and dialogue and encourage similar studies of other linguistic and cultural contexts.

Notes 1. Rowena W. Swanson, Information Sciences, 1965 (Washington, DC: Office of Aerospace Research, U.S. Air Force, 1966), iv. 2. Chaim Zins, “Conceptual Approaches for Defining Data, Information, and Knowledge,” Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 58, no. 4 (2007): 479–93.

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Foreword

3. Timon Beyes, Robin Holt, and Claus Pias, “By Means of Which: Media, Technology and Organization,” in The Oxford Handbook of Media, Technology and Organization Studies, ed. Timon Beyes, Robin Holt, and Claus Pias (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), 505. 4. Anthony G. Oettinger, “Information Resources: Knowledge and Power in the 21st Century,” Science, n.s., 209, no. 4452 (July 4, 1980): 191. 5. Earlier studies include Michael E. Hobart and Zachary S. Schiffman, Information Ages: Literacy, Numeracy, and the Computer Revolution (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998); and Robert Darnton, “An Early Information Society: News and the Media in Eighteenth-Century Paris,” American Historical Review 105, no. 1 (2000): 1–35. See also the parallel development of histories of knowledge, as in Peter Burke, A Social History of Knowledge: From Gutenberg to Diderot (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000), and A Social History of Knowledge II: From the Encyclopédie to Wikipedia (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2012); and Ian F. McNeely and Lisa Wolverton, Reinventing Knowledge: From Alexandria to the Internet (New York: W. W. Norton, 2008). 6. Peter Becker and William Clark, eds., Little Tools of Knowledge: Historical Essays on Academic and Bureaucratic Practices (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001). 7. Jacob Burckhardt, “Introduction to the History of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” in Judgments on History and Historians, trans. Harry Zohn (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1999), sec. 84, p. 168. 8. Herwig Maehler, “Books, Greek and Roman,” in The Oxford Companion to Classical Civilization, ed. Simon Hornblower and Antony Spawforth, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 249–52. 9. Michele Kennerly, Samuel Frederick, and Jonathan E. Abel, eds. Information Keywords (New York: Columbia University Press, 2020); Ann Blair, Paul Duguid, Anja-Silvia Goeing, and Anthony Grafton, eds., Information: A Historical Companion (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2020).

INTRODUCTION For a History of Literary Information in China JAC K W. C H E N , A N AT O LY D E T W Y L E R , X I AO L I U, C H R I S T O P H E R M . B . N U G E N T, A N D B RU C E RU S K

I

t is said that this is the Information Age, that a flood of information has transformed our ways of being within the world—from how we imagine our social relationships to the extended networks that structure global exchange of commodities and knowledge. Information flows all around us, in the genetic codes of living organisms and in the circuits of communication in social organizations, while digital repositories such as Google Books and collaborative online encyclopedias such as Wikipedia index the increasingly massive amount of stored information. And yet, while the current age seems singularly oversaturated, this is simply the latest information age— people in previous eras similarly reflected on the importance of information, worrying over its scarcity or wrestling with its excess. Scholars have recently explored such questions, either by conceiving of information as a distinctive entity with its own history or by using the concept of information as an analytical lens through which to examine issues in social, cultural, and intellectual history.1 In one compelling study, Ann M. Blair has shown how European scholars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries complained there was “too much to know,” particularly after the development of the printing press.2 This sentiment was all the greater in China, given the unparalleled length and continuity of its textual tradition. Indeed, faced with an ever-increasing flow of texts and teachings, scholars and others developed a vast array of literary forms and cultural practices to manage the hugeness of their cultural tradition. These strategies took shape in lexical works, classification systems, anthological and encyclopedic projects, and physical repositories as well as

xxii

Introduction

technologies for locating and making accessible this literary information. The present volume rethinks the history of Chinese literary writing from this new perspective. Collectively, the contributions to this volume show how the broader cultural apparatus—made up of the individual texts, genres, and practices that frame literary writing and reading—has responded to problems of its own scale. To this end, the present volume deemphasizes conventional subjects of literary history like genres or motifs to foreground these forms and practices of information management. The array of forms and techniques of information management that developed in earlier eras has provided models and historical foundations for methods that are still used today to organize and access literary information in China. Beyond revealing heretofore unrecognized dimensions of China’s cultural tradition, this project makes the case for the significant expansion of the reach of information history itself. The prior commonplace that the information age is a recent phenomenon is not merely a presentist fallacy but also one that also ignores the fact that information is not merely a modern product of the West (a danger that Blair herself addresses). The interwoven narratives of this volume will demonstrate how, despite the inevitable ties among informatization, modernity, and globalization, the ways in which people have conceptualized and managed information are also intensely specific to particular cultural contexts in particular historical moments. On this point, before proceeding to our discussion of information as an analytical category, it is necessary to reflect on the extent to which speaking of information in Chinese literary history might suggest a universal quality that makes the entity of information itself stable across time and between societies. Historian Dipesh Chakrabarty has warned against assuming the stability of master categories in transhistorical and translingual analysis, arguing that a more responsible approach to translation would replace the simple equivalences of the “exchange” model with a more complexly negotiated “barter” approach that acknowledges local differences without assuming a universal plane of experience.3 At the same time, if the act of translational barter requires specific words tied to specific moments in time and cultural milieux, then one logical conclusion would be that prior to the nineteenth century, the category and experience of information could make sense only in Western contexts—and even then only as far back as the term’s appearance in its contemporary form in British empiricism in the seventeenth century.4 Our project seeks to avoid the kind of historical nominalism that Eric Hayot has rightly criticized, such as bracketing the history of how information and its cognates have been translated into Chinese equivalents, such as xinxi ֵᙃ, xiaoxi ⍜ᙃ, zixun 䊛㿞, or qingbao ᚙฅ, or attempting to identify traditional or indigenous discourses on concepts resembling information.5 We hold that discursive terms not available to historical actors may nonetheless help us describe their experiences and

Introduction

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contexts, that there is explanatory power in concepts and categories not yet articulated in earlier periods. Moreover, it is worth noting that many of the historicizing objections one might level at the term information may equally be leveled at literature, a neologism that was no less modern in its emergence in China during the early twentieth century.6 Ultimately, it is a fine balance between Chinese literary history as a domain in which information and its management have taken specific forms and entailed local solutions and the possibility of a world history of information in which these forms and solutions would participate. Our project is thus inherently and implicitly comparativist, with information and its history serving as a fulcrum for revising long-standing questions about the relationality between the universal and the particular, between Chinese and world histories, and between the literary and the nonliterary.

What Is Information? In this section, we briefly rehearse how information has been theorized from its early usages to more recent definitions that have developed in connection to engineering and computational sciences. The history of information as a concept has been discussed in more detail by other scholars and writers, so what follows is intended to show how this volume relates to the broader study of information in other disciplines.7 To begin, the English term information is complicated, as mundane and ubiquitous in everyday speech as it is abstract and technical in disciplinary discourse, where work in fields ranging from engineering and computer science to philosophy and sociology have overdetermined the word. In its earliest usages, both classical and medieval, information or the Latin informatio refers to the act of shaping an object in a physical sense (i.e., giving it form) and of shaping a person in a metaphysical one (i.e., imparting knowledge to someone or animating flesh with spirit). Information thus conceived is a process or action rather than a thing or the meaning of a thing. It is only in later usage that we see its reification, beginning with its usage as news or facts that can be conveyed from one person to another, marking a shift from denoting the process of being informed to denoting a semantic quantity or a token that can be exchanged.8 The meaning of information as news in turn shaped the twentieth-century concept of information abstracted from the human mind, a “something” that can be independently encoded, stored, organized, or transmitted in material forms such as radio waves, punch cards, magnetic tape, and computer chips. We will return to the question of information as news, but let us first note how information exists within the world of material things and yet is not itself exactly material;

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rather, it exists as a kind of possible semantic overlay atop the domain of materiality.9 Many genealogies for the modern concept of information begin with the work of Claude E. Shannon, a communications engineer at Bell Laboratories in the 1940s, and mathematician Warren Weaver, who subsequently popularized Shannon’s work.10 However, the Shannon-Weaver account of information is expressly nonsemantic, defined in terms of the degrees of choice in sending a message through a communications channel and the reduction in uncertainty once that message is selected. Physicist Donald MacKay, a contemporary of Shannon, helped steer the emerging discourse on information toward questions of meaning, writing that information “makes a difference to what we believe to be the case.” He goes on: “It is always information about something. Its effect is to change, in one way or another, the total of ‘all that is the case’ for us.”11 This definition is then restated by anthropologist Gregory Bateson’s famous comment: “A ‘bit’ of information is definable as a difference which makes a difference.”12 For MacKay and Bateson, information is understood as a new input that emerges within a stable system and then, by virtue of this difference, unbalances and rebalances the equilibrium of what is currently known. MacKay’s and Bateson’s reformulation of the concept points to how information relates to its context and environment, which is to say that information does not exist apart from its material instantiations. This is in turn picked up by physicist Rolf Landauer: Information is not a disembodied abstract entity; it is always tied to a physical representation. It is represented by engraving on a stone tablet, a spin, a charge, a hole in a punched card, a mark on paper, or some other equivalent. This ties the handling of information to all the possibilities and restrictions of our real physical world, its laws of physics and its storehouse of available parts.13

Landauer’s “physical representation” spans the realms of cultural production and particle physics, encompassing human technologies and natural phenomena, with all the attendant variation in how information is encoded. As was the case with MacKay and Bateson, here the concept of information may be understood in terms of difference: the markings on a stone tablet that distinguish themselves from the blank surface and from one another to form a written script, the charge or spin that distinguishes one particle from another, or the hole in the card that is distinct from other holes and from the unpunched surface. But how and to whom are such differences meaningful? Although information may depend on physical form, a purely materialist account of information is insufficient. We only treat as information what an intelligence seeks to differentiate as signal from environmental or background noise. As literary scholar

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Bruce Clarke writes, “Information does not exist until an observing system (such as a mind) constructs it—renders it as ‘virtual reality’ for a cognitive process—in response to the noise of environmental perturbations.”14 To say that information is virtual is not to diminish its reality but to locate its reality within the phenomenological intention of a mental operation rather than in the space of physical representation. As something (a human mind or other processing entity) either encodes or decodes information in the environment, it realizes the environment as possessing information, which the environment on its own cannot do. In its broadest sense, information is the virtual structuring of environment that separates signal from noise, whether in real-time communications or in longer-term storage and organization. In both cases, it makes some environmental differences meaning-bearing and leaves others in the undifferentiated background. And if this is the case, information cannot be separated from how it is managed, as it is this management that constructs information in the first place. The question of information and its management is precisely what is central to theoretical writings associated with the so-called information schools (iSchools), which introduced a new paradigm in schools and departments of library science in North America from the late 1980s onward.15 Marcia Bates, one of the leading early figures in the iSchool movement, notes that her field of information science is “primarily concerned with the form and organization of information, its underlying structure, and only secondarily with its content,” as opposed to the traditional disciplines of the sciences and humanities, where “it is the content that is of dominating concern.” She goes on to state that “the organization of the information they are using is usually virtually or entirely invisible to the practitioners of those disciplines” and “when one does the work to gather, store, organize, retrieve, and disseminate information—the classic elements of the formal, above-the-water-line paradigm definition of information science—one necessarily gets involved with understanding and manipulating its form, structure, and organization.”16 The iSchool perspective on information is of particular significance for this project, which seeks to understand the organization of information rather than the philosophical or mathematical meanings of information itself. One valuable theoretical resource that emerges from the iSchool tradition is the notion of document, which we contrast to that of text, the usual unit of literary analysis. Text is a metaphysical abstraction that is born in the significatory interplay of reader and work; historically, it emerged from the conjunction of New Critical, phenomenological, and structuralist theories of reading.17 Thus, we use the term text in particular historical or interpretive contexts, but in most of our discussion, we employ the term document, which is defined by its contextualization in a particular system of organization. Here we follow Suzanne Briet, who begins her discussion of the document with a definition attributed to an

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unnamed bibliographer: “A document is a proof in support of a fact.”18 She elaborates on this definition to include “any concrete or symbolic indexical sign [indice], preserved or recorded toward the ends of representing, of reconstituting, or of proving a physical or intellectual phenomenon.”19 Briet’s document is not necessarily a written text; it can be any object that is inserted into a context of meaning (such as her famous example of an antelope in a zoological collection) in order to collect, encode, and mobilize evidence in the service of a larger argument. Just as a text is a unit and structure of aesthetic signification, the document is thus both a unit and a structure of information, one that provides us with the means to discuss differing scales of information complexity.

Information and Literary History To speak of literature as information may seem strange, but similar arguments can be traced back to Confucius, who famously said of the Shijing 䀽㍧ (Classic of odes) that beyond teaching ethical duties, it could serve to instruct one in “the names of birds and beasts, plants and trees.”20 This said, our concern in this volume is less with the informational content of literature (i.e., its pedagogical value) than with the question of how literary texts become information to be stored, processed, and transmitted within cultural systems of communication and control. In other words, we propose to consider Chinese literature through the forms of its organization, which operate at differing scales—from the level of the word, to the level of the document, and finally to the level of the collection. Instead of a focus on interpreting particular literary texts or on addressing questions of aesthetic judgment, we focus on the development of the forms by which literary writings are collected and fragmented, how these forms vary in function and practice, and what a history of these forms tells us about the Chinese literary tradition. This will be a literary history, itself a form of literary information management—one that seeks to encode a vast corpus according to a narrative logic, creating intelligible signals where there would otherwise be undifferentiated noise.21 Moreover, our concern with information management in Chinese literary history is not itself new: statements that raise the problem of literary information management are found throughout history. This is not surprising, as Blair’s problem of “too much to know” stands at the heart of any literary canon, which attempts to select and preserve writings that are identified by cultural arbiters as possessing aesthetic, moral, or political merit. For the medieval literary theorist Liu Xie ࡝ࣄ (ca. 465–522), the history of texts was one of repeated overgrowth that required careful management by figures such as Confucius to recover the original meanings of the first sagely writings: “With the passage of the years these [texts that embodied the original classical truths] grew remote

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and dark, with branches and streams multiplying and mixing. Ever since the Master [Confucius] edited and transmitted them, however, the great treasures have revealed their radiance.”22 These sentiments become increasingly commonplace following the extended transition from the age of manuscript culture, with its laborious process of hand copying, to the age of print culture, which allowed for more efficient methods of reproduction. The Southern Song neo-Confucian master Zhu Xi ᴅ➍ (1130–1200), who lived in the latter age, voices a similar worry over the proliferation of writings and how it had led to a moral crisis in the culture: The reason people today read sloppily is that there are a great many printed texts. . . . It would seem that the ancients had no written texts, so only if they had memorized a work from beginning to end would they get it. Those studying a text would memorize it completely and afterwards receive instruction on it from a teacher. . . . For people today, even copying down a text has become bothersome. Therefore their reading is sloppy.23

For Zhu Xi, the transmission of texts must be curated (and censored) by those who embody moral standards. Without a master to guide the reader and control the flow of information, the textual complexity of the Southern Song was seen as a danger to the empire itself. Yet today, thanks to mechanized printing and digitization, we have access to more of China’s written record than Liu Xie or Zhu Xi could have imagined. For us moderns, the problem of information overload has radically accelerated to the point that the individual human scale of reading is no longer sufficient to encompass all that can be known, and the influence of cultural arbiters has weakened in the face of multiple canons and multiple definitions of cultural literacy. And if information control represents one response to the problem of “too much to know,” we find a host of other problems—and responding strategies— that arise in the course of increasing textual proliferation. These are concerns that also can be traced back to the earliest engagements with information complexity in China, even if these concerns are articulated only at the level of design. To begin, how does one access the information in a document or collection of documents? Are there design functions that allow for what might be called efficient user interface, such as regular and repeated linguistic or textual patterns, tables of contents and indices, or encoded classification schemes? If there are classification schemes, are these based on genres, the natural order of things, or categories of knowledge? Are collections of documents intended to be selective or comprehensive? If selective, what is the principle of selection? And if comprehensive, how is comprehensiveness defined and achieved? From the structures of documents and collections to their circulation, we might also ask about the ways in which texts are transmitted, their publication histories, the

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impact of the state and the market, and the constitution of readerships. All of these speak not only to operations of information across multiple and complex levels of organization, both within and without the document or collection, but also to broader and often unexamined questions in literary history—how literary writings have been stored, processed, and made accessible over three thousand years.

Organization of the Volume Given the complexity of this literary history, there were many possible ways to organize it, and, indeed, the chapters may be understood as multiple entry points into the history of literary information, taking multiple perspectives and methodologies. Our coverage extends back to the Zhou dynasty and reaches up to the present, though not every form of information management will necessarily exist in or be recoverable for all periods of history. In terms of the macrostructure, we take the scale of the document as a middle ground between the smaller scale of the word and the larger one of the collection, thereby constructing a tripartite division—information management at the level of the word, the document, and the collection. If the concept of document refers to a text as contextualized within a structured form of information (such as an anthology), then the word is defined here as the fundamental literary unit of semantic and syntactic operations within documents, while the collection designates the organization of larger structures of information (such as a library). Within these three categories, we identify subcategories that we then discuss in terms of particular topics. Given this broad scope, this volume is representative rather than exhaustive, with the constellation of topics illustrating both the breadth of the analytical frame of information and the conceptual dividends it offers. At the smallest scale, the level of the word, we identify four subcategories: graphs, lexicons, text and textual divisions, and commentaries. Graphs are individual written characters that encode information as representations of words. This subcategory will include discussions of graphs and their relation to language, script reform and romanization, systems for ordering and indexing graphs, and technologies for inputting them into mechanical and electronic systems. Lexicons are collections of words that provide information on their pronunciation, graphical representation, meaning, and usage. These include word lists and dictionaries compiled in the early imperial period, charts of words arranged by phonetic value, modern-style dictionaries that emerged in the late imperial and early Republican eras, and more recent digital dictionaries. By text and textual divisions, we refer to the organization of words at the phrase level and above, with discussions of sentences and paragraphs;

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lines, couplets, and stanzas as structures of organization; and cultural practices of punctuation and page layout. The last subcategory, that of commentaries, bridges information at the levels of the word and the document. We discuss the history of classical annotation and the modern commentarial practices that succeeded it; genre-specific commentaries on poetry, fiction, and drama; appreciation-style commentaries in the late imperial and modern periods; and modern reader’s guide commentaries, such as those used in readers (duben 䅔 ᴀ) and textbooks. At the level of the document, we identify three subcategories that represent key modes of selection and organization: anthologies, encyclopedias, and histories. Anthologies are selections of documents that represent some aspect of a literary corpus. Anthologies in China have filtered and organized documents in various ways: by genre, by chronology, by topic, or by a combination of schemes. We discuss anthological works as they develop in the early and medieval periods, turning then to specific anthological modes in the late imperial and modern periods, including anthologies based on genre (poetry, prose, fiction, and drama and drama scripts), those based on theme (religious writings), those intended as textbooks, and those focused on specific authors. Encyclopedias, by contrast, are selections of documents that represent a universe of knowledge, whether through the deployment of extracts grouped by topic or through original writing. We trace the history of encyclopedic writings from early leishu 串᳌ (categorized writings) to the large-scale imperial projects of the Song, Ming, and Qing dynasties, from vernacular leishu to modern baike quanshu ⱒ⾥ܼ᳌ (literally, all writings from the numerous classes) encyclopedias and online wikis. The last subsection here examines historical and biographical works that embed literary documents as part of narrative accounts. Such works include the imperial annals (benji ᴀ㋔) and biographical accounts (liezhuan ߫‫ )ڇ‬of dynastic histories as well as literary histories, which often provide long documentary citations in support of their narrative arguments, and author-indexed reference works. Finally, at the level of the collection, we identify subcategories for libraries, museums, and archives; bibliographies and catalogs; and serial publications. Libraries are organized repositories of documents, usually existing in physical, architectural form, though sometimes as virtual (i.e., textual or digital) simulations of a physical repository. The archive, as a subtype of the library, is a repository of collections and documents (not all of them textual in nature), usually on a particular or specialized theme; related to this is the literary museum, which celebrates the life of a particular author and collects writings, ephemera, and association objects. Also related to the library are document services, which gather current publications in literary studies and related fields, making them a predigital model for an online full-text research database. The history of libraries in China is primarily told through the textual record—from

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bibliographical treatises in dynastic histories that preserve imperial catalogs to casual prose notes (biji ㄚ㿬) that detail personal book-collecting habits. We discuss the history of bibliographies here as well as the development of literary indices and concordances in the modern period. Finally, serial publications are, as the name suggests, collections of documents issued serially, including both the traditional form of the collectanea (congshu শ᳌) and the modern form of newspapers and journals, publications intended for overseas Chinese readerships, and emergent forms of internet literature. The editors have asked the contributors to this volume to consider how literary information has been stored, encoded, and transmitted for their particular periods or in regard to a particular cultural form. In a large collaborative volume such as this, contributors will take different approaches to this invitation: some draw out broader principles from an exemplary case study or from a set of case studies, some take a more survey-like approach to the evidence, some bring theoretical concerns to bear on their subjects, and some address the question within a more historical framework. The editors feel that a plurality of approaches is a strength of this volume, given the vast scope and complexity of the topics at hand. At the same time, there will be some overlap in coverage (particularly for canonical works) and significant gaps in what could have been discussed. The editors have sought to minimize repetition while preserving instances where a different informatic framework might present the same body of evidence in new light. In terms of what might have been discussed but was not, the editors hope that this volume encourages other scholars to consider how an informatic perspective might generate new insights into the organizational strategies of literary texts and collections.

Conclusion: The Purpose of This Volume European medievalist Seth Lerer once wrote, “The literary past is the bibliographical past. No line can be drawn between the literary artifacts that we imagine circulating in particular past periods and the media that circulated them.”24 To think through the literary history of China by means of the forms and practices that have preserved, organized, and circulated its literature is to think through its imagined communities as bibliography. This way of thinking about literary culture is both deeply traditional, in that it gives precedence to the sources that constitute the written record, and profoundly new, in that it engages with contemporary theories of media and information science. Although the history of the book in China has been the subject of renewed and vigorous study, there is to date no systematic account of how China has organized its literary information across the breadth of its long history or how this history of information management has itself shaped contemporary

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practices of data collection and online publication. What this volume offers is an unprecedented history of literary information in China, one that reveals the continuities and ruptures in organizational forms and practices—the cultural technologies that have preserved and transmitted literary writing—from its beginnings to the twenty-first century.

Notes 1. On histories of information, see Geoffrey Nunberg, “Farewell to the Information Age,” in The Future of the Book, ed. Geoffrey Nunberg (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 103–38; Michael E. Hobart and Zachary S. Schiffman, Information Ages: Literacy, Numeracy, and the Computer Revolution (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998); Daniel R. Headrick, When Information Came of Age: Technologies of Knowledge in the Age of Reason and Revolution, 1700–1850 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); James Gleick, The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood (New York: Vintage Books, 2011); and Paul Duguid, “The Ageing of Information: From Particular to Particulate,” Journal of the History of Ideas 76, no. 3 (July 2015): 347–68. 2. Ann M. Blair, Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information Before the Modern Age (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010). 3. Dipesh Chakrabarty, “Translating Life-Worlds Into Labor and History,” in Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 72–96. 4. John Durham Peters, “Information: Notes Toward a Critical History,” Journal of Communication Inquiry 12, no. 2 (1988): 9–23. 5. Eric Hayot, “Against Historicist Fundamentalism,” PMLA 131, no. 5 (2016): 1414–22. 6. See Lydia H. Liu, Translingual Practice: Literature, National Culture, and Translated Modernity; China, 1900–1937 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), 214–38. 7. For example, see Peters, “Information”; Rafael Capurro and Birger Hjørland, “The Concept of Information,” Annual Review of Information and Technology 37, no. 1 (2003): 351–56; and Harold Garfinkel, Toward a Sociological Theory of Information, ed. Anne Warfield Rawls (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2008). The concept is also discussed in Gleick, The Information. 8. It is this sense of information that is discussed in the somewhat idiosyncratic sketch essay “Jane Austen’s Concept of Information (Not Claude Shannon’s)” by Aaron Sloman, published on his site as http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/projects/cogaff/misc /austen-info.html. 9. Consider here the famous statement by Norbert Wiener: “Information is information, not matter or energy.” Wiener, Cybernetics or Control and Communication in the Animal and Machine, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1961), 132. 10. Claude E. Shannon, “A Mathematical Theory of Communication,” Bell System Technical Journal 27, no. 3 (July 1948): 379–423; 27, no. 4 (Oct. 1948): 623–56. This was republished with a long explanatory introduction by Warren Weaver, in Shannon and Weaver, The Mathematical Theory of Communication (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1949). For a trenchant critique of how Shannon and his followers have naturalized the concept of information, see Peter Janich, What Is Information?, trans. Eric Hayot and Lea Pao (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018).

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11. From a 1950 talk entitled “The Nomenclature of Information Theory,” reprinted in Donald M. MacKay, Information, Mechanism and Meaning (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1969), 158. 12. Gregory Bateson, “The Cybernetics of ‘Self ’: A Theory of Alcoholism,” in Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution, and Epistemology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 315. 13. Rolf Landauer, “The Physical Nature of Information,” Physics Letters A 217 (1996): 188. 14. Bruce Clarke, “Information,” in Critical Terms for Media Studies, ed. W. J. T. Mitchell and Mark B. N. Hansen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 157. Clarke is commenting here on Heinz von Foerster’s well-known pronouncement: “The environment contains no information. The environment is as it is.” See the essay “Thoughts and Notes on Cognition,” in von Foerster, Understanding Understanding: Essays on Cybernetics and Cognition (New York: Springer, 2003), 189. 15. For overviews of the iSchool phenomenon, see Ronald L. Larsen, “The iSchools,” in The Encyclopedia of Library and Information Sciences, ed. Marcia Bates, 3rd ed. (London: Taylor & Francis, 2010), 3018–23; and Andrew Dillon, “What It Means to Be an iSchool,” Journal of Education for Library and Information Science 53, no. 4 (Oct. 2012): 267–73. 16. Marcia Bates, “The Invisible Substratum of Information Science,” Journal of the American Society for Information Science 50, no. 12 (Oct. 1999): 1044–45. 17. See Roland Barthes’s classic essays, “The Death of the Author” and “From Work to Text,” in Image, Music, Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 142–48 and 155–64, respectively. On the broader history and concept of text, see John Mowitt, Text: The Genealogy of an Antidisciplinary Object (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1992). 18. Suzanne Briet, What Is Documentation?, trans. and ed. Ronald E. Day and Laurent Martinet with Hermina G. B. Anghelescu (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2006), 9. Note that this use of the term document differs from the same term’s usage in textual studies. 19. Briet, What Is Documentation?, 10. 20. Analects XVII.9, in Confucius, The Analects, trans. D. C. Lau, 2nd ed. (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 1992), 175. 21. For analyses of literary forms in relation to the question of information and noise, see Xiao Liu, Information Fantasies: Precarious Mediation in Postsocialist China (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019), esp. chap. 4; and William R. Paulson, The Noise of Culture: Literary Texts in a World of Information (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988). 22. From Liu Xie’s Wenxin diaolong ᭛ᖗ䲩啡 [The literary mind carves dragons], cited and translated in Stephen Owen, Readings in Chinese Literary Thought (Cambridge, MA: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University, 1992), 195. 23. From Zhu Xi’s Yulei 䁲串 (Sayings classified); cited and translated in Daniel K. Gardner, “Transmitting the Way: Zhu Xi and His Program of Learning,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 49, no. 1 (June 1989): 148. 24. Seth Lerer, “Medieval English Literature and the Idea of the Anthology,” PMLA 118, no. 5 (Oct. 2003): 1261.

L I T E R A RY I N F OR M AT ION I N C H I NA

SECTION A

GRAPHS E DITED BY CHR ISTOPH ER M . B. N UGE N T

A

s a history of literary information, this volume concerns itself with information found in written form. All such information is connected, whether directly or through more circuitous routes, to language—that is, to human speech. The written graphs that form the smallest essential informational components of this literature (persistent myths and fantasies about their origin and development notwithstanding) are no different: their primary informational content depends on reference to human language.1 Indeed, this feature is key to their status as writing—“the use of graphic marks to represent specific linguistic utterances.”2 Beyond conveying linguistic information, however, these graphs can serve a range of different functions as basic elements of written scripts. Sinitic graphs, commonly referred to as Chinese characters, convey different sorts of information in different contexts. Modern linguists emphasize their direct reference to sounds—to words in spoken language. That connection to speech is particularly clear in the earliest extant stages of the script, with their many examples of paronomasia.3 At the same time, traditional philological writings, beginning with the Han period’s Shuowen jiezi 䁾᭛ 㾷ᄫ (Explaining simple graphs and analyzing complex graphs), considered graphs (zi ᄫ) to have three elements: meaning, sound, and shape. In the particular analysis provided in the Shuowen jiezi, the focus is on graphic form rather than either sound or meaning. The only semantic explanations it provides tend to be those “that are relevant to the explanation of the graphs used to write words.”4 The informational content of a given graph would, in this

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understanding, include more than what is indicated through its connection to the spoken word. Graphs can also function as the basis for organizing and indexing larger sets of written information. In alphabetic scripts, this is typically done following the order of the alphabet in question; users of Sinitic script have employed its graphs in a wider range of ways to organize and index information. The basic graphs can be broken down into their component parts when organizing dictionaries and other kinds of lexicons according to bushou 䚼佪, the “radicals,” or, more accurately, “significs.” Today such reference works are increasingly ordered according to the Roman alphabetic order of the pinyin romanization of the graphs’ pronunciations. In earlier periods, the order in which the graphs appeared in the Qianzi wen गᄫ᭛ (Thousand character classic), a widely-memorized children’s primer, was often used as an indexical and organizational schema. In all these cases, the graphs’ usefulness is tied to the way they connect to larger networks of information. While for most of their history Sinitic graphs were produced primarily by hand and brush, in the computer age the vast majority of writing is produced digitally, introducing new relationships between graphs and information. To produce a Sinitic graph in digital form typically requires the use of more robust computer coding than that necessary to produce text using alphabetic scripts. Thus, Sinitic graphs today are enmeshed in matrices of information that include both traditional relationships and complex new ones.

Notes 1. On the myth of Chinese writing as ideographic, see John DeFrancis, The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1984). 2. Henry Rogers, Writing Systems: A Linguistic Approach (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005), 2. 3. See William G. Boltz, The Origin and Early Development of the Chinese Writing System (New Haven, CT: American Oriental Society, 1994), 90. 4. Françoise Bottéro and Christoph Harbsmeier, “The Shuowen Jiezi Dictionary and the Human Sciences in China,” Asia Major, 3rd ser., 21, no. 1 (2008): 249.

CHAPTER 1

GRAPHS Z E V H A N DE L

G

raphs are the basic units of writing systems. Throughout their history, Chinese languages—both mainstream and dialects, literary and vernacular—have been written in a logographic script. This script comprises an open-ended, ever-changing set of graphs variously called Chinese characters, sinographs, or sinograms. This chapter considers the nature of the information encoded in Chinese characters (Hanzi ⓶ᄫ) from two perspectives: that of the modern discipline of linguistics and that of the traditional Chinese conception of the structure and function of the writing system. Both of these perspectives are important for understanding the way graphs have been employed to manage literary information over the past two millennia in China; this chapter therefore serves as a foundation for the following nine chapters on graphs and lexicons. From a linguistic perspective, the graphs that make up any script—whether letters of an alphabet, syllabographs of a syllabary, or logographs like Chinese characters—are characterized in terms of their representation of units of spoken language. While spoken language and written language are not identical—and indeed can diverge dramatically—all written languages have spoken language as their foundation and can be transformed into spoken language—that is, read aloud—by knowledgeable users of the script. The characterization of this representation operates at two levels. At the simplest level, it can be expressed as a structural relationship between written graphs and the units of spoken language they represent. In the Roman

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alphabet script used to write modern English, letters of the alphabet generally represent individual sounds (phonemes) of spoken language. For example, the graph b represents the spoken sound [b]. At a more complex level, the relationship can be analyzed in terms of functional elements that are smaller than graphs and/or functional units that are combinations of graphs. It can further take into account the roles these various graphic units play in the mental processing involved in the acquisition and deployment of literacy, such as in the process of learning to read and in the act of reading. For example, while “b:[b]” is a general rule for the representational function of the letter b in English writing, in the word lamb the letter is “silent.” In combination with a preceding m and a following space, the letter b serves (among other things) to differentiate homophones (cf. the word lam, as in “on the lam”). Unlike Roman letters, Chinese characters have functional internal structure, which is essential to the way that these characters encode and transmit information. Chinese writing is typically categorized as logographic, which, interpreted broadly, means that its graphs represent spoken words rather than meaningless sounds or sound sequences. But the relationship between Chinese characters and units of Chinese spoken language is in actuality more complex and nuanced than this term implies. A full understanding of the informational content and structure of Chinese characters requires a refinement of the concept of the graph. Setting aside the fact that from a linguistic perspective the concept of a word is notoriously difficult to define with precision,1 an intuitive understanding of a word is not commensurate with minimal units of semantic and syntactic operations. For example, the word books is made up of two meaningful elements: book and -s. But despite having semantic and syntactic properties, -s is not a word, as it cannot stand on its own as an utterance. The same is true of the elements un-, -ity, and -ed in the words unlikely, relativity, and discussed. All have meaning; all are not words. Similarly, in Modern Standard Chinese, many linguistic elements, including many roots, are unable to stand on their own as words despite having clear semantic and/or syntactic functions. Examples are the prefix fēi-, “un-”; the suffix –xìng, “-ic”; and the root kē, “sort, class, kind” in the word fēikēxuéxìng, “unscientific.” Many common roots such as m·, “mother,” and jī, “machine,” are not words, as they cannot be uttered in isolation in ordinary speech. Yet all of these Mandarin elements are represented by single Chinese characters; see examples (1) through (6). (All examples in this chapter are given in traditional characters, but the characterizations of the script apply equally to simplified character forms used in the People’s Republic of China today.)

Graphs

(1)

䴲

fēi, “un-”

(2)

⾥

kē, “sort, class, kind”

(3)

ᅌ

xué, “study of, -ology”

(4)

ᗻ

xìng, “-ic”

(5)

↡

m·, “mother” (as in the word m·qin, “mother”)

(6)

″

jī, “machine” (as in the word jīqì, “machine”)

7

These Chinese characters represent not words but morphemes, which are defined as minimal meaningful units of language. While some morphemes are free elements, utterable on their own and therefore words, others must always combine with other morphemes to form words. This latter type is called bound. The vast majority of Chinese characters, as used in Chinese writing over the last two thousand years or so, represent single morphemes.2 Here are some more examples from Modern Standard Mandarin: (7a)

Ҏ

rén , “person” (free morpheme—i.e., a word)

(7b)

ҕ

rén , “humane” (bound morpheme)

(8a)

क

shí, “ten” (free morpheme—i.e., a word)

(8b)

亳

shí, “to eat, food” (bound morpheme)

(9a)

㊪

táng, “sugar, candy” (free morpheme—i.e., a word)

(9b)

ූ

táng, “hall” (bound morpheme)

The following words are made up of two morphemes and are therefore written with two characters: (10)

亳㊪

shítáng, “edible sugar” (compound of one bound and one free morpheme)

(11)

亳ූ

shítáng, “dining hall” (compound of two bound morphemes)

To precisely capture this relationship between graphs and morphemes, one can describe Chinese writing as morphographic; that is, most Chinese characters represent morphemes (not necessarily words) rather than sounds or sound sequences. The morphographic aspect of the script can be seen in the fact that homophonous but distinct morphemes are ordinarily written with distinct graphs; see examples (7a) through (9b). Put another way, the script is representational at the level of meaning as well as at the level of pronunciation. Two other facts about linguistic representation are important to mention here. The first is that because most morphemes in modern spoken Chinese

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varieties are one syllable long, the written graphs that represent those morphemes typically have one-syllable pronunciations.3 As a generalization, one can say that Chinese characters distinctly represent meaningful syllables of spoken language. The second is that in the case of the minority of morphemes that are longer than one syllable, a separate character is used to represent each syllable: (12)

੪ଵ

kāfēi, “coffee” ( kā and fēi are meaningless syllables, not morphemes)

In a sense, then, one can say that the syllabic aspect of character representation takes precedence over the morphemic aspect. But this is only partly true because even graphs representing meaningless syllables like kā typically have different forms correlating with the morphemes of which those syllables are a part. For example, hú is a meaningless syllable in each of the one-morpheme, two-syllable words in examples (13) through (15). But it is written differently (⨮, 㵈, 㨿) depending on the morpheme of which it is a part. (13)

⦞⨮

shānhú , “coral”

(14)

㵈㵊

húdié, “butterfly”

(15)

㨿㯚

húlu , “gourd”

This is why even when graphs write submorphemic syllables, it is more accurate to characterize them as functioning morphographically rather than syllabically—that is, as representative of meaning as well as sound. One more aspect of Chinese writing bears mentioning: a graph can be severed from its morphemic representation and used purely for its sound value as a syllabograph. This is most commonly done for transcriptional representation of foreign proper names or borrowed vocabulary—that is, in situations where syllables need to be represented without regard for their meaning. A modern example is (16)

ࡴᣓ໻

Jiānádà, “Canada”

The word Canada is written with three graphs that in most contexts write three Chinese morphemes: (17a)

ࡴ

jiā , “to add”

(17b)

ᣓ

ná , “to take, grasp”

(17c)

໻

dà , “big”

Graphs

9

All of the examples given so far are from Modern Standard Written Chinese, a written language closely related to spoken Modern Standard Chinese (Putonghua ᱂䗮䁅). But the characteristics of the script and spoken language just described are true of all written varieties of Chinese over the past two thousand years—that is, since the Han dynasty. However, the lexicon is not the same across these varieties, so the existence of certain compound words and the characterization of particular morphemes as bound or free vary. To take just one example, the Classical Chinese and modern Cantonese cognates of Mandarin shí 亳 “to eat,” from example (8b), are free, not bound. Scholars are less certain of the nature of the writing system prior to the Han, in part because our understanding of the structure of the spoken language remains imperfect. There is some reason to suspect that in the centuries following its creation in the thirteenth century BCE, the Chinese script was more strictly logographic in the sense that each graph represented a word, including words containing more than one morpheme and/or more than one syllable. For example, William H. Baxter and Laurent Sagart have reconstructed words from Old Chinese (the earliest attested stage of the language) as follows: (18)

仐

*s-m-lΩk-s > sì, “to feed”

This word is reconstructed with four morphemes (two prefixes and a suffix attached to the root *lΩk) and, depending on the unresolved question of whether the first two prefixes are pronounced with a short following vowel, with between one and three syllables.4 One reason less is known about the characteristics of the script in the preHan era is that there appears to be no explicit analysis or discussion of the function and structure of the script in the textual record prior to the QinHan imperial unification (late third century BCE). Only at this time did a true epistemology of writing emerge, in conjunction with the desire to organize, consolidate, standardize, and teach the writing system.5 It is to this era that one may turn to gain an understanding of the native conceptualization of the informational content of graphs, a conceptualization that continues to inform the modern lay and scholarly understanding of Chinese characters even after two millennia. The most important early work on the structure and function of Chinese characters is the Han dictionary Shuowen jiezi 䁾᭛㾷ᄫ (Explaining simple graphs and analyzing complex graphs) by Xu Shen 䀅ᜢ (ca. 58–148).6 Completed in 100 CE, the Shuowen represents the view of an ascendant school of thought concerning the origin, development, and nature of Chinese writing. This theory of writing is explicitly elaborated in the Shuowen postface attributed to Xu Shen and is implicitly reflected in the structure and content of the dictionary as a whole as well as in its individual entries.

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According to this conceptualization, all Chinese characters embody three properties: (1) a form or physical shape (xing ᔶ), (2) a sound or syllabic pronunciation (yin ䷇), and (3) a meaning or significance (yi 㕽). The Shuowen entries provide, analyze, or explain all three properties for each character. Further, these three properties are interconnected: the form is always related to the meaning, to the sound, or to both. From this observable fact, one may conclude that Chinese characters were not abstract symbols but were recognized as embedded in written language and inseparably bound to elements of spoken language. For example, consider the following Shuowen entry for the character ෎, still used in modern writing to represent the morpheme jī, “base.” (19)

ˈ⠚ྟгDŽҢೳ݊㙆DŽ7

Jī, qiáng sh΃ yě. Cóng t· qí shēng.

Jī ෎ means the start[ing portion] of a wall. [The graph’s meaning is derived] from ೳ (t·, “earth”); ݊ (qí [grammatical particle], also earlier jī, “winnowing basket”) [conveys] the sound.

In this example, as in all Shuowen entries, each character is tied to a specific morpheme of spoken language. The explanations for the structure and function of the characters would be nonsensical absent an understanding that the characters are script elements writing specific utterances. The character ݊ can function meaningfully as a sound-indicating element only if it represents a unit of spoken language with a specific pronunciation; in turn, the character ෎ must be understood as writing a specific spoken morpheme with the meaning “base”—that is, the one pronounced similarly to ݊. (The modern pronunciations differ from the sound values these characters had in the Han, but the parallelism of the pronunciations is no different. Baxter and Sagart’s Old Chinese reconstructions of jī, “base”; qí [grammatical particle]; and jī, “winnowing basket,” are *kΩ, *gΩ, and *kΩ, respectively.)8 The native conceptualization is therefore completely at odds with the false view of Chinese writing that came into fashion in Enlightenment Europe and perniciously persists in some Western intellectual circles today that characters embody essential ideas unmediated by spoken language.9 The traditional Chinese view of the tripartite information content of Chinese characters is, however, fully compatible with our modern linguistic understanding. As the smallest unit of spoken language that embodies meaning, a morpheme has both semantic and phonological content. It follows that as a written representation of a morpheme, a Chinese character is a graph that by proxy has both semantic and phonological content. Viewed from a modern perspective, the nature of the relationship between a character’s physical form and its sound and meaning values is a complicated one. The historical origin of a graph’s form may not have any bearing on how

Graphs

11

later users of the graph conceptualized its form or structure. The writing system can and does function perfectly well with apparently arbitrary relationships between graphic forms and spoken representations. For example, one of the most commonly seen characters in modern Chinese is ⱘ, writing the subordinating clitic de. To modern users of the script, its form is completely arbitrary. The two recognizable character elements, ⱑ (bái, “white”) and ࣎ (sháo, “spoon”), bear neither a sound nor a meaning relationship to de. This is no impediment to using it in the writing system. All that is necessary is for users of the script to have a conventionalized agreement on the character’s representational value and for the character’s form to be distinct from that of other characters that represent other spoken morphemes. However, a completely arbitrary set of several thousand graphs writing several thousand spoken morphemes would be an impractical writing system for several reasons. It is not clear that the average person could master the great number of arbitrary graphs needed to become literate. The creation of new graphs as needed to represent new morphemes would be extremely challenging. In many cases, it would be impossible for readers to determine the representative value of unfamiliar graphs, even in context. It is not surprising, then, that the majority of graphs in the Chinese script are nonarbitrary—not only in their historical origins but also as learned and used by a community of readers. Evidence for this includes mechanisms employed in the creation of new characters historically and in the modern era, studies of educational practices and outcomes as young students acquire literacy, and psycholinguistic experimentation on the recognition of characters and the cognitive processes associated with reading.10 All of this evidence demonstrates that the majority of graphs in the Chinese script have an internal structure that is consciously perceived and unconsciously processed as nonarbitrary. And contrary to conventional wisdom, the nonarbitrary aspect of these elements does not depend on iconicity; that is, Chinese characters and their components do not have to be images with representational properties to have functional value. It is certainly true that many of the highest-frequency graphs are pictographic in origin. But their iconic value was already diminished in the earliest stages of script development, as seen on the inscribed Shang dynasty oracle bones, and disappeared entirely in the transition to clerical script (lishu 䲌᳌) forms in the Han dynasty. For this reason, the connection between the graphic form and the morphemic (sound and meaning) value of these pictographic-in-origin graphs is effectively arbitrary for users today—and indeed has been for over two thousand years. While young learners are taught that ᳜ is a picture of the moon, 侀 is a picture of a horse, ཇ is a picture of a woman, and ㍆ is a picture of silk, these associations must be learned. They are not intuitively apparent from the shapes of the graphs, as anyone unfamiliar with Chinese characters will

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demonstrate if asked to look at the graphs and say what they picture. It is fair to say that unit graphs, those that are not combinations of recurring structural elements, are arbitrary in form, at least from a nonhistorical perspective. Their associations with specific morphemes must be memorized, and their identification in the process of reading is not based on iconic value. But well over 80 percent of Chinese characters (the exact proportion depends on how one counts) have an internal structure in which components play a functional role.11 The most common type, called xingsheng ᔶ㙆 (giving form to the sound) in Shuowen, has two functional components, which can be characterized as phonetic and semantic in function, as seen in example (19). At the time of character creation, the pronunciation of the phonetic element in isolation and the pronunciation of the character containing it were similar; the precise nature and degree of that similarity in the pre-Qin period remain matters of debate. The semantic elements are taxonomic; that is, they represent not lexical meanings but semantic classes that are perceived as being in a categorical or metonymic relationship with the meanings of the morphemes written by the graphs as a whole. The semantic element ೳ, which by itself writes t·, “earth,” is metonymically applied to the class of objects made from dirt or clay. In example (19), it is part of the graph writing jī, “base (of a structure).” Another example is the graph 䎇, writing the morpheme zú, “foot,” which functions as a categorical semantic element in graphs for body parts related to the foot and as a metonymic semantic element in graphs for verbal actions involving the foot. The graph 䞥, writing the morpheme jīn, “gold,” functions as a categorical semantic element in graphs for names of metals and as a metonymic semantic element in graphs for objects made of metal and for money and valuables. (The distinction between categorical and metonymic functions does not appear to be recognized within the Chinese tradition of graphic analysis and is seldom noted by modern scholars.) Examples (20) through (23) are semantic-phonetic compound graphs that illustrate the preceding discussion: (20)

䏱

huái, “ankle”; categorical semantic 䎇 (zú , “foot”), phonetic ᵰ (gu€, “fruit”)

(21)

䎯

b΅, “to limp”; metonymic semantic 䎇 (zú, “foot”), phonetic Ⲃ (pí, “skin”)

(22)

䡙

tóng, “bronze”; categorical semantic 䞥 (jīn, “gold”), phonetic ৠ (tóng, “same”)

(23)

䠫

qián, “tongs”; metonymic semantic 䞥 (jīn, “gold”), phonetic ⫬ (gān, “sweet”)

There is no doubt that as the motivation and mechanism for character creation and as an aid to readers encountering the character for the first time, these

Graphs 13

elements were functional and salient at the time the character was first put into use as part of the script. The degree to which these elements are functional in conveying meaning and pronunciation, at a conscious or unconscious level, to a modern learner or reader remains a matter of ongoing investigation. Psycholinguistic studies have demonstrated that semantic and phonetic components play a role in cognitive processing in character recognition tasks (and presumably therefore also in the process of reading texts) as well as in the learning and acquisition of characters. But this varies by component and appears to be related to how consistent the semantic and phonetic values are within the system of the modern script.12 Consider example (4), fāng 㢇 “fragrant.” The functional structure of the graph is transparent to modern script users. There are several reasons for this. The elements 㡍 (an allographic form of c΁o 㤝 “grass”) and ᮍ both occur frequently in the script, and the latter is itself a high-frequency Chinese character writing the morpheme fāng, “square.” Not only does the pronunciation fāng of  ᮍ “square” perfectly match the pronunciation fāng of 㢇 “fragrant” in Modern Standard Chinese, but also the commonly occurring characters containing ᮍ as a component are nearly all pronounced fang (in a variety of tones); for example: (24a)

᠓

fáng, “room”

(24b)

䰆

fáng, “to defend”

(24c)

㋵

f΁ng, “to spin (thread)”

(24d)

㿾

f΁ng, “to visit”

(24e)

ӓ

f΁ng, “to imitate”

(24f)

ᬒ

fàng, “to release”

The combination of high frequency and high consistency makes the component ᮍ highly salient as a phonetic indicator for Mandarin-speaking script users. Similarly, the component 㡍 is found in hundreds of characters with meanings related to plant life. It is commonly referred to as cao zi tou 㤝ᄫ丁 (character-top element “grass”), a label that reinforces the value inducible from the high frequency and consistency of its semantics. Over the past two thousand years, sound changes have taken place in spoken varieties of Chinese, and semantic shifts have occurred in the meanings of words; taken together with cultural changes, these can obscure the original role of semantic and phonetic components. When this happens, modern users may have no understanding of the historical motivation for a character’s structure while still being able to recognize the structure and manipulate its components. Consider the character shuì ⿢ “taxes.” Its semantic component is hé ⾒ “grain,” metonymically associated with tax payments when the character was

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created. Its phonetic component is duì ‫“ ܥ‬to exchange,” whose Old Chinese pronunciation, *lӑot-s, was close to the pronunciation *lֈot-s of shuì ⿢. The opacity of these functional elements to twenty-first-century Chinese citizens—who speak Mandarin and pay their taxes in cash or by electronic funds transfer—is not an impediment to the use of the character, which students learn to arbitrarily associate as a whole with the spoken morpheme shuì, “taxes.” It is also not an impediment to disassembly, as users readily isolate the commonly occurring ⾒ component as the radical in order to locate the character in a dictionary or index. Many character components can be consciously manipulated by script users. When new characters are invented as needed to represent new morphemes in the language, one may observe that the same processes involved in the creation of characters in ancient times are still at work today. As an example, consider the recently coined Modern Standard Chinese morpheme hēi, “hassium.” Hassium (Hs), chemical element 108, was named after the German state of Hesse, where it was first synthesized in laboratory experiments in 1984. In order to write hēi, the new character 鶎 was created. Like most characters writing the names of metallic or metalloid chemical elements, it has the semantic element jīn 䞥 “gold.” Its phonetic element, hēi 咥 “black,” was chosen because of its homophony with hēi, “hassium.” (The choice of 咥 is not related to the color of hassium, as it has not been created in sufficient quantities to have a known color property.) If, as the preceding discussion demonstrates, character components are recurring and recombinable, one might well ask why they are not considered the basic graphs of the script, just as one treats letters, not whole orthographic words, as the basic units of the Roman alphabet. For one thing, there are quite a few components that do not recur, that have an unclear functional value, and/or that are not easily manipulatable or pronounceable. For another, note the regularity of size and shape of Chinese characters: they each occupy the same rectangular (slightly higher than wide) notional space, equally sized and equally spaced. In contrast, their recombinable structural components are deformed (or, more properly, reformed) in combination so that the graph they are part of retains the same size and proportionality. Observe the components in the graph 䏣 as an example, compared to their full forms: 䎇, ∈, and ᮹. Chinese script users can and do manipulate internal structural elements for the various purposes described here; however, at the level of using the script to write texts, to catalog documents, to organize information, to count the length of written passages, to represent speech units, and so on, it is the graph that is clearly basic. In Chinese, there is a common word for a graph—that is, zi ᄫ— while there is no single term for graphic components and no nontechnical term for any of the functional types of graphic components. These reasons, among others, militate against an analysis that takes semantic and phonetic components as basic units of the Chinese script.

Graphs

15

The “information” content of a character depends on many factors. Beyond the simple observation that all characters embody three basic informational properties—form, sound, and meaning—analysis of the informational value of internal structural components is a complex task. One may focus on those aspects that are relevant to cognitive processing even though they may not be consciously accessible to a script user; those aspects that are of cultural and lexicographic significance and thus are objects of conscious manipulation in the organization and transmission of the script in dictionaries, indices, literacy education, and so forth; those aspects whose informational value is purely structural (i.e., a component is present or absent or is distinctive from another component); and those aspects whose informational value is contentful (i.e., related to sound or meaning). These aspects, all overlapping and interconnected to some degree, vary across time and space. They also vary from individual to individual depending not just on the script user’s literacy level but also on their degree of cultural and historical awareness. In terms of the role of the information structure of graphs in literary and cultural history, the conscious manipulation of components is most relevant, affecting how characters are organized and accessed in reference works; how they are manipulated or employed for literary effect in written texts; how they are discussed and described in the metalanguage of lexicographers, writers, readers, and educators; and how they are manipulated or folk-etymologized to yield meaning in the analysis of texts. All these aspects of the information content of graphs bear on the complex informational structures of higher-order documents embedded in the literary and cultural history of China.

Notes 1. For various approaches to the definition of a word in modern Chinese, see Jerome L. Packard, The Morphology of Chinese: A Linguistic and Cognitive Approach (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 7–20. 2. This figure varies somewhat depending on the criteria used to select the set of characters that constitute the writing system and on the method used to analyze their morphemic representation. For example, Ping Chen states that 87.5 percent of characters in the modern writing system represent single morphemes. See Chen, Modern Chinese: History and Sociolinguistics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 138. 3. Chen (Modern Chinese, 138) puts the percentage of monosyllabic morphemes in Modern Standard Chinese at 95 percent. 4. The root *lΩk is also seen in *mΩ-lΩk > shí 亳 “to eat” in example (8b). See William H. Baxter and Laurent Sagart, Old Chinese: A New Reconstruction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 230. The notation used for Old Chinese reconstructions is the International Phonetic Alphabet. The symbol Ω represents the vowel sound at the start of the English word about, so lΩk is pronounced similarly to the English word luck. The preceding asterisk indicates that these are hypothetical reconstructed forms, not directly attested.

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5. William G. Boltz, The Origin and Early Development of the Chinese Writing System (New Haven, CT: American Oriental Society, 1994), 138; David Prager Branner, “Phonology in the Chinese Script and Its Relationship to Early Chinese Literacy,” in Writing and Literacy in Early China: Studies from the Columbia Early China Seminar, ed. Li Feng and David Prager Branner (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2012), 85–86. 6. William G. Boltz, “Shuo wen chieh tzu 䁾᭛㾷ᄫ,” in Early Chinese Texts: A Bibliographical Guide, ed. Michael Loewe (Berkeley: Society for the Study of Early China and Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California, 1993), 429–42. 7. Xu Shen, comp., Shuowen jiezi zhu 䁾᭛㾷ᄫ⊼, annot. Duan Yucai ↉⥝㺕 (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1986), 684b. Shuowen was originally written in lishu 䲌᳌ (clerical script), the form of Chinese commonly employed in the late Han. The head characters were given in zhuanshu ㆚᳌ ([small] seal script), as they still are in modern editions. 8. Baxter and Sagart, Old Chinese, 343, 355. 9. For more on the “ideographic fallacy,” see Mary E. Erbaugh, ed., Difficult Characters: Interdisciplinary Studies of Chinese and Japanese Writing (Columbus: National East Asian Language Resource Center, Ohio State University, 2002); and J. Marshall Unger, Ideogram: Chinese Characters and the Myth of Disembodied Meaning (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2003). 10. Zev Handel, “The Cognitive Role of Semantic Classifiers in Modern Chinese Writing as Reflected in Neogram Creation,” in Seen Not Heard: Composition, Iconicity, and the Classifier Systems of Logosyllabic Scripts, ed. Ilona Zsolnay (Chicago: Oriental Institute, 2019). 11. John DeFrancis, The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1984), 84. 12. See, for example, Clay Williams and Thomas Bever, “Chinese Character Decoding: A Semantic Bias?,” Reading and Writing 23, no. 5 (2010): 589–605.

CHAPTER 2

SCRIPT REFORM AND ALPHABETIZATION Y U ROU Z H O N G

S

cript reform of the Chinese writing system has been ongoing for four millennia. According to the Han dictionary Shuowen jiezi 䁾᭛ 㾷ᄫ (Explaining simple graphs and analyzing complex graphs), the creation of the Sinitic script dates from the time of the legendary figure Cang Jie ‫( ䷵ם‬trad. mid-third millennium BCE), but most contemporary scholars date its appearance to the late second millennium. Since then, there have been at least four script reforms that involved standardizing, regulating, and reinventing the script: first, the Qin dynasty reform that decreed the small seal script (xiaozhuan shu ᇣ㆚᳌) as the official script of the newly unified empire; second, the birth of the cursive script (caoshu 㤝᳌) and development of the clerical script (lishu 䲌᳌) in the Han dynasty; third, the subsequent development and dominance of the regular script (kaishu Ὃ᳌) and semicursive script (xingshu 㸠᳌) from the third century onward; and fourth, the nineteenth-century phonetic script movement that sought to bridge the gap between Chinese characters and phonetic alphabetic writing. All these premodern script reforms worked to change one or more aspects of the script: physical shape (xing ᔶ), pronunciation (yin ䷇), and meaning (yi 㕽). Though the nineteenth-century development highlighted phonetic representation more than previous reforms, none of these set out to abolish characters and implement full alphabetization or phoneticization of the script. The twentieth-century modern Chinese script reform marked a radical break. To the minds of many reformist intellectuals, the Chinese script seemed incompatible with the modern era and was a roadblock to literacy, democracy,

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and science and technology; it thus had to be modernized and revolutionized by means of alphabetization. By charting the stakes and scope of the intertwinement of modern Chinese script reform and alphabetization, this chapter explores the significance of this seismic process that reshaped modern Chinese writing, culture, and epistemology. All of this began in 1916 when a young Yuen Ren Chao 䍭‫ܗ‬ӏ (1892– 1982)—the future father of modern Chinese linguistics—published an English article, “The Problem of the Chinese Language,” which unequivocally argued for the alphabetization of Chinese writing while tackling potential objections.1 Then, in 1922, a special issue of Guoyu yuekan ೟䁲᳜ߞ (National language monthly) titled “Hanzi gaige” ⓶ᄫᬍ䴽 (Reformation of Chinese characters) was published, bringing together a constellation of major intellectuals such as Cai Yuanpei 㫵‫ܗ‬෍ (1868–1940), Hu Shi 㚵䘽 (1891–1962), Yuen Ren Chao, Qian Xuantong 䣶⥘ৠ (1887–1939), Li Jinxi 咢䣺❭ (1890–1978), Fu Sinian ٙᮃᑈ (1896–1950), and Zhou Zuoren ਼԰Ҏ (1885–1967), among others. The language of radical change was rife throughout. As one of the issue contributors noted, “The so-called [script] reform in fact conveys a sense of revolution.”2 Similarly, the proper name of the reform, as philologist and editor of the special issue Qian Xuantong acknowledged in his contribution to the volume, was “Hanzi geming” (Script revolution). What he intended first and foremost was to eradicate—not simply reform and preserve—Chinese characters. In this call to arms, Qian announced, “What is the most fundamental script revolution? It is the adoption of the alphabet of the world—the Roman-Latin alphabet.”3 Indeed, the cover art for the issue presented valiant soldiers in the center armed with the new National Alphabet (zhuyin zimu ⊼䷇ᄫ↡) slaying the Chinese script, with blood-stained Chinese characters of variant forms piled up in the lower right front, while another army of people stands behind the Roman-Latin alphabet in the far left rear, ready to join the battle against the millennia-old Chinese writing system. Two major alphabetization movements followed: first, the Chinese Romanization movement, endorsed by the Guomindang (KMT) Nationalist government in the 1920s, and second, the dissident Chinese Latinization movement, initiated in the Soviet Union and championed by the Chinese Communist Party in the 1930s, which placed special emphasis on the representation of local speech and found renewed energy after the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949. While opposed in political ideology, the two movements worked together to transform the notion of a Chinese alphabet from a form of intellectual radicalism to a litmus test for progressivism and patriotism. Hardly any self-respecting intellectual at the time questioned the necessity of alphabetizing the Chinese script. One document that showcased the overwhelming popularity of the cause was a 1935 public letter signed by 688 leading Chinese script revolutionaries advocating for an alphabetic Chinese, including educators

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Cai Yuanpei and Li Gongpu ᴢ݀‌ (1902–46), politicians Sun Ke ᄿ⾥ (1891– 1973) and Liu Yazi ᷇Ѳᄤ (1887–1958), and writers Mao Dun 㣙Ⳓ (1896–1981), Guo Moruo 䛁≿㢹 (1892–1978), Ba Jin Ꮘ䞥 (1904–2005), Ye Shengtao 㨝㘪䱊 (1894–1988), Tao Xingzhi 䱊㸠ⶹ (1891–1946), Xiao Hong 㭁㋙ (1911–42), and Lu Xun 元䖙 (1881–1936).4 The bipartisan appeal of the script revolution stemmed from its unifying high stakes. According to Qian Xuantong, “I dare proclaim: if the Chinese script is not revolutionized, then education cannot be popularized, national language unified, nor national literature adequately developed, and new principles, new disciplines, and knowledge shared by all people of the world will never be easily and freely written in Chinese.”5 For Qian, the revolution would determine the future not only of the Chinese script, which was automatically linked to literacy and education, but also of three other interconnected arenas: first, the unification of a national language; second, the development of a new national and alphabetic literature; and third, the creation of a new Chinese epistemology that could claim commensurability with that of the rest of the world and lend Chinese writing a new universality. Among the four stakes of the script revolution identified by Qian Xuantong, it was the last one—the pursuit of a new and universal epistemology represented by, and written in, the Roman-Latin alphabet—that drove alphabetization and connected China to the world. To be clear, the Chinese script was not the only writing system that faced the challenge of becoming Roman-Latin. With its perceived superiority of speech representation, its access to modern technologies such as telegraphy and the typewriter, and its civilizational status, which purportedly held “the secret of Western power over man and nature alike,”6 the Roman-Latin alphabet was at the top of the script hierarchy. In the words of Walter J. Ong, there might have been “many scripts but only one alphabet.”7 Therefore, the Chinese alphabetization movement coincided with the reforms of numerous other non-Roman-Latin writing systems: the OttomanTurkish Arabic-Persian script, the Russian Cyrillic alphabet, the Vietnamese chữ nôm, and the Japanese kana syllabary, to name a few.8 To varying degrees, the global force of alphabetic universalism—the perceived technological and civilizational superiority of the Roman-Latin alphabet as the best writing system to transcribe speech sound—changed the faces of these non-Roman-Latin counterparts, Turkish and Vietnamese being two of the best-known cases of complete conversion. Although the Chinese script by all measures survived the challenge, the encounter of alphabetic and nonalphabetic worlds left deep imprints on Chinese writing, education, literature, and culture while raising probing questions about the legitimacy of alphabetic universalism and, together with it, ethnocentrism. Qian Xuantong’s pithy statement not only laid out the stakes of the script revolution but also highlighted their interconnectedness—that is, the scope of the reform. Instead of being limited to the question of the writing system, the

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modern Chinese script reformers saw literacy, education, and national language and literature as also needing concerted effort. Given that premodern script reforms also involved pedagogy and politics, the modern reform was unique in its degree of intertwinement and its support from and service to a nation-state. Qian’s viewpoint was echoed by Yuen Ren Chao’s “Guoyu luomazi de yanjiu” ೟䁲㕙侀ᄫⱘⷨお(A study of romanized Chinese writing) in the same special issue, where he argues that the romanization movement could not find better allies than the two other movements supporting “the unification of national language” (guoyu tongyi ೟䁲㍅ϔ) and “literature in colloquialized written language” (yuti wenxue 䁲储᭛ᅌ).9 While script revolutionaries like Qian and Chao had more to say on both national language and national literature—as well as pedagogies for both— they initially proposed three different solutions to alphabetization. The first was the National Alphabet. Comprised of thirty-seven letters based on Zhang Taiyan’s ゴ໾♢ (1869–1936) reconstructed symbols from the Chinese seal script, it was endorsed by the Conference on the Standardization of National Pronunciation in 1913, one year after the founding of the Republic of China, and is still in use today in Taiwan. The National Alphabet concluded the lateQing Phonetic Script movement, which produced a plethora of other phonetic schemata such as the Mandarin Alphabet (guanhua zimu ᅬ䁅ᄫ↡) by Wang Zhao ⥟✻ (1859–1933), the Combined Tone Simple Script (hesheng jianzi ড়㙆ㇵᄫ) by Lao Naixuan ࢲЗᅷ (1843–1921), and the Number-One Under Heaven Phoneticized New Script (tianxia diyi qieyin xinzi ໽ϟ㄀ϔߛ䷇ᮄᄫ) by Lu Zhuangzhang ⲻ៛ゴ (1854–1928), to name a few. However, the National Alphabet did not aim to eliminate characters and served in fact as a prelude to the two aforementioned alphabetization movements: the Chinese Romanization and Latinization movements. Next came Gwoyeu Romatzyh (GR; National Language Romanization Script)—the crown jewel of the Chinese Romanization movement. The Guomindang government officially recognized it in 1928 as the “Second Form of the National Alphabet,” second only to the National Alphabet. Although largely credited as its chief inventor, Yuen Ren Chao never hesitated to acknowledge that it was a collective project among colleagues on the Committee on the Unification of the National Language. Two attributes set GR apart from previous phoneticization systems. First, it was the product of the nascent Republic of China’s search for a national language (guoyu ೟䁲). Initially used to transcribe a dialect-eclectic artificial national language, dubbed the “old national language,” GR was soon used to record a new national language based on the Beijing dialect.10 Second, it was meant to provide a scientific and universal orthography suited not only for Chinese but also for all languages. Using a so-called tone-in-letter system, GR eliminated diacritics in marking tonal values and instead used a basic form (jiben xingshi ෎ᴀᔶᓣ) for the first tone

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21

(e.g., hua 㢅, shan ቅ) and an added r for the second tone (e.g., char 㤊, torng ৠ) while doubling vowels for the third (e.g., chii 䍋, faan ড) and changing finals for the fourth (e.g., yaw 㽕, bann ञ).11 Furthermore, GR treated speech sound as melody to be written ideally in a “GR drama score” with maximized control of time and pitch. For its creators, who prided themselves on a scientific precision that surpassed all existing alphabetic writing systems, GR constituted the Chinese bid for alphabetic universalism. Chao concluded his 1922 article for the special issue by envisioning that in a hundred years GR would secure its status as the universal orthography and that Chinese children learning English would ask, “Why do the British use our Chinese script too?”12 The third proposed solution was the Chinese Latinization movement, together with its creation of Sin Wenz (literally, New Script). A descendant of the Soviet Union Latinization movement, the Chinese Latinization movement took place when Qu Qiubai ⶓ⾟ⱑ (1899–1935) devised the first Chinese Latinized Alphabet in collaboration with Soviet sinologists.13 While the creators of Sin Wenz and GR shared an opposition to the Chinese script, their aims differed in every possible way—from the choices of orthographies (tonal representation, in particular) to positions on national language vis-à-vis dialects, from practices of mass education to affiliations of political parties. The GR system provided tonal representation, and its proponents supported the unification of the Chinese national language and the creation of a mass education model that could be best characterized as reformist with allegiance to the Nationalist government. Sin Wenz did not include tonal representation, and its proponents advocated for the coexistence of alphabetic writing systems for transcribing local speech; they developed a radically democratic and class-conscious approach to mass education, which converged with national salvation movements during the Second Sino-Japanese War. Supported by the Chinese Communist Party, including leaders such as Mao Zedong (1893–1976) and Zhu De ᴅᖋ (1886–1976), Sin Wenz was briefly banned by the Nationalist government. While it was not the first attempt to render dialects in the Roman-Latin alphabet— nineteenth-century Protestant missionaries created alphabetic dialect Bibles for proselytization—it was the first time Chinese writing was reimagined as a plurality of dialect alphabetic writing systems. According to Ni Haishu ‫׾‬⍋Ჭ (1918–88), the chief historian of Latinization, in the short period between 1934 and 1937, thirteen dialects created their own Sin Wenz–based systems, including the Cantonese, Minnanese, Hakka, Chaozhou, Shanghai, Ningbo, Wenzhou, Suzhou, and Guangxi dialects.14 Before the Latinization movement in the 1930s, there had already been a variety of alphabetic transcriptions for Chinese. The special issue of Guoyu yuekan alone listed eight schemata, including two GR proposals created by Qian Xuantong and Yuen Ren Chao, respectively, giving spelling examples of each transliterating Ye Shengtao’s short story “Dineng er” Ԣ㛑‫( ܦ‬An imbecile

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child).15 This choice of text was not insignificant; the special issue framed education as a built-in component of the script reform. In the postscript to the decision of the Committee on the Unification of the National Language to adopt alphabetization and character simplification, Qian took a personal tone, attributed his own “neuroses” and lack of real knowledge to the Chinese script, and pleaded that if it was too late for the older generation already irrevocably plagued by characters, then it was high time “to salvage future generations.”16 More aptly, Zhou Zuoren invoked in his contribution to the special issue the last words of Lu Xun’s “Kuangren riji” ⢖Ҏ᮹㿬 (“Diary of a Madman”): “Save the children.”17 However, Zhou Zuoren was also quick to note that the script reform was not only for the children but also for “all people across China.”18 Thus, the script revolution joined forces with the national Mass Education movement. Primers of “one thousand characters” proliferated in tailor-made editions for soldiers, workers, peasants, and city dwellers.19 Leading figures of the Mass Education movement, such as Tao Xingzhi, Chen Heqin 䱇厈⨈ (1892–1982), and Ye Shengtao, supported Sin Wenz. The Latinization movement also coincided with the “massification of literature and art,” which was integral to the global phenomenon of the Proletkult, or “proletarian culture.”20 As the script revolution transmuted to accommodate the literary revolution, the initial inkling of Chinese proletarian and revolutionary literature also manifested itself through the script revolution and its progressive promise made to all people. Although largely treated as separate movements, script reform, national language unification, national literature, and mass education converged—as Qian Xuantong prescribed in the special issue—and functioned together in shaping the linguistic and grammatological reality of modern Chinese writing from the beginning of the script revolution to its sudden suspension in 1958. Despite its direct lineage from the Latinization movement and its proclamation to end the reign of Chinese characters for good, the socialist script reform movement shelved indefinitely its most radical agenda item—replacing characters with the Roman-Latin alphabet—when Zhou Enlai ਼ᘽᴹ (1898–1976) announced, “The current tasks of script reform are: simplify characters, promote putonghua ᱂䗮䁅, and issue and implement a pinyin plan.”21 The socialist script reformers seemingly gainsaid the script revolution by substituting alphabetization with an auxiliary spelling plan called pinyin ᣐ䷇ (literally, to spell sound). However, the final—or, more accurately, the most recent—stage of script reform was not so different from the special issue’s call for radical revolution; it similarly reconfigured the definition of alphabetization as well as the fundamentals of the science of writing. First, the socialist script reformers acknowledged that the script question must work in conjunction with the promotion of the national language. Second, they reconceptualized what Zev Handel in the previous chapter has termed the “functional internal structure” of the Chinese

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23

script by focusing on speech sound representation through alphabetization. Opening up ideo-phonographs (xingsheng zi ᔶໄᄫ) for scientific reform, socialist script reformers such as paleographer Tang Lan ૤㰁 (1901–79) found an innovative and, at the same time, age-old solution to the modern challenge of managing the Chinese script. On the one hand, the new Chinese script—to be reinvented as so-called new ideo-phonographs that included both phonetically accurate phonetic markers and ideographic radicals22—would fulfill the task of speech representation and hence uphold the principle of alphabetization. On the other, by preserving the Chinese national form and reconciling it with the universal alphabetic norm, Chinese script reformers most recently questioned the ethnocentrism of the Roman-Latin alphabetic universalism and reworked the grammatological or, rather, informational basis upon which an antiethnocentric epistemology might materialize. As the universal sway of alphabetic universalism—and, with it, an increasingly technologizing view of writing—challenged the Chinese script, Chinese writing undertook a makeover of simplification and phoneticization while retaining its particular, local, and anti-identitarian national form and creating a new national literature and culture.

Notes 1. Yuen Ren Chao, “The Problem of the Chinese Language: Scientific Study of Chinese Philology,” Chinese Students’ Monthly 11, no. 6 (1916): 437–43; 11, no. 7 (1916): 500–509; 11, no. 8 (1916): 572–93. For the significance of the year 1916, see the introduction in Yurou Zhong, Chinese Grammatology: Script Revolution and Literary Modernity 1916–1958 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019). 2. Houchio [Houjue] ᕠ㾎, “Hanzi gaige de jige qianti” ⓶ᄫᬍ䴽ⱘᑒ‫ᦤࠡן‬, Guoyu yuekan 1, no. 7 (1922): 133. 3. Qian Xuantong, “Hanzi geming” ⓶ᄫ䴽ੑ, Guoyu yuekan 1, no. 7 (1922): 19. 4. Wo Dan ⏹Ѝ, “Women duiyu tuixing xinwenzi de yijian” ៥‫ץ‬ᇡᮐ᥼㸠ᮄ᭛ᄫⱘᛣ㽟, in Zhungguo wenz latinxua wenxian Ё೟᭛ᄫᢝϕ࣪᭛⥏ (Shanghai: Latinxua chubanshe, 1940), 153–57. 5. Qian Xuantong, “Hanzi geming,” 7. 6. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, ed. W. Terrence Gordon (Corte Madera, CA: Gingko Press, 2003), 121–22. 7. Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (London: Routledge, 1991), 84. 8. Nergis Ertürk, Grammatology and Literary Modernity in Turkey (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); Terry Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923–1939 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001); John Phan, “Lacquered Words: The Evolution of Vietnamese Under Sinitic Influences from the 1st Century BCE Through the 17th Century” (PhD diss., Cornell University, 2013); Komori Yōichi ᇣỂ䱑ϔ, Nihongo no kindai ᮹ᴀ䁲ȃ䖥ҷ (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 2000).

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9. Yuen Ren Chao, “Guoyu luomazi de yanjiu”, Guoyu yuekan 1, no. 7 (1922): 117. 10. For the debate between the old and new national pronunciations or languages, which were used interchangeably by participants on both sides, see Li Jinxi, Guoyu yundong shigang ೟䁲䘟ࢩ৆㎅ (1935; repr., Beijing: Shangwu yinshuguan, 2011), 152–59; and Zhu Lingong ᴅ味݀, ed., Guoyu wenti taolun ji ೟䁲ଣ丠㿢䂪䲚 (Shanghai: Zhongguo shuju, 1921). 11. For the official announcement of GR and an incomplete glossary of character pronunciations, see Yuen Ren Chao, Tzueyhow wuu-fen jong ᳔ᕠѨߚ䧬 (Shanghai: Zhonghua shuju, 1929), 42–43. 12. Chao, “Guoyu luomazi de yanjiu,” 117. 13. Qu Qiubai’s Zhonguo Latinhuadi zemu Ё೟ᢝϕ࣪ᄫ↡ was revised and published in 1932 as Xin Zhongguowen cao’an ᮄЁ೟᭛㤝Ḝ. See Qu Qiubai, Qu Qiubai wenji ⶓ⾟ⱑ᭛䲚, vol. 3, Wenxue bian ᭛ᅌ㎼ (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1989), 351–418, 423–91. 14. Ni Haishu, Zhongguo pinyin wenzi yundongshi jianbian Ё೟ᣐ䷇᭛ᄫ䘟ࢩ৆ㇵ㎼ (Shanghai: Shidai shubao chubanshe, 1948), 142–43. The Chinese term fangyan ᮍ㿔 could be taken to mean “language,” “dialect,” and “patois” all at once. I adopt the translation “dialect” to indicate how the term was used historically. 15. Li Jinxi, “Hanzi gemingjun qianjin de yitiao dalu” ⓶ᄫ䴽ੑ䒡ࠡ䘆ⱘϔṱ໻䏃, Guoyu yuekan 1, no. 7 (1922): 27–65. 16. Li Jinhui 咢䣺ᱝ and Qian Xuantong, “Liangge zhongyao de yi’an” ܽ‫ן‬䞡㽕ⱘ䅄Ḝ, Guoyu yuekan 1, no. 7 (1922): 159. 17. Zhou Zuoren, “Hanzi gaige de wojian” ⓶ᄫᬍ䴽ⱘ៥㽟, Guoyu yuekan 1, no. 7 (1922): 71–73. 18. Zhou Zuoren, “Hanzi gaige de wojian,” 72. 19. These were inspired by the Qianzi wen गᄫ᭛ (Thousand character classic), a sixth-century primer. The method of teaching a limited number of frequently used characters was revived in World War I France to teach Chinese laborers basic literacy and then applied to modern Chinese mass education programs in the 1920s and 1930s. See Yan Yangchu ᰣ䱑߱ [James Yen], Fu Ruoyu ٙ㢹ᛮ [Daniel C. Fu] and Huang Canyu 咗 ␠ⓕ, eds. Pingmin qianzi ke ᑇ⇥गᄫ䂆 = Foundation Characters, 4 vols (Shanghai: Qingnian xiehui shuju, 1924). 20. See Wen Zhenting ᭛ᤃᒁ, ed., Wenyi dazhonghua wenti taolun ziliao ᭛㡎໻ӫ࣪䯂 乬䅼䆎䌘᭭ (Shanghai: Shanghai wenyi chubanshe, 1987); and Bill Mullen, “Proletarian Literature,” in Oxford Bibliographies in American Literature, ed. Jackson R. Bryer, Richard Kopley, and Paul Lauter, https://doi.org/10.1093/OBO/9780199827251-0130. 21. Zhou Enlai, “Dangqian wenzi gaige de renwu” ⭊ҷ᭛ᄫᬍ䴽ⱘӏࢭ, in Dangdai zhongguo de wenzi gaige ⭊ҷЁ೟ⱘ᭛ᄫᬍ䴽, ed. Wang Jun ⥟ഛ (Beijing: Dangdai Zhongguo chubanshe, 1995), 556. 22. For principles and examples of new ideo-phonographs, see Tang Lan, Tang Lan quanji ૤㰁ܼ䲚, vol. 5 (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 2015), 295–310.

CHAPTER 3

INDEXING SYSTEMS U LUĞ K UZUOĞLU

A

good place to start this brief chapter on the history of Chinese indexing systems is a peculiar book titled Zhongguo jianzifa yange shilüe ji qishiqi zhong xin jianzifa biao Ё೟⁶ᄫ⊩⊓䴽৆⬹ঞ ϗकϗ。ᮄ⁶ᄫ⊩㸼 (A brief history of the development of Chinese indexing methods), published in 1933 by Jiang Yiqian 㫷ϔࠡ. Jiang was a member of the Indexing Commission of the Chinese Library Association, and his book was about not only the history but also the troubled present and unstable future of Chinese indices, as suggested by its subtitle: “With a List of Seventy-Seven New Indexing Methods.” Jiang’s work indeed showcased seventy-seven indices available for arranging and retrieving Chinese characters—a staggering number that would be surprising to most present-day scholars who are familiar with at most a few indices. A closer inspection of these indexical designs would elicit even more bewilderment, for some of them relied on numbers, some on a mix of alphabetical letters and strokes, and some on cutting-edge psychological theories of reading. In the following years, the number of new indexing methods increased even more—by some counts reaching one hundred by the late 1940s, which was suggestive of a highly innovative yet precarious period in the history of Chinese indices.1 Why were there so many indices in early twentieth-century China? How were they different from the indices of the imperial era? And how can this period of intense volatility and creativity be used to chart a methodological framework for the historical study of Chinese indices? Ever since the publication of Michel Foucault’s The Order of Things in 1966, historians and philosophers of science have revolutionized our scholarly

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understanding of taxonomic structures, demonstrating how sociopolitical preconceptions embedded in classification systems affect the kind of knowledge produced. With the exception of a few studies drawn on here, however, indices have largely remained peripheral to this larger scholarship, as they were relegated to the secondary role of instruments that merely facilitated information retrieval. This chapter moves beyond the functional values of indices and argues that they are historical artifacts embodying larger political, economic, and even ethical and cosmological values in their technical designs and that their classificatory qualities, like taxonomic structures in general, are never neutral. Furthermore, indices are at times visible and tangible, adjoined to dictionaries, encyclopedias, or library catalogs, while they serve at other times as invisible underground agents, indispensable for computerized algorithmic work. As such, they indeed constitute the information infrastructures that enable and sustain the management of knowledge. As historical artifacts and infrastructures, indices have never been merely technical but also always techno-political, and their rich and contested past allows us to divulge the historical layers in the multiplicity and diversity of Chinese literary cultures. This chapter excavates and observes the formation of those layers over a period that stretches from the second-century origins to the twentieth-century crises. While Chinese systems of indexical classification can be broadly consolidated under three categories—phonetic, semantic, and graphic—my focus will be only on the graphic, which may be traced back to the Shuowen jiezi 䁾᭛㾷ᄫ (Explaining simple graphs and analyzing complex graphs), the early dictionary compiled by Xu Shen 䀅ᜢ (ca. 58–149 CE) in 100 CE and presented to the Han dynasty court two decades later. Shuowen’s compilation was undoubtedly an attempt to codify language and information under a centralized political authority. But for the purposes of this chapter, the significance of Shuowen lies in its index, which was composed of 540 bu 䚼 (sections or, more commonly, radicals) that Xu employed to graphically arrange the characters. Xu Shen’s 540 radicals embodied deeper cosmological and political values. His index begins with the radical yi ϔ and ends with hai ѹ, drawing cosmological justification from the numerology of Yijing ᯧ㍧ (Classic of Changes). The first radical, yi (the number one), signifies the supremeness of the universe. The last radical, hai, on the other hand, was derived from er Ѡ (the number two), representing man and woman, yang and yin, which coupled to beget yi—that is, “one” formed “two,” and “two” made up “one,” symbolizing the Way (dao 䘧). The last indexical sign, in other words, contained within it the first, signaling the cosmological nature of cyclical continuity. Even the number of radicals (540 in all) embodied the same cosmological principle, as it equaled the multiplication of the numbers six, nine, and ten. The number six could symbolize heaven, earth, and the four seasons, and the number nine signaled completeness. In different readings, the numbers six and nine stood in for yin

Indexing Systems 27

and yang, respectively.2 The number ten, on the other hand, embraced the four directions and the center of the universe in its own graphic composition: क. The 540 radicals were thus heavily charged with numerological values, which also explains why some radicals did not even have any characters arranged under them. Called “empty radicals” by Françoise Bottéro, they were intended not to help retrieve characters but to complete the cosmos.3 Xu Shen’s indexical arrangement, in short, stood as nothing less than an index for the universe. Numerology aside, a political semantics presents itself in the arrangement of characters as well. Under the first radical, yi ϔ, for example, Xu arranged the characters that expressed what might be called greatness, such as yuan ‫ܗ‬ (origin), tian ໽ (heaven), pi ϩ (great), and li ৣ (government official), and discarded others that, at least graphically speaking, might have been arranged under the same radical too, such as bu ϡ (not), bing ϭ (third), and yu Ѣ (toward).4 The decision to include both heaven and government official under the radical for supremeness and cosmological origin without a doubt represented Xu Shen’s own political ideology. Even more importantly, it indicated the power of an index to serve as an instrument of interpellation: in the act of locating government official in Shuowen, the knowledge-seeking subject inadvertently absorbed the values that Xu Shen had embedded in his index. An index not only embodied sociopolitical values but also served as a technology of power. As opposed to alphabetical scripts that technically do not permit much room for indexical innovation, Chinese indexical designs have proliferated in the nearly two thousand years since Shuowen. Much like the system of 540 radicals, the designs of later indices were interwoven with larger sociopolitical, linguistic, and technological changes, such as the centralization and decentralization of state authority, institutionalizations of Buddhism and Daoism, advancements in paper production, commercialization of the economy, and arrival of colonial and industrial modernity. In 776, for instance, Zhang Can ᔉগ (n.d.), the Tang dynasty’s director of studies, designed an index of 160 radicals that accompanied Wujing wenzi Ѩ㍧᭛ᄫ (Characters of the Five Classics). The new design embodied the dynasty’s desire to recentralize authority after centuries of political disintegration that occurred in tandem with fundamental linguistic and phonological changes and an increase in the use of new and nonstandardized characters. Commenting on this period, Zhang noted in his preface that people were using the four tones of speech rather than graphic components to arrange characters, which was a testimony for the common strategies used by literate people to manage linguistic information (see Branner, chapter 6). Zhang’s index was an imperial remedy intended to reintroduce order and control, and for that purpose, he even designed his radicals for the commonly used kaishu Ὃ᳌ (standard script), as opposed to the zhuanshu ㆚᳌ (seal script) of Shuowen. His 160 radicals, in other words, were the product of a deeper change in the culture of knowledge and information before and during the Tang dynasty.5

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Zhang’s was not the only example. The institutionalization of Buddhism served as another defining force in the history of indexical innovation during this period. The ninth-century Xinding yiqie jinglei yin ᮄᅮϔߛ㍧串䷇ (Newly established classified pronunciations for all sūtras), for instance, was a Buddhist attempt to reorder knowledge, following the influx of characters that arrived with the translation of Sanskrit terminologies from India. Its index, as opposed to earlier ones, had only 259 radicals. The following century saw the compilation of Longkan shoujing 啡啩᠟䦵 (Hand mirror of the dragon niche), a large Buddhist dictionary with more than twenty-six thousand characters arranged according to 242 radicals along with the four tones of speech.6 Similar examples of new indices can be enumerated, but these suffice to show how integral indexical innovation was to the making of diverse literary cultures in China. Given the multiplicity of indices throughout history, why did some disappear whereas others lasted for centuries? The response lies somewhere between the sociopolitical circumstances surrounding the indices and the infrastructural power of an index itself—that is, its ability to determine the mental and physical habits used to search for information, habits that become so ingrained in literary practices that they are hard to abandon even if sociopolitical and technological conditions change significantly. Indeed, the path dependence observed in many large- and small-scale infrastructures, from the longue durée persistence of communications networks to the continued use of QWERTY keyboards, may also be noticed in the history of indices. An archaeology of indices thus unearths not only the diversity and multiplicity of literary cultures in Chinese history but also the ways in which these cultures and their information infrastructures interlaced with one another to produce new ones without completely abandoning their predecessors. Observing the historical development of indices, one can see that as old infrastructures bled into new ones, they carried residual marks with them, creating what anthropologist Brian Larkin has called a “layering of infrastructures over time.”7 The system of 214 radicals, the most widely used and contested index since Shuowen and commonly known as Kangxi radicals, offers an example of how an index had a long-lasting impact on literary culture. The late-Ming scholar Mei Yingzuo ṙ㞎⼮ (dates unknown) devised the 214 radicals in 1615 to accompany his lexicographical work Zihui ᄫᔭ (Collection of characters). This was a critical period in history, as increasing commercialization and socioeconomic transformations enhanced by the global silver age of the sixteenth century and the simultaneously growing book market propelled scholars to devise not only new indices for retrieval but also scientific classification schemes for reordering nature. It was perhaps not a coincidence that Mei’s 214 radicals were devised shortly after the printing of Li Shizhen’s ᴢᰖ⦡ (1518–93) Bencao gangmu ᴀ㤝㎅Ⳃ (The compendium of materia medica) in 1597, which introduced a new taxonomic arrangement that revolutionized scientific culture in early modern China and Japan. The connection between the two was not causal but

Indexing Systems 29

rather suggestive of a deeper change in the culture of information that manifested itself in new classification systems. While Mei’s design for his index was evidently different from those of earlier indices, he was also drawing on numerology and liushu for his cosmological justification and reusing 168 radicals of the previously mentioned Buddhist dictionary Longkan shoujing.8 In other words, Mei repurposed existing intellectual and information infrastructures within a changing literary and scientific landscape, which partly explains its successful acceptance by a scholarly community that had no shortage of other idiosyncratic index designs to choose from during this period (see Vedal, chapter 7). An equally important element, on the other hand, in explaining the 214 radicals’ long-lasting use was the system’s entanglement with the Qing dynasty’s imperial politics long after Mei Yingzuo died. It was selected as the official index for the majestic Kangxi zidian ᒋ❭ᄫ‫݌‬ (Kangxi dictionary) in 1716, which compiled close to fifty thousand characters as an outcome of the Manchu emperor’s politics of appeasement through the patronage of Han literary culture. Had the patronage networks been different, the 214 radicals might have shared the same fate as the indices mentioned earlier that gradually disappeared from historical memory. The tension between the long development of indexing habits and the historically specific desires to design new indices persisted into the twentieth century. With the Manchus’ support, the 214 radicals ruled as the sovereign indexing method from the eighteenth century until the early twentieth century, when it was severely challenged by index reformers operating in a period of unprecedented transformation in the culture of information in China and the world. The new global order imposed by industrial capitalism brought new institutions and communications technologies that challenged existing infrastructures in the non-Western world. Iron hand presses and movable metal type, linotype, monotype, typewriters, telegraphy, and Morse code entered China in a relatively short period of time in the nineteenth century. Translated works in a multitude of disciplines proliferated, “mass literacy” emerged as a modern desire to attain and produce knowledge on a mass scale, and new institutions such as libraries, archives, and governmental organizations all converged to invent a new information age in China, which was now synchronically linked to a global modernity. The pressure on the management of information and knowledge was unlike that in previous transformations, and indices were once again the keys to ordering large amounts of information in new databases, such as codebooks, library catalogs, phone books, and dictionaries for the masses. Global modernity imposed a different kind of cosmological order in which the core industrial values of efficiency, productivity, and the optimization of physical and mental labor dominated the techno-politics of indexical innovation. Speed—the marker of industrial modernity—replaced earlier values and objectives in the design of indices. Dozens of designers argued that the 214

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radicals of the Kangxi zidian were confusing and required too much time to access information because the process of locating the radical, which is typically found on the left or top of a given character, was not straightforward. The radical for tian ⬟, for example, was zhi ᬃ, not tian ⬄; the radical for yi ᕍ was shu ↇ rather than chi ᕇ; the character wang ⥟ was under the radical yu ⥝; and so on. These residues from the deeper history of indexing were reframed as perplexing, especially for beginners, in a modernizing economy of knowledge. According to reformers, indices needed optimization, and a favorite slogan in the 1920s was “Down with the Kangxi Dictionary (dadao Kangxi zidian)!”—a slogan that laid bare the postimperial politics of the day.9 The sheer number of new indices was striking, but the success of an index depended on the alliances its inventor could form within the deeply transforming political economy of knowledge, in which the modern publishing houses had considerable impact. The main arena of indexical innovation was in fact the field of dictionaries published by the two largest publishing houses, the Commercial Press (Shangwu yinshuguan ଚࢭॄ᳌仼) and Zhonghua Book Company (Zhonghua shuju Ё㧃᳌ሔ), both of which sought to dominate the growing market of knowledge and identified indexing as a crucial selling point. The initial attempts at indexical innovation by these presses sought to optimize the 214 radicals themselves instead of completely annihilating them. Zhonghua’s encyclopedic Zhonghua dazidian Ё㧃໻ᄫ‫( ݌‬Great character dictionary of China; 1915), for instance, introduced an “ocular” formula that rearranged the 214 radicals according to their visual resemblance. The twostroke radicals in the Kangxi zidian that were rendered as ѠѴҎ‫࣮ࣩ࣍࡯ߔ߉޴ݿݪݖܹܿܓ‬ऌकरऽॖঊজ

were rearranged as ѠѴҎܹܿ‫࣮ࣩ࣍࡯ߔ޴ܓ‬ऌ߉‫ݪݖ‬ॖऽकर‫ݿ‬ঊজ

Following the Zhonghua dazidian, along with similar minor adjustments to the 214 radicals that appeared in other dictionaries, reformers began to selectively utilize the modern epistemic and technological apparatus to either reform the existing infrastructure or devise an entirely new one to optimize information retrieval. By the 1920s, indices had truly become instruments for capitalizing on the attention economy of the modern age and revolutionizing information access through “a revolutionizing of the means of perception.”10 The most popular of all the indices was the (in)famous Four-Corner indexing method (sijiao haoma jianzifa ಯ㾦㰳⺐⁶ᄫ⊩) of the late 1920s (figure  3.1). Designed by Wang Yunwu ⥟䳆Ѩ (1888–1979), general manager of the Commercial Press, this index mirrored Chinese telegraphic codebooks that identified each character with a four-digit code, ranging from 0001 to 9999.

3.1 Wang Yunwu’s Four-Corner method. Source: Y. W. Wong [Wang Yunwu], Wong’s System for Arranging Chinese Characters: The Revised Four-Corner Numeral System (Shanghai: Commercial Press, 1928), 39.

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A telegraph codebook was indeed like a dictionary—but without definitions. In order to retrieve a character and determine its number, a telegraph operator would have to first determine the radical, then count the strokes of the character, then locate it under the designated category, and finally translate the four-digit code into the dots and dashes of the Morse code in order to wire it. On the receiving end of the telegraph line, however, it was much easier for the operators to decode the message, since they only had to find what character corresponded to the number in hand. Wang’s Four-Corner was an attempt to turn each dictionary user from a code dispatcher to a code receiver.11 Wang thus designated as his basic units the four corners of a character— upper left, upper right, lower left, lower right. He then devised a list of ten basic strokes, or combinations of strokes, and assigned them a digit ranging from 0 to 9. The dictionary user was supposed to recognize the strokes in each corner of a given character and match them with the numerical values. Take the character tian ໽, for instance (figure 3.2). The upper-left corner of tian ໽ was composed of a horizontal stroke, which corresponded to 1; the upper-right corner had no additional strokes, hence 0; the lower-left corner had two crossing strokes corresponding to 4; and the lower-right corner had a right slanting stroke, which corresponded to 3. The four-digit number for tian was thus 1043. Wang Yunwu’s Four-Corner was highly disputed and loathed at the time of its invention. Given that he was the general manager of the largest printing company, Wang’s intentions were questioned by an angry group of index innovators—a dispute that culminated in a six-month-long public debate on indexing. Some called Four-Corner “stupid” and Wang himself “ridiculous” and noted that “relying on indexing methods to make a fortune [was] a fool’s dream.”12 Others supported the image of the selfless and brilliant entrepreneur that Wang had fashioned for himself. Regardless of which side one took, it was clear that Four-Corner’s success depended heavily on the colossal power of the Commercial Press and its control over the production and distribution of books. Dynamics of the market economy aside, some inventors were utterly dissatisfied by the mathematical premises of Four-Corner, which was truly unlike any other index in Chinese history. Du Dingyou ᴰᅮট (1898–1967), the pioneer of modern library sciences in China, was the most outspoken critic of numerical indexing systems, which, in his opinion, were counterintuitive to a Chinese mind (figure 3.3). Similar to the imperial-era index designers who repurposed

3.2 The character tian ໽ as expressed in the Four-Corner method.

3.3 Du Dingyou’s eight psychophysiological forms. Source: Du Dingyou, Hanzi xingwei paijianfa ⓶ᄫᔶԡᥦ⁶⊩ (Shanghai: Zhonghua shuju, 1932), 2.

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earlier indices to invent new ones, Du drew on a modern epistemic apparatus to reform the Kangxi radicals and make them conform with the “psychological and physiological habits” of seeing and reading Chinese.13 Drawing on the contested debates on the psychology of reading that the first generation of U.S.trained Chinese psychologists were spearheading at the time, Du noted that numbers were alien to Chinese readers and destroyed the millennia-old practice of interfacing with Chinese characters through their graphic forms. This interface, according to Du, had formed a psychophysiological bond between the eye and the page that could be optimized only from within. Kangxi radicals, he argued, were still a functioning system of retrieval, except for the problem of imprecision in the location of radicals, a problem that demanded reform (gailiang ᬍ㡃), not reinvention (gaizao ᬍ䗴). In reading his last name, Du ᴰ, for instance, the eye, he argued, habitually identified the radical mu ᳼ before tu ೳ. The first character in his first name, ding ᅮ, on the other hand, demanded a vertical reading in which the eye habitually saw mian ᅔ before zheng ℷ. Based on these psychophysiological habits of seeing, Du came up with eight different forms that encompassed all characters.14 As long as the radicals were reformed, the system of retrieval could persist. And, after all, it did persist. In the twenty-first century, a reformed version of the 214 radicals can still be easily detected in printed works, which stands as a testament to the enduring legacy of information infrastructures that are outlined in this chapter. The index commonly placed at the front of a present-day paperback dictionary contains in its design the multiple historical layers of infrastructures and the dynamic sociopolitical worlds with which they have continually interlaced for the past two millennia. The residual marks of the past that it bears, even though forgotten in the mundanity of its daily use, remind us of the contested histories, the contingencies of success, and the ubiquity of change and failure that characterized the history of Chinese information technologies. The 214 radicals are still in common use. This, however, should not blind us to the bifurcated age of indexical designs that industrial modernity had initiated in China, as Wang’s Four-Corner exemplifies. The use of numerical values for characters was a modern, unprecedented invention that bespoke the cosmological transformation caused by global capitalism, and it was not limited to the 1920s. Indices that conjured entirely new ways of retrieving and organizing characters appeared on the market with the further development of industrial technologies, especially with computer keyboards. According to one count, the number of competing “input methods” surpassed five hundred in 1989, signaling the intense pressure brought to bear on indexing during the early years of Chinese computing (see Mullaney, chapter 4).15 The different temporalities of indices thus continue to interlace with each other during the age of relentless (post)industrial expansion, even as the latter changes the culture

Indexing Systems 35

of indexical innovation and challenges its deep foundations. In that regard, the cyberinfrastructures that are currently being developed for Chinese are indeed similar to Shuowen in that they embody new values and engender new habits in an increasingly digital age—and these values and habits, it seems, will extend into a distant future.

Notes 1. Jiang Yiqian, Zhongguo jianzifa yange shilüe ji qishiqi zhong xin jianzi fabiao (n.p.: Zhongguo suoyinshe chuban, 1933); Ping Baoxing ᑇֱ݈, “Minguo shiqi hanzi jianzifa shilun” ⇥೑ᯊᳳ∝ᄫẔᄫ⊩৆䆎, Cishu yanjiu 5 (2014): 61–62. 2. Mark Edward Lewis, Writing and Authority in Early China (Albany: SUNY Press, 1999), 280–82. 3. Françoise Bottéro, Sémantisme et classification dans l’écriture chinoise: Les systèmes de classement des caractères par clés du Shuowen jiezi au Kangxi zidian (Paris: Collège de France, Institut des hautes études chinoises, 1996), 64–69. 4. Bottéro, Sémantisme et classification, 64. 5. Bottéro, Sémantisme et classification, 124–44. 6. Bottéro, Sémantisme et classification, 149–58. 7. Brian Larkin, Signal and Noise: Media, Infrastructure, and Urban Culture in Nigeria (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 5. On residues, see Shannon Mattern, “Deep Time of Media Infrastructure,” in Signal Traffic: Critical Studies of Media Infrastructures, ed. Lisa Parks and Nicole Starosielski (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2015): 96–104. 8. Bottéro, Sémantisme et classification, 143–44; Nathan Vedal, “Scholarly Culture in Sixteenth and Seventeenth-Century China” (PhD diss., Harvard University, 2017), 87–90. 9. Uluğ Kuzuoğlu, “Codebooks for the Mind: Dictionary Index Reforms in Republican China, 1912–1937,” Information and Culture 53, no. 3/4 (2018): 337–66; Thomas S. Mullaney, The Chinese Typewriter: A History (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017), 237–81. 10. Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), 13. 11. Y. W. Wong [Wang Yunwu], Wong’s System for Arranging Chinese Characters: The Revised Four-Corner Numeral System (Shanghai: Commercial Press, 1928). 12. Ting Tao 㙑▸, “Jianzi wenti (2)” ㇵᄫଣ丠 (2), Juewu 17, no. 9 (1928): 2. 13. Du Dingyou, Zhongguo jianzi wenti Ё೟ㇵᄫଣ丠 (1931), 53. 14. Kuzuoğlu, “Codebooks for the Mind,” 355–60. 15. Feng Zhiwei ‫ރ‬ᖫӳ, Xiandai hanzi he jisuanji ⦄ҷ∝ᄫ੠䅵ㅫᴎ (Beijing: Beijing daxue chubanshe, 1989), 43.

CHAPTER 4

CHARACTER INPUT THOM AS S. MU L L A N EY

When Writing Became Retrieval: The Origins of Input Across the Sinophone world, personal computers, tablets, and mobile devices feature the same QWERTY keyboards as their Anglophone counterparts. In Chinese computing, however, the keys on the QWERTY keyboard are not used in the conventional “what you type is what you get” way that they are in English-language typing and word processing; rather, they provide instructions to a piece of software known as an input method editor (IME). In Chinese, there is no such thing as typing—only input. Chinese character input is governed by IMEs, “middleware” software programs that operate in the background on one’s desktop, laptop, tablet, or mobile system, intercepting the user’s keystrokes and then presenting Chinese character candidates to the user for confirmation. From the moment the first key is depressed, the IME (e.g., Sogou Pinyin, Google Pinyin, and QQ Pinyin) sets off on a dynamic, iterative process, searching in computer memory for those Chinese characters intended by the user. With the first key depression—the letter marked C, perhaps—an IME based on phonetic input begins to present the user with options in a pop-up menu that follows along at the margins of the screen—in this case, Chinese characters whose phonetic value begins with C, such as chi ৗ (to eat), cai ᠡ (only then [among many other meanings]), or any of dozens of other possibilities. When the user depresses a second key—for example, H—the IME rapidly adjusts its list of recommended Chinese characters, now offering up only those

Character Input

37

characters whose pronunciations begin with ch (thereby excluding the example of cai). Proceeding letter by letter, then, IMEs enable one to use the letters of the Latin alphabet and the keys of the QWERTY keyboard to produce Chinese character output. Whether the user is composing a document in Microsoft Word, surfing the Web, or completing some other task, they are constantly engaged in this iterative process of criteria, candidacy, and confirmation, using one IME or another. The first “input” system predates personal computing, word processing, and new media by three decades. It was an experimental Chinese typewriter called the MingKwai (Clear and Fast), invented by linguist, cultural commentator, and best-selling author Lin Yutang ᵫ䁲ූ (1895–1976) (figure 4.1). Debuted in 1947, MingKwai was not the first Chinese typewriter—far from it. It was, however, the first Chinese typewriter to feature a keyboard reminiscent of the kinds of mechanical typewriters then found in all corners of the globe.1 Despite its uncanny resemblance to a Remington, however, there was something peculiar about this machine by standards of the day: it did not operate on

4.1 The MingKwai Chinese typewriter. Source: “Chinese Project: The Lin Yutang Chinese Typewriter,” Mergenthaler Linotype Company Records, 1905–1993, box 3628, Archives Center, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC.

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the principle of “what you type is what you get.” The goal of depressing a key on the MingKwai typewriter was not to cause a particular symbol to appear on the page, as with other QWERTY-style typewriters, but rather to provide criteria to the machine to describe which Chinese character one wanted to retrieve from the machine’s metal hard drive. Were an operator to sit down at the machine and depress one of the keys, they would hear gears moving inside—but nothing would appear on the page. Depressing a second key, they would hear more gears moving inside the chassis of the device, and yet still nothing would appear on the page. After the depression of a second key, however, something would happen: in a small glass window at the top of the chassis of the machine— which Lin Yutang referred to as his “Magic Eye”—up to eight Chinese characters would appear. With the third and final keystroke using a bank of keys on the bottom—numerals 1 through 8—the operator could then select one of the eight of the Chinese character candidates they had been offered (figure 4.2). Phrased differently, Lin Yutang had designed his machine as a kind of mechanical Chinese character retrieval system in which the user provided a description of the desired character to the machine, following which the machine offered up to eight Chinese characters that matched said description

4.2 The keyboard layout of the MingKwai typewriter. Source: “Chinese Project: The Lin Yutang Chinese Typewriter.”

Character Input 39

and waited for the user to confirm the final selection before imprinting it on the page. Criteria, candidacy, confirmation—over and over. Lin Yutang invested a personal fortune in the project, but ultimately his timing did not prove fortuitous. Civil war in China was raging, and executives at Mergenthaler Linotype—the principal backer of the project—grew worried about the fate of its patent rights if the Chinese Communists won (as they did). Later Mergenthaler heard rumors that China’s new “Great Helmsman,” Chairman Mao Zedong (1893–1976), was calling for the abolition of Chinese characters and their replacement by full-scale romanization (which, of course, never happened), a change that would have made MingKwai pointless. Everything being too uncertain, the company decided to wait, placing Lin in a financially untenable position. MingKwai may have failed as a potential commercial product, but as a proof of concept, it opened up new vistas in text technology. It radically altered the relationship between a machine’s keyboard interface and its output, changing the typewriter from a device geared primarily toward inscription into one focused primarily on finding or retrieving things from memory. With the merger of inscription and retrieval, the age of “input” was born.

When Inscription Becomes Retrieval: Sinotype and the Origins of Autocompletion What are the repercussions of such a merger between writing and retrieval? One answer comes from the 1950s, in the work of MIT electrical engineering professor Samuel H. Caldwell (1904–60), who was the first since Lin Yutang to venture into this domain of retrieval-based Chinese composition.2 Caldwell did not speak a word of Chinese but was an expert in logical circuit design. He was first exposed to the Chinese language at informal dinnertime chats with his overseas Chinese students at MIT—most importantly, Francis Fan Lee ᴢ޵ (b. 1927). As they got to talking about Chinese characters, one seemingly rudimentary fact caught Caldwell by surprise: “Chinese has a ‘spelling,’. . . . Every Chinese learns to write a character by using exactly the same strokes in exactly the same sequence.” Here he was referring to stroke order (bishun ヨ乎): “If the strokes are regarded as the ‘letters’ of an ‘alphabet’, the Chinese always ‘spell’ a word the same way each time it is written.”3 His curiosity piqued, Caldwell sought the help of a professor of Far Eastern languages at Harvard, Lien-sheng Yang ἞㙃䰲 (1914–90), to analyze the structural makeup of Chinese characters and to determine the stroke-by-stroke “spelling” of approximately two thousand common-usage graphs. Caldwell and Yang ultimately settled on twenty-two stroke-letter combinations in all: an ideal number to place on the keys of a standard QWERTY-style typewriter keyboard (figure 4.3).

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4.3 The keyboard of the Sinotype. Source: From the Bruce Rosenblum Collection, Stanford University Special Collections.

Caldwell’s use of the word spelling is at once revealing and misleading and helps clarify the difference between conventional forms of inscription— whether chirographic or machine mediated—and a form of inscription premised on retrieval. To “spell” the word pronounced /kΩmҼpjutђ/ by means of conventional inscription—a Remington typewriter, perhaps—one must depress a sequence of keys, C-O-M-P-U-T-E-R. The “spelling” of the word is said to be complete only when all eight letters are present in the correct order. Such was not the case when a user “spelled” with Caldwell’s Ideographic Type Composing Machine, also known as the Sinotype. As with MingKwai before it, the operator depressed a single key on the Sinotype not to produce the corresponding symbol but, as Caldwell explained, “to furnish the input and output data required for the switching circuit, which converts a character’s spelling to the location coordinates of that character in the photographic storage matrix.”4 Like MingKwai, the Sinotype was not primarily an inscription device but rather a retrieval device. Inscription took place only after retrieval was accomplished. While this distinction might seem minor at first, the implications were profound—as Caldwell quickly discovered. Not only do Chinese characters have a “spelling,” but also “the spelling of Chinese characters is highly redundant.” In other words, in the retrieval-inscription framework, it was almost never necessary for Caldwell to enter every stroke within a character in order

Character Input

41

Table 4.1 Comparison of Full and Minimum Spellings for Sample Characters

Character

Spelling in Full

Strokes Required Strokes Required to Write Minimum to Find or Select Characters Spelling Characters

Ѣ

AAK

3

AAK

3

䊇

ABB CPB BBG ENE

12

ABB

3

ᓘ

ABC AAF C

7

ABC

3

䊀

ABD ACP BBB GE

11

ABD AC

5

㸼

ABD AGM GV

8

ABD AG

5

ओ

ABD BDA GDP BR

11

ABD BD

5

ᓣ

ABD BNE

6

ABD BN

5

for the Sinotype to retrieve it unambiguously from memory. “Far fewer strokes are required to select a particular Chinese character than are required to write it,” Caldwell explained.5 In many cases, the difference between “spelling in full” and “minimum spelling” (Caldwell’s terms) was dramatic. For one character containing fifteen strokes, for example, it was necessary for the operator to enter only the first five or six before the Sinotype arrived at a positive match. In other cases, a character with twenty strokes could be unambiguously matched with only four keystrokes.6 Plotting full versus minimum spellings of some 2,121 Chinese characters, Caldwell determined that the median minimum spelling of Chinese characters fell between five and six strokes, whereas the median total spelling equaled ten strokes. At the far end of the spectrum, moreover, no Chinese character exhibited a minimum spelling of more than nineteen strokes despite the fact that a number of Chinese characters contained twenty or more strokes. Full and minimum spellings for selected characters are compared in table 4.1. In short, in addition to creating the world’s first Chinese computer, Caldwell had inadvertently stumbled on what is now referred to as autocompletion: a techno-linguistic strategy that did not become part of English-language text processing in a widespread way until the 1990s but that has been part of Chinese input (and Chinese computing more broadly) from the 1950s onward.

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When Is an Interface Stable? The Input Wars (1980s to the Present) Beginning in the 1980s, the era of custom-designed Chinese machines came to an end. With the rise of personal computing and the increased opening of mainland China’s economy to imports from the capitalist West, QWERTY keyboard–based devices began making inroads into the Sinophone computing world, steadily becoming dominant. From the 1980s to the present day, in fact, no non-QWERTY keyboard or non-keyboard input surface ever seriously competed with the QWERTY keyboard in the Sinophone world. As the diverse ecology of custom-designed apparatuses died out, giving way to a standardized technological monoculture of QWERTY-based interfaces, one might be tempted to describe Chinese human-machine and human-computer interaction as undergoing a process of stabilization—moving from a diversity of interfaces to a single standard. In fact, the growing ubiquity of QWERTY keyboards in China was accompanied by a proliferation of input systems: with hundreds of IMEs competing all at once, the 1980s and 1990s in China have been referred to as a time of “input wars.” To provide a sense of the sheer diversity of competing input systems during this period, table 4.2 lists a small sample of the hundreds of IMEs available at the time, including the codes that an operator would have used to input the Chinese character dian (electricity) for each. In the context of alphabetic typing, it would be an oxymoron to suggest that the keyboard could undergo stabilization while the interface could remain in flux. In typing, after all, the keyboard and the interface are effectively one and the same thing. But in the case of retrieval-based inscription—input— the stabilization of the physical interface (the keyboard) does not exert any straightforward stabilizing effect on the retrieval-inscription processes themselves (insofar as there are effectively an infinite number of meanings one could assign to the keys marked Q, W, E, R, T, and Y even if those keys never change location on the physical device). When inscription becomes an act of retrieval, our notion of stabilization—of what it means and when it can be assumed to take place—changes fundamentally. Within this context, many input system designers, knowingly or unknowingly, revived and recycled methods invented in the 1910s to 1930s—an era well before computing, of course, but one in which language reform and educational reform circles were in the grips of what was then called the character retrieval problem (jianzifa wenti Ẕᄫ⊩䯂乬): a far-reaching debate among various parties over which among a wide variety of experimental new methods was the best way to recategorize and reorganize Chinese characters in such contexts as dictionaries, phone books, filing cabinets, and library card catalogs. For example, the Five-Stroke Input method (wubi shurufa Ѩヨ䕧ܹ⊩)—one

Table 4.2 Thirty-One Ways (Among Hundreds) to Input dian ⬉ (Electricity) Chinese Transalphabet

diantmvv

Zhengma 䚥ⷕ

kzvv

Wubi shurufa Ѩヨ䕧ܹ⊩

jnv

Cangjie bianma ‫䷵ם‬㎼⺐

lwu

Shouwei yinxing shurufa 佪ሒ䷇ᔶ䕧ܹ⊩

djfz

Shuangbi yinxing shurufa ঠヨ䷇ᔶ䕧ܹ⊩

djjm

Pinyin ᣐ䷇

dian#

Bixing bianma ヨᔶ㓪ⷕ

601

Sijiao fuyin ಯ㾦䰘䷇

50716d

Shuangpin shuangbu bianmafa ঠᣐঠ䚼㓪ⷕ⊩

dqtk

Yi shurufa ᯧ䕧ܹ⊩

rgd

Dianbaoma ⬉᡹ⷕ

7193

Shuangpin ঠᣐ

dm#

Quweima ऎԡⷕ

2171

Guobiao ೑ᷛ

3567

Xingyi sanma ᔶᛣϝⷕ

b1

Weiwuma ଃ⠽ⷕ

љ47

Wushi ziyuan shurufa Ѩकᄫ‫ܗ‬䕧ܹ⊩

ljd

Hanzi bixing chazifa bianmafa ∝ᄫヨᔶᶹᄫ⊩㓪ⷕ⊩

60

OSCO Jianzi shima 㾕ᄫ䆚ⷕ

DDDD

Qianma 䪅ⷕ

djm

Wubi zixing Ѩヨᄫൟ

jn

Ziranma 㞾✊ⷕ

dmlo/

Biaoxing 㸼ᔶ

lkkd

Dazhongma ໻ӫⷕ

doww

Huama ढⷕ

drz

Taijima ໾ᵕⷕ

ny

3F ma 3F ⷕ

;d

Cangjie ‫䷵ם‬

mbwu

Wubixing Ѩヨൟ

jtw

HPX ∝ᄫᣐᔶ䕧ܹᮍḜ

egj

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of the most popular input systems in the 1980s and 1990s—was in certain respects a computationally repurposed version of the Five-Stroke Character Retrieval method (wubi jianzifa ѨヨẔᄫ⊩) invented by Chen Lifu 䱇ゟ໿ (1900–2001). The nearly one hundred experimental retrieval systems of the 1920s and 1930s, as well as the principles and strategies on which they were based, thus formed a kind of archive (consciously or not) for those who later worked in the techno-linguistic ecology of computing (see Kuzuoğlu, chapter 3).

Pinyin Is a Platform: The Rise of Phonetic Input Beginning in the 1990s, phonetic- and pinyin-based input systems began to displace structure-based ones—a transition that took place much later than many have assumed. For the greater part of Chinese computing history, including the input wars of the 1980s and early 1990s, an overwhelming majority of Chinese input systems were based on the structural properties of Chinese characters, not their phonetic values. Phonetic input was a very late development. Even with the rise of a Latin alphabet–based, phonetic input framework, however, Chinese input has remained a retrieval-based composition system. That is, despite its uncanny resemblance to spelling, Pinyin input and its component pieces—the letters of the Latin alphabet—are not spelling. They behave in much the same way as the symbols employed by Lin Yutang in the 1940s and by Caldwell in the 1950s. While in English the letters of the Latin alphabet serve the purpose of spelling, in Chinese phonetic input they are symbols employed in the aforementioned three-part process of criteria, candidacy, and confirmation. Consider, for example, one of the earliest and most popular pinyin input methods, Tianhui ໽∛. The original guidebook for this system suggests no fewer than five different techniques for inputting the name Tianhui itself (table 4.3). Users could select a setting called complete pinyin (quanpin ܼᣐ) and enter the sequence t-i-a-n-h-u-i. But so, too, could they use one of four other settings, none of which involved entering the full spelling of the Chinese compound. Using the simplified pinyin (jianpin ㅔᣐ) setting, which required users to input only the initial pinyin phonetic value of each character, the correct input sequence was t-h. Using the mixed pinyin (hunpin ⏋ᣐ) setting, which allowed users to input either the full phonetic pinyin vowel or a character or just the initial value, the correct sequence was either t-h-u-i or t-i-a-n-h. Finally, using a setting called simplified pinyin + stroke-shape (jianpin ㅔᣐ + bixing ヨᔶ), a setting in which numerals and the letters of the Latin alphabet could be used to describe the phonetic pinyin value of a character or to act as variables that represented one or another structural feature of the desired Chinese graph, the correct sequence was t-1-h-4. In other words, out of the five

Character Input

45

Table 4.3 Inputting tianhui ໽∛ Using Tianhui Pinyin Input

Pinyin Mode

Input Sequence Entered by User

Full pinyin

tianhui

Simplified pinyin 1

th

Mixed pinyin 1

thui

Mixed pinyin 2

tianh

Pinyin + stroke-shape

t1h4

Screen Output ໽∛ (The screen output is identical for all input sequences.)

methods an operator could use to input just this one two-character compound, only one of them was based on pinyin as it is commonly (mis)understood. The other four were all based on methods that while using pinyin as an underlying “platform,” harnessed the letters of the Latin alphabet within the context of retrieval-based composition. While Tianhui is an early (and now largely forgotten) IME, the pattern just described has become increasingly prevalent in the domain of phonetic input systems over the past decade. Returning to our very first example—inputting chi ৗ (to eat)—we can expand our examples briefly to consider just some of the countless abbreviations and shortcuts that phonetic IMEs offer. If a user enters the sequence CX, for example—a sequence that does not correspond to the beginning of any recognized phoneme in Hanyu pinyin—the IME interprets this as a request to retrieve and present all meaningful, two-character Chinese compounds in which the pronunciation of the first character begins with the value C and the pronunciation of the second character begins with the value X—such as chuangxin ߯ᮄ (innovation) and chaoxi ᡘ㺁 (plagiarism). Meanwhile, entering the sequence YL yields other two-character offerings, such as Yelu 㘊剕 (Yale) and yanlei ⴐ⊾ (tears) (figures 4.4 and 4.5). Beginning in the 2000s, moreover, Chinese computing has harnessed the ever-increasing processing power of personal computers and mobile devices to speed up the retrieval-composition process dramatically, with all Chinese input relying heavily on predictive text, autocompletion, and retrieval shortcuts. Of particular importance, Chinese input has joined the Cloud. Unlike IMEs from the 1980s through the 2000s, where the entire process took place inside the computer, so-called Cloud input systems (yun shurufa ѥ䕧ܹ⊩) by Sogou,

4.4 Chinese input shortcuts, example 1.

4.5 Chinese input shortcuts, example 2.

Character Input

47

Baidu, QQ, Microsoft, and others have begun to harness enormous text corpora as well as sophisticated retrieval protocols and natural language processing algorithms. In 2013, Microsoft researchers touted the growing power of Microsoft’s Chinese IME, and Sogou has boasted on its website of far greater accuracy and performance for its Cloud-based IME.7 “Long sentence accuracy”—the likelihood that an IME will convert a long and complex sequence of letters into the intended multicharacter passage—has grown from 62.5 percent on locally stored IMEs to 84 percent with Cloud input, according to Sogou, while “short sentence accuracy” has grown from 91.52 percent to 96 percent. Using these pinyin-based input systems, along with a larger number of lesserused nonphonetic Chinese IMEs, hundreds of millions of Chinese computer and new media users have transformed China from a backwater of the global information infrastructure to one of its engines, cores, and most lucrative marketplaces. Along the way, the production of these information technologies for Chinese writing has fundamentally transformed writing itself in ways that theorists, technologists, and historians are still attempting to understand.

Notes 1. For the history of early Chinese typewriters, see Thomas S. Mullaney, The Chinese Typewriter: A History (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017). 2. Samuel H. Caldwell, “The Sinotype—A Machine for the Composition of Chinese from a Keyboard,” Journal of the Franklin Institute 267, no. 6 (June 1959): 471–502. 3. Samuel H. Caldwell, “Progress on the Chinese Studies,” in “Second Interim Report on Studies Leading to Specifications for Equipment for the Economical Composition of Chinese and Devanagari,” report by the Graphic Arts Research Foundation, Pardee Lowe Papers, Accession no. 98055–16.370/376, box 276, 1, Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford, CA. 4. “Final Report on Studies Leading to Chinese and Devanagari,” Graphic Arts Research Foundation, 14. Caldwell filed a patent for the Sinotype on October 24, 1956, and it was patented on August 30, 1960, as Ideographic Type Composing Machine, United States No. 2950800. 5. Caldwell, “Progress on the Chinese Studies,” 1. 6. Caldwell, “Progress on the Chinese Studies,” 1–6, and “Machine Seen as Possible ‘Breakthrough’ in Chinese Printing,” FEFile no. 147 (June 22, 1959), Pardee Lowe Papers, box 276, Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford, CA. 7. See Matt Scott [Mate Sikete 偀⡍gᮃ⾥⡍], “Weiruan yingku pingyin shurufa beihou de jishu he gushi” ᖂ䕃㣅ᑧᣐ䷇䕧ܹ⊩㚠ৢⱘᡔᴃ੠ᬙџ, http://tech.sina.com.cn/it/csj /2013-01-25/08418014659.shtml; and “Sogou yunrufa: yunjisuan jieshao” ᧰⢫䕧ܹ⊩ ѥ䅵ㅫҟ㒡, https://pinyin.sogou.com/features/cloud/.

SECTION B

LEXICONS E D I T E D B Y B RU C E RU S K

T

o talk about its own products and contents, a literary culture needs ways to refer to the building block of its texts, the word. The most ubiquitous device for doing so is the dictionary or lexicon, an ordered list of words with supplemental information about them. Compiling a word list requires, perhaps more than any other mode of traditional scholarship, labor that abstracts linguistic information from its contexts of usage. The work of creating a dictionary can be broken down into three information-management tasks: building a list of lexemes (words) from a corpus, ordering or indexing that list, and providing information about each lexeme (definition, pronunciation, etymology, citation, etc.). These are not sequential steps but three aspects of lexicographical practice, and works that involve only one or two are still important for the development of lexicography. Over the centuries, word lists were compiled based on various principles of selection (topical lexicons, phonological inventories, lists of distinct local usages, etc.) and of organization (semantic, graphical, and phonetic). Some were bare lists, while others provided details about meaning, pronunciation, and/or orthography. Certain lexical works were intended to affect language use by standardizing written forms, pronunciations, or usages; others were more documentary, recording colloquial, technical, or historical usages. Since the nineteenth century, new ways of thinking about language and new technologies for processing information have given rise to new kinds of lexicons and new

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tools for using lexical information, some of which blur the line between dictionary and database. All these acts of selection depend on the identification of a basic element of linguistic information, which for scholars literate in Classical/Literary Chinese was closely tied to the writing system. Most early word lists took as their basic unit the graph (zi ᄫ), which in traditional philological thought was said to possess a form, a sound, and a meaning. Until the twentieth century, lexicography was mainly a practice of collecting zi: their forms, their meanings, and their pronunciations. In modern usage, zi can refer to an individual glyph in Sinographic script, to a single spoken syllable, or to a written or spoken word in a non-Chinese language (where it may be made up of multiple glyphs and/ or multiple syllables). These usages reinforce the impression that ancient and modern Chinese languages are monosyllabic—that their fundamental components are meaning-bearing units of a single syllable. The consensus among linguists, however, is that Chinese languages have long featured polysyllabic expressions functioning as units, and these have become increasingly prominent over time in terms of total number and as a proportion of vocabulary. Linguists have devised a variety of tests to identify which strings of syllables act as single closed units (words) and which are open constructions formed according to the syntactic rules of the language (phrases). No prescriptive definition has proven wholly satisfactory, even in the well-studied case of Standard Mandarin.1 Nonetheless, most linguists agree that native speakers of modern Chinese languages operate with an implicit notion of something like a word that consists of one or more syllables and upon which syntax and prosody operate as a unit. Still, the zi remains the principal unit by which many native speakers quantify and divide their own speech and writing, what Yuen Ren Chao called the “sociological word.”2 And literate speakers describe it as having the three properties of form, sound, and meaning. Most Chinese dictionaries have been organized around one of these three features, providing varying amounts of information about the other two. Graphic organization facilitated the lookup of unfamiliar characters—for example, those encountered in reading. Thematic or onomasiological classification permitted the discovery of words in a semantic category, often within a universal ontological scheme. Phonetic ordering, the last to appear, separated meaning and written form from the sound of language. Alphabetically organized dictionaries, now common, are, strictly speaking, semasiological—that is, ordered by written signs rather than by phonology. Computerization has transformed lexicography by enabling on-the-fly reordering by multiple criteria and the systematic mining of source corpora for the discovery of words and usages.

Lexicons

51

Notes 1. See, for example, Jerome L. Packard, ed., New Approaches to Chinese Word Formation: Morphology, Phonology and the Lexicon in Modern and Ancient Chinese (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1998); Duanmu San, “Word and Wordhood, Modern,” in Encyclopedia of Chinese Language and Linguistics, ed. Rint Sybesma et al. (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 4:543–49; and Lukáš Zádrapa, “Word and Wordhood, Premodern,” in Sybesma et al., Encyclopedia of Chinese Language and Linguistics, 4:566–76. 2. Yuen Ren Chao, A Grammar of Spoken Chinese (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1965), 136–37, 170–74.

CHAPTER 5

EARLY LEXICONS Z E V H A N DE L

L

exicons or dictionaries (zidian ᄫ‫ )݌‬are a prime exemplar of the decontextualized reorganization of linguistic and graphic information. The essential function of written words is to form texts that express written language. In a lexicon, words are removed from linguistic contexts and presented as discrete units. The structural organization of the lexicon, just as much as any accompanying glosses and annotations, conveys useful information about those words. The lexicon may function as a tool for employing the words in textual contexts (i.e., for composing texts, or writing) and for understanding the words in textual contexts (i.e., for interpreting texts, or reading). It may have additional uses such as teaching literacy and establishing language norms or standards. The specific ways in which lexicons organize and present lexical information reveal and reinforce cultural assumptions about the use and function of words. In addition, the lexicons themselves can become texts of cultural significance because their role as repositories of literary and cultural knowledge lends them symbolic power and prestige. The focus of this chapter is on the premodern era, primarily the Han through Song. It will trace three distinct strands of lexicographic organization in ancient China, providing a window into the interaction of literary culture and information management in China through time. Early Chinese lexicons were not general-purpose repositories of the vocabulary of a language like modern dictionaries; they were connected to the production and consumption of certain types of literary texts according to cultural

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norms. They therefore present the informational content of graphs in a format meant to facilitate the specific use for which the lexicon was intended. A key difference between many Chinese lexicons and those in the European tradition is that in China the basic unit of organization—the head of each lexicographic entry—has usually been not a written word but a graph—that is, a Chinese character (zi ᄫ). While many characters represent words, many do not (see Handel, chapter 1).1 Chinese characters are traditionally conceptualized, at least as far back as the Han dynasty, as having a tripartite informational structure encompassing a form or shape (xing ᔶ), a sound or pronunciation (sheng 㙆), and a meaning or significance (yi 㕽). The three lexicographic traditions mirror this tripartite structure. In their macrostructure, lexicons organize and sequence entries according to one of these three properties, and in their microstructure, they explicate one or more of these three properties. Put another way, properties of the graphs are both the information that is sought by a lexicon user and the information by which that user carries out the search. The names of several early word lists used for instruction in Chinese characters are known to us.2 But because their structure and function are not completely understood and it is uncertain whether they should be considered full-fledged lexicons, they will not be dealt with here. The lexicographic tradition of meaning-based organization originates in Erya ⠒䲙 (Approaching the elegant; ca. third cent. BCE), and that of formbased organization originates in Shuowen jiezi 䁾᭛㾷ᄫ (Explaining simple graphs and analyzing complex graphs; 100 CE). Pronunciation-based organization is not seen until centuries later, in the tradition represented by early medieval rime books or rime dictionaries (yunshu ䷏᳌), whose prime exemplar is Qieyun ߛ䷏ (Finely distinguished rimes; 601 CE), and by later rime tables (see Branner, chapter 6). The three lexicographic traditions can be associated with three traditional intellectual spheres related to textual studies and literary production: wenzixue ᭛ᄫᅌ (grammatological study of character form), xunguxue 㿧䀕ᅌ (exegetical study of character meaning), and shengyunxue 㙆䷏ᅌ (phonology). These are collectively termed xiaoxue ᇣᅌ (philology; literally, lesser learning). The correlations listed in table 5.1 informed the way that lexicons, mediating between graphs and literary-scholarly activity, came to be compiled and used.3 At the most superficial level, the three kinds of lexicographic organization can be seen as three different ways of solving a basic information-management problem: how to order and group thousands of head-entry graphs in such a way that a user can quickly locate the one being sought. But for the earliest lexicons, solving the lookup problem was likely secondary to the use of organizational structure to encode and convey useful information about the graphs. Indeed, these two functions of lexicographic structure may have been conceptually

Early Lexicons

55

Table 5.1 Correlation of Character Features to Organization, Dictionaries, and “Lesser Arts”

Character Feature

Form

Meaning

Sound

Lexical organization

Graphic component

Semantic field

Tone and rime

Exemplar dictionary

Shuowen jiezi

Erya

Qieyun

Related “lesser art”

Grammatology

Exegesis

Phonology

inseparable. For example, the sound-based structure of Qieyun simultaneously allowed for quick lookup of a graph based on its pronunciation and for the determination of its pronunciation relative to other graphs. The macrostructure, as much as the entry for each graph, conveyed crucial information about the graph. The value of that information was connected to the literary purpose for which Qieyun was intended: the composition of poetry in accordance with formal constraints.

Erya and Meaning-Based Lexicons The authorship and date of composition of Erya are uncertain. It is likely a hybrid work, made up of sections compiled at different times by different people. The earliest sections probably date to the Western Han or slightly earlier.4 W. South Coblin characterizes the content this way: The received version consists of 19 sections or chapters. . . . The title of each chapter begins with the word shì 䞟 “to explain”, which is followed by a word denoting the nature of the material treated in the chapter. . . . Close analysis of the first three chapters of the Ěry΁ suggests that they may have been compiled by excerpting and combining glossing material from early commentaries on classical texts . . . [while in the latter] parts of the book, one finds many glosses for which few or no source texts are available.5

Table 5.2 shows the nineteen chapters of the received version along with explanations of the range of contents as given by Coblin. As a grouping of graphs or binomes into broad semantic categories, Erya’s macrostructure reflected a conceptual, culturally determined categorization of the world: an ontology.6 It also provided a mechanism for a user to locate a target word.

Table 5.2 Chapters of the Erya 1

Shi gu 䞟䀕

“On old words” (verbs, adjectives, adverbs, a few grammatical particles)

2

Shi yan 䞟㿔

“On words” (verbs, adjectives, adverbs)

3

Shi xun 䞟㿧

“On explanations” (mostly adjectives, adverbs; many are reduplicative binomes)

4

Shi qin 䞟㽾

“On kinship”

5

Shi gong 䞟ᆂ

“On architecture”

6

Shi qi 䞟఼

“On utensils”

7

Shi yue 䞟ῖ

“On music”

8

Shi tian 䞟໽

“On heaven” (astronomy, meteorology, calendar)

9

Shi di 䞟ഄ

“On earth” (geography, topography)

10

Shi qiu 䞟Ϭ

“On hills”

11

Shi shan 䞟ቅ

“On mountains”

12

Shi shui 䞟∈

“On waters” (rivers, streams, islands, boating)

13

Shi cao 䞟㤝

“On grasses” (grasses, herbs, vegetables)

14

Shi mu 䞟᳼

“On trees”

15

Shi chong 䞟㷆

“On vermin” (insects, spiders, reptiles, etc.)

16

Shi yu 䞟儮

“On fish” (aquatic creatures)

17

Shi niao 䞟効

“On wildfowl”

18

Shi shou 䞟⥌

“On wild animals” (including legendary beasts)

19

Shi chu 䞟⬰

“On domestic animals”

Early Lexicons

57

Each entry in the first three chapters is a list of graphs sharing a single gloss. The first entry is (1)

߱ǃઝǃ佪ǃ෎ǃ㙛ǃ⼪ǃ‫ܗ‬ǃ㚢ǃ‫׊‬ǃ㨑ǃ⃞ǃ䔓ˈྟгDŽ7

The entry equates the first twelve listed graphs (up to 䔓) with shi ྟ (start), indicating that this character can serve as a gloss for all the others. The scholarly supposition that such entries were compiled from earlier textual annotations is supported by the existence of similar glosses in early texts and commentaries, as seen in entries (2) and (3): (2)

߱ˈྟгDŽ

chū—the first graph listed in entry (1)—is sh΃ (start) from the Chunqiu Guliang zhuan ᯹⾟〔ṕ‫ڇ‬ (Guliang commentary to the Annals)8

(3)

෎ˈྟгDŽ

jī—the fourth graph listed in entry (1)—is sh΃ (start) from the “Zhouyu” ਼䁲 (Dialogues of Zhou) section of Guoyu ೟䁲 (Dialogues of the states)9

By collecting words that have been identically glossed into a single entry, Erya, whether by accident or by design, presents lists of words that are, at least in some contexts, approximately synonymous; this is why Erya is sometimes erroneously labeled a thesaurus. But this is true only of the three first and likely oldest chapters, which perhaps represent an attempt to summarize the commentarial glossing tradition. The microstructure of later chapters is simpler. Consider these entries from chapter 15, “Shi chong” 䞟㷆 (Explaining vermin):10 (4a)

㵰ˈ໽㶏DŽ

hú means tiānlóu .

(4b)

㳮ˈ㷺㴄DŽ

fěi means lúféi.

(4c)

㶒瑙ˈܹ㘇DŽ

y΃ny΁n means rù’ěr (literally, enters the ear).

(4d)

㴢ˈ㲷瓖DŽ

hé means jiéqū.

(4e)

㴸㷤ˈ㴢DŽ

qiúqí means hé.

(4f)

㴢ˈḥ㷆DŽ

hé means sāngchóng (mulberry tree vermin).

These appear to be decodings of unfamiliar, obscure, dialectal, or obsolete words by means of contemporary words, analogous to an English annotation like “eft means newt.” It is easy to see how this collection of terms would be of value in decoding ancient texts containing obsolete or obscure vocabulary, although it is not clear if this was an intended purpose of Erya.

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Shuowen jiezi and Form-Based Lexicons Shuowen is the earliest known lexicon to be arranged according to character structure. The author, Xu Shen 䀅ᜢ (ca. 58–149), selected 540 graphic elements to serve as bushou 䚼佪 (section headings). Characters containing those elements as semantic components were grouped together under each heading, and their entries always contained the formula cong X Ң X (derived from X), where X is the element in question; see entry (5). Once a user had memorized the order of the 540 elements, they could quickly locate any target character. This form-based method of character organization and lookup is the precursor of the fully developed “radical plus stroke count” system familiar to modern users of Chinese dictionaries. But this arrangement did not just have indexical function; it also conveyed information by embedding analysis of character form into the macrostructure. Figure 5.1 is taken from Duan Yucai’s ↉⥝㺕 (1735–1815) annotated edition of the Shuowen.11 The top row shows bushou 98–110 in seal script form. The broad ordering is based on cosmological notions prevalent in Xu Shen’s time, and within this, ordering is based on graphic similarity and derivation.12 Duan’s annotations in half-width standard script present his understanding of Xu Shen’s rationale for the sequencing from one form to the next, frequently making use of the term meng 㩭 (link with) to reference graphic similarity. Shuowen was intended as a tool for arriving at a correct understanding of ancient classics. This is why Xu Shen glossed each character with what he

5.1 Bushou 98–110 from Shuowen jiezi. Source: Xu Shen, comp., Shuowen jiezi zhu 䁾᭛㾷ᄫ⊼, annot. Duan Yucai (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1986), 768.

Early Lexicons 59

determined to be its original meaning, the one reflected in the structural elements of the oldest form known to him. The graphic analysis serves the purpose of clarifying the meaning, which in turn is meant to aid in textual comprehension. This is the reason that the head entries are in the seal script (zhuanshu ㆚᳌, also known as xiaozhuan ᇣ㆚), which better reflects the structural origins of the graphs than the clerical script (lishu 䲌᳌) in common use at the time of Shuowen’s composition. The microstructure of Shuowen entries is complex compared to that of Erya. Entries contain up to six elements, of which only two (bolded here) must be present. Definition/explanation; elaboration and/or textual citations; graphic structure; bushou formula; pronunciation notes; earlier graphic forms (along with explanations of their structure).

Element is always present for graphs that function as bushou (and thus as semantic categories). For unit graphs, which are either pictographic or iconic in origin, the explanation of graphic structure is a description of the graph’s representational quality. For compound graphs, the function of each element making up the graph is elucidated, either as taxonomic (i.e., representing a semantic category), using cong Ң (derived from), or as phonetic (i.e., approximating the syllabic pronunciation), using sheng 㙆 (sound). The following example entries are keyed to the numbered elements listed here.

Unit Graph (5)

ˈᆺгDŽ໻䱑П㊒ϡ㰻DŽ Rì ᮹ means full. The essence of the great ҢრϔDŽ䈵ᔶDŽ޵᮹Пቀⱚ yang is not depleted. [The graph is] composed Ң᮹DŽ স᭛DŽ䈵ᔶDŽ13 of რ and ϔ. It resembles the form [of the sun]. In all cases [characters listed in] the ᮹ category are derived from ᮹. is the ancient character. It resembles the form [of the sun].

Compound Graphs (6)

ˈ∈гDŽߎᬺ✠า໪ᯚ ժቅⱐॳ⊼⍋DŽҢ∈ৃ 㙆DŽ14

Hé ⊇ is [the name of] a river. It emerges from a source in the Kunlun Mountains, beyond the pass at Dunhuang, and flows into the sea. [The graph’s meaning is] derived from ∈ (shu΃ “water”); ৃ (kě “able”) [conveys] the sound.

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ˈྟгDŽҢߔ㸷DŽ㺕㸷П ྟгDŽ15

Chū ߱ means the start. [The graph is] derived from dāo ߔ “knife” [and from] yī 㸷 “clothing” because these are the start of tailoring clothing.

In Shuowen, one may identify characters that are not words themselves but rather parts of binomes when the gloss is a two-character word containing the entry character. In such cases, both characters in the binome are glossed identically. Consider the entries for the characters in the word jiequ 㲷㊘ (a kind of wood-eating vermin); compare entry (4d). (8)

(9)

ˈ㲷㊘ˈ㴢гDŽҢ㰿ঢ় 㙆DŽ16 ˈ㲷㊘гDŽҢ㰿ߎ㙆DŽ17

Jié 㲷, [in the word] jiéqū, [which] means hé. [The graph’s meaning is] derived from 㰿; ঢ় (jí “auspicious”) [conveys] the sound. Qū ㊘, [in the word] jiéqū. [The graph’s meaning is] derived from 㰿 (chóng “vermin”); ߎ (chū “emerge”) [conveys] the sound.

Qieyun and Sound-Based Lexicons In the Han, the pronunciation of graphs was conceptualized solely at the syllabic level. It was only after an analytical mechanism was developed for breaking syllables into parts that those parts could be employed as an organizing and sequencing structure for graphs. That mechanism, fanqie ডߛ, arose in the late third century, possibly under the influence of exposure to Indic writing and phonological knowledge, and, along with the development of tones in spoken Chinese, may have spurred the development of new poetic formalisms.18 Only afterward did sound-based lexicons arise. From Lu Fayan’s 䱌⊩㿔 (ca. 581–618) preface to Qieyun and from other sources, one can see that a number of rime books were already in circulation before Qieyun.19 Qieyun proved so popular, however, that its successive redacted and improved versions displaced all those earlier books, none of which is now extant; qieyun became a term generally applied to rime books of its type.20 The organization of rime books by pronunciation and the particular phonetic features used reflect the purpose of this type of lexicon: to aid in the composition of poetry meeting the complex formal requirements of jintishi 䖥储䀽 (new-style verse). With poetry so deeply enmeshed in the cultural identity of medieval literati—and a component of the imperial exams—the qieyun line of rime books became an indispensable reference work for all educated Chinese.21 Definitions in the original Qieyun were brief and secondary to the position of a character within the macrostructure. That position indicated its place

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within the constellation of tones and rimes of the formal system. The microstructure provided a fanqie spelling that fixed its literary reading in relation to that of other graphs. Over time, however, the entries were expanded, and later redactions, such as the widely used Guangyun ᒷ䷏ ([Finely distinguished] rimes, expanded; 1008), came more to resemble general-purpose lexicons ordered by pronunciation rather than tools intended exclusively to aid in poetic composition. Characters in early rime books were first grouped broadly into the four tones of ancient Chinese: ping ᑇ (level), shang Ϟ (rising), qu এ (departing), and ru ܹ (entering). Within each tonal grouping, characters were collected into rimes (yun ䷏ or yunbu ䷏䚼) according to whether they could be rhymed together in poetry. Finally, within each rime, characters were collected into homophone groups (xiaoyun ᇣ䷏, literally, “little rimes”), each of which was provided with a fanqie spelling. Compare the following entry in Guangyun for hé 㴢 with entries (4e) and (4f). (10)

㷆ৡDŽ⠒䲙᳄˖”㴸㷤ˈ㴢” ˈজ᳄˖”㴢ˈḥ㷆” DŽ22

Name of a vermin. Erya says “qiuqi means he,” and also says: “he means mulberry tree vermin.” In the macrostructure, hé 㴢 is placed in ru-tone rime 12, which is designated hé ᳋, and given the fanqie spelling hú gé 㚵㨯—that is, h- plus -é.23

Later Development of Lexicographic Traditions Although Erya is frequently described as highly influential, its lineage is not extensive. Notable early lexicons sharing its macrostructure type are Shiming 䞟ৡ (Explanation of names; also called Yiya 䘌䲙 [Lost Erya]), perhaps dating to the early third century, which uses twenty-seven categories and provides paronomastic (i.e., based on similarity of pronunciation) definitional glosses, and the third-century Guangya ᒷ䲙 (Expanded Erya; an expansion supplement to Erya). After this, no major lexicons of this type appeared. This is perhaps not surprising because meaning-based categorization, being unavoidably somewhat arbitrary and unwieldy, is an imprecise way of organizing a vocabulary for a general-purpose lexicon. However, the division of terms and concepts into Erya-like semantic categories did persist in other textual formats, where it proved more practical as a way of organizing conceptual and literary knowledge. In this respect, the influence of Erya played an important and ongoing role in ontologically based management of Chinese textual information.24 It is seen, for example, in the regional lexicon Fangyan ᮍ㿔 (Regional speech) by Yang Xiong ᦮䲘 (53 BCE–18 CE) and in the leishu 串᳌ (categorized writings) that arose in the medieval period (see Nugent, chapter 30). It also

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proved useful for organizing circumscribed subsets of vocabulary. In the Ming and Qing dynasties, the official multilingual Chinese dictionaries known collectively as Hua Yi yiyu 㧃་䅃䁲 (Chinese-foreign interpreter vocabularies) were organized by semantic category. The sixteenth-century Korean Chinesecharacter primer Hunmong jahoe 㿧㩭ᄫ᳗ (Collection of characters to educate the ignorant) is arranged in thirty-three semantic categories. Linguists doing field surveys of minority languages in the People’s Republic of China during the second half of the twentieth century produced short grammars in the series called Yuyan jianzhi 䇁㿔ㅔᖫ (Language sketches), published by Minzu chubanshe ⇥ᮣߎ⠜⼒ (Publishing House of National Minorities). Their appended word lists are arranged by semantic category, which proved the most convenient way for field researchers to elicit vocabulary. These are just a few examples among many; whether these texts reflect influence of the structure of Erya is an open question, but it is a plausible hypothesis. The fate of Shuowen is different. Venerated, widely used, and extensively cited, it never bred successors in its image. Instead, it was the subject of ongoing textual analysis and editorial revision, especially from the Song through the Qing, acquiring an ever-expanding annotational and exegetical apparatus, with commentaries accreting upon commentaries. In a sense, Shuowen became more of an object of scholarly inquiry in itself than a living tool. In the early twentieth century, this process culminated in the massive sixteen-volume Shuowen jiezi gulin 䁾᭛㾷ᄫ䀕ᵫ (Forest of glosses on Shuowen jiezi).25 Xu Shen’s analysis of character structure was retained and remains deeply influential; it is still evident in the way ordinary Chinese users of the script conceptualize character structure and character components. Shuowen’s organizing principle also became fundamental to the organization of Chinese dictionaries and is still found (supplemented by stroke-count ordering of both bushou and characters under them) in many modern Chinese character dictionaries. Thus, although Shuowen did not breed successors with the primary function of explicating character structure, its macrostructure was inherited by later character dictionaries arranged by bushou (whose number decreased over time). Through the medieval period, these lexicons represented imperial and elite definitions of standard usage. In addition to providing definitions and textual citations, one of their key functions was to list variant forms of characters and designate one as orthodox (zheng ℷ) and others as vulgar (su ֫) or common (tong 䗮). Among the many lexicons of this type, one might mention the thirteenth-century Zitong ᄫ䗮 (Mastery of characters) and the seventeenth-century Zihui ᄫᔭ (Collection of characters). Also deserving mention are dictionaries that appear to combine macrostructure features of the Shuowen and Erya traditions. The sixth-century Yupian ⥝㆛ (Jade chapters), for example, has a system of 542 classifiers that differs minimally from Shuowen’s system of 540, but these classifiers are grouped and

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ordered by semantic category. This method combines the precision of classifier lookup with the naturalness of semantic organization.26 Among the three lexicographic types, it is rime books in the Qieyun tradition that had the longest history of practical use. Not only did new rime books continue to be written and used in later periods, such as the Mandarin rime book Zhongyuan yinyun Ё‫( ䷏䷇ܗ‬Tones and rimes of the Central Plain; 1324), but also rime books were intimately connected with the later rise of rime tables in the late Tang and early Song, which represented the earliest phonologically sophisticated presentation of Chinese pronunciation at a level smaller than the syllable.27 In one sense, the three strands can be said to have ultimately merged. In later lexicons, individual entries became more comprehensive, providing detailed definitions, information on pronunciation, examples of usage, and citations from earlier lexicons and texts (see Vedal, chapter 7). The macrostructural aspects of the lexicon accordingly lost much of their function of providing information, becoming merely a mechanism for indexing and looking up graphs. An example of the merger of the three strands is the eighteenth-century Kangxi zidian ᒋ❭ᄫ‫( ݌‬Kangxi dictionary; 1716). Its macrostructure of 214 bushou is inherited, ultimately, from Shuowen. It contained a rime table based on Mandarin reading pronunciations of characters. The entries provide medieval fanqie spellings taken from Qieyun series rime books, indicate standard and variant character forms, and cite earlier lexicographic sources. For example, the Kangxi entry for hé 㴢 gives fanqie spellings from the medieval rime books Tangyun ૤䷏ (Tang rimes) and Jiyun 䲚䷏ (Rimes with collected scholia) and cites Shuowen and Erya glosses.28 Kangxi is the preeminent exemplar of the combined structural and substantial information content of the premodern lexicographic tradition (see Vedal, chapter 7).

Notes 1. It is only in the modern era that true word-based Chinese dictionaries emerged; for example, see John DeFrancis, ed., ABC Chinese-English Dictionary (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1996). 2. On the content and structure of a surviving manuscript of one of these early word lists, the Cang Jie pian ‫䷵ם‬㆛, see Roger Greatrex, “An Early Western Han Synonymicon,” in Outstretched Leaves on His Bamboo Staff, ed. Joakim Enwall (Stockholm: Association of Oriental Studies, 1994), 97–113. 3. Lei Zhu, “Language and Linguistics in Pre-modern China and East Asia,” in Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Linguistics, ed. Mark Aronoff (July 27, 2017), https://doi .org/10.1093/acrefore/9780199384655.013.382. 4. W. South Coblin, “Erh ya ⠒䲙,” in Early Chinese Texts: A Bibliographical Guide, ed. Michael Loewe (Berkeley: Society for the Study of Early China and Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California, 1993), 94–99.

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5. W. South Coblin, “Ěry΁ ⠒䲙,” in Encyclopedia of Chinese Language and Linguistics, ed. Rint Sybesma et al. (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 2:188. 6. Binomes are words consisting of two characters. In most cases, binomes represent bisyllabic morphemes, not compound words. Note that Erya differs from Shuowen and Qieyun in that the single graph is not the sole unit of organization. 7. Jiang Zhaoxi ྰ‫ܚ‬䣿, Erya zhushu canyi ⠒䲙⊼⭣গ䅄, in Xuxiu siku quanshu 㑠ׂ ಯᑿܼ᳌, ed. Xuxiu Siku quanshu bianzuan weiyuanhui, vol. 185 (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 2002), 484a. 8. Chunqiu Guliangzhuan zhushu ᯹⾟〔ṕ‫⭣⊼ڇ‬, 18.53a, in Chongkan Songben Shisanjing zhushu fu jiaokanji 䞡ߞᅟᴀकϝ㍧⊼⭣䰘᷵ࢬ㿬, ed. Ruan Yuan 䰂‫( ܗ‬1764– 1849) (preface 1815). 9. Guoyu, 2 vols. (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1978), 1:116. 10. Jiang Zhaoxi, Erya zhushu canyi, 535ff, entries 1, 2, 3, 12, 52, 60. 11. Xu Shen, comp., Shuowen jiezi zhu 䁾᭛㾷ᄫ⊼, annot. Duan Yucai (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1986), 768b. 12. Françoise Bottéro, Sémantisme et classification dans l’écriture chinoise: Les systèmes de classment de caractères par clé du Shuowen jiezi au Kangxi zidian (Paris: Collège de France, Institut des haute études chinoises, 1996), 71–75. 13. Xu Shen, Shuowen jiezi zhu, 302a. 14. Xu Shen, Shuowen jiezi zhu, 516a. 15. Xu Shen, Shuowen jiezi zhu, 178b. Compare with entry (2). 16. Xu Shen, Shuowen jiezi zhu, 665a. 17. Xu Shen, Shuowen jiezi zhu, 665a. 18. See Jintao Sun, “Fӽnqiè ডߛ,” in Sybesma et al., Encyclopedia of Chinese Language and Linguistics, 2:225–28. 19. See Young Oh, “Rime Dictionaries,” in Sybesma et al., Encyclopedia of Chinese Language and Linguistics, 3:600–8. 20. Françoise Bottéro, “The Qièyùn Manuscripts from Dūnhuáng,” in Studies in Chinese Manuscripts: From the Warring States Period to the 20th Century, ed. Imre Galambos (Budapest: Institute of East Asian Studies, 2013), 33–48, esp. 47. 21. Pauline Yu, “Chinese Poetry and Its Institutions,” in Hsiang Lectures on Chinese Poetry, ed. Grace S. Fong (Montreal: Centre for East Asian Research, McGill University, 2002), 2:53–69. 22. Lin Yin ᵫል, ed., Xinjiao zhengqie Songben Guangyun ᮄ᷵ℷߛᅟᴀᒷ䷏ (Taipei: Liming wenhua shiye, 1976), 482–83. 23. Fanqie spellings were based on Middle Chinese pronunciations, but this one happens to work in Mandarin. 24. On early manuscript examples from the Tang, see Bottéro, Sémantisme et classification, 121–38. 25. Ding Fubao ϕ⽣ֱ, Shuowen jiezi gulin (Shanghai: Shangwu yinshuguan, 1930). 26. Bottéro, Sémantisme et classification, 95–96. 27. See Richard VanNess Simmons, “Rime Tables and Rime Table Studies,” in Sybesma et al., Encyclopedia of Chinese Language and Linguistics, 3:609–19. 28. Kangxi zidian (Shanghai: Shanghai wenyi chubanshe, 2000), 1214.

CHAPTER 6

RIME TABLES DAV I D P R AG E R B R A N N E R

R

ime tables are the third expression of phonology—following phonogram character-structure and fanqie ডߛ phonology (see Handel, chapters 1 and 5)—known to have emerged in China, and the first that was rigorous. From the standpoint of information management, the tables introduced two systematic innovations to thinking about pronunciation: discrete, named categories for different components of a Chinese syllable and a schematic visual presentation. Category names reflected an articulatoryphonetics analysis of those components, which appeared in a regular order. Rime tables embodied the first known systematic Chinese phonology, and their innovations were meant to help people use dictionaries. Mastering rime table phonology required considerable technical understanding in the tables’ own era, as does studying them today. Rime tables existed by the twelfth century, the era of our earliest surviving examples. Even then, they did not describe actual oral language but were meant as guides to the reading-tradition phonology of rime books, to which they were closely keyed. They provided none of the content of a rime book, specifying only the phonology of various xiaoyun ᇣ䷏ (subrimes or homophone groups) in rime books. Their origin is unknown, but they are associated at first with Buddhist communities, where some knowledge of the Indic phonological tradition must have existed. This chapter illustrates the use of tables and then describes two aspects of them as information: their diversity of form and structure and their workings as abstract vehicles for linguistic information, both of which distinguish them from tools originating in the West.

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Using the Yunjing as a Guide to the Guangyun The Yunjing ䷏䦵 (Mirror of rimes) is the earliest and best known rime table, though atypical of the tradition overall. It answers one primary question: If one is looking at a character glossed in a dictionary like the Guangyun ᒷ䷏ (Finely distinguished rimes, expanded; 1008), how does one pronounce it? A secondary consequence was to schematize Guangyun phonology as a formal system— something rime books themselves did not do until much later. For example, suppose one is looking at the graph ⚟ (mái in Modern Standard Chinese) in the Guangyun: ⚟ǃ᜻г ⚟ means “wise, intelligent.”

How is it pronounced? In the Guangyun, it appears in column 17 of its rime (14jiē ⱚ) (see figure 6.1). The gloss is simple, and no alternate readings are cross-referenced (some graphs have more than one reading, and not all are cross-referenced, but in any case, none is shown here). This graph is one of several making up a xiaoyun, all of which share the same reading. A xiaoyun is marked by a circle before the first character, ඟ (also mái in Modern Standard Chinese), itself glossed:

6.1 Rime 14-jiē ⱚ in the Guangyun. Source: Songben Guangyun, Yongluben Yunjing ᅟᴀᒷ䷏独∌⽓ᴀ䷏䦵 (Nanjing: Jiangsu jiaoyu chubanshe, 2002), shangping Ϟᑇ, 25b–26a.

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ඟǃ⯲гǃ㮣гǃ㥿ⱚߛǃಯ ඟ. It means “to bury.” It means “to store away.” It is read as 㥿 and ⱚ pronounced close together. There are four [graphs in this xiaoyun].

The phrase “㥿 and ⱚ pronounced close together” is a fanqie ডߛ, the Guangyun’s way of indicating the pronunciation of ඟ in this formal system along with all the other graphs in the same xiaoyun. But fanqie are imprecise; also, one fanqie is hard to relate to another. The Yunjing offers precision and places the reading of ⚟ in an overall system. How? The Guangyun’s rime 14-jiē ⱚ is schematized in tables 13 and 14 of the Yunjing (table numbering from the original text). Table 13 (figure 6.2) shows ඟ in the second row of the first section of the table and the fourth column from the right. The heading of that column (chunyin—qingzhuo 㛷䷇爤⏙▕) indicates that ඟ has a labial sonorant initial in this phonology, which modern linguists represent concisely as *m-. (Column headings and other matter around the edges of table 13 use technical language, translated in figure 6.4.)1 The phonological meaning of the row where ඟ appears (labeled jiē ⱚ in the leftmost column) is harder to represent in Roman letters, but it is some variety of *-ai or *-ei, so that the whole syllable is something like *mai

6.2 Table 13 of the Yunjing. Source: Songben Guangyun, Yongluben Yunjing, 11b.

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or *mei. Only ඟ is shown, standing for all four characters in its xiaoyun— including ⚟. The Yunjing normally uses the head character of the xiaoyun in the Guangyun. The placement of ඟ in the table shows how its reading relates to the readings of other graphs. It has the same theoretical ending as the readings of the other graphs in the same row: ᥦ, 뺂, ᧟, ᨼ, ⱚ, ᦽ, 鉧, 唟, Ꮒ, 䉎, ጑, ⷌ, ⚱, 䂻, and ଏ. (A circle ⚪ where a graph is expected means none has the corresponding reading.) The reading of ඟ begins with the same initial sound as all other graphs placed in the column for labial sonorant initials in this and other tables of the Yunjing. One could not easily have gotten that kind of information from the Guangyun without a lot of labor—the Yunjing is a guide to the Guangyun, and it turns the phonology implicit in the Guangyun into an explicit formal system that one can consider as a whole. Some of the xiaoyun head-characters in the Guangyun’s rime 14-jiē ⱚ do not appear in table 13 of the Yunjing; they appear instead in the second row of the first section of table 14 (figure 6.3): ሉ, Ъ, ः, 㝫, 㱎, ់, ᐡ. The Yunjing shows that tables 13 and 14 are related as open mouth versus closed mouth (kaikou 䭟ষ versus hekou ড়ষ), so table 14 can be visualized as representing sounds something like *-u֒ ai or *-u֒ ei, compared to table 13’s *-ai or *-ei.

6.3 Table 14 of the Yunjing. Source: Songben Guangyun, Yongluben Yunjing, 12a.

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Say one wants to know how to read ୱ (guāi in Modern Standard Chinese), in column 9 of Guangyun rime 14-jiē ⱚ: ୱǃ䁾᭛᳄ǃ㚠ਖгǃ榢ᄫᕲℸ ୱ. The Shuowen jiezi says, “the vertebrae of the back.” Graph 榢 is a phonetic derivative of this.

It is in the xiaoyun headed by Ъ: Ъǃⵑгǃ䲶гǃ᠒гǃ㚠гǃস់ߛǃಯ Ъ. It means “isolated.” It means “separated from.” It means “violating norms.” It means “turning the back on.” It is read as স and ់ pronounced close together. There are four [graphs in this xiaoyun].

Ъ is found in the Yunjing’s table 14, in the second row of the first section and the column for velar unaspirated stops (*k-), so it is pronounced something like *ku֒ ai or *ku֒ ei. (Column headings and other matter around the edges of table 14 use technical language, translated in figure 6.4.) The Yunjing is less useful for going from a known syllable to a precise spot in the Guangyun, but it can serve as an index to xiaoyun head-characters if the reader is comfortable with its phonological system. The Yunjing corresponds to the contents of the Guangyun more closely than to that of older books in

6.4 The translated legend for figures 6.2 and 6.3.

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the tradition, though still imperfectly: there is one xiaoyun in the Guangyun, headed by ገ, that appears in neither Yunjing table for this rime. Comparing the Yunjing with the Guangyun makes obvious how much more explicitly the former indicates a character’s reading. And fanqie such as the Guangyun uses were not the first but the second system known to have been used for specifying Chinese phonology. Phonogram character-structure was the first. Both may appear precise, but neither was accurate. If either was designed or taught systematically, there is no evidence of that today. And rime books, always compendious, grew fat with obscure graphs by the time of the Guangyun. Rime tables were revolutionary because they streamlined phonology. Rime tables are compact and sophisticated, and their phonological information is dense: one representative character per distinct syllable. In addition to using rime names from the Guangyun, the Yunjing assigns names to other phonological categories (figure 6.5). Each attested syllable is represented by a single character, the head-character of a rime book homophone group. Large columns—demarcated by vertical lines—represent groups of initials with the same place of articulation; smaller columns—not so demarcated—represent distinct initials within those groups. The initials are named not explicitly but (not quite uniquely) by place

6.5 The Yunjing’s presentation of the thirty-six initials. Source: Songben Guangyun, Yongluben Yunjing, 3a.

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and manner of articulation. That is what makes the Yunjing atypical—most other rime tables label words with exemplary initial names. Rows represent rimes that are congruent but differ by tone. Tones are not marked explicitly; you must recognize them. Horizontal rows within the large sections represent different divisions or grades (deng ㄝ “rows”). Deng give their name to rime tables overall, known in Chinese as dengyun tu ㄝ䷏೪ (charts of rimes on different rows). What the deng mean linguistically is unresolved, apart from referring literally to rows of the tables. They have been interpreted phonetically (Zenone Volpicelli, Bernhard Karlgren), phonologically (Simon Schaank, Yuen Ren Chao 䍭‫ܗ‬ӏ), as cooccurrence patterns (Li Rong ᴢᾂ, Li Xinkui ᴢᮄ儕, W. South Coblin), prosodically (Edwin G. Pulleyblank, Axel Schuessler), and morphologically (Laurent Sagart) as well as with combinations of those and other approaches. This is a key question in Chinese historical phonology but beyond the scope of this discussion.2 The innovations of the rime tables—discrete tokens of phonological information in a fixed order and tabular format—caught on and began to appear more and more widely. But no single format emerged as a standard until the work of Yuen Ren Chao (1892–1982) in 1928–30, discussed in the final section of this chapter. The Yunjing’s condensed analysis of Guangyun phonology can be quantified in several ways. The Guangyun has 26,194 graphs in 3,878 xiaoyun; the Yunjing has only 3,695 syllables, 95 percent of the expected number—not only are some xiaoyun omitted, but also some Yunjing syllables are unattested in the Guangyun. While the Yunjing shows only one graph per syllable, the median number of graphs per xiaoyun is five in the Guangyun. The Yunjing preface asserts that there are thirty-six discrete syllable-initials, which its tables display in twenty-three columns. The Guangyun uses many different characters to represent each of those thirty-six: a median of fourteen fanqie “uppers” (initial graphs). Such is the compression effected by the Yunjing, bringing the Guangyun’s 526 half-pages down to forty-three tables. But within those tables, the Yunjing also adds considerable detail. The Guangyun has 206 rimes, each in its own chapter. The Yunjing elaborates them into 398 rows, almost doubling their number, to distinguish them by differences in kaikou and hekou and other qualities.

Rime Table Phonology After the Yunjing Rime books continued to use fanqie alone to indicate readings, independently of rime tables, for some centuries after the time of the Yunjing. But by the late thirteenth century, there was a full rime book—including compounds, citations from classical texts, and notes on character-structure—organized according to rime table principles: the 1297 Gujin yunhui juyao সҞ䷏᳗㟝㽕 (Essentials of

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the collection of ancient and modern rimes) of Xiong Zhong ❞ᖴ.3 Although the Juyao uses the simplified Pingshui ᑇ∈ system of rimes, like the Guangyun it describes an idealized mainstream reading pronunciation—the focus of many tables even as that ideal pronunciation evolved over the centuries. But mainstream reading pronunciation is not the only kind of phonology in rime tables. By the sixteenth century, one also begins to see tables describing regional language and phonology predating the Guangyun. By the late eighteenth century, scholars such as Jiang Yong ∳∌ (1681–1762) and Dai Zhen ᠈䳛 (1724–77) were illustrating their ideas on Old Chinese with tables.4 From then into the twentieth century, countless tabular dictionaries appeared, documenting words of popular origin alongside character readings in diverse regional languages of northern and southern China. A modern but traditional example is Jiang Rulin’s 㫷‫ۦ‬ᵫ Chaoyu shiwu yin ╂䁲कѨ䷇ (Dictionary of Chaozhou dialect on the system of fifteen initials; 1921).5 The Sisheng yunpu ಯ㙆䷏䄰 (Schema of rimes in all four tones) of Liang Sengbao ṕ‫ڻ‬ᇊ (jinshi 1859) conservatively presents the phonological content of the Guangyun in rime table format, with some emendations based on the more massive Jiyun 䲚䷏ (Rimes with collected scholia; 1039) (figure 6.6). Liang does just what the creators of the Yunjing did: he tries to make complex reading-phonology easier. His work is much more conservative than most of the tables of his time because he lived in an era that admired philological rigor. But he notes that scholars then were familiar only with the 106 Pingshui rimes (guanyun ᅬ䷏ “the official rimes”) and found it painful to command the full Guangyun system.6 Columns in Liang’s book represent medieval initials under their standard names. Rows represent congruent rimes in different tones, which are marked explicitly. The large characters are head-characters or other prominent characters in the Guangyun, with the Guangyun’s fanqie above them. Smaller characters under a head-character are the rest of that homophone group. Cells without a head-character are syllables not formally part of this table but treated as though they belong here because of the way living phonology had diverged from the tradition. In addition to the varied systems of syllable-components found in different tables, there are other sources for thinking about tables. The Dunhuang manuscripts include menfa 䭔⊩ (techniques for the course of study)—rules for resolving technical problems in understanding a fanqie or the structure of a syllable.7 By the Ming, syllable-components are also being associated with esoteric forces: yin and yang, the five effectings (wuxing Ѩ㸠), the four immanences (sixiang ಯ䈵), the trigrams and hexagrams of the Yijing ᯧ㍧ (Classic of Changes), and various other numbered lists of syncretic tokens. In fact, esoteric use of phonology already appears in correlative cosmologist Shao Yong’s 䚉䲡 (1011–77) Huangji jingshi shu ⱛὉ㍧Ϫ᳌ (Book for governing the world

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6.6 Page from Liang Sengbao’s Sisheng yunpu corresponding to figure 6.2. Source: Liang Sengbao, Sisheng yunpu (1890; repr., Beijing: Guji chubanshe, 1955), 11.20a.

through the utmost of majesty). Although rime tables rationalized the study of phonology, their tradition has not always exposed information in a rational way.

Rime Tables as Abstract Vehicles for Linguistic Information The information in rimes tables is abstract and represented by exemplary tokens. On one hand, its categories seem much less flexible than alphabetic

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or phonetic writing, but on the other, they free one from representing sound literally. Yuen Ren Chao declared the significance of this abstractness in 1928: These are a set of symbols that represent categories.  .  .  . As for what sounds (phonetic values) they have when read out loud, that varies from place to place. . . . This concept of the sound category is like Jones’s concept of the phoneme, but even broader than the phoneme. . . . The “sound” is taken not as a sound, but as a class. This idea is somewhat like that of phoneme . . . but still more radical than the phoneme, as the bringing in of different times and places makes it more inclusive and complicated.8

Although here Chao is describing a system for notating diverse dialects in a single Roman-letter representation (a diasystem), he is also stating the fundamental concept of rime table categories as abstract classes rather than absolute phonetic values. This point is not trivial, and Chao is not exaggerating. It is a distinctively Chinese outlook on the representation of language. Western-style historical phonology, in contrast, is strongly focused on reconstructions, which imply the existence in the past of a population that used the ancestral language with some sort of consistency. Notions of racial-ethnic identity are bound up in the history of how reconstruction was developed in the decades between Sir William Jones and August Schleicher in envisioning a literal phonetic form for Indo-European. However, rime tables like the Yunjing describe not an actual language but a system for making sense of fanqie in rime books of the Guangyun tradition. And what those fanqie represent is something more abstract and independent of geography than any form of speech that can be reconstructed with explicit phonetics. People today also often assume the Chinese phonological tradition developed in response to the needs of poetic composition, but the Yunjing preface, like the prefaces to the Guangyun and the other rime books that preceded it, says nothing about poetry. The creator of the Qieyun ߛ䷏ (Finely distinguished rimes)—of which the Guangyun is an elaboration—says in his preface that the book makes fine (qiè ߛ) distinctions between sounds, finer than observed in the pronunciation of any one regional accent. The purpose of learning these distinctions, he says, is to “broaden one’s path to success in civil appointments” (guang wenlu ᒷ᭛䏃; “civil,” rather than military) and to “enjoy the company of like-minded people in literary composition” (shang zhiyin 䊲ⶹ䷇).9 These are not handbooks of poetic rhyming or even narrowly of correct pronunciation—they are used to understand what words may be finely distinguished by sound as part of having cultured sensibilities. However, around the time of Liang Sengbao, the phonology of the early rime tables began to be seen as the ancestor of all Chinese language. This idea

6.7 Page from Yuen Ren Chao’s Fangyin diaocha biaoge corresponding to figure 6.2. “Litzibiao [Lizibiao] ՟ᄫ㸼,” in Yuen Ren Chao, Fangyin diaocha biaoge (Peiping: Guoli Zhongyang yanjiuyuan lishi yuyan yanjiusuo, 1930), pt. 1:15.

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evidently originated not in China but among Western residents of China such as Joseph Edkins (1823–1905), who knew something of Indo-European methodology. On the one hand, it formed the basis for reconstructing Chinese, pioneered by Bernhard Karlgren (1889–1978). On the other, it became the basis of a core aspect of thinking about Chinese linguistic identity during the Republican era.10 The idea culminated in a modern rime table designed by Yuen Ren Chao in 1930 to represent the phonology underlying most of Chinese: the Fangyin diaocha biaoge ᮍ䷇䂓ᶹ㸼Ḑ (Tables for surveying dialect pronunciation). A page of it appears in figure 6.7, corresponding to part of figure 6.2 from the Yunjing. This shows nearly all the distinctions of medieval Chinese, with common representative characters likely to be known to educated speakers, for use in dialect surveying. Chao and his colleagues used the Biaoge extensively in fieldwork, and it was eventually revised as the 1956 Fangyan diaocha zibiao ᮍ㿔䂓ᶹᄫ㸼 (Character tables for dialect surveying), a core tool for dialect fieldwork and the study of historical phonology in China.11 The Chao model also spread to modern work on Old Chinese: Dong Tonghe 㨷ৠ啶 (1911–63), a close colleague of Chao’s in dialect surveying, produced the first Old Chinese reconstruction after Karlgren, plotted in a rime table format close to that of the Biaoge.12 The Biaoge embodies the notion that dialects and medieval rime books are mutually interpreting aspects of the same unified corpus of information. That notion, the ideal that all Chinese dialects are the children of a medieval parent language summarized in the rime tables, persists today. Every Chinese student of Chinese historical phonology learns the rime table categories. And so Chao’s tables are the end of perhaps a millennium of development and are now the primary model for thinking about the unity of Chinese language on a historical foundation—influenced by South Asian phonetic theory and Western historical linguistics.

Notes 1. See David Prager Branner, “Introduction,” in The Chinese Rime Tables: Linguistic Philosophy and Historical-Comparative Phonology, ed. David Prager Branner (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2006), 1–7, for discussion of the parts of a similar early table, the Sisheng dengzi ಯ㙆ㄝᄤ. 2. Much of Branner, The Chinese Rime Tables, deals with different interpretations of the deng. 3. Xiong Zhong, Gujin yunhui juyao (1297; 1883; repr., Kyoto: Chubun shuppansha, 1990). 4. Jiang Yong, Sisheng qieyun biao ಯ㙆ߛ䷏㸼, 1771; Dai Zhen, Shenglei biao 㙆串㸼, 1777. Both appear in Yan Shihui ಈᓣ䁼, comp., Yinyunxue congshu ䷇䷏ᅌশ᳌ (1933; repr., Chengdu: Sichuan renmin chubanshe, 1957).

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5. Jiang Rulin, Chaoyu shiwu yin (1921; repr., Hong Kong: Chan Sheung Kee Book Store, n.d.). 6. Liang Sengbao, “Xuli” ᬬ՟, in Sisheng yunpu (1890; repr., Beijing: Guji chubanshe, 1955), 3b. 7. W. South Coblin, “Reflections on the Sh€uwēn Fragments,” in Branner, The Chinese Rime Tables, 99–122. 8. Yuen Ren Chao, Studies in the Modern Wu-Dialects = Xiandai Wuyu de yanjiu ⧒ҷਇ 䁲ⱘⷨお (Beijing: Tsing Hua College Research Institute, 1928). The first quoted paragraph is translated from the Chinese text in “Diaocha shuoming” 䂓ᶹ䁾ᯢ (11) and the second paragraph from “Introduction in English” (vi). 9. Qieyun preface from the Wang Renxu ⥟ҕ᯿ Kanmiu buque Qieyun ߞ䄀㺰㔎ߛ䷏ edition quoted in Li Rong ᴢᾂ, “Lu Fayan de Qieyun” 䱌⊩㿔ⱘljߛ䷏NJ, 28, in Li Rong, Yinyun cungao ䷇䷏ᄬ〓 (Beijing: Shangwu yinshuguan, 1982). 10. For a detailed account of the roles of Edkins and Chao, see David Prager Branner, “Some Composite Phonological Systems in Chinese,” in Branner, The Chinese Rime Tables, 209–32. 11. Zhongguo shehui kexueyuan yuyan yanjiu Ё೟⼒᳗⾥ᅌ䰶䁲㿔ⷨお, ed., Fangyan diaocha zibiao ᮍ㿔䂓ᶹᄫ㸼, rev. ed. (Beijing: Shangwu yinshuguan, 1981). 12. Dong Tonghe, Shanggu yinyun biaogao Ϟস䷇䷏㸼〓 (Lizhuang [Sichuan]: Institute of History and Philology, Academia Sinica, 1944).

CHAPTER 7

LATER IMPERIAL LEXICONS N AT H A N V E DA L

T

he most common premodern terms for lexicographic compilations of information concerning the meaning, pronunciation, and written form of graphs are zishu ᄫ᳌ (graph book) and yunshu ䷏᳌ (rime book).1 Generally, zishu referred to dictionaries organized according to the structure of graphs, while yunshu were organized according to their phonology. The two terms also seem to have been used interchangeably, however, and it is not uncommon to see either one used as a generic designation for lexicons in bibliographies. In 1716, the Qing court printed an influential dictionary with the term zidian ᄫ‫ ݌‬in the title. As it first appears in this context, the term zidian should be understood literally as “a canonical collection of graphs” and later as a shorthand reference to this specific dictionary; however, it would eventually be adopted as a generic word for “dictionary” in the modern Chinese language. The classical tradition of lexicography established the primary modes of accessing information about Chinese graphs based on their shape, sound, or meaning (see Handel, chapter 5). Although there was interaction among these three categories, dictionaries were typically organized with a focus on one of these aspects in order to serve varying literary, pedagogical, and scholarly functions. For the most part, the language represented in premodern lexicons was Literary Chinese rather than spoken vernaculars.2 The classical tradition of regional lexicography, initiated in Yang Xiong’s ᦮䲘 (53 BCE–18 CE) Fangyan ᮍ㿔 (Regional speech), inspired relatively few later imitators, although there exist several late imperial dictionaries concerned with regional languages, such

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as Li Shi’s ᴢᆺ (ca. 1596–ca. 1674) Shuyu 㳔䁲 (The speech of Shu) and Mao Qiling’s ↯༛唵 (1623–1716) Yueyu kenqing lu 䍞䁲㚃㎂䣘 (A record of the essential points of Zhejiang dialect). Given the largely monosyllabic nature of the literary language, as well as the basis of the organizational principles of Chinese lexicons in aspects of the graph itself, lexicons primarily explicated individual (single-syllable) graphs rather than the multisyllabic compounds common in the vernacular.3

Phonological Organization As it is a primarily logographic script, the sound of individual Chinese graphs is not immediately apparent based on their form (see Handel, chapter 1). The existence of phonetic elements in the majority of graphs notwithstanding, the issue of how to effectively “spell” Chinese has been a topic of considerable discussion from antiquity to the present day. Lexicons concerned primarily with phonology presented several significant methods for conceptualizing the phonological nature of the Chinese syllable as well as indexing this information. Accessing lexicographic information on the basis of phonological characteristics was often motivated by literary necessity. Particularly in the composition of rhymed genres, from poetry to operatic arias, phonological dictionaries provided writers with a rhyming standard and served as reference works to facilitate composition. The following discussion of phonological organization is divided into two parts: literary phonology and historical phonology. Lexicons of literary phonology were primarily aimed at setting a standard for composition within a set of genres. Lexicography of ancient phonology could also be motivated by literary concerns within the context of ancient-style poetry composition but also pertained to the study and recitation of the Classics.

Literary Phonology The earliest significant lexicon organized by sound is the 601 Qieyun ߛ䷏ (Finely distinguished rimes), known primarily today through its 1008 Song court redaction Guangyun ᒷ䷏ ([Finely distinguished] rimes, expanded) (see Handel, chapter 5, and Branner, chapter 6). The phonological characteristics codified in Qieyun that had the greatest influence on later lexicons were, first, a four-part tonal division of Chinese graphs and, second, the glossing of a single syllable (one Chinese graph) by means of two graphs. Early sound-based dictionaries emphasized phonology for rhymed verse composition but included other kinds of information as well. A typical entry in Guangyun appears as follows: “zhōng: good, correct, appropriate, central; also as in

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zhōngyī, undergarments” 㹋ˈ୘гˈℷгˈ䘽гˈЁгˈজ㹋㸷㼏㸷г.4 The primary mode of semantic explanation in phonological dictionaries was by means of synonyms. Some entries in Guangyun also reference explanations in classical lexicons such as Shuowen jiezi 䁾᭛㾷ᄫ (Explaining simple graphs and analyzing complex graphs), Erya ⠒䲙 (Approaching the elegant), and Shiming 䞟ৡ (Explanation of names). Occasionally, alternate pronunciations are provided. It is uncommon to see extended definitions, further suggesting that such lexicons were consulted primarily for their phonological content. The rime system of Qieyun/Guangyun functioned as an authority for poetic composition in many genres in later imperial China, owing to the belief that it represented the phonology of the great medieval poets. In the thirteenth century, its system would be further modified, most notably reducing the rime groups from 206 to 106. These 106 rime groups, known as the pingshui ᑇ∈ rimes, would form the basis for elementary poetic education for later generations. Subsequent philologists experimented with rime categories entirely removed from those of Guangyun, developing new rhyming lexicons based on contemporary vernaculars. Such lexicons were still primarily concerned with the literary language, but their phonological basis was no longer directly linked to the foundational medieval works of the tradition.5 Perhaps the most significant deviation from the Qieyun tradition arose in the fourteenth century in the context of northern drama (zaju 䲰࡛) composition. Zhou Deqing’s ਼ᖋ⏙ (1277–1365) Zhongyuan yinyun Ёॳ䷇䷏ (Tones and rimes of the Central Plain) contained only three tones: level, rising, and falling. It eliminated the entering tone, which had largely disappeared from many northern dialects by this time, and distributed graphs that had formerly been categorized as entering tone among the other three tones. This innovation was justified not only by its basis in contemporary northern speech but also on the aesthetic grounds that the stop consonant (-p, -t, -k) characteristic of entering tone finals was inappropriate for refined singing. Zhou also divided the level-tone graphs into two divisions based on whether their initial was voiced, creating a four-part division akin to that of Modern Mandarin.6 The removal of an entering tone category was contentious, particularly among southern scholars whose native topolects preserved this tone. However, the text was widely adopted by dramatists and served as a model for later opera lexicons, such as the fourteenth-century Qionglin yayun ⪞ᵫ䲙䷏ (Elegant rimes of the jadewhite forest) and the eighteenth-century Yunxue lizhu ䷏ᅌ倾⦴ (Precious pearls of rime study). Zhongyuan yinyun also provided an alternative method of phonological ordering. In Qieyun/Guangyun, the overarching organizational feature was the tone, with each juan devoted to a single tone. Within each juan, there was a set of rime categories specific to that tone, and within each rime category, graphs were placed into homophone groups on the basis of shared fanqie spellings.

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The fundamental structural element of Zhongyuan yinyun was the rime group rather than tone. Graphs were grouped within a rime group based on a shared final and further subdivided within that rime group by tone. In addition, Zhongyuan yinyun provides only headword graphs with no semantic information, signaling an even more exclusively phonological function than Qieyun. The Qieyun mode of phonological organization remained dominant in later rime books. The influence of Zhongyuan yinyun ultimately lay less in its organizational system than in its reflection of a contemporary pronunciation as well as its attention to the language of a nonclassical genre of literature.

Historical Phonology The rhyme patterns of classical texts were significant to later scholars for their function in two primary venues: recitation of the Classics and poetic composition in ancient styles. Prior to the twelfth century, scholars recognized that ancient poetry no longer rhymed when read in their contemporary language, but they typically made ad hoc adjustments to reading pronunciations according to the largely unsystematic xieyun ৊䷏ (forced-rhyme) method.7 Some Tang poets, such as Han Yu 䶧ᛜ (768–824), also emulated ancient poetic rhyming, but their attempts were largely impressionistic. The first dictionary to systematically analyze ancient rimes was Wu Yu’s ਇế (ca. 1100–1154) Yunbu ䷏㺰 (Rime supplement). Wu created a set of nine rime classes that he posited to have existed in antiquity. Although he included some graphs in more than one class, his system nevertheless reduced the range of options for adjusting the pronunciation of a graph. Chen Di’s 䱇㄀ (1541–1616) Mao Shi guyin kao ↯䀽স䷇㗗 (An analysis of the ancient sounds in the Mao Odes) of 1606 refuted Wu’s method and is generally considered the first clear articulation of the concept that the entire phonological system of Chinese in antiquity was different from that of later periods. Wu Yu had delimited a set of readings for each graph, but the ability to choose freely among these options did not reflect systematic phonological differences. Chen Di, on the other hand, argued that each graph in antiquity had only one pronunciation. Chen’s work was highly influential on the increasingly sophisticated phonological dictionaries of ancient pronunciations produced by scholars such as Gu Yanwu 主♢℺ (1613–82), Jiang Yong ∳∌ (1681–1762), and Duan Yucai ↉⥝㺕 (1735–1815).8

Script-Based Organization Sound-based methods of information lookup were immensely useful in a context of literary composition and recitation. Conceivably, they could also be used

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to consult the proper form of a graph for which one was certain only of the pronunciation. Later phonologically organized dictionaries, such as the late fourteenth-century Ming court lexicon Hongwu zhengyun ⋾℺ℷ䷏ (Correct rimes of the Hongwu reign), therefore promoted themselves not only as phonological reference tools but also as standards for the correct script. Phonological lexicons would be of limited utility, however, in the identification of unknown graphs encountered in reading. Script-based lookup could provide readers with a convenient way to access the pronunciation and meaning of unfamiliar graphs as well as the proper form of known graphs. Given the epistemological authority invested in the graph itself, script-based dictionaries also became a locus for investigating the nature of Chinese writing and the perceived intent underlying the construction of individual graphs. Experimentation with organizational systems was particularly fruitful in this domain and gave birth to one of the major lookup methods still in use today in Chinese dictionaries. There were many attempts from the sixth century onward to reorganize or simplify the 540-classifier system by which graphs were organized in the seminal script dictionary, Shuowen jiezi. Most significantly, Mei Yingzuo ṙ 㞎⼮ established a set of 214 classifiers in his 1615 Zihui ᄫᔭ (Collection of characters). Beyond significantly reducing the number of classifiers, Zihui offered an innovative and subsequently influential lookup method. Classifiers within Zihui were ordered according to the number of brushstrokes needed to write them. Similarly, graphs falling under a particular classifier category were ordered according to the number of strokes needed to write them, not including the classifier. Earlier dictionaries had experimented with stroke-based ordering within classifier categories but had organized the classifiers themselves phonologically or thematically.9 Stroke-based ordering provided a relatively simple method to quickly delimit the scope of consultation in a dictionary. For example, while reading, one might encounter a graph such as 亚 without knowing its pronunciation (biāo) or meaning (storm). To look up this information, one would first identify the classifier—in this case, 乼 feng (wind)—and count the remaining number of strokes in the graph—in this case, twelve. The graph 亚 is located under the 乼 classifier section of the dictionary (containing a total of 154 individual graphs) and within the subsection of graphs containing an additional twelve strokes, where it is one of thirteen graphs. The 乼 classifier, which itself contains nine strokes, is grouped in a volume with other nine-stroke classifiers. Dictionaries in the Zihui lineage included substantial content within lemmata, providing phonological, semantic, and paleographic information. Synonyms or short descriptive glosses functioned as definitions, which were illustrated by means of citations culled from throughout the classical and literary tradition. Because the structural foundation of such dictionaries was the form of graphs

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rather than the sound, a single entry included any pronunciation variants as well as definitions specific to these different readings. Historical and variant graph forms were also frequently listed. Mei Yingzuo’s dictionary had an immediate impact and was succeeded by several expansions, culminating in what is perhaps today the best-known premodern dictionary of Chinese, the Kangxi zidian ᒋ❭ᄫ‫( ݌‬Kangxi dictionary). Compiled over the course of six years by a committee of thirty court scholars and first printed in 1716, Kangxi zidian listed over forty-seven thousand graphs, organized according to the classifier system of Zihui (known today as the Kangxi classifiers). Its Ming imperial predecessor Hongwu zhengyun is reported to have fallen into disuse following its compilation. The Qing court, which generally supervised intellectual and literary production more strictly than the Ming, promulgated Kangxi zidian widely and censored competing lexicons. Although the information contained within the lemmata of Kangxi zidian does not diverge widely from that of Zihui or its successor Zhengzi tong ℷᄫ䗮 (Comprehensive rectification of characters), the imperial imprimatur, as well as court compilers’ claims to accuracy in the revision of this earlier material, lent the work authority for later users.

Thematic Organization Not all dictionaries concerned with script were organized solely according to the form of graphs. Some were organized by rime but engaged in script analysis within the lemmata—for instance, the twelfth-century Shuowen jiezi wuyin yunpu 䁾᭛㾷ᄫѨ䷇䷏䄰 (Shuowen jiezi arranged by rime according to five tones) and the fourteenth-century Liushu zheng’e ݁᳌ℷ䄠 (Correcting errors in the six principles of graph formation). Others were ordered according to broad thematic categories, which encouraged semantic interpretations of the construction of graphs. Beginning in the eleventh century, a new method of glossing graphs emerged, which attempted to interpret all Chinese graphs as if each of their component parts told a story. The Song statesman Wang Anshi ⥟ᅝ⷇ (1021– 86) composed a dictionary that he promulgated throughout the school system. This text, entitled Zishuo ᄫ䁾 (Explanations of characters), was briefly incorporated into the civil service examination curriculum. Wang reasoned that by revealing the way that component parts of ancient graphs related to each other, he could reconstruct the systematic coherence he believed to have governed society in antiquity. He further established relationships between graphs on the basis of this semantic content in order to draw a social or moral lesson. For example, he related the graphs fu ໿ and tian ໽ in the following manner:

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The graph “husband” (fu ໿) and [the graph] “heaven” (tian ໽) are [constructed from the graphs] “one” (yi ϔ) and “big” (da ໻). This is because husbands are heaven to their wives. Heaven is big and has nothing superior to it; therefore [the graph] “one” is on top of “big.” Now although a husband is also “one” and “big,” he is not without anything above like heaven, and therefore [the graph] “one” cannot be on top of “big” [in the graph for husband]. ໿Пᄫ㟛໽ⱚᕲϔᕲ໻DŽ໿㗙ྏП໽ᬙгDŽ໽໻㗠⛵ϞDŽᬙϔ೼໻ϞDŽ ໿䲪ϔ㗠໻DŽ✊ϡབ໽П⛵ϞDŽᬙϔϡᕫ೼໻Ϟ DŽ10

The dictionary was mocked even in its own time for what contemporaries considered absurd explanations, and the text is no longer fully extant today.11 Nevertheless, Wang’s method of analyzing graphs did not disappear. The Ming scholar-official Wei Jiao 儣᷵ (1483–1543), for instance, wrote a dictionary entitled Liushu jingyun ݁᳌㊒㯞 (Mysterious essence of the six principles of graph formation), in which he argued that the key to unlocking the minds of the ancient sages was to analyze the way in which they had constructed written graphs. Like Wang Anshi, Wei Jiao frequently interpreted each component part of a given graph as bearing semantic importance.12 Wei Jiao’s text was organized not by classifiers, as was often the case in dictionaries of the script, but rather by overarching thematic categories such as heavens, earth, and human relations. These categories reflected a hierarchy of knowledge and established a semantic framework that permeated the analysis of graphs in the lemmata. Over the course of the thirteenth through the seventeenth centuries, a substantial number of dictionaries adopted some form of thematic ordering, as shown in table 7.1. All of the titles in table 7.1 include the term liushu ݁᳌, which refers to the principles informing the historical construction of graphs elucidated in Shuowen jiezi. The appearance of this term in the titles reflects their concern with etymology and the relationship between script and meaning. Most of these texts included a script-based organizational system beneath their thematic categories. For instance, the graph ᮹ ri (sun) would typically be placed within the thematic category of heavens, where it would also serve as the heading of a graphically organized subsection, including all graphs containing ᮹ as a component (such as ᮺ dan, ᯢ ming, and so on). Thematic organization was upheld as a way to highlight additional layers of meaning and connections between related graphs that would be obscured by other methods. The similarities in thematic organization across dictionaries are striking and suggest either direct inheritance or shared sources. Differences in the ordering also reflect conscious choices in terms of both the appropriate hierarchy and the relationship between concepts. This concern with hierarchy and thematic categorization of knowledge was paralleled in the leishu tradition (see Nugent, chapter 30).

効⥌ (Birds and beasts) 㰿儮 (Insects and fish) 㤝᳼ (Plants and trees)

఼⫼ (Implements) 㤝᳼ (Plants and trees) 効⥌ (Birds and beasts) 㰿儮 (Insects and fish)

ᆂᅸ (Dwellings) ఼⫼ (Implements)

ഄ⧚ (Earth)

Ҏક (People)

ᆂᅸ (Dwellings)

㸷᳡ (Clothes)

఼⫼ (Implements)

効⥌ (Birds and beasts)

㰿儮 (Insects and fish)

㤝᳼ (Plants and trees)

ᗾ⭄ (Anomalies)

໽ (Heaven)

ഄ (Earth)

Ҏ (Man)

ࢩ⠽ (Animals)

ỡ⠽ (Plants)

Ꮉџ (Crafts)

䲰 (Miscellaneous)

⭥ (Indeterminate)

㸷᳡ (Clothes)

仆亳 (Food)

ᆂᅸ (Dwellings)

Ҏ储 (Human form)

Ҏ‫( ׿‬Human relations)

ഄ⧚ (Earth)

໽᭛ (Heavens)

䈵ᭌ (Images and numbers)

఼⫼ (Implements)

ᆂᅸ (Dwellings)

㸷᳡ (Clothes)

仆亳 (Food)

䑿储 (Human form)

Ҏ‫( ׿‬Human relations)

ഄ⧚ (Earth)

໽᭛ (Heavens)

ᭌԡ (Numerical positions)

Liushu tong is organized according to the six principles of graph formation, and the section for each of the six principles contains a unique, albeit related, subset of thematic categories. Included here are the thematic categories for the first principle (xiangxing, “image and form” graphs).

1

Note: See Dai Tong ᠈ի, Liushu gu ݁᳌ᬙ, in Siku quanshu (Taipei: Shangwu yinshuguan, 1983–86); Yang Huan ἞ḧ, Liushu tong ݁᳌㍅, in Siku quanshu; Zhao Huiqian 䍭ᩱ䃭, Liushu benyi ݁᳌ᴀ㕽, in Siku quanshu; Wei Jiao 儣᷵, Liushu jingyun ݁᳌㊒㯞, in Siku quanshu cunmu congshu (Jinan: Qi Lu shushe, 1995–97); and Wu Yuanman ਇ‫ܗ‬ⓓ, Liushu zongyao ݁᳌ 㐑㽕, in Siku quanshu cunmu congshu.

᳡仒 (Attire)

仆亳 (Food)

㷆⥌ (Insects and beasts)

㤝᳼ (Plants and trees)

Ҏ⠽ (Humans)

ഄ⧚ (Earth)

໽᭛ (Heavens)

ᭌԡ (Numerical positions)

໽᭛ (Heavens)

Comprehensive summary of the six principles of graph formation

ᭌ (Numbers)

Mysterious essence of the six principles of graph formation

Original meaning of the six principles of graph formation

System of the six principles of graph formation

Liushu zongyao ݁᳌㐑㽕 (sixteenth century)

Origins of the six principles of graph formation

Liushu jingyun ݁᳌㊒ 㯞 (sixteenth century)

Liushu benyi ݁᳌ᴀ㕽 (fourteenth century)

Liushu tong ݁᳌㍅ (xiangxing category)1 (fourteenth century)

Liushu gu ݁᳌ᬙ (thirteenth century)

Table 7.1 Thematic categories compared across Yuan-Ming dictionaries

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Late imperial lexicographers grouped together graphs with shared component parts in the tradition of Shuowen jiezi but also invoked the overarching thematic categories of another classical precedent, the Erya (for specifics of Erya organization, see Handel, chapter 5). Erya played a formative role in conceptions of glossing (xun 㿧) in the Chinese tradition. Late imperial lexicographers produced a number of major commentaries on and expansions of the Erya, the latter aimed primarily at glossing terms in classical texts, particularly Shijing 䀽㍧ (Classic of odes). However, Erya’s greatest influence on later lexicons was the principle of thematic organization. While Erya contained only a thematic level of organization, later lexicons synthesized its thematic categorization scheme with the graph-based lookup of Shuowen jiezi.13 Erya was associated with classicism and a tradition of textual exegesis that flourished in the Han dynasty. Neo-Confucian practitioners of the Learning of the Way (daoxue 䘧ᅌ) of the eleventh and twelfth centuries opposed what they saw as the negative effects of such exegetical commentaries on efforts to achieve a true understanding of the meaning of the Classics and the Way. Chen Chun 䱇⏇ (ca. 1159–1223)—disciple of the leading thinker and codifier of neo-Confucian thought, Zhu Xi ᴅ➍ (1130–1200)—composed an influential dictionary of metaphysical terms entitled Beixi ziyi ࣫⑾ᄫ㕽 (Beixi’s [i.e., Chen Chun’s] meanings of characters). While sharing the Erya’s concern with glossing, Beixi ziyi was intended not as an aid for reading texts but as an introduction to key Learning of the Way concepts. Its position in the lexicographic tradition is ambiguous; the text was classified as a work of Confucian philosophy (Rujia ‫ۦ‬ᆊ) within the zibu of Siku quanshu ಯᑿܼ᳌ (Complete writings of the four repositories) but as a philological work (xiaoxue ᇣᅌ) in jingbu by other bibliographers.14 Although not intended as a complete lexicon for composition or reading purposes, its focus on glossing graphs caused some late imperial scholars to associate it with more direct inheritors of the lexicographical tradition, such as Zhongyuan yinyun and Liushu jingyun.15 The twenty-six entries of Beixi ziyi proceed in a sequential hierarchy, beginning with ming ੑ ([heaven’s] mandate) and concluding with what the author portrays as the inferior metaphysics of Buddhism and Daoism. Each entry provides an extended essay on the headword and its philosophical implications, citing from the Classics as well as the writings of Zhu Xi and other Song Learning of the Way practitioners. The text was evidently intended to be read sequentially, as later entries frequently reference previous entries. It is also unique in that the headwords include not only single-graph terms but also multigraph concepts. For example, the five-graph headword ren yi li zhi xin ҕ㕽⾂ᱎֵ (humaneness, righteousness, propriety, wisdom, and faithfulness) discusses the relationship of these five cardinal virtues in neo-Confucian thought. Beixi ziyi, as a dictionary of concepts, is exceptional in the history of Chinese lexicography, which predominantly involved phonological and script

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analysis. The mode of defining graphs in the majority of Chinese dictionaries involved short glosses composed of a synonym or brief description and occasionally citations of usage in literary and classical texts. It therefore belongs to the relatively small set of lexicons concerned with in-depth semantic examination. Despite, or perhaps because of, its unique qualities, Beixi ziyi was frequently reprinted in new editions and circulated widely in Japan and Korea.

Conclusion A central discussion within the broader world of philological discourse concerned the appropriate structure of a lexicon. Lexicons occupied a fundamental place in the transformation of linguistic data into information. If the Chinese graph is conceived as conveying certain kinds of information, lexicons were the primary venue for standardizing or debating how to interpret this information. Despite claims for the transparency of meaning in logographic writing, the substantial disagreement over valid pronunciations and etymologies evidenced in lexicons suggests both the challenges and the possibilities for Chinese graphs as bearers of information. There was widespread consensus that graphs conveyed multiple layers of information from phonetic and etymological to aesthetic and even epistemological. Lexicons not only functioned as reference works for accessing this information but also played a major role in constructing it. The circulation of lexical information served a number of goals, perhaps foremost among them being unity or standardization. Lexicons were an authoritative place for discourse on the correct form of graphs and the proper readings for literary usage and recitation. This fact was not lost on successive early dynastic emperors, who, purportedly beginning with Qin Shihuang ⾺ྟⱛ (First Emperor of Qin; r. 221–210 BCE), routinely promulgated lexical compilations to provide a standard for court communications and eventually for the civil service examinations. Imperial sponsorship could also lend authority to the lexicon, as in the case of the Kangxi zidian, alternatives to which were suppressed by imperial order. Similarly to encyclopedias, lexicons extracted citations from their original location. In the case of lexicons, however, citation served as a form of evidence, justifying or exemplifying the definition, form, or pronunciation provided. Occasional appeals to the authority of lexicons can be found in philosophical and literary texts, but the extent of their consultation in reading and composition must have been far greater. The extensive circulation, copying, and reprinting of dictionaries old and new, evident in both premodern and present-day book catalogs, indicate their prominent place in literati libraries.

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Notes 1. This chapter makes a distinction between rime (referring to words that belong to a class as defined by a rime book) and rhyme (referring to words that have similar-sounding terminals). 2. There are a few exceptions, such as the discussions of colloquial expressions in the Classics in Chen Shiyuan 䱇຿‫( ܗ‬1516–1597), Gu suzi lüe স֫ᄫ⬹ [Overview of ancient vernacular characters], in Siku quanshu cunmu congshu ಯᑿܼ᳌ᄬⳂশ᳌ (Jinan: Qi Lu shushe, 1995–97), and Liyan jie ֮㿔㾷 [Explanations of colloquial speech], in Min Shin zokugo jisho shūsei ᯢ⏌֫䁲䖁᳌䲚៤ (Tokyo: Kyūko shoin, 1974–77), as well as in encyclopedic texts such as Zhao Nanxing 䍭फ᯳ (1550–1627), Muqian ji Ⳃࠡ䲚 [Collection of (things) before one’s eyes], in Min Shin zokugo jisho shūsei; and Lu Xuyun 䱌ధ䳆, Shishi tongkao Ϫџ䗮㗗 [Comprehensive examination of worldly affairs], in Min Shin zokugo jisho shūsei. 3. Some lexicons glossed multigraph terms and phrases: for example, Zhu Mouwei ᴅ䃔⨟ (1564–1624), Pianya 侶䲙 [Elegance of pairs; 1587], in Jieyue shanfang huichao ‫׳‬᳜ቅ᠓ ᔭ䟨, comp. Zhang Haipeng ᔉ⍋區 (Shanghai: Boguzhai, 1920); and Zhang Yushu ᔉ ⥝᳌ (1642–1711) et al., comps., Yuding Peiwen yunfu ᕵᅮԽ᭛䷏ᑰ [Imperially commissioned rime storehouse of Peiwen Studio; 1711], in Siku quanshu (Taipei: Shangwu yinshuguan, 1983–86). The lookup method remained the single-graph rhyme. 4. Chen Pengnian 䱇ᕁᑈ (961–1017) et al., comps., Xinjiao huzhu Songben Guangyun ᮄ᷵Ѧ䀏ᅟᴀᒷ䷏, ed. Yu Naiyong ԭ䗎∌ (Shanghai: Shanghai cishu chubanshe, 2000), 1.8b / 24. 5. Geng Zhensheng 㘓ᤃ⫳, Ming Qing dengyunxue tonglun ᯢ⏙ㄝ䷉ᄺ䗮䆎 (Beijing: Yuwen chubanshe, 1992), 140–45. 6. Ning Jifu ᅕ㒻⽣, Zhongyuan yinyun biaogao Ёॳ䷇䷉㸼〓 (Changchun: Jilin wenshi chubanshe, 1985). 7. William H. Baxter, A Handbook of Old Chinese Phonology (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1992), 152. 8. Baxter, A Handbook of Old Chinese Phonology, 154–55. 9. Françoise Bottéro, Sémantisme et classification dans l’écriture chinoise: Les systèmes de classement des caractères par clés du Shuowen Jiezi au Kangxi Zidian (Paris: Collège de France, Institut des hautes études chinoises, 1996), 152–57; Fukuda Jōnosuke ⽣⬄ 㼘Пҟ, Chūgoku jishoshi no kenkyū Ё೑ᄫ᳌৆ȃⷨお (Tokyo: Meiji shoin, 1979), 396–406. 10. Adapted from translation in Peter K. Bol, “Wang Anshi and the Zhouli,” in Statecraft and Classical Learning: The Rituals of Zhou in East Asian History, ed. Benjamin A. Elman and Martin Kern (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 239. 11. For reconstructions based on extant citations in Song dynasty encyclopedias, dictionaries, and commentaries, see Huang Fushan 咗ᕽቅ, Wang Anshi Zishuo zhi yanjiu ⥟ᅝ ⷇ljᄫ䁾NJПⷨお (Taipei: Hua Mulan wenhua chubanshe, 2008). 12. Bruce Rusk, “Old Scripts, New Actors: European Encounters with Chinese Writing, 1550–1700,” East Asian Science, Technology, and Medicine 26 (2007): 84–88. 13. The graphs that double as components within Shuowen jiezi also follow a sequence, the meaning of which has been uncovered in recent research. This thematic reasoning would not necessarily have been evident to later imperial readers, however. Cf. Françoise Bottéro, Sémantisme et classification. 14. Cf. Ji Yun ㋔ᯔ et al., comps., Siku quanshu zongmu tiyao ಯᑿܼ᳌㐑Ⳃᦤ㽕 (Shanghai: Shangwu yinshuguan, 1933), 1916–17; Wang Qi ⥟ഏ, Xu wenxian tongkao 㑠᭛⥏

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䗮㗗, in Siku quanshu cunmu congshu, 176.5a. Another Ming bibliography included Beixi ziyi alongside other lexicons in its zabu 䲰䚼 (miscellaneous section), within a subsection called shuhua lei ᳌⬿串 (writing and painting category); see Xu Tu ᕤ೪ (jinshi 1583), Xingrensi chongke shumu 㸠Ҏৌ䞡ࠏ᳌Ⳃ, in Congshu jicheng xubian (Shanghai: Shanghai shudian, 1994), 36b. For a translation of the text, see Ch’en Ch’un, Neo-Confucian Terms Explained: The Pei-hsi tzu-i, trans. Wing-Tsit Chan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986). 15. See, for instance, Li Yuheng ᴢ䈿Ѽ (fl. 1570), Tuipeng wuyu ᥼㇋ᆸ䁲, in Siku quanshu cunmu congshu, 7.16a.

CHAPTER 8

EARLY TWENTIETH-CENTURY DICTIONARIES Y U E M ENG A ND X I CHEN

T

he impact of the modern information era had already been experienced to an extent in China nearly a century ago, in the midst of intensifying encounters and exchanges within East Asia and beyond. At the time, the impact of new flows of information was heightened by two fundamental transformations of print-based public culture: a radical development of media, “comparable in its impact to the current Internet age,”1 and a holistic new knowledge movement that was part and parcel of the “Enlightenment at large.” By the 1930s, the technologies of lithography and letterpress, originally brought to China by missionary presses, had inspired a bustling industry of several hundred printing enterprises across China.2 Newspapers and periodicals, a medium introduced to China by British merchants in 1870s, had burgeoned to some fifteen hundred titles in Shanghai alone by 1937 (see Des Forges, chapter 55, and Li Jianli, chapter 56).3 The new knowledge movement was sparked at the turn of the twentieth century by the abolition of the civil service examinations and by a series of projects aimed at new types of learning. These released the creativity of reform-minded literati into what has been described as the “Enlightenment Business” of educational and knowledge-oriented publishing.4 The Commercial Press produced two book series with 1,721 titles in a mere eight years, from 1929 to 1937 (see Culp, chapter 54). The new media and the new knowledge movement combined to generate an unprecedented synergy. A significant part of this historical experience of information explosion was the abrupt surge in the publication of new dictionaries, encyclopedias, and

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other reference books. More than four times as many dictionaries were published in the three decades from the 1910s to the 1930s as in the preceding two centuries. Moreover, the encyclopedic dictionaries that appeared at this moment tended to expand their contents and to update information every few years. Ciyuan 䖁⑤ (Source of words; 1915), for example, was updated several times in less than three decades, and its print runs amounted to some four hundred thousand copies by 1949.5 A representative list of the titles would include, first of all, two comprehensive language dictionaries, Zhonghua dazidian Ё㧃 ໻ᄫ‫( ݌‬Great character dictionary of China; 1915) and Guoyu zidian ೟䁲ᄫ‫݌‬ (Dictionary of the national language), and a pair of encyclopedic dictionary projects, Ciyuan and Cihai 䖁⍋ (Ocean of words; 1936), as well as other influential reference books such as Fojiao dacidian ԯᬭ໻䖁‫( ݌‬Great dictionary of Buddhism; 1921), Zhiwuxue dacidian ỡ⠽ᅌ໻䖁‫( ݌‬Botanical Nomenclature: A Complete Dictionary of Botanical Terms; 1918), and Dongwuxue dacidian ࢩ⠽ᅌ໻䖁‫( ݌‬Zoological Nomenclature: A Complete Dictionary of Zoological Terms; 1922). Publishing enterprises of the time heavily invested in this sector, which saw intense competition over the quality and reputation of these works; many would become milestones in modern Chinese history.6 Newspapers and other periodicals are often thought of as laying the foundation for the print-mediated modern world. But why did dictionaries and encyclopedias, seemingly the form most unlike newspapers and journals, become so prominent in China’s first modern information boom? The question points to a key factor driving this boom, the proliferation of translated terminology. China’s loss in the 1894–95 Sino-Japanese War and a series of reform policies initiated after 1900 gave rise to wave after wave of translations of foreign-language works. These works and other printed matter were suffused with neologisms and translated words, including not only vocabulary for entirely novel things— such as “1930 Buick,” “republic,” and “industry”—but also new uses for existing words. Because of the large number of Chinese students in Japan and the shared use of Sinitic vocabulary, new words and new usages came in primarily from Japan, whether they were indigenous coinages or were used to translate terms from Western languages. This moment of information revolution, which scholars have characterized in terms of the “translingual practice” of modern literature, the infrastructure of the “Shanghai modern,” and “semiotic modernity” in knowledge, rested on a foundation of words, the building blocks of information exchange.7 This explosion of new words was more than a quantitative expansion of vocabulary; it contributed to a set of systemic changes in language use. These new words and new usages formed the basis of the Vernacular movement that began in 1917 and helped legitimate what would become today’s Modern Standard Chinese.8 In this context, early twentieth-century Chinese dictionaries and encyclopedias implemented two innovative ways of working with word-based

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information. First, they enhanced the accessibility of information, and, second, they preserved the historicity of words themselves. Accessibility was achieved by maximizing the inclusiveness, portability, and searchability of dictionaries and encyclopedias. Inclusiveness was embodied in the quantity of terms and concepts included in reference works. Within the constraints of the print medium, these dictionaries were the product of database projects that sought to offer comprehensive representations of a lexicon. The contrasting goal of portability, also highlighted by many of these works, was aided by letterpress technology that used small, precisely formed, movable pieces of metal type and by thin, light, machine-made paper. A large set of thread-bound books that took up multiple cases could be reduced to one or two handy volumes. Portability sold then, just as it sells today. The importance of searchability had been long acknowledged in lexicography. The late Ming and Qing periods saw a series of refinements to the organization of dictionaries (see Vedal, chapter 7), culminating in the Kangxi zidian ᒋ❭ᄫ‫( ݌‬Kangxi dictionary). Early twentieth-century reference projects carried this innovation forward by developing new or improved indexing systems for ordering either the dictionary itself or its supplementary indices. These included radical order, stroke order, alphabetical indexing, and indexing in foreign languages. The Four-Corner code devised by Wang Yunwu ⥟䳆Ѩ (1888–1979) was common, especially in books published by the Commercial Press, which Wang managed (see Kuzuoğlu, chapter 3). In addition to increasing accessibility, many dictionary projects had a deeper, subtler way of engaging with the information explosion based on their shared emphasis on the historicity of words. This was embodied by the very protocol of compilation. The compilers took on the task of documenting the origin and subsequent uses of each word. Citations of key sources would be arranged in chronological order. In the case of new and translated terms, the entry would include the explanation of the word or phrase as well as its disciplinary origins. According to Lu Erkui 䱌⠒༢ (1862–1935), lead editor of the Ciyuan project, the purpose of this type of annotation, however brief it might be, was to order “the history and transformation of the meanings of words.”9 This was necessary to bridge the gap he recognized between readers familiar with long-standing, established terminology and usage and others who had learned the new imported vocabulary. While it was not entirely novel for encyclopedias to be compiled along these lines, a conscious engagement with the early twentieth-century information boom underlay these projects and played a part in their success and popularity. Ciyuan, the first modern dictionary project, demonstrated this. Already in 1908, when the project was first undertaken, the compilers had in mind the cultural politics resulting from the interaction between received terminology and newly translated language. Terms from recent Chinese books circulated

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alongside others translated from European languages and even more numerous Sino-Japanese neologisms (that is, words written in kanji and formed according to Sinitic syntax; Chinese readers could easily pronounce them and reuse them in Chinese sentences). Chinese dictionary compilers noticed that during the Meiji period (1868–1912), Japanese translators of Western works used Literary Sinitic vocabulary somewhat haphazardly, often effacing the earlier history of the words.10 Moreover, Japan’s East Asian cultural politics entered Chinese along with the Sino-Japanese terms. For example, as the concept of evolution reached China from Japan, it brought with it the social Darwinian notion of superior over inferior in wars of survival.11 Chinese dictionary compilers saw they needed to compile this new knowledge and information, but they also knew they needed to engage critically with Sino-Japanese words. The Ciyuan compilers’ conscious effort to record “the history and transformation of the meanings of words” indicates a nonconfirmative interaction with information modernity—that is, they engaged with the new globalized knowledge without confirming the power structure that produced it. The emphasis on the historicity of words was closely related to an earlier history of knowledge and learning that originated with the New Text school of classical studies in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Classical studies at that time took as its mission the provision of access to an ideal antiquity through studying the words of the sages. But in doing so, New Text scholars arrived at an epistemological threshold of critical thinking and took seriously the historical truth of words and texts themselves.12 To seek truth from evidence, these scholars used the philological approaches of kaozhengxue 㗗䄝ᅌ (evidential learning) and xunguxue 㿧䀕ᅌ (exegetical study of character meaning) as critical tools. A network of cross-local scholarship, publishing, and academies flourished, bringing forward a culture comparable to a smallscale Renaissance. Jiangnan and Guangdong, then crucibles of thought and knowledge production, nurtured prominent intellectuals and reformists such as Kang Youwei ᒋ᳝⚎ (1858–1927), Liang Qichao ṕਃ䍙 (1873–1929), and those who had devoted themselves to the new knowledge movement since the turn of the twentieth century. This ongoing trend in cultural history honed the critical edge with which China met the early twentieth-century information boom. In fact, top intellectuals, scholars, and book compilers trained in scholarship derived from the New Text school occupied key roles at the leading dictionary and encyclopedia publishers. The editorial department of the Commercial Press, for example, was headed by Zhang Yuanji ᔉ‫( △ܗ‬1867–1959), an expert in classics and a reform-minded late-Qing scholar-official, and its staff included several New Text scholars. As the global circulation of information became increasingly hegemonic, their emphasis on the historicity of words helped maintain equity in the accessibility of indigenous knowledge and alternative minor histories.

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The division of labor among these dictionary projects deserves a closer look as well. Ciyuan set out to sort through written Chinese terms in pre-twentiethcentury texts, though many of these words were put to new uses. Cihai, the flagship project of the Chong Hwa Book Company (Zhonghua shuju Ё㧃᳌ሔ), led by chief editor Shu Xincheng 㟦ᮄ៤ (1893–1960), differentiated itself by offering encyclopedic coverage of recent and contemporary terms. This represented another approach to informational globality, though it, too, strictly implemented the principle of historicity in its handling of neologisms. During the Republican period, Literary Sinitic, the descendant of Classical Chinese that had been the medium of scholarly and formal communications, ceased to be the dominant written language. The Cihai and Ciyuan dictionaries, as well as a few other encyclopedias compiled at this time, were written in the classical language, a medium that was still in use but that had a looming expiration date. Nonetheless, the quantity of words in Ciyuan and Cihai as they were expanded in subsequent years still highlights the scope of the projects’ expansion. By 1939, Ciyuan and its supplement had some 88,074 entries based on texts published up to the late nineteenth century, a 35 percent increase from the revised edition of 1931.13 Emphasizing horizontal inclusiveness, the two volumes of Cihai (1935, 1938) were catching up, listing some 85,000 single-character and compound words. By the late 1930s and into the 1940s, the quest for historical truth seemed to be rapidly giving way to efforts to include increasing numbers of new words. Today the dictionaries and encyclopedias published during this period are celebrated as legendary successes of the modern culture industry. But they can also be remembered in light of the subsequent information era. As modern databases on paper, these dictionaries and encyclopedias represent the first wave of conscious interventions with the modern world of information.

Notes 1. Joan Judge, Barbara Mittler, and Michel Hockx, “Introduction: Women’s Journals as Multigeneric Artefacts,” in Women and the Periodical Press in China’s Long Twentieth Century: A Space of Their Own?, ed. Michel Hockx, Joan Judge, and Barbara Mittler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 2. 2. On the adoption of letterpress, lithography, and other printing technologies, see Christopher A. Reed, Gutenberg in Shanghai: Chinese Print Capitalism, 1876–1937 (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2004). 3. Judge, Mittler, and Hockx, “Introduction: Women’s Journals,” 2. 4. Leo Ou-fan Lee describes the textbook and other series of the Commercial Press as “Enlightenment Business” in Shanghai Modern: The Flowering of a New Urban Culture in China, 1930–1945 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999). 5. According Qiao Yong ஀∌, each updated edition of Ciyuan contained 25 percent to 50 percent new content; see “Ciyuan banben kaolüe” 䕲⑤⠜ᴀ㗗⬹, Zhonghua dushubao, July 29, 2015, 15.

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6. For a fuller account, see Yue Meng, Shanghai and the Edges of Empires (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 30–61. 7. The three phrases come from, respectively, Lydia H. Liu, Translingual Practice: Literature, National Culture and Translated Modernity; China, 1900–1937 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995); Lee, Shanghai Modern; and Meng, Shanghai and the Edges of Empires. 8. Yurou Zhong, Chinese Grammatology: Script Revolution and Literary Modernity, 1916– 1958 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019). 9. Lu Erkui, “Ciyuan shuolüe” 䕲⑤䇈⬹, in Shangwu yinshuguan jiushiwu nian ଚࡵॄк 佚бकѨᑈ, ed. Gao Song 催ዻ et al. (Beijing: Shangwu yinshuguan, 1992), 158–62. 10. Meng, Shanghai and the Edges of Empires, 34–64. 11. See Chen Liwei 䱇࡯㸯, “ ‘Yūshō reppai, tekisha seizon’: shinkaron no Chūgoku rufu ni kiyo suru Nihon Kango” Nj‫ࡷࢱ۾‬ᬫ, 䘽㗙⫳ᄬnj̣䘆࣪䂪ȃЁ೑⌕ᏗȀᆘϢǮ Ƞ᮹ᴀ⓶䁲, Seijo daigaku keizai kenkyū 210 (Dec. 2015): 247–71; and Huang Kewu 咗 ‫℺ܟ‬, “He wei tianyan? Yan Fu ‘tianyan zhi xue’ de neihan yu yiyi” ԩ䃖໽ⓨ˛ಈᕽ Nj໽ⓨПᅌnjⱘܻ⎉㟛ᛣ㕽, Zhongyang yanjiuyuan jindaishi yanjiu jikan 85 (2004): 129–87. 12. On New Text scholarship, see Benjamin A. Elman, Classicism, Politics, and Kinship: The Chұang-Chou School of New Text Confucianism in Late Imperial China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990). 13. Benjamin K. Tsou, “Towards a Comparative Study of Diachronic and Synchronic Lexical Variation in Chinese,” in Mapping Meanings: The Field of New Learning in Late Qing China, ed. Michael Lackner and Natascha Vittinghoff (Leiden: Brill, 2004), 355–80, esp. 358.

CHAPTER 9

POST-1949 DICTIONARIES J E N N I F E R A LT E H E N G E R

O

ne day in late August 1966, a group of Red Guards banged on the door of Liang Shuming’s ṕ┅⑳ (1893–1988) home in Beijing’s Xicheng 㽓ජ district, demanding entry. Following the call by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to carry out the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, the middle school students had come to raid Liang’s house, confiscate property, and burn things associated with the “four olds”—old ideas, old culture, old customs, and old habits. Liang, a well-known intellectual, philosopher, and rural reformer, kept numerous books, calligraphies, and manuscripts in his home. Raging through the rooms, the Red Guards tore his precious collection from bookshelves, ripped pages from books, and threw everything into a fire outside the house. Only the works by Mao Zedong (1893–1976) and Marxist authors were left unharmed. When the students were about to toss valuable copies of the Cihai 䕲⍋ (Sea of words) and the Ciyuan 䕲⑤ (Source of words) into the fire, Liang intervened. These famous reference works from the Republican period, he tried to argue, were books that “everyone uses”—surely they could be spared. The Red Guards looked at him and responded, “It is enough to have a Xinhua zidian ᮄढᄫ‫( ݌‬New China character dictionary),1 no need for these feudalist antiques,” and both dictionaries went up in flames.2 This story was told by Wang Donglin ∾ϰᵫ (b. 1937), one of Liang’s colleagues, in an article commemorating Liang’s experiences during the Cultural Revolution. Although he called it a “first-hand account” (zishu 㞾䗄), Wang freely admitted in an abstract that Liang had not written the piece himself; rather, it was based on Liang’s papers and his private conversations with Wang.3

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As such, it is best classified as biographical literature. It reveals as much about Liang as about what Wang considered worth chronicling and what he thought a readership could relate to. Seen in this light, Wang’s decision to include this anecdote about the dictionaries is noteworthy because it can be read in different ways. It could be a tale of the accomplishments of China’s most famous pocket-sized dictionary. Or it could be a reminder of the mindless actions of young Red Guards who thought that one of China’s most basic dictionaries contained all the knowledge anyone needed. Wang leaves it up to the reader to judge the dictionary’s significance. One interpretation is clear though: during one of the most fervent campaigns of the early Cultural Revolution, a time when many books published as late as the 1950s were being attacked as vessels of “old ideas” and “old culture,” the Xinhua zidian was remarkable for being one of the few works deemed by many to possess the necessary revolutionary credentials to escape the flames. Together with other famous dictionaries such as the Xiandai Hanyu cidian ⦄ҷ∝䇁䆡‫( ݌‬Contemporary Chinese dictionary), the Xinhua zidian is synonymous with the history of lexicography following the establishment of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 1949. First published in 1953 by the Renmin jiaoyu chubanshe Ҏ⇥ᬭ㚆ߎ⠜⼒ (People’s Education Publishing House), Xinhua zidian combined graphical, phonetic, and semantic information with a politically driven demand to make knowledge and the Chinese language accessible. Publication and oversight of the dictionary moved to the Shangwu yinshuguan ଚࡵॄк佚 (Commercial Press) from 1957 onward, and a fully revised edition was published in 1971. Since its first edition, Xinhua zidian has become a long-term best seller, with new editions appearing every few years. Having sold over half a billion copies, it was granted the title of “most popular dictionary” by Guinness World Records in 2016. The dictionary, so the press release says, represented “a tool for several generations of Chinese people, bearing the culture of a great country and impacting the linguistic lives of millions.”4 The history of how the dictionary was made and an examination of its entries over time illustrate the mechanics of information management under CCP rule. Lexicographical practice after 1949 had to be political because the party-state believed that all knowledge was class-based.5 Dictionary entries were reflections of their makers’ consciousness, and entries were understood to function not only as conveyors of information by managing information but also as conveyors of interpretations by managing readers’ perceptions.6 Only in this way could the political project of socialism help render graphic, phonetic, and semantic information truly useful to the people at large. Although Xinhua zidian became one of the best-known dictionaries of the Mao period (1949–76) and Reform period (since 1978), it was certainly not the only dictionary published during the 1950s and perhaps not even the most popular or useful at first. After 1949, customers could choose from a range of

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established or newly published dictionaries, including character dictionaries and more substantial dictionaries that contained explanations of both individual words, mono- or polysyllabic, and compound terms made up of two or more words. Many of these had originated in pre-1949 citizen education campaigns and in the changing cultural, social, and political context of the Republican period: customers could, for example, purchase copies of the Xinmingci cidian ᮄৡ䆡䕲‫( ݌‬Dictionary of new terms), published by Chunming Bookstore (Chunming shuju ᯹ᯢкሔ); different editions of Xinzhishi cidian ᮄⶹ 䆚䆡‫( ݌‬New knowledge dictionary), published by Beixin Bookstore (Beixin shuju ࣫ᮄкሔ); and many others.7 Developments throughout the Republican period proved crucial for socialist lexicography. During the first half of the twentieth century, writers, lexicographers, editors, scientists, intellectuals, and many others managed information, operating within a vibrant publishing field made up of large-scale comprehensive publishing houses as well as smaller specialist publishers. In their lexicographical work, they built on the tradition of canonical works such as the Kangxi zidian ᒋ❭ᄫ‫( ݌‬Kangxi dictionary) (see Vedal, chapter 7). But they also adapted methods for organizing knowledge from abroad, as Gao Fengqian 催勇䃭 (1875–1936), editor of Commercial Press’s 1912 Xin zidian ᮄᄫ‫݌‬ (New character dictionary), explained in his foreword when he wrote that the dictionary was a combination of new and traditional forms. The new forms he was thinking of included “new terms” often found in cishu 䕲к or cidian 䕲‫݌‬, dictionary genres imported and translated from Japan. While plenty of specialist reference works conveyed advanced knowledge to users in specific fields, the far bigger market during these decades was for reference works that explained the canon of new and modern words and terms to ordinary citizens, covering a range of topics from politics to law, economics, natural sciences, geography, literature, art, and much more and serving as an accessible supplement to popular education (see Meng and Chen, chapter 8).8 Lexicographers could therefore tap into a rich legacy after 1949. Officials within China’s new party-state supported state publishers’ plans to continue existing lexicographical projects but also, and more importantly, to promote new dictionaries for a New China (xin Zhongguo ᮄЁ೑). In 1954, for example, Chen Kehan 䰜‫ܟ‬ᆦ (1917–80), deputy head of the central Publishing Administration located in Beijing, wrote to the head of the central Propaganda Department, Xi Zhongxun дӆ࢟ (1913–2002), explaining that there was a great need for accessible character dictionaries (zidian) and dictionaries (cidian).9 Xinhua zidian catered to this need, though its mission was going to be different from that of more extensive encyclopedic dictionaries of the time. Encyclopedic dictionaries—for instance, the best-selling, privately published Xinmingci cidian by Chunming Bookstore; the state-published Xinzhishi cidian ᮄⶹ䆚䆡‫݌‬ (Dictionary of new knowledge), edited by the New Knowledge Publishing

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House (Xinzhishi chubanshe ᮄⶹ䆚ߎ⠜⼒); and the Dubao shouce 䇏᡹᠟‫ݠ‬ (Newspaper readers’ handbook), which originated in the publishing sector of the People’s Liberation Army—covered new terminologies and were compiled using recent publications, domestic and international newspapers and periodicals, printed speeches, and policy announcements. From an information-management perspective, these reference works were useful to readers because they broke down, indexed, and helped explain new knowledge and new information as it was being made, usually encompassing binomes and multisyllabic words. But the fact they conveyed fresh factual information in dictionary format could mean they were easily outdated or, worse, contravened party policy and, from the CCP’s perspective, misrepresented facts.10 Xinhua zidian, by contrast, was designed to work at the level of the individual character, extending to binomes where necessary. It also sought to make relevant information accessible to a broad readership, but it did not strive to offer the most up-to-date explanations of current politics. The dictionary contained a selection of characters that editors had decided readers of all ages should know and be able to access. As the guide (fanli ޵՟) at the beginning of the 1954 edition explained: “The main goal of editing this dictionary is to let readers who use this dictionary obtain a correct understanding of the words of our country’s spoken and written language.” Xinhua zidian’s main audience, the guide continued, would be “primary school teachers, junior middle school students and cadres with a cultural level comparable to junior middle school.”11 At first, the selection of characters was often not expressly political—or only carefully so during the 1950s. Until the late 1960s, entries in Xinhua zidian avoided the language of political campaigns, giving preference to explaining terms by citing from the somewhat more stable canon of Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong thought. This, however, changed during the revisions in the early 1970s and then again at the end of the decade after the official end of the Cultural Revolution. The dictionary’s editors were explicitly instructed to include political terminology to bring the dictionary more into line with the politics of the day, including—in the case of the 1979 revision—the attack on the so-called Gang of Four, who were by then being blamed for the entirety of the Cultural Revolution. The question of where to draw the line between a dictionary and a political textbook was contentious, and the answers shifted over time.12 The editors aimed at a specific audience of teachers, students, and cadres, yet the dictionary’s actual audience turned out to be much larger. The first run was a sizable two hundred thousand copies, and it only kept increasing. One of the factors explaining its popularity may have been its pocket-sized format: the 1950s editions measured 112 × 125 mm; the 1980s edition was slightly smaller, at 95 × 126 mm. It made the dictionary more portable and more convenient to consult, compared to more substantial works. Another, more important explanation for its long-term success was the fact that Xinhua zidian became looped

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into the party-sponsored standardization and simplification of the Chinese script. The first plans for such a dictionary were drawn up in the late 1940s as a CCP victory in the civil war became likely.13 One of its main editors was the linguist and “language planner” Wei Jiangong 儣ᓎࡳ (1901–80). Wei, as Mariana Münning has discussed, was a former Beijing University student who had studied under famous Republican intellectuals, including Zhou Zuoren ਼԰Ҏ (1885–1967), and he became one of the key figures in the process of simplifying Chinese characters during the 1950s.14 Under Wei’s lead, a group called the Dictionary Editorial Department assembled the Xinhua zidian. This department eventually merged into the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Languages Research Institute (Yuyan yanjiusuo cidian bianjishi 䇁㿔ⷨお᠔䕲‫݌‬㓪䕥ᅸ).15 It pursued separate but connected lexicographical projects; for instance, from 1956 on, it was also in charge of compiling the Xiandai Hanyu cidian (though this was published only in trial versions until 1977).16 Within a few years following its initial publication, the Xinhua zidian became one of the main reference works to incorporate, systematize, explain, and thereby popularize simplified characters. If the simplification of characters was politically driven information management at the level of the graph, this dictionary was its transmission belt. While the first edition listed entries according to phonetics, the second edition, published in 1954, was arranged according to radicals in order to make it accessible to readers regardless of the dialect they spoke. Later editions added more search features, so that by the 1980s readers could search for characters in an alphabetically-organized pinyin list. Once characters had been simplified, each appeared in the dictionary as a main entry, with its full-form counterparts in parentheses, along with guides on how to pronounce the character and indications of any alternate ways of writing the character. Each entry listed different meanings of a single character, generally providing a brief example of each of the meanings and sometimes also one or two examples of binomes including this character. The choice of characters to include mattered greatly. Lü Shuxiang ৩ন␬ (1904–98) explained in a Renmin ribaoҎ⇥᮹᡹ (People’s Daily) article in 1957 that the Xinhua zidian was one of the reference works to have surpassed all other character dictionaries that had gone before it because it included words that had become important since the May Fourth movement and many words that had gained in importance since “liberation” in 1949.17 This was not inconsequential praise. Lü was one of the PRC’s most prominent language reformers and coauthor of a set of lectures published in 1951 that set the tone for language reform and the purification of language under socialist rule. A few examples illustrate how words were incorporated and explained in early and later versions of the dictionary and how political language came to help manage meanings. The 1954 entry on dang ‫( ܮ‬party), for instance, stated that the word could mean “Political party, a political organization representing class interests.”

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Other meanings included qinzu ҆ᮣ (members of the same clan) and dangtongfayi ‫ܮ‬ৠӤᓖ (being partisan).18 By 1985, following the 1971 revision, the same entry included party rule more clearly: “Political party, a political organization representing class interests. In our country this refers in particular to the Chinese Communist Party.”19 Another example would be the term ren Ҏ (person/man). In 1954, the dictionary merely explained that ren referred to “an animal that can make tools and can use tools to carry out labor.”20 The equivalent entry in 1985 kept this definition but added: “In class struggle, every person belongs to a certain class.”21 Class (jieji 䰊㑻) appeared in some entries during the 1950s, thus ensuring readers were instructed to appreciate that this concept was central to the world that they lived in, but it became far more prominent by the 1970s. The 1954 entry on dou ᭫ (to fight/denounce/vie for), for instance, said nothing about douzheng ᭫ѝ (struggle), the key element to jieji douzheng 䰊㑻᭫ѝ (class struggle), but it did in later versions: “Struggle: a contradiction in which two parties are in conflict with each other, one party strives to defeat the other party. [E.g.,] class struggle, thought struggle.”22 Characters that had obvious connections to the CCP’s agenda were very useful to readers who were increasingly encountering these in daily life. But the inclusion of many other quite specific characters, especially in 1950s editions, suggests that the editors thought their readers would require much more besides: from entries on zhu ネ (bamboo) that explained it was a common plant that took several years to grow, was a hard material, and could be used for making tools and building houses to a large variety of characters relating to China’s fauna. The 1954 edition, for instance, featured forty-seven entries on characters that included the yu 剐 (fish) radical and introduced a range of different fish. Twenty-eight entries were accompanied by small drawings of aquatic creatures, including an eel, a whale, a carp, and a horseshoe crab (hou 剢). Entries for the radical niao 右 (bird) were similarly detailed: fifty-seven entries with thirty-one images. By 1985, many of these entries were still included—but without images and with fewer details. The editors might have thought that most schematic drawings were no longer necessary in such a compact volume, they might have presumed a more literate readership for whom the link between graph and image was less essential, or they might have simply wanted to use the space the images occupied for additional entries. Inclusion and also exclusion of certain characters could be seen as political statements, indicating that how the dictionary was read changed over time. In his article commemorating fifty years of the Xinhua zidian, Chen Yuan 䰜ॳ provided one of the most telling examples of this process when he mapped the trajectory of the character she ⼒, a component of shehui ⼒Ӯ (society) and therefore of shehui zhuyi ⼒ӮЏН (socialism), in different editions of the dictionary. Xinhua zidian’s first edition had a forty-one character explanation of the term and generally stated that socialism referred to a “social system

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that opposes private property.” Following the first full revision during the early 1970s, the entry was more than two hundred characters long, with substantial extracts from a party directive. In 1979, it was cut down, but it maintained its political character by mentioning the dictatorship of the proletariat. Thereafter, any mention of socialism was deleted entirely, which in turn led some people, as Chen remarked, to criticize the dictionary because the term was still important in contemporary Chinese politics.23 Individual entries therefore served the purposes of information and perception management, and these two purposes also merged in the form of several appendices that accompanied each edition of the Xinhua zidian. Over time, appendices included a punctuation guideline; a chart of dynasties and their emperors; a chart of world countries’ territories, populations, and national capitals; a list of important dates and events; a metric conversion table; a periodic table; and a table of foreign currencies. Where readers may have previously learned about punctuation by studying extracts from literary texts, they now did so using extracts from a canon of Marxist-Leninist works, writings by Mao Zedong, national laws, and crucial CCP policy directives. The 1954 edition’s explanation of how to use a full stop correctly, for instance, included the example sentence “All state power of the People’s Republic of China belongs to the people.”24 In the 1985 edition, readers were given the following sentence as an example for how to place a colon correctly: “Our government reaffirms: Taiwan is an inseparable part of the territory of the People’s Republic of China.” Charts of important dates, too, suggested to readers that certain facts and events were now worth remembering. The 1954 edition, for example, listed the birth and death dates of Marx, Engels, Stalin, prominent CCP leaders such as Mao and Zhu De ᴅᖋ (1886–1976), and authors favored by the party, such as Lu Xun 剕䖙 (1881–1936). It also included the national holidays of all countries of the socialist bloc beginning with Albania but also added those of selected other countries such as India; other notable dates were the commemoration day for Lenin’s death, International Women’s Days, the date of the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany, and the date on which the Sino-Soviet friendship treaty was signed in 1950.25 The average reader—whether school student, teacher, cadre, or ordinary resident—would probably not have been familiar with most of these dates. The appendices thus contributed to the project of creating and disseminating a new party-state approved canon of information. As a handy compilation of graphic, phonetic, and semantic information, Xinhua zidian therefore became an important mediator for many of the substantial changes in everyday life that resulted from the first decades of CCP rule. These changes were signaled, at the level of the graph, by simplified characters and, at the level of the word, by the shifting and sometimes completely new semantic scope of a character. Xinhua zidian dominated the lexicographical market because it was one of the few reference works to survive the Cultural

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Revolution period mostly unscathed, as the example of Liang’s house raid illustrates, and one of the few available dictionaries that was not a trial or an internal version with a restricted audience. Not everyone shared Liang’s experience, however. People whose homes were not raided were often able to hold onto their copies of reference books from before the founding of the PRC or from the 1950s, thereby complicating the task of state-led information management. Anyone who was able to own or consult different reference works long after their political expiry dates had passed became in many ways their own information managers, deciding for themselves—often quietly—what was worth knowing and keeping.26

Notes 1. Zidian ᄫ‫ ݌‬is translated here as “character dictionary,” though that translation is not faultless. See Henning Klötter, “Chinese Lexicography,” in Dictionaries: An International Encyclopedia of Lexicography, ed. Rufus H. Gouws et al. (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2013), 885. 2. Wang Donglin ∾ϰᵫ, “Huiyi Liang Shuming” ಲᖚṕ┅⑳, Guilin wenshi ziliao 23 (1993): 182. 3. Wang Donglin, “Huiyi Liang Shuming,” 176. 4. Press Centre, “Guinness World Records Announces Xinhua Dictionary as the ‘Most Popular Dictionary’ and the Best-Selling Book ‘(Regularly Updated),’ ” press release, April 12, 2016, http://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/news/press-release/2016/4/gwr%20announces %20xinhua%20dictionary. 5. Sigrid Schmalzer, The People’s Peking Man: Popular Science and Human Identity in Twentieth-Century China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008); Jennifer Altehenger, “On Difficult New Terms: The Business of Lexicography in Mao Era China,” Modern Asian Studies 51, no. 3 (2017): 622–61. 6. Michael Schoenhals, “Demonising Discourse in Mao Zedong’s China: People vs. Non-people,” Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions 8, no. 3–4 (2007): 465–82. 7. Altehenger, “On Difficult New Terms,” 627–29. 8. Barbara Mittler, “China’s ‘New’ Encyclopaedias and Their Readers,” in Chinese Encyclopaedias of New Global Knowledge (1870–1930): Changing Ways of Thought, ed. Milena Doleželová-Velingerová and Rudolf G. Wagner (Heidelberg: Springer, 2013), 399–424; Catherine Vance Yeh, “Helping Our People ‘to Jointly Hurry Along the Path to Civilization.’ The Everyday Cyclopedia, Riyong baike quanshu ᮹⫼ⱒ⾥ܼ᳌,” in Doleželová-Velingerová and Wagner, Chinese Encyclopedias, 367–98. 9. Letter from Chen Kehan, dated March 1, 1954, in Zhongguo renmin gongheguo chuban shiliao Ё೑Ҏ⇥݅੠೑ߎ⠜৆᭭, ed. Zhongguo chuban kexue yanjiusuo Ё೑ߎ⠜ ⾥ᄺⷨお᠔ and Zhongyang dang’anguan Ё༂ḷḜ佚 (Beijing: Zhongguo shuji chubanshe, 1997), 4:135–37. 10. Altehenger, “On Difficult New Terms.” 11. “Fanli” ޵՟, in Xinhua zidian, ed. Xinhua cishushe ᮄढ䕲к⼒ (Beijing: Renmin jiaoyu chubanshe, 1954), 1. 12. Chen Yuan 䰜ॳ, “ ‘Xinhua zidian’ wushinian ganyan” ᮄढᄫ‫݌‬Ѩकᑈᛳ㿔, Renmin ribao, September 15, 1998, 11.

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13. For more details on Chinese book formats and measurements, see Andreas Seifert, Bildergeschichten für Chinas Massen: Comic und Comicproduktion im 20. Jahrhundert (Cologne: Böhlau, 2008), 268. 14. Mariana Münning, “Wèi Jiàngōng 儣ᓎࡳ (1901–1980),” in Encyclopedia of Chinese Language and Linguistics, ed. Rint Sybesma et al. (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 4:508–12. 15. Some of the documents that show the discussions surrounding the reorganization of the publishing unit have been republished in Zhongguo chuban kexue yanjiusuo and Zhongyang dang’anguan, eds., Zhongguo renmin gongheguo chuban shiliao, vol. 6 (Beijing: Zhongguo shuji chubanshe, 1999), and later volumes of the series. 16. A historical analysis of the Xiandai Hanyu cidian can be found in Siu-yao Lee, “Defining Correctness: The Tale of the Contemporary Chinese Dictionary,” Modern China 40, no. 4 (2014): 429–33. 17. Lü Shuxiang, “Tantan xiandai hanyu fanhua gongzuo” 䇜䇜⦄ҷ∝䇁㾘㣗࣪Ꮉ, Renmin ribao, November 26, 1959, 7. 18. Xinhua cishushe, ed., Xinhua zidian (Beijing: Renmin jiaoyu chubanshe, 1954), 613. 19. Xinhua zidian ᮄढᄫ‫( ݌‬Beijing: Shangwu yinshuguan, 1985), 79. 20. Xinhua cishushe ᮄढ䕲к⼒, ed., Xinhua zidian ᮄढᄫ‫݌‬, (Shanghai: Shangwu yinshuguan, 1957), 38. 21. Xinhua zidian (1985), 386. 22. Xinhua zidian (1985), 97. 23. Chen Yuan, “ ‘Xinhua zidian’ wushinian ganyan,” 11. 24. “Biaodian fuhao yongfa” ᷛ⚍ヺো⫼⊩, in Xinhua cishushe, Xinhua zidian (1954), 7. 25. “Changyong biaodian fuhao yongfa jianbiao” ᐌ⫼ᷛ⚍ヺো⫼⊩ㅔ㸼, in Xinhua zidian (1985), 613. 26. Jie Li discusses palimpsests in “The Past Is Not Like Smoke: A Memory Museum of the Maoist Era (1949–1976)” (PhD diss., Harvard University, 2010), esp. chap. 3.

CHAPTER 10

APP-BASED AND ONLINE DICTIONARIES M I C H A E L L OV E

E

lectronic Chinese dictionaries have been available since the widespread adoption of CD-ROMs in the 1980s. But with the rise of dedicated handheld e-dictionaries in the late 1990s and web- and app-based dictionaries in the 2000s, electronic dictionaries have now become the dominant form of Chinese dictionary. This chapter summarizes the distinctive features of electronic Chinese dictionaries and the ways in which they remain bound to practices originally developed for their print predecessors.

Search The primary interface to most e-dictionaries is a search box; users can enter a search string using characters (provided by the operating system’s Chinese input method), romanized pronunciation, or other identifying information such as Cangjie (graphical keyboard input) codes. While a few smartphone apps and websites can still be navigated using hyperlinked radical lists or stroke-count tables, as in paper dictionaries (see Kuzuoğlu, chapter 3), for the most part these functions have been integrated into the search box as pop-up character input methods. Using a search box is far more efficient than tediously leafing through a paper dictionary, it allows for wildcards and for the easy mixing of multiple search methods, it supports full-text search to find entries containing particular words in their definitions, and it can employ “fuzzy search” to handle misspellings, rare variants, or easily confused characters. Where features like

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alphabetical search or search by the second character of a string were previously available only in specialized index volumes, they can now be seamlessly integrated into the main dictionary. Electronic dictionaries also enable the easy aggregation of results from multiple dictionaries in a metasearch, which can cover not only dictionaries but also external resources like web search engines. While print dictionaries sometimes include entries from earlier dictionaries—and, indeed, some historical dictionaries like Hanyu dacidian ⓶䁲໻䀲‫( ݌‬Great dictionary of the Chinese language) devote much of their space to presenting usage excerpts from other texts—in a modern e-dictionary this can be done on a much greater scale.

Input Methods Most electronic Chinese dictionaries feature some sort of handwriting input method. It may be supplied by the operating system: most modern desktop and mobile operating systems include a free virtual handwriting keyboard for Chinese input using a stylus or fingertip (also see Mullaney, chapter 4). It may also be built into the app/website itself. While handwriting input is less efficient than pinyin romanization for entering known words, it is invaluable when searching for an unfamiliar character, being an order of magnitude faster than the radical-plus-stroke-count method inherited from paper dictionaries. Many users also like the fact that handwriting input encourages them to use proper stroke order, since the results are less accurate with incorrect stroke order. A more recent innovation is the use of optical character recognition (OCR) to look up printed characters with a smartphone camera. This method is even easier than handwriting input, but it is also less accurate. While the character recognition is almost instantaneous, the act of turning on a device’s camera function and framing the text to be recognized can often end up taking longer than simply handwriting the character, making OCR useful chiefly when looking up lots of words in a long passage. Chinese dictionaries have also been incorporated into a variety of reading apps, such as e-book readers and web browsers, to allow easy lookups of words from electronic texts; a user can simply highlight or tap on a word to instantly pop up a definition. In some cases, this method is even available for all Chinese text systemwide; for the last seven years, every iPhone has included a “Define” text menu command with high-quality Chinese dictionaries. Despite all of these advances, radical and component inputs are still widely used as well, driven in part by tradition—print dictionaries remain an important component of many Chinese speakers’ understanding of their language—and in part by the recent rise of component-centric systems for studying characters as part of Chinese as a second language methods such as those developed by

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James Heisig and by Outlier Linguistics. While much less efficient than handwriting or OCR, the traditional idea of understanding characters through their visual components retains a great deal of aesthetic appeal.

Content Modern smartphones can easily store several bookshelves’ worth of dictionaries in their internal memory and can present that content without regard for page space: an e-dictionary can use comfortably large fonts, put each definition or example on a separate line, and even duplicate content, for example, by inserting a usage note or example sentence under every word to which it relates. This flexibility also applies to the content itself: users can easily switch between romanization systems or between traditional and simplified characters, whereas most printed dictionaries offer one or the other and, at most, provide both forms for single-character headings. An e-dictionary can also incorporate additional layers of information, for example, by coloring characters based on their Mandarin tone or grade level. It can also seamlessly incorporate additional, nondictionary data: for example, a list of synonyms or homonyms, a character’s stroke-order diagram or a list of its visual components, or a frequency-sorted list of words containing that character. Cross-references are much more efficient, taking the form of tappable hyperlinks, with “see X” replaced by a link to X, or, in some cases, simply being added to the entry without a link at all, for example, if a character exists in modern Chinese only as a bound form. Most dictionary apps also support some form of bookmarking: users can easily mark words for later review, share word lists with peers or teachers, and even study words with a built-in or closely integrated flashcard app. The results of those flashcard sessions can even be incorporated back into a dictionary search, for example, by highlighting words that a user ought to know or even by delaying or disabling definitions for them to encourage recall.

Characters While a printed Chinese dictionary can accommodate any character equally well, in an e-dictionary rare characters suffer from several limitations compared to more common ones. Input methods based on artificial intelligence (AI), like handwriting recognition and OCR, necessitate significant trade-offs between breadth of character set coverage and recognition accuracy, so they are usually optimized around recognizing only the most common characters. Few Chinese handwriting recognition libraries support more than twenty-eight thousand characters, and

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OCR engines often support less than half that many. Since there’s no way for a user to tell whether a character is not supported or the AI simply fails to recognize it, users attempting to look up an unsupported character often simply become frustrated and give up. Many historical or recently created characters lack code points in the current eighty-eight-thousand-Chinese-character Unicode standard, meaning that there is no universal way to represent them on a computer or encode them in a font file. These can be accommodated in a dictionary only through embedded image files, which often clash with the style of other characters in the dictionary. They cannot be looked up from other apps or e-books—indeed, they are often incompatible between databases in the same app—and are generally accessible only through old-fashioned radical lookup, and then only if the app developer has taken the time to add special lookup data. The need to map characters to code points can sometimes cause a significant loss of information. Many simplified/traditional stylistic variations are not distinguished in character encodings at all: for instance, there is only one standard code point for gu 偼, which has a different appearance in the two forms of the script, and the form displayed depends solely on the user’s or the software’s choice of Chinese font. While the Unicode standard does include a system for selecting character variants, it is neither consistently used nor consistently supported by Chinese fonts or text-rendering engines, and most dictionaries simply don’t bother with it.

Pedagogical Concerns Modern input methods are more efficient than radical or stroke lookup, but they also force users to spend much less time grappling with the nuances of Chinese characters; with handwriting input, one can blindly copy strokes (preferably in the correct order) without thinking about their larger structures, and with OCR, one needn’t pay any attention to the form of a character at all. Faster Chinese word lookups also have a dramatic impact on reading practice, particularly with electronic texts; with the help of a pop-up dictionary, students can read through a much longer and more challenging text than they might otherwise. While more reading practice is generally beneficial, if reduced friction produces bad habits—looking up known words instead of taking the time to remember them, for example—or more superficial reading, it may do more harm than good. The switch from flipping through lists of words to simply entering a word in a search box may also make students somewhat less aware of the relationships between graphs or words. No longer does the process of finding a word involve reviewing a long list of characters containing a shared radical or a long list of

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words whose pronunciation begins with ma; now the word simply appears out of a cloud without any obvious links to others. While there does not appear to be much research on the impact, if any, of the switch to e-dictionaries on Chinese literacy, the topic certainly merits further study; the shift to e-dictionaries is probably irreversible, but there may nonetheless be ways to adjust their functionality to retain some of the benefits of printed dictionaries.

Online Translation The most novel electronic Chinese dictionaries from a content perspective are not dictionaries at all but rather online translators like Google Translate. These represent something akin to a first attempt at removing humans from the editorial process, using AI to tease out different senses of a word and generate definitions for them. While online translators are used chiefly to produce translations in a second language, there is no reason that similar techniques could not also be used to define Chinese words in Chinese. Online translators are not perfectly reliable and at times can be spectacularly wrong, but one can nevertheless imagine future Chinese dictionary development taking the form of a human-AI partnership, with a computer not merely compiling a word list based on corpus analysis, as has been done for decades, but also distinguishing and ranking senses, finding usage examples, and even proposing definitions, with human editors needed only to clean up and curate the work. One can even imagine augmenting such a partnership with a crowdsourcing project, assigning users to log the context and other particulars about the words they look up, with the aim of charting modern or historical usage in more detail than has ever been possible before.

Future Developments Even today most dictionaries are still authored within the limitations of print. There has never been a comprehensive Chinese dictionary built primarily around an electronic format, taking advantage of the unlimited storage space and flexible data retrieval to offer something more than a one-dimensional list of short entries. Although dictionaries are increasingly developed in appfriendly formats such as semantic XML and a publisher might add a bit of supplemental content exclusively for digital licensees, the overall organization and scope are still defined by the paradigms of print production. Most Chinese dictionaries are also tied to print development cycles, with new editions every five years or so and few, if any, updates to the electronic data in between, while an e-dictionary can be updated at arbitrary intervals. The

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popularity of a new term can rise and fall in the time between two editions of a dictionary, leaving little more than historical interest by the time it is finally defined. However, revenues from even the most successful apps and websites are insufficient to cover the cost of developing a major new dictionary from scratch; the number of products and the existence of “good enough” free alternatives put a low cap on what most consumers are willing to pay for a dictionary. Even less ambitious efforts—smaller, specialized dictionaries or attempts to digitize large or historically significant old dictionaries—tend to lose a great deal of money, and publishers are reluctant to invest in them. The current digital dictionary industry is essentially coasting on the products of decades of well-funded print projects. Developers have spent the last few decades expanding the limits of what is technically possible with electronic Chinese dictionaries, but further, substantial change will depend on turning attention back toward the editorial side: designing a new Chinese dictionary revolutionary enough to command a premium over a “good enough” free app at a low enough cost to be viable in the postprint world.

SECTION C

TEXT AND TEXTUAL DIVISIONS E D I T E D B Y JAC K W. C H E N

T

he concept of text has been central to modern literary theory and criticism, serving as a heuristic device that abstracts a literary work from its physical instantiation for the purposes of analysis. The text is therefore both an object of cognition and something that is experienced in phenomenological terms, a focal point of thought and a world that encompasses the reader. At the same time, no text is truly autonomous but is always constituted and entangled in the complex web of prior literary writings and language use—which is to say, of intertextuality. This volume takes heed of the various deployments of text in other methodological and disciplinary contexts, thus adopting a minimal definition of text to denote any coherent literary object that either circulates discretely on its own or is included as a discrete object within collections of other texts (for example, anthologies or journals). Most crucial here is an understanding of text as a structure of information management, one that is in turn comprised of smaller structures of information management, from punctuation and layout to words and phrases, from sentences (or lines) to paragraphs (or couplets and stanzas). These textual divisions may themselves act as discrete texts insofar as memorable sentences and poetic lines or couplets have a tendency to circulate on their own or as quotations embedded (i.e., collected) in other textual media. The following chapters consider basic units of text as ways of organizing words, beginning with the prose sentence and poetic line, both of which are syntactically coherent structures of meaning that afford the construction of larger compositions. While sentences and lines are comprised of words and

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phrases, the kind of information conveyed by a word or phrase is substantially different than that conveyed by a sentence or line, which subordinates the semantic content of the words through syntactic order. It is the case that sentences and lines are in turn subordinated by larger structures of information management (i.e., paragraphs and stanzas), but the kind of semantic determination imposed by these larger structures remains within the same syntactic order. Lastly, although conventional layout, recognizable syntactic divisions, and parallel rhetorical schema obviated much of the need for explicit punctuation in earlier periods, the increasing complexity of syntactic possibilities over time made an explicit graphical system of punctuation useful in later periods as a means of disambiguating textual divisions, not to mention marking up the text to indicate correction or aesthetic appreciation.

CHAPTER 11

SENTENCES, PARAGRAPHS, AND SECTIONS D I R K M E Y E R A N D L I S A I N D R AC C O L O

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ext is a complex unit of meaning. It can be composed, recorded, and transmitted in speech, in writing, or in a combination of speech and writing. As transmitted linguistic matter, text is abstracted from any material carrier and can travel independently of given material contexts, such as manuscript or received text. This chapter aims to provide the reader with an introduction to the most basic textual units and structural components of premodern Chinese texts, with a focus on early Chinese texts, which present fairly coherent informatic structures organized into more or less predictable patterns and typically built up by relatively stable, substantially modular textual units that may be termed building blocks.1 Texts composed in the postimperial period present remarkable similarities to their preimperial predecessors, especially in terms of internal structuring devices and organizational patterns.2 In these later works, similar ways of breaking down a text (and a train of thought) into smaller constituents can be detected that were first elaborated and developed in these earlier periods. The proposed analysis will highlight early Chinese modes of text composition to provide a deeper understanding of the structure of texts in Classical Chinese at large. Regardless of genre and form of transmission (i.e., manuscript or received), the building blocks of text composition represent the most basic constituents of meaning. Structurally, the building block is located one level up from the individual sentence and comprised of a “sufficient” number of graphs. As such, it is generally more than one sentence. These building blocks are purposely

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arranged to establish all necessary semantic links and conceptual cross-references and allusions across the different sections of a text. Their composition may be aided by text-structuring devices such as rhyme or parallelism, but this is not a defining feature of the building block. Because the form of a building block is particular to each individual text, there can be no exhaustive description of its defining features across the different genres and text structures, although occasionally some regularities can be identified in texts of a similar nature. Nonetheless, three basic features must apply: (1) structural stability, (2) relative independence, and (3) semantic (or informational) significance. Textual building blocks are relatively independent and self-contained units of informational meaning, but they are normally not autonomous. Thanks to the relatively recent discovery of larger corpora of manuscript texts, especially those from the second half of the twentieth century, we now know of several cases where, in different instantiations of a text, its constitutive building blocks remain more or less intact, while their overall arrangement within the text differs profoundly.3 Methodologically, we can differentiate between two ideal forms of text structure: argument-based texts and context-dependent texts.4 Put briefly, argument-based texts develop a point in a continuous way, such that the discussion extends beyond the individual building blocks by connecting them in a larger web of informational meaning. In contrast, in context-dependent texts the individual building blocks each present a more isolated concern. They are typically not connected to one another in a continuous way. In context-dependent texts, this has no bearing on the information content of the building blocks. Again, this is different in argument-based texts, where differently arranged text configurations change how one understands the information content of the building block. Some scholars have identified the building block as corresponding in length to a chapter (zhang ゴ).5 However, this view cannot be substantiated. Instead, it is useful to distinguish between two levels in the internal organization of early Chinese texts. At the level above the individual building block, there are larger textual units capable of circulating independently as texts in their own right at earlier stages of text transmission. These units of the second order can be generally identified as chapters in broader collections or as sections in an individual text. As units of meaning, the information they provide differs according to their immediate contexts. The text “Kang wang zhi gao” ᒋ⥟П䁹 (Proclamation of King Kang) is a case in point. In the pseudo-Kong ᄨ archaic script recension of the Shangshu ᇮ᳌ (Esteemed documents), it was read conjointly with “Gu ming” 主ੑ (Testamentary charge), forming an organic subsection of the latter. In the Han-era modern script recension of the Shangshu, it was taken as a separate chapter from “Gu ming.” The meaning of “Kang wang zhi gao” differs depending on whether it was read as a separate entity on its own or merged and read conjointly with another text. And it goes without saying that

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such forms of recontextualization are not exclusively written but pertain to oral performance and transmission as well. At the level below the building block, individual chapters and sections consist of smaller constituents of meaning in the form of strings of graphs. These range in length from a basic sentence to a building block or short paragraph. The way smaller units of meaning configure the text as carriers of information changes along with their contexts is parallel to the preceding discussion. To give one example, slip 13 of “*Yucong 1” 䁲শϔ (Collected sayings 1) from Guodian Tomb 1, contains disconnected sentences of the following sort: “there are things, there is appearance, there are appellations, there are names” ᳝⠽᳝ ᆍ᳝々᳝ৡ. (The asterisk at the beginning of the title indicates that the manuscript text in question recorded no designation and the title was given to it by modern editors.) This can also be rendered as “when matter has a wrapping, appellations become names.” In any case, no further information is provided. However, Christoph Harbsmeier has pointedly translated the same sentence as addressing matters of metaphysics: “there being things, there are outlines > ‘physiognomies’ (of these things), there being calling, there is a name (for the thing called by that name).”6 While this reading is convincing, the sentences in “*Yucong 1” also broadly resonate with what is developed in more detail at other places in the manuscript texts of Guodian. It is therefore equally possible to read “*Yucong 1” more plainly as notes taken by the owner of the manuscript texts—that is, as shorthand key phrases from a defined group of texts. Or are they perhaps written samples of the repertoire of cultural learning, with the philosophical texts of Guodian expounding the pool of knowledge in a more systematic fashion? This is not known. Yuri Lotman once stated that “a brief poem may contain information beyond the capacity of thick tomes.”7 As is becoming plain from the (now isolated) phrases of “*Yucong 1,” the way that information content increases as the verbal explicitness of the text gets reduced is not true of poetry alone but can also occur in philosophical cogitation. Lotman’s point is prominently manifest in the more context-dependent texts. The *Laozi 㗕ᄤ (or Daodejing 䘧ᖋ㍧, Classic of the Way and Its Virtue) in its many instantiations is a case in point. It is context dependent in the sense that the various units of thought each put forward an isolated concern, so they serve as smaller though equally authoritative and meaningful texts in their own right—even though most of them never had a history of their own but existed only in the context of the other units of meaning. It is likely that the text-context served as a frame to safeguard the individual units from the effacing effects of time. The building blocks of *Laozi are mostly pithy, often ambiguous, and yet highly successful as carriers of information content. This becomes clear in particular when reviewing their wide range of applications in history. To this day, they serve as the go-to texts of countless communities that read the same units of thought as something on

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a spectrum ranging from “cunning military stratagems” to “containers of metaphysical truth”—either way without doing harm to the text.8 Just as with good poetry, the information content of these units was raised in correspondence to their reduced form of verbal articulation. In argument-based texts and other narrative texts, the position of the building blocks is not random, even when they occasionally differ among different instantiations of a text. Unlike in context-dependent texts, building blocks generally appear in grids of fairly regular patterns, and their location to one another is key to the argument and meaning construction of the text. Through the intratextual links that connect the building blocks to one another in often nonlinear ways, the building blocks together establish meaningful conceptual connections among the different units of a text. In more context-dependent texts, the position of the building blocks within the text plays less of a role in the process of meaning construction.9 Broader overarching intratextual cross-references among and across the units are absent in context-dependent texts and feature in argument-based texts and other narrative texts alone. However, both text structures do at times engage in direct and lively dialogue with the lore of a shared background culture through the strategic use of intertextual correspondences, historical analogies, and literary allusions. Finally, it has been argued that the modular nature of early Chinese texts is in large part due to, and mirrored by, the specific morphology of the material carriers of writing—sleek bamboo and wooden slips, which physically allowed only a relatively limited amount of graphs per slip. This characteristic consequently required texts to be broken down into smaller, more manageable units, from the building block as a unit of meaning of the first order to more complex units of the second order that, after having been copied onto the slips, were brought together in somewhat bulky bundles. Such bundles could be stored and carried separately, with some becoming subject to continuous rearranging and misplacing until the texts started to undergo a more systematic editing, and sometimes canonization, during the Han and the early medieval periods. It is impossible to confirm the hypothesis on the precise impact of the materiality of writing on the textual representation of thought in China. There are numerous examples where the number of graphs that constitute a building block of a manuscript text corresponds with the number of graphs one could conveniently place on a slip but where the copyist “chose” not to observe this match between text and the materiality of its carrier. The argument-based text “*Zhong xin zhi dao” ᖴֵП䘧 (The way of fidelity and trustworthiness) from Guodian is a case in point.10 However, this phenomenon might just reflect a stage of text production where, to the copyist, the textual matter was entirely abstracted from any given materiality, so it certainly does not serve as counterevidence to the hypothesis just mentioned.

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It was also not uncommon for completely unrelated texts to be written on one manuscript. The boundaries of such independent textual units were sometimes demarcated by adding spaces, by placing different punctuation marks on the bamboo slips, or by leaving some portions of the slips blank. Sometimes, however, none of the above practices was observed.11 While within manuscripts from the Warring States period it is indeed possible to identify with some certainty the role and the function of punctuation marks, this is less consistent in the transmitted texts of the premodern period. For the manuscripts of the Warring States, although clues hint at the sequence of the individual slips within a manuscript,12 there is generally not much material evidence pointing to the internal segmentation of a text or its boundaries. In the transmitted records, such marks, if there were any, have often been overlooked or ignored, so that the later printed editions of early Chinese texts often bear no punctuation at all (see Galambos, chapter 13). This results in cases where the meaning of a premodern text and its segmentation can be deduced only from close reading by considering the dense mutual interaction of the information content of the textual features, the structural features of text organization of the first and second orders, and the physical materiality of the text.

Notes 1. See William G. Boltz, “The Fourth-Century B.C. Guodiann Manuscripts from Chuu and the Composition of the Laotzyy,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 119 (1999): 590–608, and “The Composite Nature of Early Chinese Texts,” in Text and Ritual in Early China, ed. Martin Kern (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2005), 50–78. Also see Vladimir S. Spirin, Postroenie drevnekitajskix tekstov (Moscow: Nauka, 1976), and “Composition des textes chinois anciens,” in Modèles et structures des textes chinois anciens: les formalistes soviétiques en sinologie, ed. Karine Chemla, Alexeï Volkov, and Vera Dorofeeva-Lichtmann, Extrême Orient-Extrême Occident 13 (1991): 31–57; and Alexei Volkov, “La structure des textes chinois anciens: quelques remarques,” in Chemla, Volkov, and Dorofeeva-Lichtmann, Modèles et structures, 155–61. 2. See Ori Sela, China’s Philological Turn: Scholars, Textualism, and the Dao in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018). 3. Examples include “*Wu xing” Ѩ㸠, a Warring States manuscript text found at Guodian Tomb 1, in comparison to its Western Han counterpart from Mawangdui Tomb 3, and “*Xing zi ming chu” ᗻ㞾ੑߎ from Guodian, in comparison to its unprovenanced Warring States counterpart from the Shanghai Chu manuscripts. 4. For a detailed discussion of this taxonomy, see Dirk Meyer, Philosophy on Bamboo: Text and the Production of Meaning in Early China (Leiden: Brill, 2011). 5. Rudolph G. Wagner, “The Impact of Conceptions of Rhetoric and Style Upon the Formation of Early Laozi Editions: Evidence from Guodian, Mawangdui and the Wang Bi Laozi,” Transactions of the International Conference of Eastern Studies 44 (1999): 32–56; Boltz “The Composite Nature.”

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6. Christoph Harbsmeier, “A Reading of Guodian 䛁ᑫ Manuscript Yucong 䁲ᕲ 1 as a Masterpiece of Early Chinese Analytic Philosophy and Conceptual Analysis,” Studies in Logic 4, no. 3 (2011): 16. 7. Yuri Lotman, Analysis of the Poetic Text, ed. and trans. D. Barton Johnson (Ann Arbor, MI: Ardis, 1976), 33. 8. See Ashton Ng, “Is the Laozi a Book of Stratagems? Examining the Hanfei Zi’s Illustrations of the Laozi” (MSt thesis, University of Oxford, 2019). 9. See also Edward L. Shaughnessy, “Rewriting the Zi Yi: How One Chinese Classic Came to Read as It Does,” in Rewriting Early Chinese Texts (Albany: SUNY Press, 2006), 63–130; and Lisa Indraccolo, “The Junzi and the Black Robe: Confucian Political Thought in the Light of the Manuscripts of Guodian and Shanghai” (MA thesis, Ca’ Foscari University, 2006). 10. See Dirk Meyer, “A Device for Conveying Meaning: The Structure of the Guodian Tomb One Manuscript ‘Zhong xin zhi dao,’ ” in Komposition und Konnotation: Figuren der Kunstprosa im alten China, ed. Wolfgang Behr and Joachim Gentz, Bochumer Jahrbuch zur Ostasienforschung 29 (Munich: Judicium-Verl, 2005), 57–78, and Philosophy on Bamboo. 11. For instance, the unknown copyist disambiguated the argument-based “*Taiyi sheng shui” ໾ϔ⫳∈ from “*Laozi” in bundle C of Guodian by using the same marks and spacers that were also used to separate the various units within “*Laozi” C from one another. 12. Some slips are numbered on the back and contain a carved line indicating which slips come from one bamboo tube.

CHAPTER 12

LINES, COUPLETS, AND STANZAS JAC K W. C H E N

W

hen referring to Chinese poetry, one usually means shi 䀽, conventionally translated as “lyric poetry,” though there are three other major genres—fu 䊺 (rhapsody), ci 䀲 (song lyric), and qu ᳆ (arias)—that may also be categorized as poetry. This said, the problem of using the term poetry with reference to the Chinese literary tradition is both that there was no general term for all poetic forms in pretwentieth-century China and that genres such as fu were categorized as wen ᭛, which is usually rendered as “prose,” even though they sometimes exhibit characteristics typical of poetry. Given the constraints of this chapter, the focus will be on the regulated form of shi poetry, though a number of the implications apply to the other forms. As with other literary traditions, classical Chinese poetry is constructed from lines that often then form couplets and sometimes stanzas. A line generally conveys a single thought or proposition, though sometimes the thought or proposition takes place over the course of the couplet, in which grammatical and semantic parallelism may be enforced. While modern editions of poems often graphically either represent the line as a discrete unit or mark line endings with punctuation, the line is usually understood in earlier periods as a regular number of syllables (in which one character is equal to one syllable) and is not represented as graphically separate on the page. There is usually a limit to the number of couplets allowed in a classical shi poem, which was most often eight lines (four couplets) in length and four lines in the case of quatrains (jueju ㌩হ or xiaoshi ᇣ䀽), though other forms such as pailü ᥦᕟ (extended regulated

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verse) did not have such restrictions. Rhapsodies were typically much longer, while song lyrics and arias were of variable lengths, some shorter and some longer. Stanzas are not always employed, though some shorter poems might be divided into two parts, with the second half taking place at a different point in time from the first half or reflecting on the events of the first half. Longer poems might use stanzas of two couplets, where the stanza represents a complete thought. There is also the poem cycle, in which multiple poems should be read together as a single set and may be said to constitute a single poem; in these cases, the unit of the poem is equivalent to a stanza. This is related to but also different from the poem series, in which a set of poems is composed on a common topic though each poem may be read separately and indeed often circulates separately in anthologies. Within the level of the line, there are other formal characteristics. Classical Chinese poetry is largely but not entirely comprised of monosyllables, each of which manifests a set of phonetic qualities, with tone being the most prominent. Tonal balance, as expressed by level (ping ᑇ) and deflected (ze Ҙ) tones, is used to some extent in most shi, though rules for tonal balance were not articulated until the fifth century and were followed strictly only in regulated-style poetry (lüshi ᕟ䀽). Chinese poetry also employs a syllabic meter (as opposed to English poetry’s accentual and accentual-syllabic meters), with the most common syllable counts being four, five, and seven per line, though three and six also occur. Classical shi poems are strongly isomorphic, so a pentasyllabic poem will usually have the same five-beat meter per line for the whole poem. The end of a couplet (the last syllable of an even line) is marked by the rhyme foot (yunjiao ䷏㝇), though sometimes the last syllable of the first line of the poem might also employ the rhyme. A change in rhyme can be used to mark the end of a section in a longer poem or to demarcate stanzas. Rhymes were based not on vernacular speech but on codified rime tables (dengyuntu ㄝ䷏೪; see Branner, chapter 6). There is also usually a caesura in each line, occurring between the second and third syllables in a pentasyllabic line and between the fourth and fifth syllables in a heptasyllabic line. All these structures and attributes—from the organizing forms of line, couplet, and stanza to the elements of syllabic count, rhyme, caesura, and tonal balance—together channel the semantic information that flows through the text, in the sense of both providing a medium through which the information flows and delimiting selections within the universe of possible word choices for each line. This channeling of information differs from how the forms of sentence and paragraph in prose manage information (see Meyer and Indraccolo, chapter 11), given that poetry imposes a greater set of formal restrictions on how words are distributed within the syllabic count, how the ordering of the syllables is determined by the needs of tonal balance (or not), how caesurae are employed (or disregarded), whether the line is a complete thought on its

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own, how the position of the rhyme foot impacts diction and syntax, and a host of other concerns. One might expect that the high degree of selectivity imposed on poetry would result in an information-poor system, one that is highly conventionalized because of its rigid rules. Yet, as semiotician Yuri Lotman has demonstrated in a different context, these rules in fact increase the informational complexity of poetry because all of these formal constraints are also semantic elements that make the poem more than its verbal-propositional content. Lotman writes, “Poetry is a complexly constructed meaning. All of its elements are semantic elements and are designations of certain content.”1 At this point, it would be helpful to consider one example of how poetry may function as a complex informatic system. This is the poem “Chunye xiyu” ᯹໰୰䲼 (Delighting in the rain on a spring evening) by famed poet Du Fu ᴰ⫿ (712–70):2 ད䲼ⶹᰖ㆔ˈ

A good rain understands its season,

ҘҘᑇᑇҘ

⭊᯹Зⱐ⫳DŽ

So it’s right in spring that it brings forth life.

ᑇᑇҘҘᑇ

䱼乼┯ܹ໰ˈ

Imperceptibly, it enters the night on the wind,

ᑇᑇᑇҘҘ

┸⠽㌄⛵㙆DŽ

So fine, without sound it moistens all things.

ҘҘҘᑇᑇ

䞢ᕥ䳆‫ׅ‬咥ˈ

Field paths and clouds have all turned dark,

ҘҘᑇᑇҘ

∳㠍☿⤼ᯢDŽ

The river boat’s fire is all that still shines.

ᑇᑇҘҘᑇ

Ოⳟ㋙▩㰩ˈ

By dawn you’ll see where the red petals are wet,

ҘᑇᑇҘҘ

㢅䞡䣺ᅬජDŽ

Flowers weighed down in Brocade Official City.

ᑇҘҘᑇᑇ

First, some basic observations. The poem is an example of a pentasyllabic regulated shi poem. The first couplet is an oblique opening (zeqi Ҙ䍋) couplet, and the tonal scheme can be seen next to the translation. Verbal parallelism is observed in the second and third couplets. The rhyme employed is in the level-tone (sreing ᑮ) category (following Branner’s transcription system). As an informatic system, these formal constraints determine what may be represented within the space of the poem. What follows will consider the selection of words in Du Fu’s poem in relation to other possible selections from the Quan Tangshi ܼ૤䀽 (Complete Tang poems; see Patterson, chapter 22), proceeding from two perspectives: that of the word and line and that of the couplet. One may first consider the opening two words, which form a subunit within what Lotman would call “the unity of the line,” as the pentasyllabic caesura normally separates the first two syllables from the last three. The poem opens with haoyu ད䲼 (good rain), a phrase that conforms to the oblique opening tonal distribution, which dictates an oblique tone in the second position, with a variable tone in the first. A computer count of the Quan Tangshi corpus reveals that the combination haoyu is uncommon in Tang poetry, occurring only twice. Much more frequent are oblique tone combinations like muyu ᲂ䲼 (evening

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rain). Moreover, given that the opening tonal position is variable and only the second position obligatory, occurrences of yunyu 䳆䲼 (clouds and rain) and chunyu ᯹䲼 (spring rain) are common. However, tonal considerations are only one aspect of selecting the words that comprise a line; there is also the semantic logic that limits the possibilities of word selection. It is possible to write “Evening rain understands its season,” but does this statement make sense in the same way as “A good rain understands its season,” a line that then lends a normative force to shijie ᰖ㆔ (season)? This is to say nothing of aesthetic elegance and avoidance of redundant imagery. The poet will use ye ໰ (night) as the oblique ending word in the third line, and while nothing forbids him from also using mu in the first line, this would result in inelegant repetition. Moreover, the full propositional statement is realized only over the course of the couplet, which elaborates how “A good rain understands its season”—namely, by giving life to all things precisely in the springtime, which is, after all, the proper season for nurturing things. The couplet as a unit of meaning may represent a syntactic proposition, as is seen in this first couplet, but often in the middle two couplets of a shi poem the two lines represent a different kind of unity, one dependent on a more or less strict parallelism that combines “sameness, likeness, difference, and antithesis” and encompasses “phonological, grammatical, and semantic features.”3 The second couplet is bound not as a syntactic unity but as a paratactic one, which transversally juxtaposes the even-tone combination suifeng 䱼乼 and the oblique-tone combination runwu ┸⠽. The pairing of suifeng and runwu occurs only in this poem in the Quan Tangshi corpus, though suifeng is itself very common, occurring over one hundred times. Much more frequent are pairings of suifeng with combinations using ri ᮹ (sun), yun 䳆 (cloud), shui ∈ (water), di ഄ (ground or earth), and yue ᳜ (moon), with the oblique-tone combination xiangri ৥᮹ (facing the sun) occurring several times. The fact that it is a rainy night means that certain options are foreclosed to Du Fu, so he cannot use the common pairings of sun or moon and has to avoid rain, given that he has already used it in the first line. Following the statement of the first couplet, moreover, his choice of wu ⠽ (things) develops his point that a good rain (one that falls in the proper season) nurtures life. The second transversal parallel is between qian ruye ┯ܹ໰ and xi wusheng ㌄⛵㙆. Because the level-tone word qian ┯ appears very frequently as a single word in Tang poetry, it is useful to consider it only as it occurs in the third position and preceding a verb-noun phrase within pentasyllabic poems, where it would have an adverbial meaning of “in a hidden manner” or “imperceptibly.” Many of the adverbial terms that are paired with qian in the Quan Tangshi are common adverbial oblique-tone particles such as bu ϡ (not), zi 㞾 (self, in a reflexive sense), and zhi া (only), which generally occur only once as matched words. The most commonly paired word is an ᱫ (darkly), which occurs six

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times over the entire corpus—and seven if the synonym an 䮛 is included. The oblique-tone combination ruye occurs over sixty times in the Quan Tangshi, although two of these are duplicate occurrences. This is paired with level-tone combinations that match ye with words such as feng 乼 (wind) and tian ໽ (heaven or skies), including several pairings with combinations that end with sheng 㙆 (sound), including Du Fu’s own poem. However, by far the most common pairing of the phrase is with the word qiu ⾟ (autumn) and its combinations, such as linqiu 㞼⾟ (approaching autumn) and jingqiu ㍧⾟ (passing autumn), which occur nine times but would obviously not be possible here. Beyond the parallelism, it is worth noting that the phrase wusheng elaborates Du Fu’s use of the adverb qian to describe how the rain subtly moistens all things without human notice. This leads to the next couplet, which reveals a darkened world, one where the field paths (yejing 䞢ᕥ) and clouds (yun) are equally black (juhei ‫ׅ‬咥) and the fire (huo ☿) from a river boat (jiangchuan ∳㠍) is all that sheds light (duming ⤼ᯢ). Choices made earlier in the poem shape and limit the possibilities that come later, though the determination of selection may also take place within the couplet itself, as is the case here. Du Fu cuts across the caesura in this couplet, so the first three syllables of each line are grouped together, as are the last two syllables. The phrase yejing occurs in the Quan Tangshi twenty-seven times and is matched with a variety of phrases, from chuntian ᯹໽ (spring day) to sengfang ‫ڻ‬᠓ (monk’s abode), though it is matched with boat imagery two other times in addition to this poem (yuzhou ⓕ㟳 “fisherman’s boat”; pianzhou ᠕㟳 “little boat”). However, the phrase juhei occurs only once in the entire corpus—in this poem. There is nothing that necessitates the pairing of the river boat with the paths and clouds, but once paired, the collective blackness of the first line must be balanced by the single light of the second. The final couplet brings the next day, after the rains have passed. The first line of the couplet is elaborated by the second line, as was the case with the opening couplet. The level opening of the variable-tone first position is swapped between the two lines, so the oblique-tone xiao Ო is balanced by the even-tone hua 㢅. None of these combinations is very common in the Quan Tangshi, with xiao kan Ოⳟ (at dawn/to see) occurring most frequently at eleven times and even the proper name Jinguancheng 䣺ᅬජ (Brocade Official City) occurring only seven times. As with the opening couplet, it is the syntactic construction of the couplet that concerns the poet rather than the paratactic evocation of semantic and grammatical equivalences. There is a chiastic structure in this couplet, with the phrase hongshi chu ㋙▩㰩 explained by the phrase hua zhong 㢅䞡 in the next line and the opening statement xiao kan pointing to the final site of the poet’s vision, Brocade Official City. That is, by daybreak one will see Brocade Official City, where the red petals of the flowers are now laden with the raindrops from the spring rain that fell in the night before.

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Notes 1. See Yuri Lotman, Analysis of the Poetic Text, ed. and trans. D. Barton Johnson (Ann Arbor, MI: Ardis, 1976), 35. 2. See Quan Tangshi ܼ૤䀽, vol. 7 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1960), 226.2439. 3. Hans R. Frankel, “Classical Chinese,” in Versification: Major Language Types, ed. W. K. Wimsatt (New York: Modern Language Association and New York University Press, 1972), 31.

CHAPTER 13

PREMODERN PUNCTUATION AND LAYOUT IMRE GALAMBOS

P

unctuation and layout are visual devices that structure textual information into manageable units, facilitating its reading and comprehension. They are features of the written presentation of the text and to some extent are independent of its linguistic organization. Among their basic aims are to present information in a visually transparent form, to guide the reader (or writer) in interpreting structural elements of the text, and to break the text down into manageable units. They are also devices that help the reader navigate through the text and locate information with relative ease. Although punctuation and layout have many seemingly intuitive elements, such as placing titles on a separate line in front of the text and indenting the colophon at the end of the manuscript, they are to a large extent a matter of convention and have their own trajectory of development. Specific elements of layout may be inherited from the earlier tradition or adapted from foreign manuscript cultures. As readers and writers become familiar with basic layout features, they anticipate these and can immediately interpret what they signify in the manuscript. Thus, the consistency of layout—and punctuation—greatly aids the processing of information.

Punctuation Punctuation is a feature of premodern writing mostly absent from more formal manuscripts (e.g., those commissioned by the court) and printed texts. In

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most cases, it occurs in less-official contexts as an auxiliary device that helps the reader but is not really part of the text, although one can see from surviving manuscripts how this changes over time. Educated readers were expected to be able to read written texts without the help of punctuation, and, thus, most punctuation marks are absent on stone inscriptions even if these emulate many of the visual features of manuscripts. Nevertheless, punctuation marks are used from the earliest stages of Chinese manuscript culture all the way into the modern period, when Western-style punctuation marks replaced the native notational conventions and formed a relatively consistent—and mandatory— system. Although many punctuation marks display a surprising degree of stability over the course of the centuries, there are also marks that have a narrower time span, allowing them to be used for dating purposes. Punctuation can serve a variety of purposes. In many cases, it represents a secondary engagement with the text sometime after its production rather than a notation employed during the process of writing. For this reason, punctuation marks may be in a different color (e.g., red or, less commonly, white) from the text itself. They can be reading marks added by someone studying the text or by someone aiming to help others read it. They are also commonly used for correcting mistakes. In some cases, the marks are an integral part of the visual presentation of the text and are thus copied along with it onto new manuscripts. An example of how contemporary people saw the function of punctuation is seen in the colophon to juan 8 of the Fahua jing ⊩㧃㍧ (Lotus Sutra) in Dunhuang manuscript S.2577,1 which explains that the punctuation was added for the sake of beginners and only in cases where the reading did not follow the quadrisyllabic rhythm customary in written Chinese. In addition, alternate readings of certain characters (e.g., wéi or wèi for ⚎ and xíng or xìng for 㸠) were marked. Punctuation is already attested on bamboo and wood slip manuscripts from the Warring States period, when they were mostly used for segmenting text and disambiguating potentially problematic passages. They were used only sporadically when needed and did not form a regularized system of notation.2 Paper manuscripts, which appear in the archaeological record from the third and especially the fourth century CE onward, inherit many of these marks, while also introducing new ones. Among the most conspicuous marks used in manuscripts before about the end of the fifth century CE is the new section mark, which was placed in the top margin at the beginning of a section. This mark follows the physical division of the text into sections, also marked by line breaks. It thus reiterates a division already marked and, as a purely mechanical device, does not reflect the interpretation of the content of the text by the copyist. Occasionally, if there is enough space left on the last line of the previous section, the new section may begin

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Table 13.1 Examples of New Section Marks in the Top Margin

1

2

3

4

5

S.797

Kalamazoo

Nakamura 003

Nakamura 005

S.754

on the same line after a hiatus that functions as a condensed form of the line break. As shown in able 13.1, this section mark can have several shapes. It can be a dot, a short stroke in the shape of a modern serial comma (dunhao ䷧㰳), or a modern check mark. Based on its shape and function, the section mark probably developed from of a similar mark seen in bamboo slip manuscripts from the Qin-Han period. Its main function in paper manuscripts would have been to facilitate navigation through the scroll. Interestingly, by the Sui-Tang period this mark is no longer used, which is why its presence indicates a relatively early date (from the third through the fifth century). At least in such early manuscripts, it differs from most other marks in that it was added during the process of copying and was applied consistently. Clearly, it was considered to be part of the core text. Another mark used in early manuscripts as part of the core text is the duplication mark. This features even in manuscripts produced as part of official sūtra-copying projects and thus should not be considered an abbreviation or shortcut, at least not in the sense of trying to economize on time or effort when copying. This is also why duplication marks are among the very few marks that can be seen in stone inscriptions, as they were part of the way certain compound words or phrases were normally written. Once again, this mark is inherited from pre-paper manuscripts, where it was already used in a very similar way. In early China, it mostly consisted of two horizontal strokes added below the character on the right side of the strip, resembling a smaller version of the character er Ѡ (two), which made sense in terms of its function even if this may not have been its origin. By the period of the Southern and Northern dynasties, there was a variety of shapes in use for the same function. In table 13.2, examples 1 and 2 come from the same manuscript, yet one is in the

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Table 13.2 Examples of Duplication Marks

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

S.116

S.116

S.341

S.2073

P.2212

S.5529

P.3082

form of an elongated dot, and the other is a cursive variant of the two-stroke form. This second form is also seen in examples 3 and 4, whereas example 5 shows a related version that appeared relatively late (in the ninth and tenth centuries) but then remained in use until modern times. Examples 6 and 7 show how in manuscripts from the ninth and tenth centuries the repetition marks may take the shape of wiggly strokes placed directly next to characters rather than underneath them. Whenever multiple characters are marked, as in examples 1, 6, and 7, the characters are read by repeating the entire string (ABC-ABC) and not by repeating the characters one by one (AA-BB-CC). While this is a straightforward rule, there are numerous examples where textual corruption can be attributed to a copyist misreading the repetition mark somewhere in the course of the text’s transmission. Among the most common applications of punctuation was to segment text. Such marks may take a variety of shapes, including dots and circles placed at the end or beginning of shorter segments or entire sections of text. The marks do not delineate sentences and clauses in the modern sense but break continuous text into smaller units and mark words that belong together. These do not necessarily coincide with syntactical divisions; even when the marks are applied consistently, they do not distinguish the ends of sentences from smaller breaks. In many cases, the marks are used only in places that were otherwise ambiguous. The beginnings of larger sections in the text are often marked in a way that makes them stand apart from smaller breaks. This is normally achieved by placing a larger circle (sometimes in red ink), a check mark, or a right-angle hook (with a long vertical stroke) at the top right corner over the first two or three characters at the beginning of the text.

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129

Table 13.3 Examples of Deletion Marks

1

2

3

4

5

6

S.341

S.116

S.116

S.1920

P.3053

P.2914

There are also marks used for correcting mistakes. These always represented a secondary engagement with the text and were never thought of as being part of it. When a new copy was made, the corrections were never copied but instead translated into the correct reading, which then appears in the manuscript. The marks could be added by the person copying the text or by a different person who checked the manuscript at a later stage, either as part of the production process or while using it. Among the most common marks are those that indicate the deletion of characters and the reversal of accidentally inverted ones. In the pre-Tang period, the most common way of indicating a deletion is to add three dots to the right side of the character. Examples 1–3 in table 13.3 show this technique in early manuscripts. In later manuscripts, the three-dot deletion mark develops into a five-dot mark, although the two could be used concurrently, as shown in example 4, where an entire string of five characters is deleted. By this time, the most common notation signaling a deletion is a mark consisting of a longer vertical stroke and a shorter horizontal one to its right side, as seen in examples 5 and 6. The reversal mark is used when two characters are accidentally written in the wrong sequence, which is among the most common mistakes in Chinese manuscripts. This mark has been fairly stable in shape since the earliest examples of paper manuscripts. Example 1 in table 13.4 shows how the copyist corrected the mistake of accidentally writing the word douzheng 價⠁ (fight) as ⠁價 using a mark that resembles the character yi Э. More common was the mark in the shape of a modern check mark, as it is seen in the other examples. In manuscripts produced as part of larger sūtra-copying projects, especially in the early period (examples 2 and 3), the corrections are discrete, employing a tiny mark

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Table 13.4 Examples of Reversal Marks

1

2

3

4

5

6

S.797

Kalamazoo

S.754

P.2212

P.2914

S.120

placed on the right side between the two characters. In less formal manuscripts, the mark can be made much more visible, either by writing it larger (examples 4 and 5) or using a red ink (example 6, though not visible in this reproduction). Another category of notation is the so-called poyin ⸈䷇ marks typically added to differentiate between multiple readings of certain characters. The default reading is left unmarked, whereas the alternative one is signaled by a red dot placed directly on the middle of the character.3 Lu Deming 䱌ᖋᯢ (556–627) referred to this practice as “marking with a red dot” (zhudian ᴅ咲) and suggested that it was done by readers using older manuscripts.4 For example, in manuscript S.2577, there is a red dot in the middle of xiang Ⳍ in the gāthā line “Oh, Venerable One, possessing wondrous attributes” Ϫᇞ཭Ⳍ‫݋‬, indicating that it should be read as a noun in the sense of attribute. A bit later in the text the character ⚎ is marked similarly in the line “I will outline this for you” ៥⚎∱⬹䁾, signifying that in this place it stands for the word for and should be read with a corresponding pronunciation. To cite another example, in manuscript S.767 the character ῖ is consistently marked with a red dot, signaling that it should be read in the sense of joy rather than music.

Layout As a norm, Chinese texts are written in vertical lines going from right to left. This was the direction of writing already on bronze inscriptions and later on manuscripts written on bamboo, wood, and silk. Paper manuscripts inherited this convention but relied on the scroll format, which contained rectangular sheets glued together in succession to form a continuous writing surface.

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131

Typically, the paper was ruled with thin lines to produce vertical columns for writing the text. Horizontal top and bottom lines were also added to delineate the margins. In early Buddhist scrolls from before the sixth century, the top and bottom margins are relatively narrow, but with time, they became significantly wider. By the time of printed books, the margins may have amounted to half of the page surface. In this early period, Buddhist scriptures typically had an irregular line length of between eighteen and twenty characters, but around the early sixth century, the seventeen-character line became the standard and was used for scrolls well into the Song period and later. Despite the equal number of characters per line, in manuscripts the characters were almost never aligned horizontally, although this feature was relatively common in stone inscriptions. In court-commissioned manuscripts, every aspect of the layout and physical form was closely regulated; these may be considered examples of ideal manuscripts. In addition to the standard line length, the number of lines per sheet was consistent, ranging for different copying projects between twenty-eight and thirty-two. The beginning of the scroll usually had a small pocket into which a slip of wood was inserted to prevent damage to the paper. Attached to this stiff edge was a cord or ribbon that was used to tie the rolled-up scroll. The last sheet in the scroll had its corners sliced off so that the leftmost edge had narrowed to about a third of the height of the sheet. The narrowed edge was glued onto a wooden roller (zhou 䓌), which provided physical support for rolling up the scroll. The ends of the roller often had knobs, some with decorative designs and inlaid ornamentation. The title of the text was written on the beginning of the verso, showing what the text was without having to unroll the scroll. The recto began with the full title (i.e., shouti 佪丠 “head title”), including the volume (juan ो) or chapter (pin ક) number. In the case of Buddhist sūtras, the name of the translator typically appeared indented in the second line. The text ended with the end title (weiti ሒ丠), which was often an abbreviated version of the full title. Sometimes the text was followed by a colophon, which was usually deeply indented, leaving the top half of the writing surface empty. It recorded the circumstances of the production of the text, including its date, the person who copied it, the reasons for the text, and sometimes even the number of sheets required for the complete scroll. The text itself ran continuously without punctuation or interruptions. Larger sections were separated by line breaks, leaving the rest of the previous line empty. The incomplete lines lent the scroll a certain visual rhythm and helped the reader navigating through it. The continuous flow of text may have been interrupted by occasional blocks of gāthā verses, which had their own layout. The gāthā consisted of four-, five-, six-, or seven-character segments, often written in a more condensed manner (i.e., tighter) than the rest of the text in

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13.1 The visual arrangement of running text and gāthā verses in juan 3 of the Lotus Sutra. Source: The British Library Board Or.8210/S.5319.

the scroll. Figure 13.1, a section of the Lotus Sutra in manuscript S.5319, illustrates how the segments were separated by spaces and structured into a regular grid that stood apart from running text (on the right). In earlier manuscripts from the Southern and Northern dynasties, the segments were often separated with horizontal ruling lines rather than spaces. In contrast with the structured layout of Buddhist gāthā, secular poetry usually appeared as running text. The copyist may have separated individual verse lines with spaces or some punctuation marks, but they made no effort to write each of them on a new line in the manuscript. Lists of similarly structured items, such as names or attributes, were often arranged into a symmetrical layout. The best example of this is the long lists of the names of Buddhas in the various versions of the Foming jing ԯৡ㍧ (Sūtra of the Buddhas’ names), which were typically arranged in manuscripts as an upper and a lower register separated by a horizontal space. Figure 13.2, a detail from manuscript S.62, shows that in addition to the blank space between the items, the identical beginning and end of each item contributed to the structured layout.

Premodern Punctuation and Layout

133

13.2 The layout of the names of Buddhas in the Foming jing. Source: The British Library Board Or.8210/S.62.

From about the ninth century, several new book forms began to be used for writing Chinese text. Among the most common ones were the pothi leaves, the concertina, the codex (i.e., booklet), and later the traditional thread-bound volumes used in print culture. All of these involved writing on separate pages, each of which contained a relatively small amount of text compared to the scroll and thus represented a structurally more segmented layout. The pages were usually ruled with vertical lines but also had top and bottom margins. Sometimes page numbers were added, which was a novel navigational feature unknown in scrolls. One of the ways of structuring text in such manuscripts was by adding illustrations. This technique was already used on scrolls (cf. illustrations to the Sūtra of the Ten Kings) but was even more common in manuscripts with pages. Figure 13.3 shows a typical arrangement of text vis-à-vis illustrations in the twenty-fifth chapter of the Lotus Sutra from manuscript S.6983. Each page is divided into an upper and a lower register for image and text, respectively. The text contains unfinished or completely empty lines so that it does not run ahead of the illustrations, which always match the content of the text. This type of

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13.3 Illustrated version of the twenty-fifth chapter of the Lotus Sutra. Source: The British Library Board Or.8210/S.6983.

image on top/text on bottom arrangement remained popular in printed books and survived into the modern period.

Notes 1. In the pressmark of manuscripts, the capital letter S refers to the Stein collection in the British Library, P to the Pelliot chinois collection at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Nakamura to the Nakamura Fusetsu Museum of Calligraphy in Tokyo, and Kalamazoo to the so-called Kalamazoo manuscript in a private collection. 2. See Matthias L. Richter, “Punctuation, Premodern,” in Encyclopedia of Chinese Language and Linguistics, ed. Rint Sybesma et al. (Leiden: Brill, 2017), 3:501–6. 3. See Harumichi Ishizuka, “The Origins of the Ssŭ-shêng Marks,” Acta Asiatica 65 (1993): 30–50. 4. See Lu Deming’s comment under the phrase “Wu bujing” ↟ϡᭀ, in Jingdian shiwen ㍧ ‫݌‬䞟᭛, 3 vols. (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1985), 11.635.

CHAPTER 14

MODERN PUNCTUATION AND LAYOUT JOH N CHR ISTOPHER H A M M

I

n April 1919, a group of scholars, including Hu Shi 㚵䘽 (1891–1962), presented a “Proposal for the Implementation of New-Style Punctuation” to the first meeting of the Preparatory Committee for the Unification of the National Language. A revised version, passed by the Ministry of Education of the Beiyang government in February 1920 (hereafter “Proposal”), became the first government-approved set of guidelines for the punctuation of the written Chinese language.1 The “Proposal” specifies twelve punctuation marks, some adapted from traditional Chinese usage but most from Western models: the period, comma, semicolon, colon, question mark, exclamation mark, quotation mark, em dash, ellipsis mark, parentheses, proper name mark, and title mark. For each, it gives the name, displays the form (including acceptable variants), succinctly explains the function and usage, and provides examples. The “Proposal” also defines punctuation, describes traditional practice, and argues for the limitations of traditional punctuation and the advantages of the new system. The influence of the “Proposal” has been long-lived. In 1951, the government of the new People’s Republic of China promulgated a document titled “General Rules for Punctuation” (Biaodian fuhao yongfa ῭咲ヺ㰳⫼⊩), which specified fourteen types of marks. A 1990 revision, adopted as a national standard in 1996, expanded the set to sixteen marks, and a 2011 revision further increased it to seventeen.2 Although these later documents variously add to, reorganize, and rename the marks set out in the “Proposal,” they draw from it their basic repertoire of symbols and their fundamental understanding of the nature and

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scope of punctuation; so, too, do similar standards issued by the Ministry of Education of the Republic of China on Taiwan.3 The “Proposal” developed by Hu Shi and his colleagues thus established the conceptual and practical foundations of the modern Chinese system of punctuation. For this reason, the “Proposal” itself, as well as the debates leading up to and surrounding its drafting, will be the chief focus of this chapter.4 The 1919 “Proposal” sprang from lively discussions on punctuation conducted within New Culture circles of the late teens. These discussions drew in turn on ideas and proposals circulating since the last decades of the nineteenth century. The question of punctuation reform was inseparable from other elements of language reform debated in late Qing and early Republican China, including script reform, vernacularization, and the promotion of a national language, and like these other elements, it developed within the broad context of a perceived need for the Chinese nation to emulate and adopt elements of the civilization, knowledge systems, and technologies of the West. Hu Shi’s earliest published essay on punctuation appeared in the journal Kexue ⾥ᅌ (Science), the organ of the Chinese Science Society, the majority of whose members were Chinese students in the United States.5 From its first issue, Kexue presented its Chinese text in horizontal alignment and marked with Western-style punctuation. Accounts of Western punctuation can be found as early as Zhang Deyi’s ᔉᖋᔱ (1847–1918) description of nine punctuation marks in his 1869 Zaishu qi ‫ݡ‬䗄༛ (Further accounts of the marvelous), a record of observations from his travels in Europe and America. Such accounts, along with direct encounters with Western texts, spurred experiments with adapting Western punctuation to Chinese use, revising traditional Chinese punctuation practice, and inventing entirely new systems. Some of the most ambitious attempts were made in the context of late Qing proposals for adopting a phonographic script, thus conceiving some form of modern punctuation as an element of a writing system that would replace traditional Chinese characters entirely.6 But Yan Fu’s ಈᕽ (1853–1921) 1904 Yingwen Hangu 㣅᭛⓶䀕 (English grammar explained in Chinese) exemplified another possibility: it not only included an explanation of eight Western punctuation marks but also employed these same marks to punctuate its Chinese text. It was also the first book in the Chinese script to be printed horizontally rather than vertically—a choice clearly determined by the exigencies of presenting Chinese and English texts in tandem. Although debates over the adoption of a phonographic script continued (see Zhong, chapter 2), by the time of the New Culture movement in the teens the question of the punctuation of the existing Chinese script was given increasing priority. Chen Wangdao 䱇ᳯ䘧 (1890–1977), a leading advocate, declared in his 1918 “Biaodian zhi gexin” ῭咲П䴽ᮄ (Reform of punctuation) that “the matter of reforming punctuation is both more important and more urgent

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than that of script reform” ࠛ䴽ᮄ῭咲ˈ݊џজ䞡Ϩ㽕ᮐ䴽ᮄ᭛ᄫ㗙⶷. The same essay lays out the rationale shared by most proponents of new-style punctuation: If the marks for writing are insufficient, then as a result the structure and disposition of clauses are at times obscure, and divergent meanings accordingly proliferate. The marginally literate, in particular, are unable to interpret [the text] without these [marks] as a guide. For this reason, what we call “punctuation” has become an important and urgent question in language and education.7

The Chinese textual tradition, in this view, includes a rudimentary form of punctuation in the practices of marking phrases (quandian ೜咲) and parsing sentences (judou হ䅔). But this indigenous system is deficient by virtue of the paucity of available marks, the imprecision of their signification, and the inconsistency—often the complete absence—of their employment. Traditional punctuation thus fails at what are seen as punctuation’s proper and essential tasks: to disambiguate and stabilize textual information, fixing its meaning and expediting the task of information processing for the reader. Although the traditional education system to some extent compensated for the indigenous deficiencies through immersive training in the textual corpus and its transmitted interpretations, divergent understandings could still arise. And in any case, a system designed to educate a privileged elite in the exegesis of received texts was unsuited to the processing of unprecedented quantities of new information, to the mass education of the citizens of a modern nation, and to the creation and transmission of the new knowledge that the nation required for its survival and prosperity. How does punctuation serve to fix and clarify meaning? What does it add to the Chinese written language that the graphs themselves, singly and in combination, fail to provide? The 1919 “Proposal” explains the word biaodian itself as a compound referring to two distinct classes of marks: “Marking” [dian] means marking divisions; all [marks] that are used to mark and divide the sentences of a text, and to let people understand the position and mutual relationship between parts of a sentence in terms of grammar, are considered “marking symbols,” and can also be called “parsing symbols.” . . . “Denoting” [biao] means denoting the significance. All [marks] that are used to denote the categorical character of words or sentences are considered “denotative symbols.”8

The first four marks in the “Proposal”—the period, comma, colon, and semicolon—fall into the former category, and the rest make up the latter. The two categories correlate with the distinction made in English grammars

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between marks of separation and marks of specification, but the classification seems imprecise, and other texts from the time point out that some punctuation marks serve both functions and go on to propose more complex classifications.9 The essential function of punctuation is nonetheless clear: it furnishes pragmatic, semantic, and grammatical information beyond that conveyed by the graphs themselves. The adoption of modern punctuation is allied above all with the project of grammaticizing the Chinese language—in the sense of both subjecting it to precise grammatical analysis and prescribing grammatical norms to which it should adhere. The prescriptions in the “Proposal” for the use of its punctuation marks rely on grammatical analysis. Three usages, for instance, are given for the semicolon: 1. If a single sentence includes several long phrases or clauses of equal status, you must use the semicolon to divide them. . . . 2. Two independent sentences, unrelated in terms of grammar but related in terms of meaning, may be divided by a semicolon. . . . 3. Several interdependent clauses, if of excessive length, should also be divided by a semicolon.10

Hu Shi’s 1916 article declares that “people today are gradually realizing that grammar absolutely must be emphasized, but they do not understand that grammar cannot be clarified without punctuation.”11 It systematically defines a series of grammatical terms (subject, predicate, transitive and intransitive, object, etc.) before going on to explain how punctuation marks serve to make manifest the presence and functioning of these grammatical features within the text. The circularity of the project—correctly apprehending grammar requires punctuation, and correctly using punctuation requires an understanding of grammar—only testifies to the inseparability of punctuation and Westerninfluenced grammaticization in the construction of Modern Standard Written Chinese.12 It is not difficult to picture the benefits that a standardized, grammatically rationalized system of punctuation might bring to the tasks of creating a modern national language and producing texts written in that language. More surprising, perhaps, is the apparent conviction that the new-style punctuation would be retroactively applicable to the entire Chinese literary tradition and be of particular benefit in facilitating broader access to texts in Literary Sinitic. The New Culture advocates of modern punctuation frequently took their examples from classical texts. One of the new-style punctuation’s earliest successes, at least in terms of volume of activity and public visibility, was the flood of punctuated editions of classical literature produced by commercial publishers in the 1920s and 1930s. The Republican-era project of punctuating classical texts was based, as noted previously, on the premise that the texts in their unpunctuated

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state failed to clearly manifest their intended meaning; it aimed, as Thomas S. Mullaney puts it, at “outfit[ting] the Chinese canon with extensive metadata” and “increasing the informational redundancy of Chinese texts” in order to ensure their “at-a-glance legibility.”13 The project also presumed that a single unified grammar informs the Chinese language from its most recently crafted standards back to the earliest written records and that the tools of modern punctuation are sufficient to the task of elucidating this grammar. The efforts of these scholars contributed to developing an understanding of both the history of Chinese grammar and the capabilities of punctuation itself. However, the indifferent quality of some editions did little for either the reputation of the new punctuation or the clarity of the texts. A dismayed Lu Xun 元䖙 (1881–1936) likened the burdening of classical texts with ill-considered punctuation to “placing dung upon the head of the Buddha” ԯ丁ⴔ㊲.14 The “Proposal” includes a section prescribing the proper use of the “preexisting symbols for marking,” explaining that this simplistic system cannot be abandoned “at a time when grammatical knowledge has not yet been widely promulgated.”15 The system described, employing circles (quan ೜) and points (dian 咲) to demarcate greater and smaller sections of text, ascribes to “oldstyle” punctuation the sole function of separation. Each example given is followed by an explanation of how the new punctuation more precisely regiments the text. In the name of imposing rationalization and standardization on traditional punctuation practices, this account ignores their rich variety of marks (including many beyond the two in the “Proposal”) and the specifying functions this variety often served, and, thus, it supports the polemical purpose of demonstrating the tradition’s insufficiency. While the “Proposal” describes a system of punctuation designed for use with vertically oriented Chinese script, it notes that Kexue, which promoted new-style punctuation, had also taken the lead in horizontalizing Chinese writing. For many in New Culture circles, the horizontalization of script and the adoption of new-style punctuation were inseparable. “In reforming punctuation,” opined Chen Wangdao, “it would be best to first settle another matter; the vertical or horizontal writing of the script.” He counseled that the matter be decided neither by allegiance to antiquity nor by blind imitation of the West but “on the authority of psychology, biology, and other branches of knowledge”; he felt certain nonetheless that the advantages of horizontal writing would be vindicated.16 Chinese graduate students in the United States in the 1920s, carrying out extensive research on the cognitive processing of Chinese script, showed that the verticality of Chinese might actually benefit reading speed and retention levels.17 Their research failed, however, to tip the scales against the authority of horizontalization as a symbol of cosmopolitan modernity and the desire of typographers and readers to find a practical solution to the integration of Western and Chinese scripts on the printed page. Horizontalization gradually

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gained ground over the later years of the Republican era and was proclaimed the standard in the People’s Republic. Vertical script’s postwar persistence in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and parts of the diaspora has slowly eroded under the influence of factors ranging from Hong Kong’s return to Chinese sovereignty to the standards and conventions of digital media platforms. The “Proposal” does briefly address aspects of textual formatting other than script direction. The description of its system includes, after discussion of the twelve punctuation marks, a thirteenth item setting out three recommendations: that the marks of separation be placed below the preceding character (rather than off to the side), that the end of a sentence be followed by a blank space equal in size to that which a character would occupy, and that the beginning of a new paragraph be marked by an indentation equal to the space occupied by two characters. The inclusion of these stipulations betrays awareness of the fact that, as Geoffrey Nunberg puts it, punctuation marks, which “provide information about structural relations among elements of a text,” must in functional terms “be considered together with a variety of other graphical features of the text, including font- and face-alternations, capitalization, indentation and spacing, all of which can be used to the same sorts of purposes.”18 The study of modern Chinese punctuation awaits further exploration of the coordination of punctuation marks—the object of the majority of research to date—with these other graphical features of the text. A fuller study would also move beyond debates, proposals, and government policies to examine the actual adoption of modern-style punctuation by the users of Modern Standard Written Chinese. Research into users’ widely diverse practices would properly consider both manuscript and printed texts as well as the generic distinctions within each of these broad categories: personal letters, journals and diaries, professional authors’ drafts, etc. for handwritten materials, and newspapers, periodicals of various types, popular and elite literature, textbooks, technical manuals, government publications, etc. for printed matter. To these categories should then be added the adoption and transformation of punctuation practices in digital media. Finally, a holistic understanding would consider modern Chinese punctuation not only in terms of the prescriptive and grammatical perspective predicated by its early advocates but also with attention to the rhetorical and semiotic possibilities creatively exploited by many of its users.

Notes 1. See Hu Shi et al., “Qing banxing xinshi biaodian fuhao yi’an (xiuzheng an)” 䂟䷦㸠 ᮄᓣ῭咲ヺ㰳䅄Ḝ˄ׂℷḜ˅, in Hu Shi wencun diyi ji 㚵䘽᭛ᄬ㄀ϔ䲚 (Taipei: Yuandong tushu gongsi, 1975), 115–28. 2. The texts of the 1951 and 1990 documents can be found at https://zh.wikisource.org /zh-hans/῭咲ヺ㰳⫼⊩_(1951ᑈ) and https://zh.wikisource.org/zh-hant/ᷛ⚍ヺো⫼

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3.

4.

5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

13.

14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

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⊩_(1990ᑈ). The 2011 “General Rules for Punctuation” can be downloaded from http:// www.moe.gov.cn/ewebeditor/uploadfile/2015/01/13/20150113091548267.pdf. For more, see Anna Stryjewska, “Punctuation, Modern,” in Encyclopedia of Chinese Language and Linguistics, ed. Rint Sybesma et al. (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 3:494–501. Jiaoyubu ᬭ㚆䚼, “ ‘Chongding biaodian fuhao shouce’ xiuding ban” lj䞡㿖῭咲ヺ 㰳᠟‫ݞ‬NJׂ㿖⠜ (2008), https://language.moe.gov.tw/001/upload/files/site_content/ m0001/hau/c2.htm. For more, see Yuan Hui 㹕ᰪ, Guan Xihua ㅵ䫵ढ, and Yue Fangsui ኇᮍ䘖, Hanyu biaodian fuhao liubian shi ∝䇁ᷛ⚍ヺো⌕ব৆ (Wuhan: Hubei jiaoyu chubanshe, 2002), 281–451. Hu Shi, “Lun judou ji wenzi fuhao” 䂪হ䅔ঞ᭛ᄫヺ㰳, Kexue 2, no. 1 (1916): 9–34. On this, see Elisabeth Kaske, The Politics of Language in Chinese Education, 1895–1919 (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 93–101, 132–48. Chen Wangdao [Chen Canyi 䱇গϔ], “Biaodian zhi gexin”, Xueyi 1, no. 3 (1918): 203. Hu Shi, “Proposal,” 115. On separation and specification, see Randolph Quirk et al., A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language (London: Longman, 1985), 1611. Hu Shi, “Proposal,” 119–20. Hu Shi, “Lun judou ji wenzi fuhao,” 11. See Edward Gunn, “Westernization of Chinese Grammar,” in Sybesma et al., Encyclopedia of Chinese Language and Linguistics, 527–30; also Alain Peyraube, “Westernization of Chinese Grammar in the 20th Century: Myth or Reality?,” Journal of Chinese Linguistics 28, no. 1 (2000): 1–25. Thomas S. Mullaney, “Quote Unquote Language Reform: New-Style Punctuation and the Horizontalization of Chinese,” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 29, no. 2 (2017): 235–36. Lu Xun, “Binghou yutan” ⮙ᕠ们䂛, Wenxue 4, no. 3 (1933): 425. Hu Shi, “Proposal,” 117. Chen Wangdao, “Biaodian zhi gexin,” 203. See Mullaney, “Quote Unquote Language Reform,” 220–35. Geoffrey Nunberg, The Linguistics of Punctuation (Stanford, CA: Center for the Study of Language and Information, 1990), 17.

SECTION D

COMMENTARIES E D I T E D B Y B RU C E RU S K

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any important works in the Chinese literary tradition were commonly encountered not on their own but in parallel with a commentarial text. Commentaries can share a physical space with the text on which they depend, for example, as interlinear or marginal notes, or they can circulate separately in writing or orally; conversely, a written commentary can explicate an oral document. In either case, commentary is rhetorically dependent on the source: it needs the anchor of the source text to make meaning. It may stand, however, at philosophical or aesthetic odds with the document on which it comments, and even a laudatory commentary posits an insufficiency: readers will not fully understand or appreciate the document without the data or judgments the commentator provides. Indeed, the grander the claim for the importance, richness, and comprehensiveness of a document, the more commentarial work it tends to require. The commentary can thus deploy several strategies for working with information within and beyond the document. Perhaps most straightforwardly, it invokes data not present in the document that direct the reader toward particular meanings, for example, by offering semantic and phonetic information about unfamiliar words and usages or by providing details about names, places, and phenomena mentioned. Some commentators do this largely by assertion and others by citation of sources (including other commentaries on the same passage, even mutually contradictory ones), which then become tied into a network of intertextual relations indexed to particular loci. Writers can even include their own annotations (autocommentary), usurping the format of the

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note to keep the provision of certain kinds of information separate from the flow of the text; this was common in the writing of fu 䊺 (often translated as “rhapsody” or “rhyme prose”), in which a writer could both use an obscure word or reference and, in another voice, explicate it. Some commentarial traditions rely on the invocation of a foundational philosophical discourse that guides the interpretation of all texts. For readers in the Learning of the Dao (Daoxue 䘧ᅌ) tradition, for example, the core Confucian (Ru ‫ )ۦ‬classics were all interpreted in accord with their view of a universe as following universal patterns (li ⧚): these li had been understood by the sages who composed the classics and governed the functioning of the human and natural realms. Marxian commentators, by contrast, could explicate a document in light of dialectical materialism and a universal history of class struggle. As divergent as these two approaches are, both could use the tools of annotation, glossing, context building, and paraphrasing to point to a desired interpretation. And the visual form of the commentary, its material and graphic relation to the source text, depends on current practice and the affordances of the physical document. The bamboo roll, with its fixed column width and high cost, offers little space for the addition commentary. Commentary cohabitates more easily on paper scrolls, where margins and interlinear space create possibilities for overlay or interjection, respectively. And text in this format was easily interrupted, resuming after blocks of commentary of arbitrary length. In the paginated books that became the norm with the spread of woodblock printing, visual conventions allowed for the clear demarcation of commentary with both character size (commonly, about half the size of the main text, in double columns) and distinctive headings. These devices allowed for the superposition of multiple strata of commentary of different kinds and/or by multiple authors; in some cases, it spilled into additional parallel registers. In modern typeset printing, it was possible to re-create much of the formatting of xylographic editions, but many publishers chose to use numerical footnotes or endnotes patterned after those in European books; these remain the norm today. Electronic text offers the promise of reshuffling the text-commentary relationship and of developing new display paradigms, but other than the inclusion of hyperlinks, there has so far been little innovation in presentation or function.

CHAPTER 15

EARLY TO MIDDLE PERIOD CLASSICAL COMMENTARIES M I C H A E L N Y L A N A N D B RU C E RU S K

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ost definitions of annotation or commentary stress its dependence on a base text and a concomitant lack of autonomous textual logic. This model typically supposes that commentaries guide readers to an understanding of the base text by supplying information absent there: the meanings or pronunciations of words, data about the world or history, and fundamental principles. This also allows for information derived from the text, such as an analysis of its rhetoric or logic. But this emphasis on “secondariness,” to use Glenn W. Most’s term,1 hardly does justice to what is seen in early to middle period Chinese classical commentaries. Instead, they have a distinct function, status, and relationship to other textual traditions. Such commentaries, in particular, were not necessarily subsidiary or supplemental texts; while somehow linked to another authoritative text, they typically displayed significant autonomy. Commentaries frequently circulated separately from the text to which they were attached, and quite a few enjoyed a status equal to that of the authoritative text they claimed to elucidate. For example, the Gongyang zhuan ݀㕞‫( ڇ‬Gongyang tradition) and Zuozhuan Ꮊ‫( ڇ‬Zuo Tradition)—and the Gongyang, in particular—were often cited simply as the Chunqiu ᯹⾟ (Annals), the laconic records ascribed to Kongzi/Confucius in Han; similarly, the “Xici zhuan” 㐿䖁‫“( ڇ‬Treatise on the Appended Remarks”) was cited as the Yi ᯧ (Changes), suggesting not only conflation but also parity between Classic and commentary. Likewise Yang Xiong’s ᦮䲘 (53 BCE–18 CE) Fayan ⊩㿔 (Exemplary Figures), modeled on the Lunyu 䂪䁲 (Analects), enjoyed equal or higher status than its model and was

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considered in Han to be “elementary learning” for beginners. The Liji ⾂㿬 (Book of Rites), with the majority of chapters explicating (jie 㾷) earlier traditions preserved in the Yili ‫( ⾂۔‬Book of Etiquette and Ceremonial), soon outstripped the latter in importance, judging from citations of the two texts in the Baihu tong ⱑ㰢䗮 (The Comprehensive Discussions in the White Tiger Hall). The Yi Zhoushu 䘌਼᳌ (Remnant documents of Zhou), which also features many chapters explicating earlier traditions about the Shang-Zhou transition, compares in some contexts with the Shangshu ᇮ᳌ (Esteemed documents; hereafter Documents) in terms of authority. Some have an almost tangential relationship with the base text, not elucidating particular passages but instead showing how to utilize such passages when constructing persuasive arguments. For instance, verses from the Shi 䀽 (Odes; hereafter Odes) appear at the end of well-known anecdotes in Hanshi waizhuan 䶧⇣໪‫( ڇ‬Han Ying’s Illustrations of the Didactic Application of the “Classic of Songs”), as if to underscore the rhetorical punch they packed. Nor were early Chinese exegetes beholden to what they found in the text: they generally devised their own theories, some in open conflict with the base text.2 And, finally, for at least one major “commentary” the base text seems never to have existed: there is a Shuijing zhu ∈㍧⊼ (Water classic commentary) but no known “Water Classic.”3 Such initial autonomy is striking. Clear conceptual subordination to authoritative base texts came only gradually and fitfully, as did graphic subordination in the form of interlinear commentaries. Judging from extant sources, subordination often came at the prompting of courts that preferred to establish unambiguous hierarchies of precedence and significance. It is seen most plainly in court-sponsored compilations such as the early Tang Wujing zhengyi Ѩ㍧ℷ㕽 (Correct readings of the Five Classics), but even there, the commentators felt free to urge major departures from their base texts in order to suit the Classics to the exigencies of their age. If not in terms of subordination to a base text, how else can the status of early commentaries and annotations be described? One important role played by many early commentaries was the preservation and glorification of celebrated men and women of the past through the authoritative texts that stood in lieu of them. As one early source puts it, men and women deserve to be commemorated for their reverential acts of commemorating others.4 Accordingly, texts like the Shuijing zhu may allot less space to lauding particular worthies than to lauding those who erected memorials to them. As composing a commentary presupposed a demanding and invigorating form of ideological and intellectual practice, it testified to the exceptional worth of the commentator, and, indeed, Yang Xiong in his neoclassical Fayan claimed absolute parity with Kongzi/Confucius as sage.5 Moreover, the commentary, before its commercialization in late imperial China, performs a sacred act tying past to present: by

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consistently invoking an authoritative text and its purported author, it secures standing for a newer project. Perhaps the chief task of most early and middle period commentaries is to supply sufficient information about the compiler(s) of an earlier text and the alleged historical contexts of compilation to allow readers in the governing elite to connect with those people of renown whose biographies and writings were deemed relevant to the issues around policy making. A stunning example of this is the early sixth-century commentary by Liu Xiaobiao ࡝ᄱ῭ (462–521) on Liu Yiqing’s ࡝㕽ᝊ (403–44) anecdote collection Shishuo xinyu Ϫ䁾ᮄ䁲 (A New Account of Tales of the World), where Liu Xiaobiao heaps up anecdotes to further reveal the characters of the dramatis personae and the settings of events. Potentially, such writing in support of an authority secures for the commentary a legitimacy that no freestanding piece of writing can assert, no matter how many “proof texts” it cites. The commentator, through a judicious selection of text and author, earned respect in turn. A more functionalist approach to commentaries would describe the institutions and projects they served, the exigencies they confronted, the audiences they addressed, and the views they reconfirmed, invented, or reimposed.6 But as remarkably little is known about the discrete textual communities formed in the early empires, one can surmise only that any commentary had to serve many needs if it was to justify the vast resources required for its transcription. As most commentaries in early and middle period China were composed by and for well-placed insiders residing in cultural centers,7 Cao Cao ᳍᪡ (ca. 155–220), in writing a commentary for Sunzi bingfa ᄿᄤ݉⊩ (The Art of War), was afforded a chance to advertise his own past successes and explain away his own past failures to opinion makers.8 Commentarial choices inadvertently reveal what exegetes felt it important to convey to their contemporaries and peers. First and foremost, they asserted the value of reading the base text by recounting the motives and circumstances of its supposed authors.9 Only secondarily did the early commentaries try to fill information gaps by providing knowledge of a linguistic sort; natural, historical, or geographic knowledge; or details about philosophical principles and historical precedents, since readers were presumed to be equally in the know. Even less often did they inform others about their appreciation of the textual properties of the base text. Generally speaking, the conveyance of basic knowledge tended to happen elsewhere—in the elementary learning geared to youngsters and cultural naïfs. Given the low literacy rates of the early empires, thorough acquaintance with authoritative texts bespoke immense privilege and lengthy training, often under rival masters. (Freelance amateurs did not enter the commentarial ranks in droves before the robust print culture of late imperial China.) Instead, early approaches to the Classics and masterworks—the very texts inviting the most

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annotation—reflected a distinctive manuscript culture heavily reliant on oral teaching, circulation, and explication and disinclined to produce verbatim transcriptions unless required to do so for administrative purposes. Concepts of authorship remained more notional than real, and the propensity was to view manuscripts as composite works in progress liable to reworking and emendation by activist editors.10 That said, once a base text began to dominate discussions, obvious contradictions within the text might tarnish its luster. Thus, some Chinese annotations bring to mind biblical apologetics. As T. H. Barrett observes, “Our reading experiences will . . . be quite radically unlike that of most of our predecessors, for one simple reason. We can concentrate  .  .  . and read it [our selection] ‘like a book.’ ” For early readers and writers who relied much more on their memories than modern readers do, associations spurred by other equally authoritative texts would have obtruded constantly, pushing them to forge linkages that moderns can remain blissfully ignorant of for as long as is desired.11 As admiration for the Classics and masterworks rested on the assumption that they had been crafted to convey a single overriding message or set of messages that could be reconciled, it became part of the commentator’s job to attenuate the most obvious discordant notes. He might divert attention to other topics or explain away apparent contradictions by glossing offending verbs as meaningless “empty” particles; he might read graphs as “loans” for others with different meanings or assign passages to different time periods. Naturally, attempts at reconciliation proved less arduous when texts circulated in small units more akin to today’s chapters than to our books. Meanwhile, court-sponsored conferences and a growing body of controversial literature endeavored to find a surer foundation for policy making rooted in the Classics and masterworks, with the acknowledged masters of the genre tracing threads running through more than one manuscript in hopes of distilling the truth of the matter. Not surprisingly, busy men and women in the early empires complained incessantly about the sheer volume of “aids” needed to claim mastery over authoritative texts. At court, an expert could make his name by providing a guide to the tradition, written or oral, in which he was well versed. This guide would then be transcribed by himself or his disciples to attest knowledge of and loyalty to the tradition. As succeeding generations sought to make their own names by recording their insights, the volume of commentarial traditions steadily increased—so much so that the first four graphs of the Documents within a century had generated some thirty thousand phrases of explication and one hundred thousand were attached to the title of the first chapter.12 Not surprisingly, the powerful at court protested that an ardent student in the imagined good old days could master a classic within a year.13 Some courts duly commissioned revised and abridged versions of the major commentaries,

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intent on making their study less burdensome. But no long-term interruption to the annotation processes could occur when each new crop of up-and-coming experts needed to promote themselves by the same method. After all, court conferences typically assembled recognized experts, and few private centers of learning existed outside the court. The change in the scale and nature of libraries following the shift first from silk and bamboo books to paper in the late fourth century and then from manuscript to print in late imperial China explains a great deal (see Nylan, chapter 41, and Egan, chapter 42). Before the late fourth century, few commentators (like few authors) explicitly mentioned the authorities they had in mind: their readers likely knew the limited textual sources as well as the writers themselves. Only from the late fourth century, as elites boasted ever-larger libraries, do the commentaries gradually evince “bibliographical richness” in the sense of citing many texts by name. Other changes to the social practices of annotating swiftly followed. By the Tang (rarely) and Song (more commonly), commentaries elucidate prior traditions of annotation, making explicit references to multiple earlier sources. By the seventh century, if not earlier, consultation of reference works is the precondition for serious readers’ claims to a virtuosic command of earlier traditions. (Some texts came to be known to less-than-studious readers mainly through quotations in such compendia; see the chapters in Part II, Section B.) With new formats in the Song (e.g., spine-bound volumes, equivalent to the codex) and ever-greater resort to printing, owning books became cheaper and comparing editions of a work increasingly routine. It may be presumed that basic literacy and numeracy spread as urbanization proceeded apace, though one cannot be sure that a greater proportion of the population at large attained the high cultural literacy that required decades of study of the Classics and masterworks.

Commentarial Practices: The View from Zheng Xuan Given how many commentaries from the early to middle periods have been lost, there are at best provisional answers to many questions regarding commentarial practices. Hence, the scholarly focus has been on a few seminal figures such as Zheng Xuan 䜁⥘ (127–200), whose surviving output suffices to discern an outline of his particular project. As Zheng utilized so many practices that came to be standard in annotated works, many regard him as a touchstone for understanding how early commentaries worked, even if Zheng’s style of writing annotations was somewhat atypical of this period.14 Zheng has been credited with the authorship of fifty-six works, some with twenty or more juan ो (roughly, chapters), of which but a small fraction survive.15 A substantial proportion of Zheng Xuan’s careful work on the

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apocryphal traditions, for example, is lost. Still, Zheng’s scattered pronouncements for the Odes, Documents, and San Li ϝ⾂ (Three rites classics; hereafter Three Rites) constitute a significant body of annotation, while surprisingly little can be ascribed to such famous Han scholars as Xiahou Sheng ໣փࢱ (d. before 37 BCE). In the pre-Tang period, Zheng’s annotations did not win universal admiration; the “more civilized” Southern dynasties favored those of Wang Su ⥟㙙 (195–256). But once the Tang had unified the realm, Zheng Xuan’s preoccupation with remote antiquity comfortably reaffirmed the consensus that “governing depends upon men, and good governing derives from the rituals,”16 and his readings were adopted, emended, and elaborated as needed—for instance, the pseudo-Kong Zheng Xuan appears to comment on Documents chapters that did not exist in his era. So when Qing exegetes working in the kaozhengxue 㗗䄝ᅌ (evidential learning) style sought to recover the original Han Learning (Hanxue ⓶ᅌ) rejected by the proponents of Song Learning (Songxue ᅟᅌ), such as Cheng Hao ⿟丹 (1032–85), Cheng Yi ⿟䷸ (1033–1107), Zhu Xi ᴅ➍ (1130–1200), and their disciples,17 Zheng’s remarks loomed large in their imaginative reconstructions of the distant past. Zheng’s interpretive project satisfied their need to provide the throne with a comprehensive view of how to govern well while softening the glaring contradictions between rival traditions.18 To those who hoped to recover the unitary Dao that underlay the teachings of various sages and worthies, it was vital to believe that the surviving transmitted texts revealed essential facets of those teachings even if inadvertent errors had been introduced during transcription or transmission and bamboo strips had gone missing or were misplaced. Given those constraints, Zheng Xuan devised a rather simple but effective method (embraced in studies of the Bible and of Plato’s works, as it happens): he assigned conflicting statements to different time periods (dynastic or biographical) or to deeper or more superficial levels of comprehension. Zheng began with what he thought an unproblematic premise: the Zhouli ਼⾂ (Rites of Zhou) must reflect an early Western Zhou “system” associated with the illustrious Duke of Zhou ਼݀ (fl. eleventh cent. BCE).19 Any assertions that seemed at odds with the Zhouli must therefore reflect practices of one of the two preceding dynasties, Xia or Shang-Yin, that had been preserved in some communities when the Zhou dynasty was founded. So when the system of noble ranks in the Zhouli disagreed with the rankings supplied in the “Wang zhi” ⥟ࠊ (Kingly regulations) chapter in the Liji, Zheng argued that the “Wang zhi” reflected late Shang-Yin usage, to which King Wu ℺⥟, the founder of Western Zhou, initially conformed. Similar reasoning undergirded Zheng’s specifications for the size of the realm under different dynasties, for the number of ancestral temples, and for the total number of each court’s administrators as he correlated divergent figures culled from equally authoritative texts.

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Zheng’s commentaries go on to deploy nearly every possible maneuver at the disposal of the commentator. Most famously, he converted inconvenient graphs into those more amenable to his project, using the following formulas: du ru 䅔བ, read a homonym, near homonym, or phonetic variant generally on the grounds that scribes mistakenly wrote down a graph having a similar sound;20 du wei 䅔⚎, replace the graph on the grounds that scribes mistook it for another visually similar graph; dangwei ⭊⚎, replace the graph deemed mistaken, often for unspecified reasons.

Confronted with particularly troublesome graphs,21 Zheng reasoned that since the teachings of the sages must be one, discrepancies must reflect local variants in pronunciation or graphic forms or complex transmission processes over centuries; thus, there was no reason not to appropriate a relevant passage from another authoritative work to shine a bright light on difficulties in his base text. Zheng’s explanations quashed a myriad of questions, giving scholars a rough idea of where to turn rather than getting hopelessly mired in controversies over the details.22 By contrast, many other commentators of Zheng’s time sought to paraphrase content units in the base text, leaving their piecemeal readings open to repeated complaints. Zheng’s focus was never on glossing words or postulating etymologies. Unlike Xu Shen 䀅ᜢ (ca. 58–149) in Shuowen jiezi 䁾᭛㾷ᄫ (Explaining simple graphs and analyzing complex graphs; see Handel, chapter 5), with whom he took frequent issue, Zheng’s interest lay in defining social relations, not language itself. He tended to gloss as mistaken graphs whatever did not tally with the ritual orders he posited for Xia-Shang-Zhou, based on his reading of the Three Rites. Demonstrating the perfection of the early Western Zhou system shaped his commentaries not only on the Three Rites but also on the Odes and Documents. Wherever there were competing versions of a passage with competing messages, Zheng trusted his own judgment and erudition to determine what the urtext had said, as one example from his commentary to the “Jun Shi” ৯ཁ (Lord Shi) chapter of the Documents shows: In the ancient writings, the passage “In the Zhou lands could be seen King Wen’s charismatic powers”23 becomes “He [the Lord on High] cut down the [Yin] in their court robes to encourage King Wen’s charismatic powers.”24 স᭛਼⬄㾔᭛⥟Пᖋ⚎ ࡆ㌇/⬇࣌ᆻ⥟ПᖋDŽ Today’s Academicians read the passage differently, as “Such was his [the last Yin ruler’s] chaotic behavior that [the High Lord] encouraged King Wen’s charismatic powers.” Ҟम຿䅔⚎ॹі࣌ᆻ⥟ПᖋDŽ

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Each of the three versions differs. It seems to me that the ancient writings are closer to it [the original meaning]. He ࡆ (often “to cut down”) means gai 㪟 (“probably”). It says that King Wen was a man of character, full of integrity and trustworthiness. Heaven probably extended [the mandate to him] to encourage him, gathering the Great Mandate upon his person.25 ϝ㗙ⱚ⭄DŽস᭛Ԑ䖥ПDŽࡆП㿔㪟гDŽ㿔᭛⥟᳝䁴ֵПᖋDŽ໽㪟 ⬇࣌ПDŽ䲚໻ੑᮐ݊䑿DŽ

Note that three competing versions of the same passage were in circulation in Zheng Xuan’s time, each with some claim to authority. Zheng Xuan prefers the version that emphasizes heaven’s careful choice of the Zhou king to replace the last, bad ruler of Shang. He does not bother to explain the merits of the rival readings, although one of them was preferred by the court-sponsored academicians of his day. Zheng expects his readers to follow him, and many have done so, dazzled by the wide range of sources he marshals, including those anachronistically associated with the so-called jinwen Ҟ᭛ (New Text) and guwen স᭛ (Old Text) traditions, the Erya ⠒䲙 (Approaching the elegant) and the apocrypha, and technical writings on portents and cosmology as well as those pertaining to Han institutions, customs, and material culture.26 By not always identifying those sources, Zheng retained a position of ultimate authority on many issues.27 Zheng’s stature makes it easy to forget how atypical his commentarial practices were and how controversial his readings were in his day. He was an outlier in his firm belief that human events are preordained (heaven-sent). He was more self-conscious about systematizing than most other early commentators. As he characterized his own style: “[The goal] is to raise a single principle that applies to ten thousand cases; to explain one chapter, so as to clarify numerous sections, and in this way, to minimize [the need for further] thought.”28 Zheng was prohibited from holding office for fourteen years in his prime under one of the proscriptions issued before the Yellow Turban Rebellion of 184. This period of enforced retirement gave him ample time to conduct his research on the Classics. After 184, Zheng concluded it was too dangerous to return to the capital, though he was invited to do so. Instead, he taught in a remote area far from the capital to which he had traveled for training. Despite his enforced retirement, there is no indication that Zheng prided himself on teaching privately (i.e., in an unofficial capacity), since he had no alternative but to do so. Nonetheless, after reading Zheng, no serious student of early-to-middle-period China is likely to read an early text without an early commentary, if one is available, or to naively assume that an early commentary aims simply to convey supplementary information to the reader.

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Common Misconceptions In the secondary literature, a number of problematic assertions about commentaries in early and middle period China unfortunately pass for the common wisdom. These include the assertions that 1. zhangju ゴহ (commentaries by chapter and verse) were composed only by certain schools or factions and eschewed by others; 2. a clear distinction between zhangju and dayi ໻㕽 (great meaning and paraphasic) annotations prevailed in early China; 3. classical learning was an academic discipline during early-and middle-period China; 4. the Imperial Academy (reportedly modeled on a pre-unification Jixia Academy) focused on textual learning during the two Han dynasties, its chief function being to produce commentaries by the court-sponsored academicians;29 5. court-sponsored and private forms of learning were somehow opposed to one another; and 6. there exists a self-evident “centrality” to acts of writing in Chinese culture, which the early annotations themselves enshrine.

In the early to middle periods, annotations took such a wide range of forms— from revelation texts such as the two magic squares, Hetu ⊇೪ (River chart) and Luoshu ⋯᳌ (Luo writing), to poetic riffs on a theme, to interlinear commentaries (“morselization” in Most’s analysis), to stand-alone texts—that it is even hard at this remove to determine which commentarial forms supposedly achieved the “great meaning.” And while the commentaries by chapter and verse could accrue in length, as exegetes debated their views over time, there is no evidence whatsoever that zhangju as a rule were either unduly long or longer than commentaries that purportedly expounded the “great meaning” of a text.30 A few offhand comments hardly constitute evidence that certain schools or factions among the learned refused to write zhangju31—not when Yang Xiong, to take one instance, disparaged the plodding writers of zhangju but apparently composed a zhangju himself.32 Most of the misconceptions that moderns cherish about early annotations can be traced back to anachronistic fantasies that analogize the men of letters to today’s intellectuals or cast China as an “empire of texts” with learned academies rivaling those of ancient Greece. Such modern enterprises are rooted in fancies about a continuous China with shared knowledge from time immemorial rather than a China with disparate polities, where for much of “Chinese” history, small textual communities seldom communicated with one another because of logistical and linguistic obstacles. No less fantastic is the insistence

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that there can be only one “best reading” for each passage in the base text or commentaries. As Indologist Sheldon Pollock has remarked of sacred texts in Sanskrit, every authoritative text has three logically distinct meanings, none inherently preferable (pace Zheng Xuan): (1) the meaning it had for its author or compiler within the textual community that generated it and to which it was addressed; (2) meanings it acquired over time, down through tradition(s) (usually plural); and (3) the meaning(s) it holds for people today (often different from the first two).33 Only if one ignores abundant evidence at hand and posits an urtext for each piece of authoritative writing known from manuscript culture can one sustain such illusions. Less fraught but equally misleading is the propensity to take situational explanations for universally valid meanings. Focusing on a single gloss will illustrate the problem. In his commentary on the Zhouli, Zheng writes “renmin, nubi ye” Ҏ⇥ˈ཈ံг. This sentence, which links two nouns with a copula marked by ye, is often taken to mean “the term renmin [always] means men and women of servile status.” Instead, the gloss conveys the limited referent or probable context of a given set of graphs and hence should be rendered “renmin, in this instance, refers to the men and women of servile status.”34 This specificity is even clearer in another of Zheng Xuan’s notes on the Zhouli, in which he writes “Renmin wei xingren nuli taowangzhe” Ҏ⇥䃖ߥҎ཈䲌䗗 ѵ㗙 (Renmin, here, refers to criminals or persons of servile status who have fled).35 The explanation fits the base text passage, which records the rewards for those who return missing goods, animals, and people or renmin to their rightful owners. But when the compilers of a major twentieth-century dictionary quote this note in isolation in support of a definition of renmin as a fugitive of criminal or servile status, they have invented a general meaning from a local, specific referent.36 Most early to middle period commentarial traditions are preoccupied with exemplification and specification rather than with paraphrasis (rewording). Teachers were to dispense basic technical information to members of the governing elite on a need-to-know basis. By contrast, the job of the master-exegete was to impart to would-be and actual officeholders memorable archetypes for constructive political behavior. Exemplary people and exemplary patterns of events were his meat and drink rather than anomalies or simple word-for-word equations. In the late imperial period, commentaries took on a broader set of forms, functions, and target documents. States and elites continued to view the Classics and other authoritative texts as resources for good governance, and courts repeatedly commissioned commentarial compendia and abridgments, but the scale of the community involved in these conversations, as well as in the production of commentary, expanded greatly. Widespread printing and cheaper paper made books more affordable and helped foster a commercial

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book market that involved long-distance trade and the production of editions, including annotated books, for readers of different levels of literacy and expertise. One factor increasing this demand was the shift to examinations that were theoretically open to a sizable segment of the male population as the principal conduit of recruitment into government service. Examination candidates valued knowledge that facilitated passing the tests, which largely focused on approved interpretations of a limited canon. Many classical commentaries from the Song to the Qing therefore supply basic information, suggesting that at least part of their readership consisted of basic learners lacking a well-informed teacher. Candidates understandably sought sample essays on which to model their own examination answers, and publishers were happy to supply collections of these, often in editions that included annotations based on those used in pedagagical and examination settings, highlighting structural features and well-turned phrases, in order to aid readers in composing essays of their own. For many types of documents, not just examination essays, Song, Ming and Qing annotation used systems of interlinear marks as well as words between the lines or in the margin to highlight passages of note or in need of explication. As discussed in the chapters that follow, these included anthologies of poetry, prose collections, plays, and (by the late Ming) vernacular fiction.

Notes 1. Glenn W. Most, ed., Commentaries—Kommentare, Aporemata 4 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1999), vii. 2. One example of a commentator revising the text comes from Kong Yingda’s ᄨ〢䘨 (574–648) commentary to a passage in the “Quli, xia” ᳆⾂ϟ chapter of the Liji, which inserts new language into the text to extend the length of the mourning period. See Liji zhushu ⾂㿬⊼⭣, 4.32a, in Chongkan Songben Shisanjing zhushu fu jiaokanji 䞡ߞᅟᴀ कϝ㍧⊼⭣䰘᷵ࢬ㿬, ed. Ruan Yuan 䰂‫( ܗ‬1764–1849) (preface 1815). 3. See Zhang Shunhui ᔉ㟰ᖑ, Zhengxue congzhu 䜁ᅌশ㨫 (Jinan: Qi Lu shushe, 1984), 60ff for details. 4. Chen Shou 䱇໑, comp., Sanguo zhi ϝ೟ᖫ, 5 vols. (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1962), 39.966. 5. Yang Xiong, Fayan 2/10; see Michael Nylan, trans., Exemplary Figures: A Complete Translation of Yang Xiong’s Fayan (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2013). 6. For impositions, consult Brook Ziporyn’s The Penumbra Unbound: The Neo-Taoist Philosophy of Guo Xiang (Albany: SUNY Press, 2003), which shows plainly that Guo Xiang’s project departs from that of the Zhuangzi; in fact, the key preoccupations have shifted in the later commentary. 7. Lu Yun शѥ, “Dong Han shiqi de wenhua quyu yu wenhua zhongxin” ϰ∝ᯊᳳⱘ᭛ ࣪ऎඳϢ᭛࣪Ёᖗ, Zhongguo wenhua yanjiu jikan 4 (1987): 155–87. 8. Cao speaks of his own feats as commander several times in his commentary; he often gives general statements more technical meanings. See The Art of War, trans. Michael Nylan (New York: Norton, 2020).

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9. See Jens Østergaard Petersen, “What’s in a Name? On the Sources Concerning Sun Wu,” Asia Major, 3rd ser., 5, no. 1 (1992): 1–31. 10. Susan Cherniack, in “Book Culture and Textual Transmission in Sung China,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 54, no. 1 (June 1994): 5–125, began to document this for Song, and others (e.g., William G. Boltz, Matthias Richter, Michael Nylan, and Martin Kern) have provided further evidence for early China. 11. A close paraphrase follows the quotation from T. H. Barrett, “Reading the Liezi: The First Thousand Years,” in Riding the Wind with Liezi: New Perspectives on the Daoist Classic, ed. Ronnie Littlejohn and Jeffrey Dippmann (Albany: SUNY Press, 2011), 15. 12. Ban Gu ⧁೎ et al., comps., Hanshu, 8 vols. (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1962), 30.1723n6. 13. E.g., Ban Gu, Hanshu 88.3596; Sima Qian ৌ侀䙋, Shiji ৆㿬, annot. Pei Yin 㻈俄, Sima Zhen ৌ侀䉲, and Zhang Shoujie ᔉᅜ㆔, 2nd ed., 10 vols. (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1962), 130.3290; Fan Ye 㣗Ი, comp., Hou Han shu ᕠ⓶᳌, 12 vols. (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1965), 35.1213. 14. Ma Nan 侀ἴ, “Ma Rong, Zheng Xuan, Wang Su ben Shangshu xingzhi taolun” 侀㵡䜁 ⥘⥟㙙ᴀᇮ᳌ᗻ䊾㿢䂪, Wenshi (2016.2): 95–106. 15. Yang Tianyu ᴼ໽ᅛ, Zheng Xuan San Li zhu yanjiu 䚥⥘ϝ⼐⊼ⷨお (Tianjin: Tianjin renmin chubanshe, 2007); chapter 2 (15–29) lists these texts and their histories, although he doubts some of the attributions. One of the longest works ascribed to Zheng Xuan is a zhangju ゴহ (commentary by chapter and verse) for the Han statutes, said to be in sixty chapters. Zheng is credited with writing a complete Documents commentary, lost before Song times, and certainly some of Zheng’s comments on that classic had to be revised to reflect the later pseudo-Kong edition (early fourth century CE) in wide use. By the Ming, Zheng’s commentary (revision?) for the Shangshu dazhuan ᇮ᳌໻‫ڇ‬ (Great commentary on the Documents) was also lost. 16. Zheng Xuan’s commentary to Zhongyong, in Liji zhushu, 53.8a, in Ruan Yuan, Chongkan Songben Shisanjing zhushu fu jiaokanji. 17. On this struggle, see Benjamin A. Elman, From Philosophy to Philology: Intellectual and Social Aspects of Change in Late Imperial China, 2nd ed. (Los Angeles: UCLA Asia-Pacific Institute, 2001). 18. After Xunzi 㤔ᄤ (ca. 310–235 BCE) claimed to have the “complete Way” (zhoudao ਼䘧), many touted their works as “complete” (bei ‫)٭‬. Tongru 䗮‫( ۦ‬classicists with a comprehensive vision) and boxue मᅌ (wide-ranging erudition) won approval. 19. Some have dubbed the Zhouli the most perfect system that never was; most reputable scholars would date it to the late Zhanguo period. See Yang Tianyu, Zheng Xuan Sanli zhu yanjiu, 34. Zheng made it the center of his theories. Michael Nylan and Nicholas Constantino translate li zhi ⾂ࠊ as “ritual regulations” (plural). They argue that the Eastern Han had no ritual system because “system” implies a coherence that did not exist. The controversial literature and the standard histories of the period show that there were many rival visions for the theory and practice of ritual, even at the courts of the early empires. What those rituals meant, when offerings needed to be made, who should make the offerings, and even who was the object of cult—all these topics were debated, early and often, with no resolution. In All about the Rites: From Canonized Ritual to Ritual Society, ed. Anne Cheng and Stéphane Feuillas (Paris: Maisonneuve et Larose/Hémisphères, 2021). 20. Work on reconstructing ancient pronunciations had begun centuries before Zheng; see Michael Nylan, Yang Xiong and the Pleasures of Reading and Classical Learning in Han China (New Haven, CT: American Oriental Society, 2011), esp. pts. 3–4. Zheng’s readings and graphic analysis often diverge from those of other experts, including Xu

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21. 22. 23.

24. 25.

26.

27. 28. 29.

30.

31.

32.

33.

34. 35. 36.

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Shen. Ninety-four fragments from Xu Shen’s Wujing yiyi were reconstructed by Qing scholars. See Zhang Shunhui, Zhengxue congzhu, 4. Fan Ye, Hou Hanshu, 35.1213. The “ancient writings” Zheng references may be the “Ziyi” ㎛㸷 (“Black Robes”) chapter of the Liji, which quotes from “Jun Shi,” but it is hard to know, since the version unearthed at Guodian differs in this very passage from the received version, which has been “corrected,” presumably to conform with an unknown text. This tentative translation adopts the more difficult reading; it is not the reading preferred by Zheng. The commentary is preserved in Zheng Xuan’s commentary on a quotation from “Jun Shi” in the Liji. Liji zhengyi, 55.17a, in Ruan Yuan, Chongkan Songben Shisanjing zhushu fu jiaokanji. William Hung, cited repeatedly in Yang Tianyu, Zheng Xuan San Li zhu yanjiu (e.g., 184n2). Pi Xirui Ⲃ䣿⨲ (1850–1908) was among the first to note the breadth of Zheng’s sources. See Yang Tianyu, Zheng Xuan San Li zhu yanjiu, 186, for examples. As Yang remarks, often Zheng merely indicated that “someone says” (huo yue ៪᳄). Zheng Xuan, “Shi pu xu” 䀽䄰ᑣ, 7a, in Mao Shi zhengyi ↯䀽ℷ㕽, in Ruan Yuan, Chongkan Songben Shisanjing zhushu fu jiaokanji. For the myth of the Jixia Academy, see Nathan Sivin, “The Myth of the Naturalists,” in Medicine, Philosophy and Religion in Ancient China (Great Yarmouth, UK: Variorum, 1995), 1:1–33. Some scholars, beginning with Yang Xiong, were said to abjure the very zhangju form itself, according to Ban Gu, Hanshu, 87A.3514. Zhao Qi’s 䍭ቤ (108–201) zhangju commentary to the Mencius provides a brilliant counterexample, as it is relatively pithy when explaining the “main ideas.” Yang Tianyu, for example, says that only New Text scholars wrote zhangju, but the post facto assignment of Han thinkers to New Text versus Old Text does not work, since the most famous scholars drew liberally from many traditions of learning. See Nylan, Yang Xiong and the Pleasures of Reading, pt. 1, n27. For Yang’s avowed disdain, see Timoteus Pokora, “The Life of Huan T’an,” Archiv Orientalni: Quarterly Journal of African, Asian, and Latin-American Studies 31 (1963): 18n11, citing Fan Ye, Hou Hanshu, 28A.955, 40A.1330, 49.1429; cf. Jack L. Dull, “A Historical Introduction to the Apocryphal (Chұan-Wei) Texts of the Han Dynasty” (PhD diss., University of Washington, 1966), 340–50. This is a point made by Pollock throughout his work; for example, see his The Language of the Gods in the World of Men: Sanskrit, Culture, and Power in Premodern India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009). Zhouli zhushu ਼⾂⊼⭣, 15.1a, in Ruan Yuan, Chongkan Songben Shisanjing zhushu fu jiaokanji. On status distinctions, see Zhang Shunhui, Zheng xue congzhu, 306–10. Zhouli zhushu, 35.21a, in Ruan Yuan, Chongkan Songben Shisanjing zhushu fu jiaokanji. Zhang Qiyun ᔉ݊ᯔ, ed., Zhongwen da cidian Ё᭛໻䖁‫݌‬, s.v. “renmin,” http://ap6 .pccu.edu.tw/Dictionary/words.asp?no=17731. The lexicographers may have been drawing on a citation in Ruan Yuan’s collection of glosses: Jingji zuangu ㍧㈡㑖䀕 (Yangzhou: Langhuanxian guan, between 1796 and 1820), 11.27b.

CHAPTER 16

POETRY COMMENTARIES M ICH A E L A . F U L L ER

F

rom the Han dynasty onward, poetry (which may be said to comprise a collection of genres of rhymed texts) in the classical Chinese tradition by its very nature has presented an informational problem. The “Daxu” ໻ᑣ (“Great Preface”) to the Mao ↯ version of the Shijing 䀽㍧ (Classic of odes), which perhaps dates from the end of the first century CE, begins: Poetry is where the resolve goes. In the heart, it is resolve; manifested in words, it is a poem. Emotion moves within and takes shape in words. Words are not enough, and so one sighs it. Sighing it is not enough, and so one draws it out in song. Drawing it out in song is not enough, and so unknowingly one’s hands dance it and one’s feet tread it. Emotion is manifested in the voice. When voice is patterned, we call it tone.1

The late Han dynasty elite who emulated Shijing poetics took their model for both writing and reading poetry from the “Great Preface.” In the normative account, which in one form or another underlies the poetic tradition throughout the premodern period, writers encountered events that touched their deeply held commitments and stirred an internal response that required external expression. Mere words, however, were not enough. Expression required an aesthetic superstructure that fully articulated the meaning of the encounter and the poet’s response. Thus, for the reader the simple word after word after word of the text of the poem by itself could not convey the

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meaning. The text required the complement of additional information to be intelligible. The model of a poetry as an aesthetically mediated, engaged encounter required four types of information. First were the internal and external factors shaping the moment of composing the poem: knowledge of the external circumstances—what the commentary tradition called the events of the time (shishi ᰖџ)—and knowledge of the poet’s moral and emotional character. While the details of external circumstances can be gleaned from the text of the poem only in some cases, traditional readers believed that knowledge of the writer’s character and of the particular intentions driving composition could in fact derive from a sensitive reading of the poem itself. The second set of data needed to read the poem turned from the inner and outer conditions of composition to the poem itself and to the reconstruction of the text through knowledge of the history and reliability of the received versions. The third informational component was an understanding of the lexical items, which, given the passage of time and changes in the language, could be a challenge. The final category of information needed to read a poem concerned matters of the larger-order aesthetic structuring of the text. Since, as the “Great Preface” explained, “words are not enough,” the lexicon had to be supplemented with additional levels of aesthetic structure that proved necessary to adequately articulate the heart’s intent. The manifest patterning (wen ᭛) of the poem included its formal structure and the larger-order components of phrasing—and allusive reference (gushi ᬙџ), in particular. Scholars from the very beginning of what is known of the poetry commentary tradition in the Eastern Han provided readers with all the elements of information needed to understand a poem in their annotations of the texts. However, as the role of texts, the readership, and the culture’s normative understanding of the nature of character and emotion out of which poetry grows shifted over time, the commentarial tradition changed. Moreover, throughout premodern history, views on how to properly engage and understand poetry were never unitary, and these different approaches to reading created a range of commentarial practices. From the perspective of the role of commentary as a form of information management, another early development adds an additional dimension. The growing corpus of poetry itself became a form of cultural information. The ability to compose passable poems based on contemporary and past models was an important skill in aristocratic society during the Southern dynasties and the Tang. Composition required adequate command of the themes, modes of treatment, and appropriate language for any given topic, and this required ways of organizing the poetic corpus to provide access to these categories of poetic practice. Encyclopedias and rhyme dictionaries were crucial components of this information system (see part II.B on encyclopedias and Branner,

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chapter  6), as were general, systematic overviews of poetic practice. But the commentary tradition also contributed to ways of sorting out the poetic corpus for use in composition. Since poetry remained an important component of elite sociality throughout the premodern era, even as the body of poems for mastery grew rapidly, commentary continued to play a role in guiding readers to the essentials they needed to know in order to effectively use the received textual tradition.

In the Beginning: Wang Yi’s Commentary to the Chuci Shijing had accumulated four major commentaries by the late Han dynasty. These commentaries derived from the collection’s status as a canonical text believed to have been edited by Confucius. The challenge of understanding why Confucius selected each poem as a moral exemplar required extensive exegesis and a good deal of creativity. Late in the second century CE, Wang Yi ⥟䘌 (89– 158) built a commentarial apparatus around a much more recent—although still ancient and difficult—collection of poems, the Chuci Ἦ䖁 (Verses of Chu). In the Han, the collection—and “Lisao” 䲶個 (“Encountering Sorrow”), the central poem in the collection, in particular—had acquired a semicanonical status. Wang Yi’s commentary serves as a good introduction to the four categories of information—external events, the author’s character and commitments, the lexicon, and the larger-order aesthetic structures—that were crucial for understanding a work of poetry, as modeled by the “Great Preface.” Wang Yi’s commentary to “Yunzhong jun” 䳆Ё৯ (“Lord within the Clouds”), one of the “Jiuge” б℠ (“Nine Songs”), provides a good example of how he supplemented the poetic text with contextual information. Moreover, one can compare his approach to annotations with those of later Tang dynasty commentators. Xiao Tong 㭁㍅ (501–31) selected the poem for inclusion in the Wenxuan ᭛䙌 (Selections of Refined Literature), and, thus, the poem also has commentary by Li Shan ᴢ୘ (d. 689) and the Five Officials (wuchen Ѩ㞷) who annotated the Wenxuan in the Tang dynasty. However, the nature of Wang Yi’s commentary raises the question of who his readers were: in terms of information, as the following selection suggests, some of the annotations should have been common knowledge or extremely obvious. A few lines suffice to illustrate Wang Yi’s approach. The text: “The numinous draws near and, having tarried  .  .  .” 䴜䗷㴋݂᮶ ⬭ (l.3) Wang Yi’s commentary: “Ling 䴜 is the shaman. The people of Chu call shamans ‘the numinous one.’ Lianjuan 䗷㴋 describes the shaman greeting and drawing forth the spirit. Ji ᮶ is ‘already.’ Liu ⬭ is ‘stop.’ ”

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Most of the comments for the line are lexical glosses. To the first, defining ling 䴜 (numinous) as “shaman,” Wang adds an explanation about distinctive Chu usage. The second gloss, on the descriptive compound lianjuan 䗷㴋, essentially describes the action—the external context—of the line: this is a poem about a shaman calling upon the Lord within the Cloud to descend into the purified ritual space. However, the final two glosses are for very standard words (ji ᮶ and liu ⬭). Wang Yi’s commentary for the final line of the poem is more interpretive: The text: “Greatly troubled at heart with grief.” Ὁࢲᖗ݂ᖗ⬣⬣DŽ Wang Yi’s commentary: “Chongchong ⬣⬣ describes a sorrow-stricken heart. Qu Yuan ሜॳ [putative author of the “Lisao,” “Nine Songs,” and other parts of the Chuci, who reportedly lived 340–278 BCE] saw the clouds in one move traverse a thousand li and travel through all within the four seas. He envisioned being able to follow and observe the four quarters to forget his own sorrows. He longed for this but in the end could not get it. Thus he sighed greatly with a heart troubled by sorrow.”2

Wang Yi thus gives the reader an interpretive framework of information for reading the poem. He explains Qu Yuan’s abiding resolve to escape his sorrows as well as the particular circumstances—the reflection on the clouds—that inspired the composition of the poem. Whether any of this information or interpretation was reliable is beside the point: Wang Yi’s exegesis provided the categories of information from lexical analysis to historical and biographical context that he considered necessary for late Han dynasty readers to understand the poem.

Two Views of Poetry Commentary for an Aristocratic Readership: The Wenxuan The classical Chinese poetic tradition grew in sophistication, complexity, and technical demands over the course of the period of division of the Northern and Southern dynasties and thus increased the demands on readers. Xiao Tong’s Wenxuan was the great compendium of the elite literature of Southern dynasties culture that survived into the Tang dynasty. Because the Wenxuan became a model for writing for an expanding and mostly northern elite that did not necessarily have the breadth of reading or even the access to libraries to knowledgeably read the Wenxuan and thus to fully master its texts as exempla for the proper use of language and literary form, commentary became crucial for providing the literary information its readership lacked. However, the authors of the two major extant commentaries to the Wenxuan appear to

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have understood the range of required information differently. Li Shan, in his commentary submitted to Emperor Gaozong 催ᅫ (649–83) in 658, focused on providing the sources of phrasing but left matters of interpretation largely to his readers. In contrast, the Five Officials’ commentary, submitted to Emperor Xuanzong ⥘ᅫ (r. 713–56) in 718, offered analyses of the texts. Lü Yanzuo ਖᓊ⼮ (fl. 718), in the memorial accompanying the latter submission, lamented that “unless one had a mastery of recondite knowledge, [the texts of the Wenxuan] would be impossible to fathom.” He complained that Li Shan had been “ensnared in trivial scholarship” and lamented that “[Li Shan] had only agitated [the readers’] minds. How could it be considered analysis of the underlying patterns?”3 The memorial reveals a fundamental debate about what constituted the information needed to read literature well and what the corresponding responsibility of the annotator was. Li Shan’s and the Five Officials’ annotations to “Lord within the Clouds” give one a glimpse of their differing approaches and of what is at stake in supplementing the Wenxuan as a source of literary information. Li Shan essentially cites the Wang Yi commentary with an occasional phonological gloss.4 The Five Officials, rather than citing Wang Yi, offer a paraphrase of his commentary. At the end of the poem, however, Liu Liang ࡝㡃 (fl. 713–41; one of the Five Officials) gives his reading of the import of the poem: “The lord” refers to the numinous spirit to represent [Qu Yuan’s] lord. The poem says that the lord’s abode is lofty and distant and that below he controls his realm; I long for my lord but in the end I cannot see him. Therefore I sigh and grieve in my heart.5

This is a more politically normative account of the poem than that given by Wang Yi and followed by Li Shan. Why this mattered returns to the status of “Lord Within the Clouds” as a text usable in contemporary composition—a chunk of literary information that could be drawn on in an appropriate context. However, the context for using phrasing from the poem and the intended meaning embodied in the allusion differ greatly if one reads the intent behind the poem as a failed yearning to forget King Huai of Chu Ἦ់⥟ (r. 328–299 BCE) in contrast to a failed effort to reach King Huai. Thus, the commentary here shapes how the poem is packaged as literary information. Li Shan’s and the Five Officials’ annotations of later poetry in the Wenxuan like Pan Yue’s ┬ኇ (247–300) simple yet powerful poem “Daowang shi sanshou diyi” ᚐѵ䀽ϝ佪㄀ϔ (“Mourning the Departed, First of Three Poems”), commemorating his deceased wife, offer a different perspective on their opposite approaches to literary information and illustrate both Lü Yanzuo’s complaint about Li Shan’s commentary and the Five Officials’ response. Lines 4–8 in Pan Yue’s poem are

Poetry Commentaries

⾕់䂄‫ܟ‬ᕲˈ

Private longing: who can follow it?

⏍⬭ѺԩⲞDŽ

[Yet] what is the benefit of tarrying?

‫֯ۊ‬ᙁᳱੑˈ

I am diligent in honoring the court’s command

ᓏᖗড߱ᕍDŽ

and turn my heart to what I first [did in] service.

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Li Shan cites a wide range of sources from the Shijing, to the Han dynasty dictionary Shuowen jiezi 䁾᭛㾷ᄫ (Explaining simple graphs and analyzing complex graphs; see Handel, chapter 5), to a Han dynasty philosophical text, Wang Chong’s ⥟‫( ܙ‬27–ca. 100) Lunheng 䂪㸵 (Discourses in the balance): “The Fu on the Divine Woman” states “These feelings alone in my private longing, with whom can I speak of them?” The Shuowen says, “Huai ់ [literally, breast] is ‘longing.’ ” The Chuci say, “I stand pacing back and forth and tarry.” The Mao Shi states “I diligently follow in service: / I dare not speak of my travails.”6 Yi ᕍ [duty] refers to what he is responsible for. Wang Chong in the Lunheng says, “I stopped my service to the prefecture.”7

Lü Yanji ਖᓊ△ (n.d.) in the Five Officials’ commentary is far more interpretive: The lines say that this is grieving over private feeling, and he desires to not go to his assignment. Who can overcome this feeling? Tarrying has no benefit. In a moment’s time, he honors the court’s command and turns back his private thoughts to return to his beginnings in his public duty. Minmian ‫ ֯ۊ‬means, “[the time it takes to] look up and down.”8

Li Shan’s lexical glosses citing earlier uses provide models for how to use the phrasing in the poem and, more generally, how to use allusive language. Even lexical glosses, however, function here beyond indexical reference and point additionally to strategies for the representation of intentions: the words are more than just words; they refer to the expression of specific intentions in the source texts, which Pan Yue then uses to aesthetically shape the intentional logic of his own poem. The commentary provides a network of literary information. In contrast, the Five Officials’ commentary focuses on the role of specific phrasing within Pan Yue’s poem as a totality. How the two commentaries address the final couplet of the poem underscores this difference. Pan Yue concludes “Mourning the Departed” with an allusion to the response of Zhuangzi 㥞ᄤ (fl. fourth cent. BCE), the Warring States proto-Daoist philosopher, to his wife’s death: “I hope it will decline in time; / Zhuangzi’s pot still can be banged on” ᒊᑒ᳝ᰖ㹄ˈ㥞㔊⤊ৃ᪞. Li Shan, after a gloss on hope (shuji ᒊᑒ), cites the full passage in Zhuangzi to allow the reader to get the point from the text. In contrast, Li Zhouhan ᴢ਼㗄

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(fl. 713–41; another of the Five Officials) gives a brief paraphrase of the passage in Zhuangzi and then makes the point explicit: “Therefore Pan Yue hoped that in his feeling and awareness there would be a time when this would decline, and thus he says ‘Zhuangzi’s pot can be banged on’ ” ᬙᅝҕᒊᑒᮐᚙⶹ᳝ᰖ㹄ˈ ᬙѥ㥞㔊ৃ᪞.9 Li Shan’s commentary makes literary information available and demonstrates its application in context. The Five Officials, through their commentary, offer a reading to make the annotated text accessible without providing a larger sense of the literary system behind the text.

The Role of Literary Information in Later Poetic Commentary In the political, social, and cultural transitions from the Tang to the Song dynasty, the old aristocratic lineages were displaced by an emerging meritocratic elite stratum that attained its standing through success in the official examination system and service to the state. While Chang’an and Luoyang were the centers of Tang culture—and where one went to learn how to write poetry—many cities in Song China developed into thriving cultural centers. At the same time as elite culture was broadening and becoming more geographically dispersed, the development of woodblock printing facilitated the circulation of texts within these wider networks. Books were becoming more available, and readers had greater access to the literary past. At the same time, however, editors compiling and publishing the fragile textual inheritance scattered upon the collapse of the Tang and during the interregnum—with a particular focus on Tang literary corpora—were reshaping the literary past. There was more to be known, since not only were old collections being reassembled and circulated but also the new literati stratum was busy producing significant new texts (see Egan, chapter 42). These factors—the changing nature of the elite stratum, the spread of printing, and the editorial work of publishers—complicated the role of commentary in information management. At heart, assumptions about the dynamics of writing poetry had not changed throughout these social and cultural transformations, and, thus, the types of information needed to read poetry—the types of information that commentary needed to provide—had not changed either. But the broadening readership required annotators to meet different demands for different audiences reading for different purposes. A brief exploration of the varieties of commentarial engagement with the poetry of Du Fu ᴰ⫿ (712–70), the greatest and most challenging of Tang poets, suggests the growing range of demands for the ordering of literary information during the Song. Du Fu, a seemingly failed poet who died while adrift in the south in the aftermath of the An Lushan Rebellion (755–63), was heralded a generation later as one of the two greatest poets of the reign of Emperor Xuanzong, the

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great age of poetry. The Northern Song elite, looking back at the culture of the late Tang, affirmed the judgment of Du Fu’s preeminence by writers like Han Yu 䶧ᛜ (768–824). But the Northern Song elite also was acutely aware of the textual losses in the intervening two centuries and strove to reassemble what they could of the Tang. Du Fu’s poetry benefited from diligent efforts to collate a reliable edition; the first important printed version of his collection, edited and annotated by Wang Zhu ⥟⋭ (997–1057), appeared in 1059. Although Wang’s initial commentary has been lost, writers in the Song produced a string of annotated editions that have survived in varying degrees of completeness. Guo Zhida’s 䛁ⶹ䘨 Jiujia jizhu Du shi бᆊ䲚⊼ᴰ䀽 (Nine scholars’ collected commentary on Du Fu’s poetry) provides a good example of a carefully annotated Southern Song edition of Du Fu’s poetry. Consider, from this collection, the commentary on Du Fu’s “Geye” 䭷໰ (“Night in the Pavilion”), an austere poem in heptasyllabic regulated verse from late in his life. Although its language is not especially dense, the poem remains challenging for readers. For example, the first line and its commentary are At year’s close, yin and yang hasten the shortening shadows ⅆᲂ䱖䱑‫ⷁڀ‬᱃ Commentary: Xie Lingyun’s “Rhapsody on Snow:” “The year about to end, the season has grown dark.” Bao Zhao’s “Rhapsody on Dancing Cranes:” “The year is precipitate and hastens toward its close” and “The ending yin 䱖 is a time of destruction, and the urgent shadows [mark the] withering year.”

That is, Guo’s edition follows the model of Li Shan’s commentary in providing source information. However, Guo’s commentary introduces other forms and sources of information. For example, for the much-admired second couplet, “The sound of the drums and horns of the Fifth Watch are sad and stalwart. / The reflection of the Milky Way in the Three Gorges wavers” Ѩ᳈哧㾦㙆ᚆໃˈϝዑ᯳⊇ᕅࢩ᧎, Guo acknowledges a new source of literary information and cites a long entry on this couplet in Cai Tao’s 㫵㌯ (d. 1126) Xiqing shihua 㽓⏙䀽䁅 (Xiqing comments on poetry). Guo’s commentary also offers relevant factual information to which the reader otherwise might not have access. The comment to the seventh line, “The sleeping dragon and leaping horse in the end become brown dirt,” states: The “sleeping dragon” refers to Zhuge Liang 䃌㨯҂ [181–234]. Outside the city wall there was a shrine to Zhuge Liang. The “leaping horse” refers to Gongsun Shu ݀ᄿ䗄 [d. 36 CE]; in the city there was a temple for the White Emperor. These two men were heroic figures from Shu. The line says that they could not avoid returning to the dirt.10

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That is, Zhuge Liang and Gongsun Shu play an immediate role in the poem because their lingering presence is part of the physical landscape as Du Fu looks out from the pavilion, yet this presence cannot be known from the text of the poem and requires supplemental commentary. Guo Dazhi’s annotation offers the model of careful, thorough commentary that draws on a wide range of literary and nonliterary information as well as including judicious interpretations that contemporary scholars consider the ideal for the commentarial organization of literary information. However, there were other models in the Song and later that served other purposes. In addition to careful engagement with the details of poetry, the literati elite wanted ways to derive information about technical issues of composition from the vast accumulation of past poetry. This was an important form of literary information for which readers turned to many types of manuals as well as to the evolving genre of shihua 䀽䁅 (remarks on poetry). There also were specialized collections like Fang Hui’s ᮍಲ (1227–1307) Yingkui lüsui ◯༢ᕟ傧 (Luminaries of essential regulated verse) that were dedicated to the assessment of regulated verse. Because of this focus, Fang’s comments on Du Fu’s “Night at the Pavilion” provide his readers with a different form of literary information: This is a poem by Du Fu from Kuizhou, called “Night at the Pavilion”: This was perhaps the Western pavilion. The movement of the poem [captured] in the couplet “sad and stalwart / wavers” is like this [throughout]. The sleeping dragon and leaping horse both [becoming] brown dirt refers to Zhuge [Liang] and Gongsun [Shu]: the worthy and the doltish together come to an end; “Confucius and Robber Zhi both [become] dust;” and “Precious Consort Yang and [Zhao] Feiyan both are dirt” are all of the same intent, deeply moving and expansively unrestrained, something that other writers lacked.11

Readers looking to bring sophisticated mastery to their engagement with the vast corpus of the poetic tradition could train their own sensibilities on this sort of appreciative assessment of Du Fu’s distinctiveness. In some cases, however, the commentary itself was far less important for organizing the received poetic tradition than was the structure of the anthology that categorized the poetry in new ways (see part II.A on anthologies). Gao Bing’s 催ẙ (1350–1423) influential Ming dynasty anthology Tangshi pinhui ૤䀽કᔭ (Graded compendium of Tang poetry), for example, lists Du Fu as a major poet (dajia ໻ᆊ) in the heptasyllabic regulated verse form, but his annotation of “Night in the Pavilions” merely cites a brief comment praising the second couplet.12 For the reader, Gao Bing’s placement of the poem within the chronological divisions and his assessment of the poet were the crucial information.

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Conclusions What one thinks of as the role of poetic commentary in organizing literary information derives from what one recognizes today as the great exemplars of scholarly judiciousness and rigor: Li Shan’s commentary to the Wenxuan, Qiu Zhao’ao’s қ‫ܚ‬分 (1638–1717) Qing dynasty synthesis of the commentary tradition on Du Fu’s poetry, and Wang Wengao’s ⥟᭛䁹 (b. 1764) aggressively thorough commentary on Su Shi’s 㯛䓒 (1037–1101) poetry. These are the models that contemporary scholars follow in continuing to produce new commentaries for poets for whom one still needs the complement of contextual information if one is to read their poetry well. Yet it remains important to remember that this is a modern model for commentary as a source of literary information and not one necessarily shared by readers throughout the tradition. The Five Officials objected to Li Shan’s source hunting as frivolous, and more serious objections appeared in late imperial China. Hu Zhenheng 㚵䳛Ѽ (1569–1645) thought that only some poets needed commentary and that, for most, annotation just got in the way: Tang poetry cannot be annotated. When poetry reached the Tang, it was very different from that of the Wenxuan. They spoke of the scenery before their eyes and used allusions that were easily understood, and as soon as there is annotation, the flavor of the poem becomes dull, and the notes become snake’s legs. However, there are two types of poets who cannot be without annotation. Those whose intentions are deep and subtle, like Du Fu, require elucidation. Li He’s shape-shifting, the obscurity of Li Shangyin and the palace poetry of Wang Jian that draws on contemporary events within the palace quarters all require careful annotation and explication.13

For readers in premodern China, poetic commentary served as an important source of literary information that shaped and supported their understanding of the nature of poetic meaning. But given the nature of poetic meaning, sometimes commentary was just an impediment to the reader’s immediate engagement with the text.

Notes 1. Mao Shi zhengyi ↯䀽ℷ㕽, 1.5a, in Chongkan Songben Shisanjing zhushu fu jiaokanji 䞡ߞᅟᴀकϝ㍧⊼⭣䰘᷵ࢬ㿬, ed. Ruan Yuan 䰂‫( ܗ‬1764–1849) (Preface 1815). 2. All modern versions of the text, including the Siku quanshu edition (Taipei: Shangwu yinshuguan, 1983–86), continue Wang Yi’s commentary with an additional comment; since Li Shan does not include this section, it is conservatively left out here. See, for

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4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11.

12. 13.

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example, Hong Xingzu ⋾㟜⼪, Chuci buzhu Ἦ䖁㺰⊼, ed. Bai Huawen ⱑ࣪᭛ et al. (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1983), 57–59. Lü Yanzuo, “Jin Wuchen ji zhu Wenxuan biao” 䘆Ѩ㞷䲚䀏᭛䙌㸼 [“Memorial on Submitting the Collected Commentaries on the Wenxuan of the Five Officials”], in Zengbu Liuchen zhu Wenxuan ๲㺰݁㞷䀏᭛䙌, comp. Xiao Tong (Taipei: Huazheng shuju, 1974), 4. Xiao Tong, comp., Wenxuan, annot. Li Shan (Taipei: Yiwen yinshuguan, 1974), 473. Xiao Tong, Zengbu Liuchen zhu Wenxuan, 614–15. Li Shan here refers to “Shiyue zhi jiao” क᳜ПѸ (New moon of the tenth month), in Shijing (Mao Shi 193). Pan Yue, “Daowang shi sanshou diyi,” in Xiao Tong, Wenxuan, 337. Pan Yue, “Daowang shi sanshou diyi,” in Xiao Tong, Zengbu Liuchen zhu Wenxuan, 428. Pan Yue, “Daowang shi sanshou diyi,” in Xiao Tong, Zengbu Liuchen zhu Wenxuan, 428. Guo Zhida, Jiujia jizhu Du shi, 31.29a, in Siku quanshu ಯᑿܼ᳌, photoreproduction of the Wenyuange ᭛⏉䭷 copy, vol. 1068 (Taipei: Taiwan Shangwu yinshuguan, 1983). Fang Hui, Yingkui lüsui (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1986), 1:29. The line “Confucius and Robber Zhi both [become] dust” ᄨϬⲰ䎪‫้ׅ‬඗ is from Du Fu’s “Zuishi ge” 䝝ᰖ℠ (“Song while Drunk”). Gao Bing, Tangshi pinhui ૤䀽કᔭ, in Siku quanshu, vol. 1371, 84.9b–10a. Hu Zhenheng, “Tangyin guiqian” ૤䷇ⱌ㈸, in Tangyin tongqian ૤䷇㍅㈸, cited in Cai Zhichao 㫵ᖫ䍙, Du shi jiuzhu kaoju buzheng ᴰ䀽㟞⊼㗗᪮㺰䄝 (Taipei: Wanjuanlou tushu gongsi, 2007), 9–10.

CHAPTER 17

FICTION COMMENTARIES M A R T I N W. H UA N G

A

lthough commentary has been written for fictional works in both Literary Chinese and Vernacular Chinese, the commentary tradition associated with vernacular fiction is more sophisticated, has taken place on a larger scale, and is far more influential; hence, it is the focus here. Ever since Jin Shengtan 䞥㘪™ (1608–61) and others made popular the practice of xiaoshuo pingdian ᇣ䁾䀩咲 (fiction commentary with critical markers) around the middle of the seventeenth century, works of xiaoshuo ᇣ䁾 (fiction) without commentary printed alongside the text proper became the exception. This fact was gradually forgotten by modern readers after publishers began to reprint works of traditional fiction during the early twentieth century in modern typeset editions without accompanying commentary. To appreciate how xiaoshuo bore information and how readers in premodern China received it, an understanding of the nature of fiction commentary is crucial. Commentary’s impact on readers is difficult to overestimate. Typography made commentary virtually impossible for the reader to ignore, as it was placed side by side with the base text of the original work and the boundaries between the two were not always clearly defined. A full edition of xiaoshuo, such as the Jin Shengtan commentary edition of the novel Shuihu zhuan ∈Ⓦ‫( ڇ‬The Water Margin or Outlaws of the Marsh), would usually include the following forms: 1. Prefatory matter: xu ᑣ (preface), fanli ޵՟ (editorial principles), dufa 䅔⊩ (how to read), and other kinds of essays.

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2. Huipi ಲᡍ (chapter commentary): huiqian pi ಲࠡᡍ (prechapter commentary) is placed before the chapter, and huimo pi ಲ᳿ᡍ or huihou pi ಲᕠᡍ (chapter-end commentary) is placed at the end of the chapter. 3. Meipi ⳝᡍ (brow commentary): usually placed in the top margin of the page. 4. Jiapi ༒ᡍ (interlineal commentary): often written in double columns, placed directly below the text being commented on. 5. Pangpi ᮕᡍ or cepi ‫و‬ᡍ (side commentary): written in the space to the right of the line to which the comment pertained.

Commentary editions of vernacular fiction began to appear during the Ming dynasty (also see He, chapter 18). Initially, the main function of commentaries was to provide annotations and glosses for certain words, phrases, historical figures, and names of places. They seldom offered literary or interpretative commentary and tended to be very brief, as in the 1522 and 1591 editions of Sanguo zhi tongsu yanyi ϝ೟ᖫ䗮֫ⓨ㕽 (The popular romance of the Three Kingdoms). Sometime during the 1590s, the publisher Yu Xiangdou ԭ䈵᭫ (ca. 1550–1637) brought out an edition of the novel Shuihu zhuan titled Shuihu zhizhuan pinglin ∈Ⓦᖫ‫ڇ‬䀩ᵫ (The Water Margin with a forest of commentary), which contains comments that can be characterized as ping 䀩 (evaluations or criticism) rather than annotations, marking the beginning of a new stage in the development of fiction commentary. However, more-sophisticated interpretative fiction commentary would not appear until the early seventeenth century, when the Hangzhou area publishing house Rongyutang ᆍ㟛ූ brought out a new edition of Shuihu zhuan with substantial commentaries attributed to Li Zhi ᴢ䋘 (1527–1602), the famous late Ming iconoclast (again, see He, chapter 18). While this attribution is now widely doubted, whoever wrote these commentaries was a very perceptive reader, demonstrating a level of literary sophistication unprecedented in the history of fiction commentary. Such editions dramatically increased the popularity of fiction commentary. The Rongyutang edition of Shuihu zhuan is one of the first to have chapter commentaries offering summary comments on each chapter. It is significant because the format of chapter commentary offers enough space in a xiaoshuo text for its commentator to provide extended comments, unlike interlinear commentary such as jiapi, where space is very limited. Furthermore, in the case of the Rongyutang edition of Shuihu zhuan, for the first time the reading of vernacular fiction was closely associated with a famous literatus (the questionable attribution notwithstanding). Li Zhi’s fame certainly contributed to the popularity of the commentary editions promoted under his name. And the figure that these editions construct of a witty and freewheeling literatus who prided himself on his outlandish and flippant opinions seems to have helped to elevate the status of the

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fiction commentator more broadly. Li’s claim of interpretative authority is now largely based on his supposed ability not only to convincingly show where in the text the original author should be praised for his literary brilliance but also to ruthlessly point out where the author has fallen short. The license with which the commentator of the Rongyutang edition of Shuihu zhuan marks off those passages or phrases in the original work for excision likewise underscores his qualifications not only as a commentator but as an author as well—indeed an even better writer than the original author. This superior status allows the commentator to posit an insufficiency in the original text—and therefore the need to manage the reader’s encounter with the text by glossing terms, supplying historical background, making links to other literary works, and, most importantly, providing new interpretative tools. This authorial-commentarial persona anticipated the even more dramatically larger-than-life supercommentator embodied by Jin Shengtan in his enormously popular edition of Shuihu zhuan. Here Jin Shengtan became that dominant and supposedly indispensable commentator. His heavily commented on and radically altered edition of Shuihu zhuan became an instant success, ushering in a new age in the history of fiction commentary. A main part of Jin Shengtan’s commentary endeavor is to construct in the mind of the reader an author figure that Jin could in turn manipulate. This helped Jin validate his own sometimes anti-intuitive interpretations of the novel. He claimed that a work of literature by a caizi ᠡᄤ (genius) could make full sense to a common reader only with the help of a commentator who was himself a caizi—like Jin—with access to unique insight and information. Jin’s infamous truncation of the one-hundred-chapter Shuihu zhuan by expurgating the last thirty chapters, which he labeled an inferior sequel by another author, testifies to the new authority a fiction commentator now claimed. Whereas the commentator of the Rongyutang edition only marked off what, in his view, should be deleted but did not actually remove it, Jin Shengtan simply expurgated nearly a third of the novel by insisting that this was actually the work of another, inferior writer. If one considers fiction commentary as an act of controlling the flow of information not just about but also from within the original work, then Jin Shengtan as a commentator takes on the new task of censoring the text and policing its content on the basis of a self-claimed authority to withhold “harmful” information from the reader. Jin Shengtan’s enormous successes as a commentator, however, are more a result of his minute analytical attention to the details of the novel in terms of plot and character analysis. He inserts an enormous volume of commentary into his truncated edition of the novel in the form of interlineal comments, prefatory materials, and lengthy chapter comments, now strategically placed before each chapter, where the reader is more likely to read them prior to the chapter itself. It is Jin Shengtan who helped define what a full commentary

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edition of xiaoshuo should be and what specific forms the commentaries should take. In his effort to construct a consistent author figure to legitimate and support his particular interpretations of the novel, Jin even went so far as to provide “fake” information: he forged an authorial preface by the supposed original novelist Shi Nai’an ᮑ㗤ᒉ (fl. fourteenth cent.) to authenticate his truncated version. Another format of prefatory essay Jin Shengtan helped popularize is the so-called dufa essay, typically a list of important points for a reader to remember in order to do a proper reading of the work. Jin’s influence on other fiction commentators was immediate and profound. His contemporaries, the father-son team of Mao Lun ↯‫( ׿‬fl. early seventeenth cent.) and Mao Zonggang ↯ᅫያ (1632–ca. 1709), soon published their commentary edition of Sanguo yanyi ϝ೟ⓨ㕽 (Romance of the Three Kingdoms), which, as Jin’s edition had done for Shuihu zhuan, soon eclipsed all other editions and became the “standard” edition of this popular historical novel. Their edition of Sanguo yanyi is characterized by its even more voluminous commentary1 and its persistent interpretative agenda of demonstrating that, among the three titular warring kingdoms, the state of Shu was the sole custodian of Confucian legitimacy. The Maos were probably the first to employ the concept of jiegou ㌤ᾟ (structure) to recategorize the information contained in the Sanguo yanyi in terms of large narrative patterns, elevating to a new level of sophistication the art of fiction commentary as a form of literary analysis.2 Zhang Zhupo ᔉネവ (1670–98) was another important commentator deeply influenced by Jin Shengtan. In his commentary edition of the novel Jin Ping Mei 䞥⫊ṙ (The Plum in the Golden Vase), he significantly expanded the prefatory section to include essays focusing on more-specific thematic concerns of the novel. He tried to defend the graphic descriptions of sex in the novel by shifting the burden of understanding the erotic content of the novel to the reader and by underscoring the extra ethical responsibility of the reader of an erotic work, heightening the need for the guidance of a commentator such as Zhang Zhupo. To further aid the reader, in the prefatory section Zhang provides several charts or lists, such as those of the names of the servants, those whom the male protagonist Ximen Qing 㽓䭔ᝊ has slept with, and those whom the female protagonist Pan Jinlian ┬䞥㫂 has slept with, creating a kind of index to the narrative work. He even offers a brief account of the physical layout of Ximen Qing’s household compound, the main setting of this domestic novel’s plot. In the hands of Zhang Zhupo, fiction commentary became even more elaborate and complete, a reading aid in the true sense of the word. His commentarial essays become a reference tool, where “key” information is reorganized and summarized in such a way that it becomes a set of reference aids a reader can turn to for help. In this regard, Zhang’s influence is quite observable in some of the late Qing fiction commentators described later.

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It is probably no coincidence that the rise of fiction commentary was closely associated with the rising status of vernacular fiction in the seventeenth century, as some of the fictional works were being promoted and eventually canonized as caizi shu ᠡᄤ᳌ (books of genius). Others grouped together the four novels Shuihu zhuan, Sanguo yanyi, Jin Ping Mei, and Xiyou ji 㽓䘞㿬 (Journey to the West) and promoted them as the Sida qishu ಯ໻༛᳌ (Four marvelous works).3 These artistically complex works of fiction in turn called for more deliberate information management. Their perceived sophistication and information density demanded reading aids and new ways of indexing or categorizing their content in various commentarial forms. These elaborate information-management efforts also helped enhance and affirm these same works’ value and their status as literary masterpieces. This explains why a successful fiction commentator was almost always associated with a xiaoshuo masterpiece rather than a mediocre work: his successes were contingent on the perceived sophistication of the work on which he commented. This is certainly true of the eighteenth-century masterpiece Honglou meng ㋙ῧ໶ (The Dream of the Red Chamber or The Story of the Stone). The novel’s phenomenal popularity gave rise to an even more impressive array of commentary efforts by an ever-expanding number of fiction commentators, a literary phenomenon that continues even into the present. The novel itself is the product of an extraordinary interaction between the author and a group of commentators. Prior to its initial publication in the early 1790s, it had been circulated in manuscript among a relatively small circle of the author’s relatives and friends, some of whom had already begun to handwrite comments on the circulating copies. Literary historians believe that the commentators of these early manuscripts, generally known under the names Zhiyanzhai 㛖⹃唟 (Rouge inkstone studio) and Jihusou ⭌ャ঳ (Odd tablet elder), were likely very close to the novelist. Their comments were mostly written in the form of top-margin and interlineal commentaries, relatively brief, and sometimes impressionistic. Thanks to their close relationship with the author, their comments shed light on the novel’s original composition, providing helpful information on the historical author’s process as he was completing and revising his novel. This “privileged” information provides the reader with a rare glimpse into the various roles these commentators were assuming and their active participation in the production of a literary masterpiece, signaling the new relationship that was emerging between commentators and fiction writers—and especially the former’s influence on the latter.4 A commentator could now be a partner and collaborator, working together with the author in the production of the novel. After its posthumous publication in an edition of 120 chapters, Honglou meng inspired an unprecedented number of editions with contributions from a vast array of commentators.5 These commentators tend to follow more closely

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the precedents set by Jin Shengtan, aiming to offer more systematic interpretations. The most important was Wang Xilian ⥟Ꮰᒝ (1805–76), whose 1832 Xinping xiuxiang Honglou meng quanzhuan ᮄ䀩㐵‫ڣ‬㋙ῧ໶ܼ‫( ڇ‬Complete edition of Dream of the Red Chamber, with new commentaries and illustrations) soon eclipsed in popularity all previous printed editions of the novel. Wang included in the prefatory section some items rarely seen in a commentary edition of xiaoshuo in the past, such as lunzan 䂪䅮 (character evaluations) and tici 丠䀲 (prefatory poems), which are not necessarily very analytical but reflect more the spontaneous responses of a common reader, thus creating a sense of the collective presence of a fan club. Here the prefatory poems are particularly significant because they were authored by Wang’s concubine Zhou Qi ਼㎎. The nearly unprecedented inclusion of a female reader’s lyrical responses might have contributed to the Wang edition’s special appeal to women, who made up a growing part of the novel’s readership. In addition, Wang included a list of errors and inconsistencies in the novel for his readers’ reference, a practice to be imitated by other Honglou meng commentators. The widespread influence of the Wang Xilian commentary edition was confirmed by the fact that almost all the popular commentary editions of the novel of later ages would include his commentary. For example, the new commentary edition titled Zengping butu Shitou ji ๲䀩㺰೪⷇丁㿬 (The Story of the Stone with additional commentaries and illustrations) was based on Wang’s commentary edition but contains additional commentaries by Yao Xie ྮ⟂ (1805–64).6 This edition could be considered a huiping ben ः䀩ᴀ or jiping ben 䲚䀩ᴀ (one where two or more commentators’ commentaries were printed side by side). Quite different from Wang, Yao Xie was a “statistician” with a sharp eye for data: for example, the monthly allowances for the concubines and various maids, the amounts of the Jia family’s various expenditures mentioned in the novel, the birthdays of various characters, and the dates and chronologies of the events in the novel; he also provides notes on foreign curios mentioned in the novel. Here important information is summarized, rearranged categorically, and listed for quick reference. In the hands of this commentator, information management takes on the form of a sophisticated reference tool.7 Reading fiction now is not only about following the plot and characters but also about amassing knowledge on various aspects of a society and culture in the past. This has become especially true for modern readers, who are often told that Honglou meng is the best source of knowledge about traditional Chinese society and culture. Almost at the same time, an expanded collective commentary edition that would be later known as Sanjia pingben ϝᆊ䀩ᴀ (Edition with contributions from three commentators) appeared under the title ๲䀩㺰‫ܼڣ‬೪䞥⥝㎷ (Fully illustrated romance of gold and jade with additional commentaries and illustrations; dated 1884 or 1888). The third commentator after Wang Xilian and Yao

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Xie was Zhang Xinzhi ᔉᮄП (1828–50), who tried to read Honglou meng as a novelistic elaboration of the doctrines espoused in the canonical Confucian texts such as “Daxue” ໻ᅌ (“Great Learning”) and “Zhongyong” Ёᒌ (“Doctrine of the Mean”). Zhang Xinzhi was one of the most voluminous commentators—his commentary alone is around three hundred thousand characters long!8 This collective commentary edition would become all the rage during the last few decades of the Qing and the early years of the Republican period, before fiction commentary in general started to lose its appeal with the rise of New Literature. With the revival of interest in the fiction commentary tradition in the late 1980s, this Sanjia pingben was republished in modern typeset style by the prestigious publisher Shanghai guji chubanshe in 1988. Three years later an edition that included five additional commentaries was published, Bajia pingpi Honglou meng ܿᆊ䀩ᡍ㋙ῧ໶ (Dream of the Red Chamber with contributions from eight commentators), under the editorship of the renowned Honglou meng scholar Feng Qiyong 侂݊ᒌ (1924–2017). While Honglou meng has been celebrated as an encyclopedia of traditional Chinese culture for its broad coverage, massive collective commentary editions such as Bajia piping Honglou meng can also be characterized as encyclopedic on account of their completeness in collecting and recategorizing all the relevant information from and about the novel—one is supposed to be able to find in such a commentary edition any information one might seek about this enormous work. Although writing commentaries to be printed alongside the text proper of a work of fiction became relatively rare after the early decades of the twentieth century, Honglou meng remains an exception: commentary editions penned by modern commentators continue to be published. One of the most notable is by the well-known fiction writer Wang Meng ⥟㩭 (b. 1934), whose fame as a writer certainly helped to legitimate his commentary edition. On the other hand, there are very few modern fictional works published with commentaries, a finding consistent with the conclusion that fiction commentary is largely a literary phenomenon associated with traditional fiction. Finally, it should be pointed out that fiction commentary not only profoundly shaped how a work of vernacular fiction was read and consumed in late imperial China but also had a significant impact on how a work of fiction was written and produced during the same period. Fiction writers were most likely also fiction readers, so their views of fiction would certainly be influenced by commentators’ commentaries accompanying the fictional works they happened to read. More interestingly, some of these fiction writers, rather than leaving their works to be commented on by others, chose to take the matter into their own hands, writing commentaries on their own works as if they were written by a commentator. Given the interpretative authority fiction commentators enjoyed, these authors wanted similar control over their own works. This was apparently on the mind of the seventeenth-century writer Chen Chen 䱇ᗅ (1615–70) when he provided

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commentaries on his own novel Shuihu houzhuan ∈Ⓦᕠ‫( ڇ‬Sequel to The Water Margin). The popularity of fiction commentary had made some fiction writers decide to construct in their fictional works the figure of a commentator whom they could manipulate for rhetorical purposes, sometimes almost serving as another narrator. David L. Rolston has argued that another seventeenth-century writer, Li Yu ᴢⓕ (1611–80), was a master of such manipulation in creating the special discursive rhetoric of his fictional works, which Patrick Hanan has characterized as “less narrative than discursive.”9 A more recent example is the late Qing reform activist and writer Liang Qichao ṕଳ䍙 (1873–1929). His novel Xin Zhongguo weilai ji ᮄЁ೟᳾՚㿬 (The future of New China), an unabashed work of propaganda, deploys fiction commentary as a vehicle to enhance the rhetorical power of its reformist polemics about his vision of China’s future. The figure of a commentator gave the author an additional voice to argue for his reformist agenda. The boundaries between the text proper and its accompanying commentaries erode further as fiction commentary becomes part of the narrative itself: both are now produced by the same author, and, consequently, fiction commentary appears to have lost the foundation of its continued existence as an independent critical discourse. In the case of Liang Qichao, paradoxically the author, in his eagerness to appropriate fiction commentary as an additional rhetorical tool, seems to have written the commentator out of existence—the commentator is now coopted by the author. So it is important to ask not only what kind of information commentary provides but also who provides it and how it is delivered. In the case of the vernacular fiction tradition, commentary manages information by manipulating and categorizing the information in the original work— typographically rearranging the text, inserting various reading instructions, and offering additional reference information—all to shape what readers can do with the text.

Notes 1. In their study Ming Qing xiaoshuo lilun piping shi ᯢ⏙ᇣ䁾⧚䂪ᡍ䀩৆ (Guangzhou: Huancheng chubanshe, 1988), Wang Xianpei ⥟‫ܜ‬䳜 and Zhou Weimin ਼‫⇥؝‬ observe (p. 362) that the Maos’ commentaries in their edition of Sanguo yanuyi are around 100,000 characters long, while Zhang Zhupo’s commentary on the novel Jin Ping Mei is twice as long. David L. Rolston states that “the commentary in the Mao edition of Sanguo yanyi has been estimated to be two-thirds as long as this 120-chapter novel,” but he does not indicate a source. Rolston, Traditional Chinese Fiction and Fiction Commentary: Reading and Writing Between the Lines (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), 4. 2. See, for example, “Du Sanguo zhi fa” 䅔ϝ೟ᖫ⊩, in Luo Guanzhong 㕙䉿Ё, Mao Zonggang piping Sanguo yanyi ↯ᅫያᡍ䆘ljϝ೟ⓨ㕽NJ, annot. Mao Zonggang, 2 vols. (Jinan: Qi Lu shushe, 1991), 22; David L. Rolston, ed., How to Read the Chinese Novel

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3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

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(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), 191–92; and Wang Xianpei and Zhou Weimin, Ming Qing xiaoshuo lilun piping shi, 376–80. On the terms caizi shu and qishu, see Tan Fan 䄮Ꮪ et al., Zhongguo gudai xiaoshuo wenti wenfa shuyu kaoshi Ё೟সҷᇣ䁾᭛储᭛⊩㸧䁲㗗䞟 (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 2013), 181–93. See, for example, Zhiyanzhai’s exhortation to the author to delete the scandalous account of the character Qin Shi in his comments at the end of chapter 13 and his interlineal comment in chapter 17 about the account of Jia Baoyu being modeled on the events in the author’s own childhood. Zhu Yixuan ᴅϔ⥘, Honglou meng Zhiping jiaolu 㑶ὐṺ㛖䆘᷵ᔩ (Jinan: Qi Lu shushe, 1986), 193, 232. According to Liu Jibao, there are more than twenty commentators from the Qing period whose commentaries on the novel are collected in various extant commentary editions (here all the so-called Zhiyanzhai commentaries are counted as the works of one commentator). Liu Jibao ߬㒻ֱ, Honglou meng pingdian yanjiu 㑶ὐṺ䆘⚍ⷨお (Beijing: Beijing tushuguan chubanshe, 2007), 29. This expanded commentary edition also appeared under the title Zengping huitu Daguan suolu ๲䀩㐾೪໻㾔⨷䣘; for a discussion of the relationship between these two editions under different titles and their exact dating, see Du Chungeng’s ᴰ᯹㗩 preface to the facsimile reprint of Cao Xueqin, Zengping huitu Daguan suolu ๲䀩㐾೪ ໻㾔⨷䣘 (Beijing: Beijing tushuguan chubanshe, 2002), esp. 7–9. Yao Xie also wrote a book titled Du Honglou meng gangling 䅔㋙ῧ໶㎅䷬ [General principles on reading Dream of the Red Chamber], with the telling alternative title Honglou meng leisuo ㋙ῧ໶串㋶ [Classified reference notes on Dream of the Red Chamber]. Some of its content is incorporated into his commentaries reprinted in the collective commentary editions; see Liu Jibao, Honglou meng pingdian yanjiu, 190–93. Liu Jibao, Honglou meng pingdian yanjiu, 282. Andrew H. Plaks’s translation of Zhang’s essay “Honglou meng dufa” [How to read Dream of the Red Chamber] can be found in Rolston, How to Read the Chinese Novel, 323–40; see also Rolston’s introduction, 316–22. Patrick Hanan observes, “His fiction is so weighted with discussion in prologues, epilogues, and elsewhere that some stories can almost be regarded as debates,” in The Invention of Li Yu (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 41–42; see also Rolston, Traditional Chinese Fiction and Fiction Commentary, 292–301.

CHAPTER 18

DRAMA COMMENTARIES Y UMING HE

T

he boom in woodblock printing from the Ming Jiajing ௝䴪 period (1522–66) to the dynasty’s end made the resulting texts a predominant and valued medium of communication. Speedy woodblock reproduction and the much wider circulation of texts and pictures it enabled increasingly led not only to the accelerated flow of information but also to the creation and accumulation of ever-evolving genres of publication aimed at helping readers keep abreast of the shifting landscape of “must know” information and cultural trends and partake in the remaking of the ever-shifting “common sense” of their times. It was in such a context that the commentated drama emerged as a central form of cultural communication. The extant editions of traditional Chinese drama, with very few exceptions, date from the Ming dynasty or later. This is not merely a reflection of the universal law of historical attrition whereby older texts are as a rule rarer than later ones. It does appear that the Ming saw an explosion in the idea that dramatic works were eligible for dissemination in textual form. Ming bookmakers and readers seem to have been actively committed to seeing drama appear in print. In the unfolding relationship between printed books and their readers, the genre of commentated drama came not only to help shape and preserve the reception of drama but also to link the bodies of knowledge relevant to understanding drama to the larger worlds of knowledge, reading practice, and interpretive procedures that characterized book culture more generally. Thus, while drama commentaries might vary in focus—highlighting performance techniques, or literary structure, or the explication of learned allusions—they

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all in one way or another aimed to give a glimpse of the world at large and of a virtual environment where readers were invited to become informed members of the field of cultural consumption. The earliest extant exemplar of the commentated dramatic text dates from 1579, but the form was to proliferate spectacularly from the late sixteenth to the mid-seventeenth century.1 During this time, more than half of the known chuanqi ‫ڇ‬༛ editions (chuanqi referring to southern-style dramas) came with commentary.2 This means that commentarial practices created a normative environment for preserving drama on the page. How was this environment designed and structured? How did such an environment organize the act of reading? Answers to these questions may help ground a historical understanding of the media process whereby drama and commentary, sharing the same physical space of the page, mutually organized each other and of the way that drama with commentary in time became a paradigmatic instance of media technology and information management in late imperial China. The total number of extant commentated drama editions (pingdian ben 䀩咲ᴀ) from Ming-Qing China is estimated to be around six hundred.3 The works discussed here are therefore presented not as part of a static model but rather as local case studies to give a sense of the process of the creation and use of this prominent cultural form.

The Cultural Form The southern drama (nanxi फ᠆) known as Zhaoshi gu’er ji 䍭⇣ᄸ‫ܦ‬㿬 (Orphan of the Zhao family; hereafter Orphan) provides a telling instance of this process. The play began to circulate on the stage sometime in the Song or Yuan dynasty, but the two extant editions of the complete play both date to the Ming. One is based on the other, and the newer version inserted commentary in the top margin of the page, referred to as eyebrow commentary (meipi ⳝᡍ) in traditional Chinese bibliographical terminology. A comparison of these two editions thus serves to illustrate the interrelation of committing drama to the page and providing it with commentary. Orphan is loosely based on narratives surrounding Zhao Dun 䍭Ⳓ (d. 601 BCE), a minister of the state of Jin, that first appear in scattered references in the Zuozhuan Ꮊ‫( ڇ‬Zuo Tradition), an early annalistic history transmitted as an adjunct to the canonical Chunqiu ᯹⾟ (Annals), and subsequently are given more continuous treatment in Sima Qian’s ৌ侀䙋 (ca. 135–ca. 90 BCE) Shiji ৆㿬 (The Grand Scribe’s Records). The play centers on the political conflict between Zhao Dun and an unscrupulous minister, Tu’an Gu ሴኌস, leading to Tu’an Gu’s attempted eradication of the whole Zhao clan, and on the survival of Zhao Dun’s newborn grandson, the eponymous Orphan.4

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Both editions were published by well-known commercial printers: the first was produced by Fuchuntang ᆠ᯹ූ (Hall of Sumptuous Spring) during the Wanli 㨀Ლ reign (1573–1620), and a later reworking of the play was printed by Shidetang Ϫᖋූ (Hall of Eternal Virtues). Textual archaeology reveals that both editions were heavily edited by Ming bookmakers, making the play text itself a site for implicit commentating. As a matter of fact, drama commentators often aimed to create “better,” “improved,” “corrected,” or more “accurate” editions—only natural in an era when the eligibility of these items of stage performance repertoire for textual (re)production was itself in question. In the publishing culture that gradually took form, the provision of commentarial notes came to be part and parcel of making a book. The introduction of commentary would often be one dimension of a range of editorial interventions that might strike later readers who had the notion that dramatic works have an “authentic” early version as shocking. The Shide text for Orphan, while based on the Fuchun edition, drastically alters the work’s organizational apparatus. First, it creates scene titles, along with a table of contents. The Fuchun edition opens with “Scene One,” and all the following forty-three scenes are marked simply by numbers at the beginning of each scene. A reader unfamiliar with the play would thus have to read from beginning to the end to gain an overall sense of the story. The Shide edition, by contrast, opens with a table of contents consisting of scenes individually titled based on the emblematic action of each scene. Adding scene titles might seem to be a superficial change, but by characterizing each scene with a short phrase, the Shide edition helps organize the reading experience into more digestible units as well as facilitating browsing among scenes. Readers could now easily locate a particular scene in the book and take a more active role in choosing what particular moment they would read in a given reading session. The Shide table of contents, listing scene titles such as “Zhao Shuo Sets Up Lanterns,” “Zhou Jian Buys Wine on Credit,” “Old Woman Wang Pursues the Debts Owed Her,” “Chatting and Delight in the Inner Chamber,” and “Slicing and Cutting Off Human Hands,” highlights the constant shift of scenes and intensification of conflicts and violence. Thus, it offers to even the casual reader a glimpse of the urban excitement, the ups and downs of the mercantile and political worlds, and a panoramic view of society in general, thereby serving as an advertisement for the book. A second change in the Shide edition is an increase in the number of illustrations, from Fuchun’s seven to fifteen, many newly created. A key change at the level of design in particular is the reworking of the captions—from the Fuchun edition’s full sentences to the Shide edition’s catchy four-character phrases. For example, the caption “Cheng Ying Sees the Imperial Son-in-Law and Relates the Speech on Banning the Lantern Festival” ⿟㣅㽟侭侀䁾⽕➜ becomes

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“Banning the Lantern Festival at the Upper Prime”Ϟ‫➜⽕ܗ‬. Four-character phrases are a common mnemonic tool, thus helping cue a more memorable visual reference for readers. That is, they help to shape a textual landscape with better-designed signposts. Illustrations work as visual commentary: while the first pictures in both editions are similar, the second picture in each edition guides readers’ attention to opposite sentiments. The Fuchun edition’s “Zhao Shuo Scolds His Son and Urges Him Not to Indulge in Wonder and Pleasure” is changed in the Shide edition to “Celebrating and Taking Delight at the Lantern Festival.” Thus, the latter edition not only alleviates the didactic tone in its depiction of the dramatic moment but also shifts the focus to the enchanting power that the lantern festival had over the imagination of contemporary audiences as an emblem of urban spectacle. The play itself, moreover, serves as an organizational tool. Scenes are natural units for illustrations; words and lines prompt commentarial response and correspondence. A deft commentator is one who can define an information gap between the text and a vision of interpretation. The Orphan is a history play, prompting a sizable number of quotations from and references to historical records in the commentary. In addition to lexical annotations, excerpted passages from a range of books provide contextual information, elucidations, or references. The books and texts cited include Zuozhuan, Shiji, Hanshu ⓶᳌ (History of the Han), Jinshu ᰝ᳌ (History of the Jin), Tangshu ૤᳌ (Histories of the Tang; probably both the old and the new), Songshu ᅟ᳌ (History of the Song),5 Shuzhi 㳔ᖫ (Records of Shu), Wu Yue chunqiu ਇ䍞᯹⾟ (Annals of Wu and Yue), Huainanzi ⏂फᄤ (Master of Huainan), Liexian zhuan ߫ҭ‫( ڇ‬Biographies of immortals), Shuoyuan 䁾㢥 (Garden of persuasions), Fengtu ji 乼ೳ㿬 (Records of local customs), Xijing zaji 㽓Ҁ䲰㿬 (Miscellaneous records of the Western Capital), Lunyu 䂪䁲 (Analects), Mengzi ᄳᄤ (Mencius), Zhuangzi 㥞ᄤ (Master Zhuang), Mao Shi ↯䀽 (Mao Odes), “Lisao” 䲶個 (“Encountering Sorrow”), and Erya ⠒䲙 (Approaching the elegant; see Handel, chapter 5); also referenced are poems by Su Wu 㯛℺ (140–60 BCE), Cao Cao ᳍᪡ (155–220), and Bai Juyi ⱑሙᯧ (772–846). These citations—from official histories, collections of anecdotes, stories of anomalies and immortals, records of places, Confucian and Daoist classics, canonical works of poetry, and an early dictionary—turn the margin of the page into a handbook of bibliographical indications. As a result, readers were offered not just a play text but also a chance to (re)collect a selection of knowledge accumulated since antiquity. By focusing on diction and historical allusions, the marginal commentary in the Orphan serves a largely pedagogical function for bookish learning.

18.1 Right: An illustration titled “Explaining the Injustice by Pointing [at a Painting Scroll]”

captures the turn of events unfolding in the following pages. The standing child figure is the Orphan and the sitting adult is Cheng Ying, who had substituted his own son to be killed by Tu’an Gu to allow the Orphan to survive—ironically, as Tu’an Gu’s adopted son. Left: The main register of the page is where one sees the play, here specifically Cheng Ying’s monologue and a short dialogue in which Cheng recounts the injustice done to Zhao Dun’s family and associates. In the top margin is eyebrow commentary consisting of an abbreviated and partially paraphrased passage from Shiji concerning the events dramatized on the page. Source: Xinkan chongding chuxiang fushi biaozhu yinshi Zhao shi gu’er ji ᮄߟ䞡㿖ߎ‫ڣ‬䰘䞟῭䀏䷇䞟 䍭⇣ᄸ‫ܦ‬㿬, late Ming Shidetang ed. (Harvard University Library, Cambridge, MA), 2.40b–41a, https:// iiif.lib.harvard.edu/manifests/view/drs:15017122$103i.

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The Circuit of Communication Drama commentary in late imperial China involved cultural luminaries, educated commoners, critics for hire contracted by commercial printshops, and female readers whose tales of love and loss absorbed and attracted passionate followers. Types and styles rapidly diversified, and the proliferation of this form of publication in the late Wanli era affected not only supply but also demand. Li Zhi ᴢ䋘 (1527–1602), the iconic heretic of late imperial China, is the putative author of at least sixteen commentated editions of drama (see also Huang, chapter 17). Li Zhi details his commentarial practice in a 1592 letter to his friend Jiao Hong ⛺ゥ (1540–1620): Five fascicles of Fenshu ⛮᳌ [A book to burn], and two fascicles of Shuoshu 䁾᳌ [On books], totaling seven fascicles: I am entrusting these to [Zhou] Youshan [਼টቅ, 1532–97] to present for your perusal. These are copies that I have myself perused, and therefore they are marked with my critical notes. I hope that you will peruse them along with me, and this is why I am sending them along to you. . . . I hope that you will carefully read through these, and return them to me via Youshan! Just consider the difficulty an old man like me has in copying, in obtaining paper and brushes, and in reading. It is in consideration of these three difficulties that you must bear in mind to give these back to Youshan to return to me. Besides, I don’t have any other copies. . . . My annotation on the Shuihu zhuan ∈Ⓦ‫[ ڇ‬Water Margin] is extremely pleasing, and my editing and recasting of the Xixiang ji 㽓ᒖ㿬 [Story of the Western Wing] and Pipa ji ⨉⨊㿬 [The Lute] are even more wondrous. But I worry that in the whole world there is no one able to read the books as seen in the Li Zhi manner—how much the less so in this place? There is only Yuan Zhongfu 㹕Ё໿ [fl. 1572–1620] who is able to read my books. I ought to give all my books to him. But he is indolent and sloppy by nature, and I figure that if these books went into his hands, they would soon be scattered and lost. Alas! Even things as tangible and crude as these books must linger in uncertainty with no place of refuge—how much the worse is it for the wondrous subtleties of my mind? Enough! Enough!6

Li Zhi’s commentary, according to this letter, constantly risks the calamity of loss. It circulated among close friends separated by distance and was dependent on the chance of a traveler to transport it and on the reliability of Li Zhi’s friends to return it. Li Zhi laments the difficulties for an old man like him “in copying, in obtaining paper and brushes, and in reading”—that is, the economic and physical toll of commentarial writing. He also regrets the lack of readers who truly understand his writing. The only person who knows how to

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read his books is unfortunately “indolent and sloppy”—gifted in understanding Li Zhi’s mind but unreliable as far as preserving his works as material objects. These comments serve among other things as a reminder that even though the Ming is often thought of as an age of print, circulation in manuscript was still the origin point for books—and the difficulties and dangers confronting books at this stage were a constant concern (see Egan, chapter 42). The tragedy of the destruction and loss of writing aside, Li Zhi’s letter lyricizes the network of exchange that makes the circulation of his commentaries possible and meaningful, including money and production tools such as paper and brushes, physical and mental strength, the circulation of books as concrete and vulnerable objects, and a circle of kindred spirits who, although perhaps unable to protect the physical integrity of his books, offer a chance for understanding and thus preserving his mind and writing. The tension between the power of his mind/writing and the material loss that threatens them provides the driving force for the epistolary narrative. It is exactly this energy that is harvested some years later, after the banning of Li Zhi’s books and his death (i.e., the physical destruction of his person and his work), when the book market produced commentated works attributed to him. To what extent the “Li-commentated” drama editions can be attributed to Li Zhi is a matter of ongoing debate—the general consensus is that the vast bulk of this material is spurious. Nonetheless, a number of brilliant commentaries did in fact enter circulation in a commentarial voice that mimics Li Zhi (at times quite convincingly), and these works helped shape a new language of literary criticism. These “Li commentaries” also become data, part of a storehouse of material to be processed and recombined in making new commentaries. A multicolor imprint of the play Xiuru ji 㐵㼺㿬 (Tale of the embroidered gown), which highlights some parts of the text (particularly commentary) in red against the predominant text in black, is one exemplar of the new commentarial style and critical language. This edition of Xiuru ji, a Ming dramatic retelling of the romance between a student and a courtesan based on the Tang story “Li Wa zhuan” ᴢ࿗‫“( ڇ‬Tale of Li Wa”), derives its commentary largely from a “Li-commentated edition” and a “Chen-commentated edition,” Chen referring to Chen Jiru 䱇㑐‫ۦ‬ (1558–1639), another leading cultural figure of the day.7 The critical perspectives and discursive patterns appearing in the pages of this edition include social comments on the world of the play, literary analysis, and a general exercise of connoisseurship on things and affairs of the world. The commentary draws on traditional poetic categories, such as qingqian 䓩‫( ׽‬light and beguiling), juan 䲟 (savory), and qu 䍷 (charming), to comment on style and aesthetic effects, and its social comments are issued in relation to the central concerns of the intellectual discourse of the day: Learning of the Dao (Daoxue 䘧ᅌ), conscience, and “the mores of the times.” It also highlights the vital place of

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qing ᚙ (feelings, emotions, love) in the play, partaking in the cult of qing, a literary and cultural movement that accords supremacy to the spontaneous and the emotional as creative and transformative power. Further, it frequently links verbal description with the creation of visual imagery, noting that certain lines are “like a painting” or that a particular phrase “paints the image of an old ‘budding talent’ ” or “paints the look of stirring charms.” Attention is given to voices of a range of social groups and positions in comments such as “these are all the words of a pedantic know-it-all,” “words of one who has experienced things of the world,” “these can be said to be words of a scholar,” and “after all, these are words of a beggar.” The commentary also reminds readers of the importance of connoisseurial judgment (shangjian 䊲䨦). Given the prevalence in these commentaries of analogies between verbal arts and painting, it is not surprising that this intermedia cross-referencing is often paralleled by an alternate and often equally crucial form of drama commentary in Ming editions that takes the form of actual illustrations, as is the case in Xiuru ji as well as Orphan. Illustrations are not merely visual interpretations of the play; they also can be designed as pictorial instructions for stage performances. Further, they enable the sense of sight to accompany reading and became a favored venue for circulating and developing pictorial styles, motifs, and topoi. The attention and focus that printshop owners in Ming China seemed to devote to illustrations in their drama editions made drama books rich sites for visual consumption. Moreover, this investment in visual commentary is indicative of an increasing fascination with media forms in general. The captions for illustrations in Xiuru ji are inked in red and shaped similarly to the seals used to stamp documents and artworks, alluding to another medium of writing and echoing late Ming antiquarians’ connoisseurship and passion for seal collecting. This turned the illustrations into facsimile paintings—since the artist’s or collector’s seal was a marker of the painting’s status and autonomy as an aesthetic object. Verbal and visual commentary together meant that the commentated drama text afforded book producers and readers an unparalleled “bandwidth” through which a vast range of cultural messages could circulate—for example, the growing system of literary criticism, current pictorial styles, and prestigious connoisseurial practices as well as ways of observing social reality.

Commentators’ Ambitions Commentators, acting as cultural arbiters who negotiate among commercial calculation, literati taste, theater connoisseurship, and shifting public interests, opened their play texts to guided epistemological, political, and aesthetic debate and exercise. In their hands, commentarial notes, typically appearing in the top

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margin of a page, can also be found interspersed between lines, passages, or scenes in other parts of the page—there is often a quite specific division of labor among comments depending on their location on the page. They also use other paratexts to make the case for their reading strategies and their text’s raison d’être, including prefaces, postfaces, colophons, and essays on principles of reading. The mutual acceleration of the spread of drama and commentarial practices in time created its own masterpieces. Jin Shengtan’s 䞥㘪™ (1608–61) Diliu caizi shu ㄀݁ᠡᄤ᳌ (The sixth book of genius), his commentated edition of Xixiang ji, became the most prevalent version of the play throughout the Qing dynasty. This edition of Jin Shengtan and the Caizi Mudang ting ᠡᄤ⠵ Ѝҁ (The genius book of The Peony Pavilion) by the wife-and-husband commentarial team of Cheng Qiong ⿟⪞ and Wu Zhensheng ਇ䳛⫳ (1695–1769) were hailed as the most marvelous instances of the commentated drama publication form. Both notably pass beyond what might seem their primary remit, which is explaining and guiding the reading of their respective base texts, to reflect on the place of the commentary itself—or on the play-plus-commentary that is often quite frankly acknowledged to be a fundamentally new act and product of creation—in relation to the field of books and reading as a whole. Jin Shengtan meditates on the place of his commentary: If there is one thing in this world whose power is certain to extend to later ages—that thing would have to be a book. If, among all the books of this world whose power is certain to extend to later ages, there is one which nonetheless to this day has no one who understands it—that would have to be this one book, Xixiang ji. If, among all the books of the world whose power is certain to extend to later ages, but which in the world nonetheless to this day have not been understood, there is one which I just happen to have been able, through exhausting all my intellect and pouring out all my powers, to elucidate completely and accurately down to the finest hair—then that would have to be the Xixiang ji that I recently annotated.8

He shifts his focus here from what books can preserve to the fact that a book may itself be something with an unmatched ability to endure in the world. Following on this shift in perspective, he reshaped the overall order of the bibliographical landscape by distinguishing a class of book that he termed the “six books of Genius” and made plans to comment on all of them. He was able to finish only his commentaries on the novel Shuihu zhuan (see Huang, chapter 17) and the drama Xixiang ji. His book list—Zhuangzi, “Lisao,” Shiji, the poetry of Du Fu ᴰ⫿ (712–70), Shuihu zhuan, and Xixiang ji—invents a vision whereby works of different genres and times and with varied pedigrees and prestige are of the same order, an order that he validates and makes real through his reading, which is in turn embodied in his commentaries. “Of the

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six books, Shengtan only uses the same ‘hands and eyes’ to read and interpret them. For example, when I read Xixiang ji, I in fact use the ‘hands and eyes’ of reading Zhuangzi and Shiji to read and interpret it. . . .”9 Through this project, Jin Shengtan aimed to turn commentarial practice into a majestic project of textual composition and macrotextual architecture. He divides The Sixth Book of Genius into eight juan (fascicles), wherein his own prefaces and “Ways of Reading The Sixth Genius’s Book The Story of the Western Wing” form the opening two. He further divides the play text into passages (jie ㆔) in order to conduct compositional analysis mirroring the more conventional modes of commentary and compositional instruction used for classical prose, embodied in the Four Books. In his own words, “Shengtan uses the way of reading Zuozhuan to comment on and annotate The Story of the Western Wing.”10 He alters the play text as needed to support his reading, making it, by his own frank admission, his play rather than a play by Wang Shifu ⥟ᆺ⫿ (1260–1307). His notes—appearing in interlinear and intersectional form and as head comments at the beginning of a scene—permeate the page and become difficult to separate from the play, thus harkening back to the early commentarial tradition “by which self-defined commentaries defined the texts they were commenting upon.”11 And the critical terms and narrative techniques he defined and employed (e.g., “[paint] a wash of clouds to set off the moon” ⚬䳆ᠬ᳜, “[like] the moon traversing a winding corridor” ᳜ᑺ䗈ᒞ) expanded the lexicon of traditional literary criticism with many terms and concepts that would become standard in later ages. While making books of and for the “genius” (caizi ᠡᄤ, literally, talented male), Jin contemplates his own role vis-à-vis later readers: Those future readers, since they love reading, will surely also love the demure heroine who knows one’s mind [zhixin qingyi ⶹᖗ䴦㸷]. The demure heroine who knows one’s mind is one who stands ready by one’s side on frosty dawns and rainy nights—a separate body in the same chamber, with whom one rises in tandem and rests together. I wish to be granted to transform in my latter existence into just such a demure heroine who knows one’s mind. . . .12

The lasting world of books and the present world of material and sensual pleasures of the reader together find an apt image in “demure heroine who knows one’s mind,” as Jin Shengtan figures the companionship between commentator and reader in gendered terms. Jin Shengtan’s Xixiang ji commentary totals around one hundred thousand characters. The commentary in Caizi Mudan ting, meanwhile, runs to over three hundred thousand characters—five or six times the length of the play itself! Readers find Cheng and Wu’s book striking in its consistent sexological interpretation of the play Mudan ting, but more to the issue at hand is the

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authors’ ambition to reference the whole textual tradition of China. Cheng states in her preface: We readers of the boudoir always feel it a cause for regret when intellect fails to enter into the wondrous, or when perception falls short of the marvelous— thus when we read Mudan ting, there is none among us who does not wish to immersively comprehend all the books and histories, and to study all manner of poetry and lyrical compositions. Where there is great desire for a broadening of knowledge and understanding, however, there likewise comes a great fear, owing to the multitude of books required. And thus there is none among us who has not wished to strike upon some method of miniaturization, so as to gather up all the engaging events, and all the phrases of fine conception, of every age down from highest antiquity, and concentrate them in the one-inch span of a single volume.13

Cheng confronts the information crisis of the age (too much to read!) and uses it to frame her work in terms of a magical “method of miniaturization” (suodi shu 㐂ഄ㸧) whereby the vast range of textual expertise and information one feels a “need” for can be presented in a concentrated and readily assimilable form. Their book gratifies this desire for encyclopedic knowledge. The commentary on the first scene of the play, for example, brings up a wide range of figures and books, including Chen Jiru, Li Zhi, Empress Lü ਖৢ (d. 180 BCE), Huang Tingjian 咗ᒁෙ (1045–1105), Wang Cihui ⥟⃵ಲ (1593–1642), Qian Shouzhi 䣶ফП (1582–1664), Li Shangyin ᴢଚ䲅 (813–58), Zhong Xing 䥒ᛎ (1574– 1624), Wang Jizhong ⥟ᄷ䞡 (1574–1646), Guo Pu 䛁⩲ (276–324), Lu Ji 䱌″ (261–303), Zhi Daolin ᬃ䘧ᵫ (314–66), Han Donglang 䶧‫ހ‬䚢 (844–923), Shishuo xinyu Ϫ䁾ᮄ䁲 (A New Account of Tales of the World), Jinshu, Nanhua फ㧃 (Southern florescence [i.e., Zhuangzi], “Lisao,” Zuozhuan, and Shuihu zhuan. In her own summary, Cheng states, “I thus ask leave to borrow this Peony Pavilion, and, in the upper register, to combine together all the masters, histories, and the hundred schools, along with all the poets and tellers of tales, to make a commentary to gratify such readers.”14 Caizi Mudan ting offers its readers the magnitude of the whole world in a miniature, in the materially manageable form of a single book.

Conclusion: The Magic of the Commentated Drama Form The rise of commentated drama was a response to specific cultural pressures and opportunities in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century China. The musical drama itself is a multimedia form, and it thus served as a natural

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foundation for the commentated drama, employed by commentators and book producers as a metamedium, comprising a still wider range of earlier media, to address the issues and disseminate the information that seemed most pressing for their age. Commentated drama offered readers not only access to and guidance in appreciating the play texts but also a concentrated synopsis of knowledge, critical concepts, and cultural commonplaces that promised membership in a class of discerning, up-to-date, and sophisticated readers.

Notes 1. Huang Lin 咘䳪, “Zuizao de Zhongguo xiqu pingdian ben” ᳔ᮽⱘЁ೑៣᳆䆘⚍ᴀ, Fudan xuebao (2004.2): 39–46, 53. 2. Li Ke ᴢ‫ܟ‬, Ming Qing xiqu pingdian yanjiu ᯢ⏙᠆᳆䀩咲ⷨお (Xinbei: Hua Mulan wenhua chubanshe, 2013), 39. 3. Zhang Yonggan ᓴ࢛ᬶ, “Zhongguo gudai xiqu pingdian yanjiu zonglun” Ё೑সҷ៣ ᳆䆘⚍㓐䆎, Xiqu yanjiu (2016.1): 172. 4. The story of the orphan of Zhao in southern drama differs from the zaju 䲰࡛ version, known for being the first Chinese play translated into a European language. 5. The reference to Songshu, the dynastic history of the Liu Song, is in error; the intended reference is Songshi ᅟ৆, the dynastic history of the Zhao Song. 6. Li Zhi, Fenshu Xu Fenshu jiaoshi ⛮кg㓁⛮к᷵䞞, annot. Chen Renren 䰜ҕҕ (Changsha: Yuelu shushe, 2011), 519. 7. Zhang Wenheng ᔉ᭛ᘚ, “Lun Li Zhuowu piping ben Xiuru ji de tezheng jiqi jiazhi” 䆎 ᴢध਒ᡍ䆘ᴀ㒷㼺䆄ⱘ⡍ᕕঞ݊Ӌؐ, Zhongguo dianji yu wenhua (2016.3): 89–99. 8. Jin Shengtan, Guanhuatang Diliu caizi shu 䉿㧃ූ㄀݁ᠡᄤ᳌, Jinguyuan 䞥䈋೦ ed., 1.7a–7b (hereafter GHTDLCS). 9. Jin Shengtan, GHTDLCS, 2.2b. 10. Jin Shengtan, GHTDLCS, 4.11b. 11. Michael J. Puett, “Text and Commentary: The Early Tradition,” in The Oxford Handbook of Classical Chinese Literature (1000 BCE–900 CE), ed. Wiebke Denecke, Wai-yee Li, and Xiaofei Tian (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 115. 12. Jin Shengtan, GHTDLCS, 1.6b–7a. 13. Tang Xianzu ⑃乃⼪, Caizi Mudang ting ᠡᄤ⠵Ѝҁ, comm. Wu Zhensheng and Cheng Qiong, annot. Hua Wei 㧃⨟ and Jiang Jurong ∳Ꮌᾂ (Taipei: Xuesheng shuju, 2004), v–vi. 14. Tang Xianzu, Caizi Mudang ting, vi.

CHAPTER 19

READER’S GUIDES M A R I A F R A N C A S I B AU

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n this chapter, the term reader’s guides (or duben 䅔ᴀ) encompasses modern (twentieth- and twenty-first-century) annotated editions that provide partial or complete translations of classical texts into Modern Vernacular Chinese. Variorum critical editions and photographic reprints of traditional commentaries, also sometimes marketed as duben, however, fall outside the scope of this survey. Reader’s guides may thus be regarded as nonspecialist, modernized scholarly editions aimed at a general audience. They are not critical editions in the strictly philological sense in that they do not typically aim to establish the text anew but rather accept and reproduce previous authoritative versions. Yet, as Jerome J. McGann has written, “Good nonspecialist editions can involve as much scholarly intelligence as critical editions, or even more.”1 A similar sentiment is echoed by a Chinese scholar in a survey of reader’s guides of the classics, with an added emphasis on the sheer difficulty of achieving a popularizing intent while maintaining scholarly rigor.2 In general, despite their remarkable diversity, there are three characteristics shared by modern reader’s guides: an intense awareness of the linguistic and cultural gulf between the original text and the modern reader, an explicit pedagogical intent shaped by the particular set of historical contingencies in which a given edition is produced, and a willingness (especially during the Republican period) to experiment with ways of organizing the commentarial apparatus and articulating textual hierarchies on the page.

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Historical Development and Typologies Latecomers to the millennia-long tradition of Chinese commentaries, reader’s guides to the classics emerged as a new bibliographical category at the turn of the twentieth century. Their emergence is linked to the complicated history of education reforms, language policies, debates on the modern relevance of the classics, and fierce competition among Shanghai publishers that took place during the last decade of the Qing and the early years of the Republican period. Texts that appeared under the rubric of duben thus ran the gamut from mere reproductions of traditional commentaries to vernacular annotations with fullscale translations and editions featuring lavish illustrations, catechistic question-and-answer sections, and a rich apparatus of contextual materials. Some guides focused on the literary quality and others on the moral import and canonical status of the classic. Editions published during the second half of the twentieth century appear more uniformly geared toward a systematized presentation of the critical apparatus, neatly labeled into notes and vernacular translations, while their prefaces continue to reassure readers with promises of accuracy, accessibility, and expert selection of the cream among traditional interpretations. The intended readership of these compilations is also inevitably a reflection of the new textual and scholarly communities that emerged with the modern school system. Targeted audiences typically encompass college and high school students and general readers as well as the nonspecialist scholarly community. Alongside their use as classroom textbooks, these editions are explicitly marketed for self-study, claiming to be self-sufficient guides without the presence of a teacher. Their compilers range from the anonymous editorial staff of publishing houses to obscure teacher-writers, major intellectuals and scholars—and even child prodigies.3

Case Study: Reader’s Guide Editions of the Four Books and Mencius, 1905–2019 This discussion focuses on modern editions of the Mengzi ᄳᄤ (Mencius)— and the Sishu ಯ᳌ (Four Books) more broadly—tracing the historical development and range of strategies deployed by compilers and publishers throughout the twentieth century. Some early twentieth-century publishers attempted to modernize the presentation of the classics by incorporating new kinds of knowledge and more accessible, vernacular language. The Biaomeng shushi ᔾ㩭᳌ᅸ (Studio for developing minds) published a series of readers, including Huitu Sishu sucheng xinti duben 㐾೪ಯ᳌䗳៤ᮄ储䅔ᴀ (Illustrated Four Books quick readers in

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new format; ca. 1905) and Tuhua Sishu baihua jie ೪⬿ಯ᳌ⱑ䁅㾷 (Illustrated Four Books with vernacular explanations; early Republican period). The annotations in Huitu Sishu sucheng xinti duben follow a catechistic format, with each word or phrase explained in simple vernacular language. Terms are illustrated with artifacts of Western science and technology in a clear, if clumsy, attempt to turn the classics into vehicles for the dissemination of modern knowledge. The question-and-answer sections are accompanied by chapter summaries (quanzhang zongjie ܼゴ㐑㌤) explicitly addressed to a young audience. The later Tuhua Sishu baihua jie maintains the chapter summaries but discards the catechistic annotations, as well as the wilder references to modern science, in favor of a vernacularization of the text that incorporates traditional glosses into an expansive and continuous narrative. Although the “reading of the classics” as a subject was famously abolished by the new Republican government in 1912, the classics did not disappear from the textbooks, and the official proscription did not lead to a dwindling of duben compilations. If anything, the proliferation of such editions may be read as a symptom of the need to supply modern students and eager autodidacts with the linguistic and cultural tools (via translation and commentarial apparatus) no longer imparted by the school system. The first decade of the Republic saw the publication of duben that build on the popularizing legacy of Biaomeng’s Tuhua Sishu baihua jie4 and others aimed at recuperating older approaches that appreciate the classics as literature and stylistic models. The Mengzi xin duben ᄳᄤᮄ䅔ᴀ (New Mencius reader; 1919), compiled by Tang Wenzhi ૤᭛⊏ (1865–1954), an early advocate for the abolition of the classics lessons in lower primary schools in 1911, represents a more nostalgic attempt to rescue such traditions.5 In the preface, Tang asserts the importance of reading his annotations in tandem with Zhu Xi’s ᴅ➍ (1130–1200) commentary, but he also draws attention to the Ming and Qing pingdian 䀩咲 commentary (i.e., commentary with emphasizing and punctuating markers) reproduced or excerpted in the upper margin (see Huang, chapter 17). Significantly, Tang does not attempt to vernacularize the text, and the commentary is entirely in Literary Chinese. The Nanjing decade (1927–37) saw a flurry of duben aimed at vernacularizing the original texts and linking them to contemporary concerns, many under the title Sishu baihua jujie ಯ᳌ⱑ䁅হ㾷 (Four Books, with vernacular explanations verse by verse). Besides ubiquitous references to Sun Yat-sen’s ᄿ䘌ҭ (1866–1925) Three People’s Principles and Chiang Kai-shek’s 㫷ҟ⷇ (1887–1975) New Life movement in the prefaces, a distinguishing feature of these editions is the phonetic notation using the newly devised National Alphabet (zhuyin zimu ⊼䷇ᄫ↡) system, a clear reflection of the Nationalist agenda of ideological unification, which included a nationwide standard of pronunciation. During the war years and shortly after the establishment of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), scholars produced well-researched editions that

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would be influential for decades to come. Jiang Boqian’s 㫷ԃ┯ (1892–1956) Sishu duben ಯ᳌䅔ᴀ (Four Books reader; 1941) reproduces Zhu Xi’s commentary in the upper margin and provides interlinear vernacular explanations less of the original text than of Zhu’s commentary. Yang Bojun’s ἞ԃ֞ (1909–92) Mengzi yizhu ᄳᄤ䅃⊼ (Mencius, translated and annotated; 1960), with its lucid vernacular translation, copious footnotes, and encyclopedic glossary, has become a standard reference edition and is still regularly reprinted.6 In Taiwan, the blue-covered Guji jinzhu xinyi congshu স㈡Ҟ⊼ᮄ䅃শ᳌ (Collectanea of classics with modern annotations and new translations) is a ubiquitous and popular series. The preface reprinted in each of the 330 titles (as of March 2019) has the motto “to simultaneously draw from all schools and offer straightforward annotations and lucid explications” ‫ݐ‬প䃌ᆊˈⳈ⊼ᯢ㾷, which encapsulates the series’ goal of providing a sweeping synthesis of the centuries of scholarship, on the one hand, and broad accessibility to a modern audience, on the other.7 Yet the annotations presented as “modern” are actually in simple Literary Chinese, as are other portions of the commentarial apparatus. Only the translations (yuyi 䁲䅃) are in straightforward vernacular. The recent Sishu yizhu ಯк䆥⊼ (Four Books, translated and annotated; 2019) suggests that reader’s guides for the classics continue to serve changing needs. The preface states that the great project of national rejuvenation that is the “Chinese Dream” must be rooted in a renewed awareness of and confidence about China’s cultural past. It underlines the importance of curbing the excesses of recent “playful” and layperson’s editions of the classics and returning to orthodox interpretation—the present edition, needless to say, accomplishes this and surpasses even Yang Bojun’s celebrated translations and annotations of the Lunyu and Mencius.8

Sectioning, Typography, and Page Layout Despite their apparent modernity, twentieth-century reader’s guides have a complicated history of experimentations, repudiations, repurposing, and transmutations that editors, printers, and publishers imposed on late imperial models. While the influence of the Zhu Xi commentary remains unsurprisingly ubiquitous, another important, if rarely acknowledged, precedent is the Rijiang Sishu jieyi ᮹䃯ಯ᳌㾷㕽 (Daily lectures on the Four Books with explanations), compiled in 1677 by Chen Tingjing 䱇ᓋᭀ (1638–1712), Lashali [Lasari] ୛≭ઽ (d. 1679), and others and issued at imperial behest with vernacular or semi-vernacular annotations and translations. The Rijiang editions constitute an important model not just because they have a popularizing agenda but also because they offer an alternative textual arrangement and page layout from the chapter-and-verse (zhangju ゴহ) format of the

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Zhu Xi commentary (see Nylan and Rusk, chapter 15). They present the original text in uninterrupted chapters followed by the commentary printed in characters of equal size, albeit slightly indented (also see Galambos, chapter 13, and Hamm, chapter 14). Virtually all modern editions of the Mencius accept Han commentator Zhao Qi’s 䍭ቤ (108–201) organization of the text into seven books, each comprising two parts that are further divided into a varying number of chapters.9 Divergent approaches, however, can be seen in the sectioning below the chapter level. By and large, early twentieth-century editions continue to parse the text according to the phrases or verses (ju হ) in Zhu Xi’s commentary—with each verse followed by commentary in smaller characters. Beginning in the mid-1920s, popular editions that reproduce the original text in whole chapters appear, along with the introduction of the new Western technology of numbered endnotes.10 There are also developments in the opposite direction—such as school editions from the Nanjing decade that atomize the original text into ever smaller units, interrupted by commentary.11 Over the years, and especially since the 1960 publication of Yang Bojun’s Mengzi yizhu, the chapter-plus-note format has become standard in most editions published in the PRC and Taiwan. Early Republican editions are generally distinguished by a typographic restlessness, seen in incessant reconfigurations of the commentarial apparatus and rearticulations of textual hierarchies on the page. Two innovations in early Republican duben are the organization of the commentarial apparatus into discrete and systematically-labeled categories and the use of numbered endnotes with corresponding callouts in the main text. For example, Baihua Mengzi duben ⱑ䁅ᄳᄤ䅔ᴀ (Mencius reader in vernacular; 1927) features an extensive use of rubrics (marked by parentheses and lenticular brackets) to organize the commentarial apparatus into purport (zhangzhi ゴᮼ), notes (zhushi 䀏䞟), vernacular translation (jieshuo 㾷䁾), and the Su [Xun] commentary (Su pi 㯛 ᡍ), the latter printed in the upper margin.12 Several typographic conventions of Republican readers, on the other hand, continue well-established traditions, such as the use of different font sizes, indentations, and placements on the page to represent a visual hierarchy between the main text and the commentary and between levels of commentary and subcommentary. Many contemporary editions prefer to achieve or reinforce the visual demarcation between text and commentary by using different typefaces or font styles rather than just different character sizes. Only rarely is indentation used for this purpose. In some cases, the original text itself is signaled by rubrics such as “original text” (yuandian ॳ‫ ݌‬or yuanwen ॳ᭛). Lastly, all modern duben provide punctuation to both text and commentary, although there was a high degree of eclecticism and experimentation with punctuation styles during the Republican era, especially after the introduction of Western-style punctuation in the 1910s (see Hamm, chapter 14). For example,

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Baihua Mengzi duben combines Western-style punctuation marks and note callouts with traditional emphasis marks and sidelines indicating proper names and toponyms.

Annotation and Translation The annotations provided in duben typically include phonetic, lexical, and grammatical glosses as well as notes that supply historical and cultural background. These are often in vernacular or otherwise simple Classical Chinese. Among the various kinds of annotations, phonetic glosses deserve special mention. Their nature and placement on the page are the most susceptible to historical change. Earlier duben often reproduce the traditional phonetic notations (such as fanqie ডߛ and homophone characters), while Nanjing decade and modern Taiwanese editions embrace Zhuyin zimu in combination with other modern notations; editions from the PRC uniformly employ pinyin romanization. Phonetic notations can be placed immediately following the term they refer to, in the upper or lower margin of the page, or in notes. Translation in its usual sense hardly captures the range of textual interventions—vernacularization, explication, rephrasing, and narrativization— that readers of early Republican duben editions may encounter in the sections dedicated to the vernacular rendition of the classical text. Since the establishment of the PRC, duben editions have adopted a narrower (scientific or modern) understanding of translation, claiming to remain as close as possible to the original text. The relationship between original text and vernacular annotation and translation remains dynamic. While some duben prefaces stress the ancillary role played by the modern vernacular translation and urge their readers to confront the original text first, others take an opposite stance by suggesting that the commentary itself is sufficient to enlighten the reader, who may choose to skip over the original text.13

Conclusion Beyond their remarkable diversity, modern reader’s guides aim to provide a clear, systematic, and accessible explanation and translation of the classics. Their prefaces often deploy the rhetoric of “profound ideas explained in plain terms” (shenru qianchu ⏅ܹ⏎ߎ). The increasing tendency toward uniformity and systematicity and the impatience with variants and conflicting interpretations may be symptoms of anxiety about or a strategy to cope with information overload. This is not to say that modern reader’s guides represent a radical break with traditional exegesis. Some old exegetical methods remain—for

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example, the citation of sources and parallels to “explain” a word or phrase. McGann’s remarks on the monumental and paradoxical aspirations of modern critical editions may apply equally well to the tacit or overt ambitions of many modern reader’s guides, which seek to “reconstitute for the reader, in a single text, the entire history of the work as it has emerged into the present.”14 They do so authoritatively and sometimes expansively but always selectively (in contrast with variorum editions whose variants destabilize the text), providing only the most salient points of commentary. They beckon readers like so many sturdy rafts, promising a safe ride across the boundless textual galaxy.

Notes 1. Jerome J. McGann, A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 92. 2. Zhang Zhenglang ᓴᬓ⛎, “Guanyu guji jinzhu jinyi” ݇Ѣস㈡Ҟ⊼Ҟ䆥, Chuantong wenhua yu xiandaihua (1995.4): 83–85. 3. Cf. Jiang Xizhang ∳Ꮰᔉ (1907–2004), ed., Xinzhu Sishu baihua jieshuo ᮄ䀏ಯ᳌ⱑ䁅 㾷䁾 [Newly annotated Four Books with vernacular explanations]. This reader, allegedly compiled by a nine-year-old boy, exists in editions by several Shanghai publishers from the mid-1920s onward, including a 1991 printing by Zhongzhou guji chubanshe. 4. These include Xu Fumin 䀅ӣ⇥ et al., Sishu baihua zhujie ಯ᳌ⱑ䁅䀏㾷 (Shanghai: Guocui shuju, 1916), reprinted in Minguo shiqi jingxue congshu ⇥೟ᰖᳳ㍧ᅌশ᳌, ed. Lin Qingzhang ᵫᝊᕄ et al., 3rd ser., vol. 43 (Taichung: Wentingge tushu youxian gongsi, 2009); and Guangzhu Mengzi duben ᒷ䀏ᄳᄤ䅔ᴀ, part of the Guangzhu Sishu duben ᒷ䀏ಯ᳌䅔ᴀ, ed. Shijie shuju Ϫ⬠᳌ሔ, reprinted in Lin Qingzhang et  al., Minguo shiqi jingxue congshu, 3rd ser., vol. 44 (Taichung: Wentingge tushu youxian gongsi, 2009). 5. Tang Wenzhi, ed., Mengzi xin duben (n.p.: 1917), reprinted in Lin Qingzhang et al., Minguo shiqi jingxue congshu, 3rd ser., vol. 51. On Tang Wenzhi, see Elisabeth Kaske, The Politics of Language in Chinese Education, 1895–1919 (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 292. 6. Jiang Boqian, ed., Sishu duben (Shanghai: Qiming shudian, 1941); Yang Bojun, Mengzi yizhu (1960; repr., Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 2003). 7. Liu Zhenqiang ࡝ᤃᔋ (1932–2017), “Kanyin guji jinzhu xinyi congshu yuanqi” ߞॄস ㈡Ҟ⊼ᮄ䅃শ᳌㎷䍋 [Foreword to the printing of collectanea of classic works with modern annotations and new translations], reprinted in Xie Bingying 䃱‫ ⨽ބ‬et al., Xinyi sishu duben ᮄ䅃ಯ᳌䅔ᴀ [Four Books reader with new translations] (Taipei: Sanmin shuju, 1966), 1. 8. Guo Qiyong 䛁唤࢛, preface to Sishu yizhu, ed. Yang Fengbin ᴼ䗶ᕀ and Ouyang Zhenren ⃻䰇⽃Ҏ (Shanghai: Huadong shifan daxue chubanshe, 2019). 9. An exception to the textual organization described earlier may be found in newly compiled (xinbian ᮄ㎼) or topically arranged (fenlei ߚ串) editions—a fascinating genre itself not new to the modern era. 10. See Guangzhu Mengzi duben. Interestingly, in later revised editions (1932, 1935), the numbered endnotes, initially placed by the side of the original text, are moved to the upper register. 11. See, for example, Zhou Jinguang ਼㾆‫ ܝ‬and Wu Gumin ਇ〔⇥, eds., Sishu baihua jujie ಯ᳌ⱑ䁅হ㾷 (Shanghai: Qiuguzhai shuju, 1927).

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12. Zhang Zhaorong ᔉ‫⨶ܚ‬and Shen Yuanchao ≜‫ܗ‬䍙, eds., Baihua Mengzi duben ⱑ䁅 ᄳᄤ䅔ᴀ (1927; repr., Shanghai: Guangyi shuju, 1934). 13. See “Bianji dayi” ㎼䔃໻ᛣ, in Shijie shuju Ϫ⬠᳌ሔ, ed., Guangzhu Mengzi duben, rev. ed. (Shanghai: Shijie shuju, 1932), 1:1, as an example of the former argument and “Fanli,” in Wang Tianhen ⥟໽ᘼ, ed., Sishu baihua jujie ಯ᳌ⱑ䁅হ㾷 (n.p.: Xueren, 1944), 1–2, as an example of the latter. 14. McGann, A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism, 93.

SECTION A

ANTHOLOGIES E D I T E D B Y JAC K W. C H E N

A

nthologies have long mediated readers’ experiences of literary traditions, from collections of canonical texts and scriptures, to commonplace books and personal miscellanies, to classroom textbooks and volumes intended for the popular marketplace. However, while there has been considerable scholarly focus on the history of anthology making, a more systematic account of the anthology as a genre—the formal question of what precisely an anthology is—has received comparatively little critical attention. Even the definition of the term anthology, which derives from the Greek anthologia, “a gathering of flowers” or “a garland,” can be unclear. Scholars such as Anne Ferry and Barbara M. Benedict have argued that anthologies are selective compilations of multiple authors, while others such as Seth Lerer note that anthologies could also be compilations of a single author’s works or even of single long works that are excerpted and rearranged.1 The problem is that many attempted definitions of anthologies have relied on particular anthological models or have built their models of anthologies based on particular historical periods. A very different definition is proposed by Christopher M. Kuipers, who writes, “The anthology is a literary storage and communication form: a textbook, (now) a digital archive, (once) a commonplace book, (perhaps still) the poems one has memorized for pleasure.” This definition shifts the grounds of the anthology from a particular set of contents to how it functions as a form of information management. Kuipers goes on to elaborate the relationship of the anthology to the corpus, offering a very useful framing of what makes an

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anthology an anthology: “Anthologies are deponent in relationship to corpuses, ‘taken from (the grammatical counterpart),’ ” whereas “only corpuses are fully ‘ponent’ or thetic, in the sense of an active whole with all the possibilities available.”2 That is, the anthology stands in selective relationship to the domain of the corpus, which is comprised of all texts within the literary tradition. To be sure, Kuipers presents a rather expansive view of the anthology, and the suggestion here that the concept of anthology could include “poems one has memorized for pleasure” seems to stretch the concept beyond what most scholars would consider acceptable. Yet there is a history of memorizing anthologies or of anthologies surviving only through memory (as is seen in the Chinese tradition), not to mention anthologies of poems printed for the sake of memorization. Indeed, just as anthologies are content agnostic, they are also medium agnostic; it is the representative logic of how the anthology selects from the undelimited potentiality of the corpus that defines the anthology as such. Of course, to speak of the anthology as a cultural form—to take as given that such a thing exists—is already to argue for retroactive conceptual coherence. The fact of the anthology should not be taken as given, particularly as there is no one term used for the concept of anthology in the Chinese tradition; rather, a range of terms indicates different emphases and stresses for specific anthological concerns. Within the Chinese literary tradition, the concept of anthology has been applied to a range of edited compilations from Shijing 䀽㍧ (Classic of odes) and Chuci Ἦ䖁 (Verses of Chu) to Shangshu ᇮ᳌ (Esteemed documents) and Guoyu ೟䁲 (Dialogues of the states), from Wenxuan ᭛䙌 (Selections of Refined Literature) to Wenyuan yinghua ᭛㢥㣅㧃 (Fine blossoms from the literary garden), from to Huajian ji 㢅䭧䲚 (Among the Flowers) to Guwen guanzhi স᭛㾔ℶ (Pinnacle of ancient-style prose), from Yutai xinyong ⥝㟎 ᮄ䀴 (New Songs from a Jade Terrace) to Mingyuan shigui ৡၯ䀽⅌ (Poetic exemplars from renowned ladies), from Tangshi pinhui ૤䀽કᔭ (Graded compendium of Tang poetry) to Quan Tangshi ܼ૤䀽 (Complete Tang poems) and Tangshi sanbaishou ૤䀽ϝⱒ佪 (The three hundred Tang poems), and from Shuoyuan 䁾㢥 (Garden of persuasions) and Shishuo xinyu Ϫ䁾ᮄ䁲 (A New Account of the Tales of the World) to the Sanyan erpai ϝ㿔Ѡᢡ (Three words and two slaps) collections and the 1935 Zhongguo xinwenxue daxi Ё೟ ᮄ᭛ᅌ໻㋏ (Compendium of New Literature in China). While these collect different materials and use different organizational criteria, they nonetheless may be characterized as selections of documents (consciously edited or not) from a larger corpus that represent, in their entirety, an argument about that larger corpus. Closely related to the concept of anthology is the concept of canon, which has from a different perspective informed much criticism on anthology. Yet, whereas the anthology is a cultural form, an encoding of information in some

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(usually) physical format, a canon is an effect, a valence that comes about through the practices of anthologies and the reading of anthologies.3 This is the argument made by the anthology: that its selections matter and that this mattering is possible only through the assemblage of selections that make up the whole of the anthology. Moreover, anthologies are compiled not only for the sake of reading but also as representations of reading. The anthology presumes its reader but does not do so passively, as something merely to be read; rather, it does so actively, in the sense of constructing a readership that may not yet exist or that exists only in the moment of the anthology. As such, the anthology is an argument about cultural significance, about what matters in a cultural tradition, even as it is itself representative of that tradition. To end with a quotation from Seth Lerer: “The mark of any culture’s literary sense of self lies in the way in which it makes anthologies.”4

Notes 1. See Anne Ferry, Tradition and the Individual Poem: An Inquiry Into Anthologies (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001); Barbara M. Benedict, “The Paradox of the Anthology: Collecting and Différence in Eighteenth-Century Britain,” New Literary History 34 (2003): 231–56; and Seth Lerer, “Medieval English Literature and the Idea of the Anthology,” PMLA 118, no. 5 (Oct. 2003): 1251–67. 2. Christopher M. Kuipers, “The Anthology/Corpus Dynamic: A Field Theory of the Canon,” College Literature 30, no. 2 (Spring 2003): 51, 58. 3. See John Guillory, “Canonical and Non-canonical: A Critique of the Current Debate,” ELH 54, no. 3 (Autumn 1987): 483–527. 4. Seth Lerer, “Medieval English Literature and the Idea of the Anthology,” 1263.

CHAPTER 20

EARLY ANTHOLOGIES M ICH A E L H U N TE R

T

he first thing to realize about the early Chinese anthology is that there is no such thing as the early Chinese anthology. From classics like the Shijing 䀽㍧ (Classic of odes) and Shangshu ᇮ᳌ (Esteemed documents) to early histories (shi ৆) and verse collections like the Chuci Ἦ䖁 (Verses of Chu), and perhaps even including excavated tomb texts, anthologization took many forms and furthered various purposes. Part of the challenge lies in the scope of the early period. Often defined as the period ending with the fall of the Eastern Han in 220 CE, early China encompasses the earliest examples of Chinese writing (the Shang oracle bones of the twelfth and eleventh centuries BCE), the advent of empire under the Qin and Han, the transition from the largely anonymous and oral textuality of the preimperial era to a more bookish milieu of authors and more stable written texts, the invention of paper, the introduction of Buddhism, and other milestones. Consequently, the parameters and meaning of anthologization vary tremendously from one context to the next. For instance, for powerful patrons like Lü Buwei ਖϡ䶟 (d. 235 BCE), the regent to the future Qin Shihuang ⾺ྟⱛ (Qin First Emperor; r. 221–210 BCE), and Liu An ࡝ᅝ (King of Huainan ⏂फ; d. 122 BCE), the Lüshi chunqiu ਖ⇣ ᯹⾟ (The Annals of Lü Buwei) and Huainanzi ⏂फᄤ (Master of Huainan) were primarily anthologies of people, not texts. To establish their intellectual authority, they gathered as many wise men as possible to their courts and then sampled and subordinated their wisdom within panoptic visions of universal rulership. Two hundred years later the situation changes dramatically. When

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Han emperor Zhang ⓶ゴᏱ (r. 57–88 CE) in 79 CE summoned the empire’s best scholars to his court, it was “to discuss and debate the differences among the Five Classics,” with the ultimate goal of “rectifying” (zheng ℷ) their interpretation.1 The main source of those discussions, the Baihu tongyi ⱑ㰢䗮㕽 (The Comprehensive Discussions in the White Tiger Hall) compendium, is a tour de force of textual learning and citation. To take another example, treating the preimperial Shi 䀽 (Odes) tradition as the same kind of anthology as the received Shijing is deeply anachronistic. The one is a fluid oral repertoire, whereas the other wraps 305 discrete odes in the prefaces, glosses, and paratext of the Mao Shi ↯䀽 (Mao Odes) exegetical tradition. The more explicitly anthological character of Shijing is an artifact of the Odes tradition’s reception history. Another challenge is isolating and reconstructing instances of anthologization in the early context. As a rule, early texts preserve precious little information about the circumstances of their creation. Of all the manuscripts that have been recovered from preimperial China, not a single one includes the name of the person who composed it. (Inscriptions are a different story.) The situation improves somewhat over time as authors begin to name themselves and explain the genesis of their texts, as Sima Qian ৌ侀䙋 (ca. 135–ca. 90 BCE) does in the final chapter of Shiji ৆㿬 (The Grand Scribe’s Records). By excerpting documents associated with famous or exemplary figures, from the Duke of Zhou’s ਼݀ speeches in Shangshu to the Qin First Emperor’s stele inscriptions and Han Feizi’s 䶽䴲ᄤ “Shui nan” 䁾䲷 (Difficulties of persuasion) treatise, Shiji also includes some of the earliest examples of explicit anthologization in the early literature.2 In general, however, it is difficult to tell if a given passage was lifted from another source, selected with redactions, or composed specifically for the text in which it appears. For the early China scholar struggling with more basic questions (How does one identify selected documents? How does one reconstruct background corpora? How does one reconstruct the choices of anthologists, given the distributed nature of authorship in the early context?), anthology is not always the most user-friendly concept. Instead, one might approach the topic through a reading of the East Asian tradition’s greatest feat of anthologization by its greatest sage-anthologist—the compilation of the Six Classics (liujing ݁㍧) by Kongzi ᄨᄤ (Confucius; trad. 551–479 BCE). That story as first recounted by Sima Qian in the Shiji is almost certainly fictional.3 But it was a tremendously useful fiction that established models of authorship, editorship, anthologization, and commentary for subsequent textual interventions, including the Shiji itself, the Hanshu ⓶᳌ (History of the Han) bibliography, and multiple early commentary projects.4 The retrospectively imagined compilation of the Six Classics was the moment when the idea of the anthology was established for the literary tradition writ large.

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Does the compilation of the Six Classics as narrated by Shiji qualify as an act of information management? Was Sima Qian’s Kongzi an early information manager? Yes and no. On the one hand, early thinkers did not turn to Kongzi because they needed an information manager. They turned to him as a sage, someone who could authenticate the classics and reveal the Way (dao 䘧) back to the sociopolitical order of the sage-kings. The question of how Kongzi stored, processed, and transmitted information—and, by extension, Kongzi’s value as a locus of thinking about information management—is necessarily incidental to that larger purpose. On the other hand, it is not far-fetched to think of Kongzi as the patron sage of literary information. In source after source, Kongzi is credited with an almost preternatural knowledge of texts and traditions from the legendary past down to his own time and from every corner of the Zhou cultural sphere. The ultimate teacher and student, Kongzi embodied the values and practices that sustained traditions of elite learning (xue ᅌ), including reverence for the past and a commitment to ritual and ethical self-cultivation. He was also a master of “heard” (wen 㘲) information, particularly within the subgenre of “Kongzi heard of this and said” ᄨᄤ㘲П᳄ comments, which relay his judgments on figures and events that he could not possibly have witnessed firsthand. The impression one has of Kongzi is of someone plugged into a vast network of text and hearsay from all over the Central States. Kongzi was one idealized response to the early Chinese version of the “too much to know” problem, a sage whose brain was the ultimate information storage, processing, and retrieval device.5 The downloading of that brain in the form of the Six Classics prompts a number of questions from an information-or knowledge-management perspective. How did early thinkers imagine the process whereby Kongzi externalized his knowledge of the Way? How did he translate embodied knowledge or wisdom into information that could be stored and transmitted? How did he model or otherwise anticipate the reinternalization of that information as knowledge by later students of the classics? And how relevant is an information-management approach to early conceptions of the Six Classics? The rest of this chapter examines these questions via the Shiji account of Kongzi’s compilation of the classics, arguing that Kongzi was meant to bridge the gap between the messy realities of canonical traditions and the promise of a universal, complete, and self-consistent curriculum of sagely governance. A sage of the meta and the macro, Kongzi guaranteed the integrity of information within the classics by defining their purpose, clarifying their structure, and otherwise confirming elites’ faith in their quality and accessibility—never mind the details.

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The Compilation of the Six Classics Sima Qian’s account of Kongzi’s textual exploits is the culminating episode of chapter 47 of Shiji, the “Kongzi shijia” ᄨᄤϪᆊ (Hereditary house of Kongzi), which is also the earliest extant biography of Kongzi. The first part of the chapter narrates Kongzi’s birth and childhood, his disappointing political career in his home state of Lu, his travels throughout the Central States in search of a ruler who would accept him as an adviser, and his eventual return to Lu to live out the end of his days. It is at this point that the chapter transitions from biography to bibliography: 1. In Kongzi’s time the Zhou house had declined, ritual and music had been abandoned, and the Odes and Documents had become fragmented.

The narrative prompt for Kongzi’s textual turn is sociopolitical decline, the proof of which is everything up to this moment in the biography. Had the Zhou house not declined and had ritual and music not been completely abandoned, then some ruler somewhere in the Central States would have recognized Kongzi for the sage he was. A common refrain in early imperial literature, the phrase “the Zhou house declined” and its variants—like references to the Qin bibliocaust—often preface descriptions of Han efforts to reconstitute lost knowledge. In the Han, information about the past was understood to be a fragile thing that required active maintenance. Note the priorities implicit in this narrative of decline: (a) a breakdown of the political order causes (b) a breakdown in the ritual order, which causes (c) a breakdown in the transmission of canonical traditions. Having failed at fixing (a) and (b), Kongzi turns to (c) as a last resort. The point of restoring and transmitting knowledge is to establish the Way back to sagely governance for those who come after. As in the Hanshu bibliography, which locates the origins of various textual traditions in particular offices within the Zhou bureaucracy, the original “text” from which all other texts derive is  that political blueprint. To paraphrase Suzanne Briet, the single fact of which the documents of the Six Classics are the proof is the Zhou sociopolitical order.6 2a. Kongzi pursued the remnants of the rituals of the Three Dynasties [of the Xia, Shang, and Zhou]. . . . He said, “I can speak about the rituals of Xia but [their latter-day descendants in the state of] Qi lack sufficient proof of them. I can speak about the rituals of Shang but [their latter-day descendants in the state of] Song lack sufficient proof of them. Were they sufficient, I could verify them.” Contemplating the differences between the Shang and Xia, he said, “Even a hundred generations after the fact they can be known. Sometimes

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the one is more refined, the other more unrefined. The Zhou inspected both dynasties—how majestic is its culture! I follow the Zhou.”

Kongzi was a sage, not a god or prophet, so his knowledge had to be earned. He first pursues (zhui 䗑) and gathers extant sources of information about the past, he verifies (zheng ᖉ) them where possible, he contemplates (guan 㾔) those documents to gain knowledge of the systems described therein, he inspects (jian ⲷ) their discrepancies, and then he makes choices about what to follow (cong ᕲ) on the basis of that knowledge. The decision to follow the Zhou over the Xia or Shang is more practical than ideological: as the last of the great dynasties, the Zhou combined the strengths of the others while leaving a more accessible legacy. 2b. [Kongzi] arranged the traditions of the Documents in chronological order from the time of Yao and Shun down to Duke Mu of Qin. . . . Thus the traditions of the Documents and the records of ritual came from the house of Kong.

This is the first passage to show an interest in the disposition of information within the classics. In the received Shangshu, the categorization scheme is chronological: first are the “Yu shu” 㰲᳌ (Documents of Yu) of the sage-kings Yao ฃ and Shun 㟰, followed by the subcollections of the Xia, Shang, and Zhou dynasties, with the sections within each division arranged chronologically and prefaced with brief historical introductions. Chronological order reflects a common strategy of legitimation, one that projects continuity and inevitability. Likewise for the Shu ᳌ (Documents) tradition, the chronological sequence of royal speeches and narratives documents the movement of “Heaven’s mandate” (tianming ໽ੑ) through the Xia, Shang, and Zhou dynasties and establishes a ready-made lineage for subsequent claimants. There is something curious about the focus on “traditions of the Documents,” as opposed to Shangshu, a text referenced numerous times throughout Shiji. The received Shangshu is a true anthology insofar as it is a selection of texts from a wider Documents tradition, a corpus that can also be accessed through the Yi Zhoushu 䘌਼᳌ (Remnant documents of Zhou), extant Documents citations, and recent manuscript finds. But the biography does not credit Kongzi with compiling the Shangshu. What Kongzi authenticates is the “traditions of the Documents” as a genre; the Kongzi of this section is the editor of the Documents tradition or corpus, not an anthologist. There is also something disingenuous about the listing of ritual records (liji ⾂㿬) alongside the Documents as if they are the same kinds of texts. By Sima Qian’s own admission elsewhere in the Shiji, the ritual classics were in a perpetual state of disarray: “The canonical texts of the ritual tradition have been incomplete since the time of Kongzi, and even more writings were scattered and lost at the time of the Qin bibliocaust.”7 Within Kongzi’s biography, then,

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the lack of detail about the ritual classics would seem to be an implicit acknowledgment of that same problem. From an early Western Han perspective, Kongzi could authenticate ritual records only as a generic category of information about the Zhou ritual system. This discussion suggests an equivocation in the biography’s discussion of the liuyi ݁㮱 (literally, the Six Arts but rendered here as the Six Classics). Originally a term for an aristocratic curriculum consisting of ritual, music, archery, charioteering, writing, and numeracy, it eventually came to refer to the canonical domains or genres of the Odes, Documents, Yi ᯧ (Changes), Chunqiu ᯹⾟ (Annals), Li ⾂ (Rites), and Yue ῖ (Music) and, by extension, their most exemplary or canonical texts. Confusingly, the relationship between the genres and texts of the liuyi varies significantly from one domain to the next. But Sima Qian deftly exploits this ambiguity, portraying Kongzi as an authenticator of texts whenever possible but otherwise having him retreat to the level of the genre or tradition, all the while conveying the impression that Kongzi was engaged in a single undertaking. 3. Kongzi said to the Music Master of Lu, “[The proper form of] music can be known. It opens in unison, it unfolds with harmonies, its parts clearly distinguishable, and it continues until the end. Only after I returned to Lu from Wei was music rectified, only then were the ‘Court Songs’ and ‘Ritual Hymns’ properly arranged.”

The least textual of the Six Classics, music poses a real challenge from a knowledge management perspective: How does Kongzi convert his knowledge of musical performance into a transmittable form? The Shiji has no answer except to echo Kongzi’s insistence that “[the proper form of] music can be known” (Analects 3/23) and that it was “properly arranged” (Analects 9/15). Discussing music’s relationship to the Odes (considered shortly) is also easier than discussing music in and of itself. Here, too, the biography’s metainformational concerns trump the information itself. The Shiji reserves its most detailed account for the most cited canonical tradition of them all: 4a. In ancient times there were more than 3,000 odes. Kongzi discarded the duplicates and kept those that pertained to ritual and propriety, picking [odes from the time of the Shang and Zhou ancestors] Xie and Hou Ji at the earliest down to accounts of the Shang and Zhou dynasties at their height and extending to the decline of [the Zhou Kings] You and Li.

Kongzi’s challenge with the Documents and ritual records was reconstructing the ritual systems of the Three Dynasties from the patchy evidence available to

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him. In contrast, extant Odes pose an early Chinese version of the “too much to know” problem. Kongzi’s filter has two selection criteria: the pieces must (1) teach ritual and propriety and (2) narrate the rise and fall of the Shang and Zhou dynasties in a way that confirms that moral framework. But unlike the Documents, the Odes are not organized chronologically. The Odes have a more complex structure that requires further explanation: 4b. Beginning [the Odes] on a sleeping mat [with a poem about a man who tosses and turns as he thinks of a woman], he said, “The coda of ‘Ospreys Cry’ is the beginning of the ‘Airs,’ ‘The Deer Cry’ is the beginning of the ‘Lesser Court Songs,’ ‘King Wen’ is the beginning of the ‘Greater Court Songs,’ and ‘Hallowed Temple’ is the beginning of the ‘Ritual Hymns.’ ” Kongzi strummed and sang all 305 pieces and sought to harmonize them with the tones of [Emperor Shun’s] ‘Shao,’ [Emperor Wu’s] ‘Martial,’ and the court songs and ritual hymns. From this point forward rituals and music could be transmitted, the Kingly Way fulfilled, and the Six Classics completed.

Shiji does not explicitly credit Kongzi with sequencing all 305 pieces of the Odes, perhaps because that sequence was still in flux in the second century BCE. For a memorized oral repertoire that “did not depend exclusively on bamboo and silk,” the question of textual order may have been less pressing for the Odes than it was for the Documents.8 Instead, Kongzi merely fixes the order of divisions and selects their opening pieces. This four-piece meta-anthology—“Guanju” 䮰䲢 (“The Ospreys Cry”), “Luming” 呓勈 (“The Deer Cry”), “Wenwang” ᭛⥟ (“King Wen”), and “Qingmiao” ⏙ᒳ (“The Hallowed Temple”)—serves as a stand-in for the collection as a whole. Kongzi here looks much more like an anthologist who “picks” (cai 䞛) pieces from a larger corpus and arranges them together. However, in his very first act Kongzi “discarded the duplicates” and thus reduced the corpus from which the Odes are selected. Even here, Kongzi is a corpus editor first and an anthologist second. How exactly did Kongzi accomplish this feat? Absent the support of a centralized political authority, how does one go about taking poems out of circulation? Shiji has no answer because it never asks the question. Macroscale tradition editing is just another skill on Kongzi’s sagely résumé. Kongzi’s final, nontextual contribution to the Odes is to fix the “tones” of all 305 odes in order to harmonize them with canonical musical traditions. Music is the interface between the lyrics of the Odes and the multimedia rituals documented in the ritual records. With this act, the biography declares Kongzi’s work finished. The previously abandoned system of ritual and music is secured, the “Kingly Way” is established for posterity, and the Six Classics are complete—except that Kongzi does not stop there. Most likely because the

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final two classics—the Changes and the Annals—do not deal as directly with the ritual and music of the Three Dynasties, they receive separate treatment: 5. Kongzi in his later years delighted in the Changes. He laid out [the meaning of] the Judgments, the Appended Phrases, and the Images and explained the Trigrams and the Words of the Text. He read the Changes [so much] that he broke the leather bindings three times. He said, “Lend me some more years and I’ll have mastered the Changes.”

The divination manual of the Zhouyi ਼ᯧ (Zhou changes) or Yijing ᯧ㍧ (Classic of Changes) requires the least amount of editing of any canonical tradition and therefore could be bound and read as a book. That is because the core text of the Yi is a complete, algorithmically derived system: broken and unbroken lines are combined in stacks of three to form eight (23) distinct trigrams, which are then combined in stacks of two to yield 64 (82 or 26) distinct hexagrams. The earliest layer of the Changes then packages each hexagram with a label, a hexagram statement or “Judgment,” and six line statements. Unlike the Documents and ritual records, there is no restoration or reconstruction required; unlike the Odes, there is no pruning of superfluous material. As the Yi leaves no room for Kongzi as tradition editor, the Kongzi of this section turns into a reader and a commentator, a figure who mediates the closed system of the Changes for later users. To that end, Kongzi externalizes his knowledge in the form of supplementary documents—the commentaries of the “Shiyi” क㗐 (Ten wings)—and then models its reinternalization as a lifelong process of joyful learning. The last classic discussed in the biography is the Annals, which is the only one said to have been composed or authored (zuo ԰) by Kongzi himself. What follows is just the first part of that discussion: 6. Kongzi said, “Alas! The noble man worries that he will pass away and that his name will not be praised. My Way is not accomplished, so how can I reveal myself to later generations?” He then composed the Annals of the twelve dukes [of Lu] from Duke Yin [r. 722–712 BCE] down to Duke Ai [r. 494–467 BCE] on the basis of scribal records. While adopting the perspective of Lu, he treated the Zhou as kin and the Shang as old friends but made use of [the wisdom of all] Three Dynasties. His language was sparing but his intent was broad. Thus, when the lords of Wu and Chu called themselves “kings,” the Annals criticized them by calling them “princes.” When [Duke Wen of Jin] summoned the Son of Heaven in Zhou to the summit at Jiantu, the Annals avoided the truth by saying that “Heaven’s King went on a hunt in Heyang.” Extrapolating from these examples, one can then assess [the virtue] of one’s era. Should a true king come after, he would uphold and expand these principles of moral critique. If the

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principles of the Annals were to be implemented, then the unruly subjects and treasonous sons of the world would tremble in fear.

Much has been said about the Annals’ special role within Kongzi’s legend, a role that expanded dramatically in the first part of the Western Han, thanks to accounts like this one. For our purposes, it suffices to note that despite compiling it from scribal records and organizing it chronologically, Kongzi does not intend for the Annals to be used like the Documents. The Annals is a how-to guide to the “principles of moral critique,” a diagnostic tool for determining how far removed the current sociopolitical order is from that of the sage-kings. Whereas the Odes, Documents, and ritual and music traditions are the primary documents of that order, the Annals—like Kongzi himself—is the interface between the now and a future that is really just a return to the past.

Conclusion One of the big takeaways from Sima Qian’s bi(bli)ography of Kongzi is that the information in the classics was in dire need of managing. Were it not for Kongzi’s intervention, the documents of the Documents would never have been salvaged, Han scholars would have been overwhelmed by thousands of odes, and the sociopolitical system of the sages would have been lost forever. Sima Qian shows Kongzi collecting and verifying documents (the Documents), eliminating redundancies (the Odes), organizing those collections to make them more accessible (the Odes and Documents), and creating new repositories of metainformation for future users (the Changes). Above all, Sima Qian invokes Kongzi to guarantee the integrity of information gathered, processed, and stored in the classics. But the devil of information management is in the details, and Sima Qian’s story leaves much to be desired on that front. If an information manager is concerned less with content and more with organization, then Kongzi falls well short of that standard. To reinstate the order of the sage-kings, the Six Classics had to edify at least as much as they had to inform. Moreover, the Six Classics for Kongzi are traditions of canonical knowledge first and documents second. Kongzi guarantees the flow of information from past to present but without necessarily specifying how it should be tapped. He states what must be true of the classics and then leaves it up to the reader to fill in the blanks. At the same time, there is reason to think that the story’s fuzziness was a feature, not a bug. It allowed the Six (or Five) Classics to be conceived as an open system, with the possibility of designating new texts and commentaries as canonical so long as they fit within the preexisting framework—which did contain a range of options. This flexibility gave the meta-anthology of the Six Classics a power and an influence beyond that of any actual anthologies from the early period.

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Notes 1. Hou Hanshu ᕠ⓶᳌, 12 vols. (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1965), 3.137–38. 2. Sima Qian, Shiji, annot. Pei Yin 㻈俄, Sima Zhen ৌ侀䉲, and Zhang Shoujie ᔉᅜ ㆔, 2nd ed., 10 vols. (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1962), 6.261–62 (for an example of stele inscription), 33.1520–21 (for a Duke of Zhou speech), and 63.2128–55 (for Han Feizi). 3. Sima Qian, Shiji, 47.1935–44. 4. Sima Qian, Shiji, 130.3296–300; Ban Gu ⧁೎ et al., comps., Hanshu ⓶᳌ (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1962), 30.1701. 5. Ann M. Blair, Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information Before the Modern Age (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010). 6. Suzanne Briet, What Is Documentation?, trans. and ed. Ronald E. Day and Laurent Martinet with Hermina G. B. Anghelescu (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2006), 9. 7. Sima Qian, Shiji, 121.3126. 8. See Ban Gu et al., Hanshu, 30.1708, which cites this fact to explain why the Shi survived the Qin bibliocaust intact.

CHAPTER 21

MEDIEVAL LITERARY ANTHOLOGIES X I AO F E I T I A N

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his chapter is concerned with belletristic anthologies produced between the third and the thirteenth centuries. In the context of this volume, it focuses on a set of issues arising from an examination of the history of anthologies: the sources of anthology and anthology as source, competing anthologies as an indicator of competing values, the transformation of anthology making, and the much more expanded scope of wen ᭛ (belletristic literature). But first it is necessary to set out some working assumptions underlying the use of the term anthology here and to offer a sketch of several important “moments” in the extensive timespan covered. The three issue-oriented sections will roughly follow the chronological order of those distinctive moments. Anthology, if defined as a “selection” (xuanben 䙌ᴀ), is primarily born out of the practical need to manage the proliferation of texts. Closely related to this is the promotion of a certain literary taste embraced by the compiler. Considered along these lines, Shijing 䀽㍧ (Classic of odes) and Chuci Ἦ䖁 (Verses of Chu), which scholars writing about the history of anthology making have often cited as early specimens of literary anthology, must be discounted. Shijing is an anthology only insofar as the legend that Confucius “selected” three hundred poems out of three thousand is concerned. As for the Chuci, it was first put together by Liu Xiang ࡝৥ (79–8 BCE) and supplemented by Wang Yi ⥟䘌 (fl. 130–140 CE), who also provided a chapter and verse commentary; this work may have represented a collection of—rather than a selection from—a body of homogenous works (see Hunter, chapter 20).

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Three periods are important to a consideration of the history of anthology making. Literary anthologies in the more restricted sense, as described earlier, began to appear and flourish only in early medieval times. Despite the appearance of a notable forerunner—namely, Zhi Yu’s ᩃ㰲 (d. 311) Wenzhang liubie ji ᭛ゴ⌕߹䲚 (Collection of literature arranged by genre)—the first golden age of anthology making was the fifth century, which saw the flowering of belletristic writing and the compiling of personal literary collections as well as anthologizing, all of which continued unabated into the next century. However, the only intact survivals from this period are two anthologies, each representing a different set of selection criteria and values but both exerting far-reaching influence: the first is Wenxuan ᭛䙌 (Selections of Refined Literature), a multigenre anthology, and the second is Yutai xinyong ⥝㟎ᮄ䀴 (New Songs from a Jade Terrace), a poetic anthology explicitly intended for elite female readership. The second important period in anthology making was the eighth century: this period witnessed the private compilation of many single-genre anthologies of poetry by the anthologist’s contemporaries or near contemporaries, forming a sharp contrast with earlier anthologies that would include poets “ancient and modern” across different dynasties. The third period was the twelfth century, which was distinguished by the proliferation of single-genre anthologies of prose, often accompanied by the anthologist’s commentaries and, along with this phenomenon, by the expansion of the scope of literature. This chapter is not meant to be a brief history of medieval anthology making or even a survey of medieval anthologies; due to length restriction, it will not discuss, among other things, the anthologies of ci lyrics that burgeoned in the tenth century and thereafter. Rather, it seeks to shed light on the dissemination of literature as information through the unique system of anthologies, with all its mechanisms and its limitations.

Sources of Anthology and Anthology as (Problematic) Source If one posits the relationship of an anthology to its source or sources as being “deponent to in relationship to corpuses,”1 one may wonder what happens if the textual totality is reduced to a phantom or a mere concept by heavy textual losses. In the age of manuscript culture, when books were reproduced in limited numbers as hand-copied manuscripts on paper, a fragile medium, and before the spread of printing brought about wider access to a book and a better survival rate, many texts were irrevocably lost to water, fire, the ravages of war, and the destructions caused by insects and mice. The power of anthologies to shape the reader’s perception of an author or even an entire period in literary history is infinitely augmented by the fact that some authors survive largely, or solely, in one anthology. For instance, twenty-five of the Tang poets

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in the eighth-century anthology Guoxiu ji ೟⾔䲚 (Collection of the kingdom’s outstanding talents) are not attested to anywhere else.2 Since every anthology reflects the aesthetic and ideological agenda of its compiler, one may be left with a skewed picture of the author or the period in question. Except for a handful of writers, the complete collections of most pre-Tang writers are lost; their works only partially survive in encyclopedias, anthologies, dynastic histories, local gazettes, and other sources. A case in point is Xiao Gang 㭁㎅ (503–51; Emperor Jianwen of the Liang, r. 550–51), who once had a complete literary collection in one hundred scrolls and who had the largest number of surviving poems—nearly three hundred in total—among early medieval writers. The renegade northern general Hou Jing փ᱃ (503–52), who toppled the Liang and murdered Xiao Gang, had accused Xiao Gang of being a man of greed and lust who composed licentious poetry. While dynastic histories all describe Xiao Gang as a man generous, upright, and serious in conduct, in contrast with Hou Jing’s vilifying denouncement (in a war proclamation, no less), the view that Xiao Gang’s poetry is frivolous and amorous is accepted without question. Another northerner, Wei Zheng 儣ᖉ (580–643), the moralistic historian of the early Tang, even went so far as to define the poetic style espoused by Xiao Gang and his courtiers by content and considered Xiao Gang as being primarily engaged in the themes of women and romantic love—an unforgivable trait in a monarch. Xiao Gang’s collection being long lost, his poems have come from a variety of sources. The poems preserved in encyclopedias are on diverse topics and were composed on an assortment of occasions. In contrast, the ones preserved in the anthology Yutai xinyong are, unsurprisingly, considering the nature and intended readership of the anthology, all about women, love, and boudoir life, and the ones preserved in the Guang Hongming ji ᒷᓬᯢ䲚 (Expanded Collection on the spreading of the light), compiled by the monk Daoxuan 䘧ᅷ (596–667) as a sequel to the Buddhist anthology Hongming ji (see Heller, chapter 24), are entirely about Buddhist themes. In later times, the survival of Yutai xinyong with its prominent representation of Xiao Gang—even though the poems must have comprised only a fraction of Xiao Gang’s massive collection—solidified his image as a “frivolous/amorous” poet for over fifteen hundred years. Only in 2012 was a complete collection of Xiao Gang’s writings, reconstituted from various sources, finally printed and made available to students and scholars of classical Chinese literature. Yet, had Yutai xinyong been lost and had only Guang Hongming ji survived, might not Xiao Gang have been regarded as a Buddhist poet instead, at the very least complicating his archenemy’s caricature of his poetry? Another possibility that few have entertained is that Hou Jing (or his ghost writer), Wei Zheng, and their like had never read Xiao Gang’s massive collection but had come across his poetry only in a popular anthology like Yutai xinyong instead.

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Indeed, an anthology could become so popular that readers would read an author only through anthologies rather than through the author’s complete collection, which could even contribute to the subsequent obscurity and even disappearance of the collection. A good example is the early Tang poet Wang Ji ⥟㐒 (ca. 590–644). A selection in three scrolls eclipsed Wang Ji’s five-scroll collection in terms of circulation until the latter was accidentally rediscovered only in the 1980s. An examination of the full version of Wang Ji’s works affords an opportunity to reconsider many unquestioned assumptions about his poetry.

Competing Anthologies and Competing Values The eighth century is a peculiar time in the history of anthology making, for not only did there appear many anthologies exclusively of contemporary poetry (of the Tang dynasty itself) but also their selection criteria were often in selfconscious contradistinction to one another. Compilers were keen to use anthology making to explicitly promote their own aesthetic agenda. A comparison of several anthologies of Tang poems, compiled in close succession, demonstrates competing values between the capital and the provinces. Guoxiu ji has an intriguing history of textual transmission: it was first put together in or shortly after 744 by Rui Tingzhang 㢂ᤎゴ, a student of the National University in the capital waiting to take the civil service examination. Yet the manuscript was later prefaced, edited, and very possibly also revised sometime between 757 and 760 by a friend of his, Lou Ying ῧ〢 (whose poems also appear in the anthology). (Lou Ying’s editorial intervention may explain why two of Rui Tingzhang’s own poems also appear in the anthology, a practice not seen in other anthologies.) Of the eighty-five poets whose poems survive in the current version of Guoxiu ji, eighty-three were officials or “presented scholars” waiting to take the examination, as the table of contents lists the poets with their official title identified. A large percentage of the poems included in Guoxiu ji are recent-style verse (jinti shi 䖥储䀽), the form favored by the Tang court. If one detects in Guoxiu ji the influence of the flowering court literature from an earlier era, then Yin Fan’s ↋⩴ (fl. 727–55) anthology Heyue yingling ji ⊇᎑ 㣅䴜䲚 (Collection of the finest souls of our rivers and alps) is practically bursting with the disgruntlement of an outsider to the capital and court culture. Yin Fan’s anthology, with 234 poems by twenty-four poets, is well known among the Tang anthologies nowadays because it has been preserved so well and because it seems to have circulated widely in the Tang and subsequently. Yin Fan was from Danyang Ѝ䱑 (in modern Jiangsu), the region around the old Southern dynasties capital Jiankang (modern Nanjing). His strong local pride prompted him to compile the first known regional anthology, the Danyang ji Ѝ䱑䲚

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(Collection from Danyang), which survives now in fragments, and a no longer extant anthology that seems to have a similar regional focus, the Jing Yang tingxiu ji 㤞᦮ᤎ⾔䲚 (Collection of the outstanding talents of Jing and Yang). The local pride is intensified by his keen sense of injustice about the talented men from the provinces, especially those hailing from the south like himself, who never rose to prominent positions in court because they lacked an illustrious clan lineage and were thus outsiders in relation to the capital elite. Yin Fan employs a variety of strategies to advance those poets high in talent but low in office. He anthologizes many old-style poems (guti shi স储䀽), the verse form not favored in court poetry. In the preface, he aggressively insists on excluding poems by powerful ministers if their poems are no good. Also in the preface, he glorifies Chu Guangxi ‫ܝ܆‬㖆 (ca. 706–ca. 762), a fellow Danyang poet, by singling him out alongside two of his more famous contemporaries, Wang Wei ⥟㎁ (701–61) and Wang Changling ⥟ᯠ唵 (ca. 690–ca. 756), both of whom were from distinguished aristocratic families. He selects fifteen poems by Chang Jian ᐌᓎ (ca. 708–ca. 754), an amount equal to that of Wang Wei and second only to that of Wang Changling, and places them at the beginning of the anthology. In the editorial headnote prefacing Chang Jian’s selections, Yin Fan laments pointedly that “a man of great talent does not occupy a great office” (a refrain throughout the anthology).3 Interestingly, the phrase yingling from the title of the anthology is from a poem by Wang Wei contained in the collection, and the poem is none other than “Seeing Off Qiwu Qian Who Having Failed the Civil Service Examination Is Going Home” 䗕㍺↟┯㨑㄀䙘䛝: “In the sagely times there is no recluse, / All the finest souls come to the court” 㘪ҷ⛵ 䲅㗙, 㣅䴜ⲵ՚⅌. A final touch is the mention in the preface of the fifteenth year of the Kaiyuan era (727 CE) as a landmark year: according to Yin Fan, the art of poetry became perfected only after this particular year. The temporal specificity has aroused much scholarly discussion. One thing is certain: it was in 727, and in the preceding year, as many as six of the poets anthologized in Heyue yingling ji, including Chang Jian, Qiwu Qian, Wang Changling, and Chu Guangxi, passed the civil service examination. After the An Lushan Rebellion, which began in 755, the old court world collapsed and never quite recovered its former glory; a somber atmosphere set in. Yuan Jie ‫ܗ‬㌤ (719–72) put together twenty-four poems by seven poets, all his close friends, and called it Qiezhong ji ㆟Ё䲚 (Collection from my book box). Strictly speaking, it is not a selection (xuanben) but a collection: Yuan’s preface, dated 760, relates that these poems were all he had from those friends in his book box. He describes these friends as good men mistreated by life, saying that some of them had died, while the others were far away. The tone is permeated with a sense of loss and nostalgia. All the poems are old style. The last of the extant eighth-century anthologies worth mentioning is Gao Zhongwu’s 催ӆ℺ Zhongxing jianqi ji Ё㟜䭧⇷䲚 (Collection of the

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ministers in the age of renaissance), which contains 134 poems by twenty-six poets, all from the reigns of Suzong 㙙ᅫ (r. 756–62) and Daizong ҷᅫ (r. 762–79), the “age of renaissance” for the Tang after the An Lushan Rebellion. In his preface, Gao Zhongwu criticizes the partiality of the earlier anthologies and explicitly aims for all-inclusiveness regardless of whether the poet was an official or a commoner and the poems were old style or recent style. Gao’s statement is remarkable for his intense awareness of the precursors and his desire to avoid bias in terms of theme, social status, and regional identity. Reading Gao’s anthology against the literary landscape of the late eighth century, it cannot be said that Gao has truly achieved comprehensiveness in his selections, but his anthology itself indeed adds to the richness of a world of competing anthologies and competing values. Throughout the pre-Tang and Tang periods, genre remained an important ordering principle, whether in a multigenre anthology like Wenxuan or in a single-genre anthology like Yutai xinyong: in the former, different genres are arranged neatly like in a well-curated museum exhibition; in the latter, poetry in the five-syllable line dominates the volume, with no thought given to the four-syllable line, which had once been honored but had by this time become synonymous with formality and conservatism. Some anthologies like Zhongxing jianqi ji that fall under the broad heading of a single genre (i.e., poetry) use individual poets as headers but include a variety of verse forms. With this in mind, one may be able to better appreciate the novelty of some of the phenomena that occurred after the Tang, such as the proliferation of anthologies of pure prose and the attempt to come up with innovative classification systems in anthology making.

Prose Anthologies and the Diffusion of Wen Anthology making is about exclusion. In examining an anthology, one naturally looks at what it includes, but one can also learn much by looking into what it leaves out. The compiler of Wenxuan, Xiao Tong 㭁㍅ (501–31), gives a lucid discussion of the kinds of texts he excludes from his anthology. First, he excludes the Confucian classics because, he states, such canonic writings cannot be excerpted and excised; next, he excludes the works of the “masters,” such as Laozi 㗕ᄤ, Zhuangzi 㥞ᄤ (Master Zhuang), Guanzi ㅵᄤ (Master Guan), and Mengzi ᄳᄤ (Mencius), saying that they put emphasis on content but not on literary technique. He then excludes histories and chronicles because they are extended narratives, as opposed to single pieces of literary composition, as well as famous speeches made by persuaders and strategists that appear in both histories and masters’ works.4 Xiao Tong’s editorial decisions mirror the four-part classification system that was used in library catalogs from the third

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and fourth centuries onward and became solidified as jing ㍧, shi ৆, zi ᄤ, and ji 䲚 in the seventh-century Suishu 䱟᳌ (History of the Sui) bibliography (see Nicoll-Johnson, chapter 49). Although clearly based on previous catalogs, the Suishu bibliography has a much more homogenous fourth part: jibu 䲚䚼, which includes comprehensive collections (zongji 㐑䲚) and individual collections (bieji ߹䲚) of literary writings and constitutes the core of belletristic literature. By the twelfth century, there was a sea change. Consider, for example, the anthology compiled by Zhen Dexiu ⳳᖋ⾔ (1178–1235), known as Wenzhang zhengzong ᭛ゴℷᅫ (Orthodox lineage of literary compositions). This anthology, with a preface dated 1232, includes 987 prose pieces and poems and is divided into four sections. Many scholars have noticed the originality of Zhen Dexiu’s classification, as he attempts to use criteria combining content and functionality, cutting across individual genres. But, most importantly, this is the first anthology that includes excerpts from early classics and histories. Before Zhen Dexiu, famous Song anthologies included only Tang and/or Song prose, such as Lü Zuqian’s ਖ⼪䃭 (1137–81) Guwen guanjian স᭛䮰䥉 (Key to ancient-style prose), hailed as the first prose anthology with commentaries, or they included a very small selection of pre-Qin prose and nothing from the classics, as in Lou Fang’s ῧᯝ (jinshi 1193) Chonggu wenjue ዛস᭛㿷 (Prose techniques that honor antiquity; 1227 preface) (see Clifford, chapter 23). Xie Bingde’s 䃱ᵟᕫ (1226–89) Wenzhang guifan ᭛ゴ㽣㆘ (Models for literary composition) includes fifteen writers, with only two from before the Tang. Zhen Dexiu’s anthology evokes a work from half a century earlier, Chen Kui’s 䱇俸 (1128–1203) Wenze ᭛ࠛ (Principles of prose; preface 1170), known as the first work of rhetoric theory in the Chinese tradition.5 Wenze is divided into ten sections; each section contains short entries discussing the art of prose writing, and the model prose is restricted to the classics and commentaries on the classics as well as the masters’ texts—exactly the kind of texts Xiao Tong excludes from Wenxuan. Chen Kui’s choice of the classics was informed by the raging neo-Confucian discourse of his time that gave priority of place to the Way over wen, but the writings embodying the Way are reduced to the minutiae of rhetorical technicalities. His focus is squarely on the craftsmanship of prose writing. The most remarkable sections are the last three. In sections 8 and 9, he lists thirteen genres and five subgenres, and for each, he prescribes its normative style and cites a model piece from the Confucian classics, such as Shangshu ᇮ᳌ (Esteemed documents) and Zuozhuan Ꮊ‫( ڇ‬Zuo Tradition) as well as the ritual classics. The last section of this work focuses on “Ciming” 䖁ੑ (Edicts [from rulers] and speeches [made by ministers]) and includes forty-four model prose pieces selected from Shangshu, Zuozhuan, Guoyu ೟䁲 (Dialogues of the states), and Sima Qian’s ৌ侀䙋 (ca. 135–ca. 90 BCE) Shiji ৆㿬

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(The Grand Scribe’s Records). Wenze turns out to be not just a work of wenhua ᭛䁅 (remarks on prose, a genre of prose criticism) but also a wenxuan ᭛䙌 (literary anthology). Compared with Wenze, one section in Wenzhang zhengzong is likewise entitled “Edicts and Speeches,” although it appears at the beginning of Zhen Dexiu’s anthology rather than at the end. There are many other overlapping selections between the two. Most important is the notion, shared by the two works, that excerpts from classics, histories, and masters’ texts could be regarded as the best models for prose writing. The four categories of jing, shi, zi, and ji began to break down in Wenzhang zhengzong, and this process continued. Indeed, this became the norm in prose anthologies in late imperial times. This is a long way from Xiao Tong. The other notable change in anthology making in the twelfth century is the emergence of pure prose anthologies in relation to the surge of interest in the old-style prose (guwen স᭛) in the eleventh century. Pure prose anthologies from pre-Tang and Tang are relatively few in number, compared to verse anthologies or anthologies containing both prose and verse, and none of them has survived.6 Judging from their titles, many consist of compositions in a particular genre or type of writing, such as collections of stele inscriptions, memorials to the throne, examination questions and answers, or imperial edicts. One difficulty in ascertaining the content of an anthology is that with the anthology itself vanishing from view, the title of the work is ambiguous, as wen ᭛ and wenzhang ᭛ゴ can include both prose and verse, just as Wenxuan does. So a collection entitled Zawen 䲰᭛ (Miscellaneous writings), composed by woman writers and recorded in the Suishu bibliography, or Mingwen ji ৡ᭛䲚 (Collection of famous writings), compiled by Xie Chen 䃱≜ (fl. 340s) and recorded in the Xin Tangshu ᮄ૤᳌ (New history of the Tang) bibliography, may well consist of both prose and verse.7 And in any case, such titles are few, compared to the number of clearly identifiable verse anthologies. This was no longer the case in the Southern Song. Not only the quantity but also the content of prose anthologies underwent a dramatic change. Many anthologies with wen or wenzhang in their titles began to refer exclusively to prose compositions, and they were compiled with a new purpose that is pedagogical in nature: that is, to teach a young student how to write. This unprecedented focus on pedagogy likewise continued into the Ming and Qing dynasties. Last but not the least, it is worthwhile to point out that the millennium saw the momentous transition from the age of manuscript culture to the age of concurrent transmission media precipitated by the invention and spread of printing technology. From the viewpoint of information management, this transition makes a dramatic difference in user access. The different objectives of anthology making should also be taken into account: at one end of the spectrum, there is the massive project compiled by a large editorial committee and

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secreted in the storage of the imperial library where it was accessible to only a choice few; at the other end is the private anthology made for the children’s edification within the bounds of one family. While both result in limited access that can and often is changed by printing, their goals and scopes are remarkably different.

Notes 1. Christopher M. Kuipers, “The Anthology/Corpus Dynamic: A Field Theory of the Canon,” College Literature 30, no. 2 (Spring 2003): 58. 2. See Fu Xuancong ٙ⩛⨂, ed., Tangren xuan Tangshi xinbian zengdingben ૤Ҏ䙌૤䀽 ᮄ㎼๲㿖ᴀ (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 2014), 275–76. 3. Fu Xuancong, Tangren xuan Tangshi xinbian zengdingben, 165. 4. See Xiao Tong, comp., Zhaoming taizi ji jiaozhu ᰁᯢ໾ᄤ䲚᷵⊼, annot. Yu Shaochu ֲ㌍߱ (Zhengzhou: Zhongzhou guji chubanshe, 2001), 163–65. 5. Chen Kui, Wenze, ed. Wang Liqi ⥟఼߽ (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1960). 6. For more on this, see Paul W. Kroll, “Anthologies in the Tang,” in The Oxford Handbook of Classical Chinese Literature (1000 BCE–900 CE), ed. Wiebke Denecke, Wai-yee Li, and Xiaofei Tian (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 303–15. 7. Wei Zheng 儣ᖉ, ed., Suishu 䱟᳌, 6 vols. (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1973), 35.1082; Ouyang Xiu ℤ䱑ׂ et al., comps., Xin Tangshu, 20 vols. (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1975), 60.1618.

CHAPTER 22

LATER IMPERIAL POETRY ANTHOLOGIES G R E G O RY PAT T E R S O N

L

ater imperial poetry anthologies differ from those of earlier periods in several respects. First, there are exponentially more of them, in keeping with a print-powered proliferation of texts generally during the Ming and Qing dynasties. Second, they are more various in their subjects and organizing principles, with collections devoted to historical periods, authors, topics, verse forms, and any number of combinations thereof. Third, they are addressed to more socially diverse audiences in an expanded book market, audiences including women and children whose imagined needs and preferences gave new direction to the decisions of editors. In dynamic counterpoint to such proliferation and variation, however, later imperial poetry anthologies are also characterized by unprecedented efforts to define and promote a small canon of great works. The Chinese poetic canon as it exists today, consisting predominantly of Tang dynasty poetry, was given shape to a large extent by the anthological practices of Ming and Qing editors.1 Thus, against the backdrop of a profusion of literary information one finds equal and opposite attempts to manage it by selecting and arranging the finest flowers of the poetic tradition. At the same time, however, one finds prominent examples of anthologies that sought to define and manage the entirety of textual corpora from which more selective anthologies were drawn. Such an attempt at completeness is exemplified by the Quan Tangshi ܼ૤䀽 (Complete Tang poems), commissioned in 1705 by the Kangxi emperor ᒋ❭ⱛᏱ (r. 1661–1722) and nominally supervised by Cao Yin ᳍ᆙ (1658–1712). The Quan Tangshi includes more than 48,900 poems by over twenty-two hundred authors and has remained authoritative,

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though supplementary works have enlarged its scope.2 The primary motive for the project, as the Kangxi emperor notes in his preface, was the near-universal consensus that Tang poetry represented the apogee of the art and the proper model for contemporary poets: “As for poetry during the Tang, the many forms reached their full complement, and the various methods reached completion. Therefore those who evaluate poetry necessarily view Tang authors as their standard, just as in archery one attends to the bow’s draw weight, or in making vessels one relies on compasses and squares.”3 This view of Tang poetry as model and standard provided the impetus for anthologies that traced its origins and development, such as the Gushi yuan স䀽⑤ (Source of ancient poetry) of Shen Deqian ≜ᖋ┰ (1673–1769), a leading literary voice under the Qianlong emperor ђ䱚ⱛᏱ (r. 1735–96). In the Gushi yuan, Shen “attempted an exhaustive collection of Zhou and Han verse” along with poems he judged the very best from the Wei, Jin, and Southern and Northern dynasties.4 Thus, whereas the Quan Tangshi sought to gather and curate all surviving pieces from poetry’s golden age, the Gushi yuan aimed for a complete representation of the poetic tradition’s beginnings. Opposite such elite encyclopedic projects on the anthological spectrum were popular poetry anthologies for children, and these offer a particularly interesting case with which to think through literary information management in the late imperial period. Editors of poetry textbooks for children had to ensure that their gardens were accessible and user-friendly for novices. This required them to drastically limit the amount of information their collections conveyed, to weed out all but the most essential introductory models of good composition. In the vocabulary of the compilers, their principles of selection (xuan 䙌) aimed for the quintessential (jing ㊒) and the necessary (yao 㽕), without entirely sacrificing breadth (bo म). The goal of maximizing accessibility pressured editors to consider organization as well, designing their gardens so that each flower could be readily located. Thus, children’s anthologies vividly highlight the selection and sorting practices whereby late imperial editors sought to manage information overload. The rest of this chapter focuses on the most successful Qing children’s poetry anthology, the Tangshi sanbaishou ૤䀽ϝⱒ佪 (The three hundred Tang poems), comparing its selections and organization with those of its declared competitor, the Qianjia shi गᆊ䀽 (Poems of a thousand masters), as well as those of Shen Deqian’s Tangshi biecai ji ૤䀽߹㺕䲚 (Excised collection of Tang poetry).5 The central claim will be that this anthology’s popularity was in large part due to the fact that it managed information more effectively than its rivals and delivered an accessible introduction to an orthodox elite vision of the poetic past. The Tangshi sanbaishou was compiled by Sun Zhu ᄿ⋭ (1711–78) and his wife, Xu Lanying ᕤ㰁㣅, and published in 1763 under the pseudonym Lotus Bank Recluse (Hengtang tuishi 㯙ฬ䗔຿).

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The publication date indicates that it was almost certainly a response to the inclusion, beginning in 1756, of a poetry question on the civil service examinations. For the first time in centuries, examinees could expect, in addition to answering questions on the Classics, policy, and other subjects, to compose a regulated poem of eight couplets (bayun lüshi ܿ䷏ᕟ䀽), the topic and rhyme of which would be set by the examiners. These compositions would be graded above all on their fidelity to prosodic rules.6 Since regulated verse was difficult to learn but easy to grade, the poetry question helped manage a swell of documents and people in the examination system. Predictably, in the years following the curriculum change all manner of anthologies, rhyme books, and primers were rushed into print to assist the newly incentivized students of poetry.7 Many of these aids were for literate adults who required models of the so-called examination form (shitie 䀺Ꮺ) of regulated verse but who already possessed basic knowledge of composition.8 By contrast, the Tangshi sanbaishou addressed the very youngest of the next generation for whom poetry would be a key to examination success. In the “Yuanxu” ॳᑣ (Original preface) to Tangshi sanbaishou, the editors broadcast their aims, the first and foremost being to supersede the standard children’s poetry textbook of the day, the Qianjia shi. A significant portion of this preface is devoted to laying out the competitor’s faults, which have to do with selection, sorting, and their consequences: Throughout the world when children begin their studies, they are taught the Qianjia shi; because it is easy to memorize and chant, it has circulated widely and not been discarded. But its poems have been quite randomly assembled, with no distinction between the skillful and the clumsy. Moreover, it only includes the two forms of five- and seven-word regulated verse and quatrains, and Tang and Song poets are freely intermingled in a remarkably eccentric format. Thus I have focused on the works of Tang poetry that have pleased all tastes and selected the most necessary examples. There are several tens of examples of each poetic form, over three hundred in all, collected to make a volume that will serve as a textbook for home and school. If children are given it to study, in old age they also won’t be able to discard it. Will this not far surpass the Qianjia shi? The adage goes: “After thoroughly studying three hundred Tang poems, even someone who can’t recite poetry will be able to do so.” I offer this volume as a test.9

The editors acknowledge the long-standing popularity of the Qianjia shi, which they ascribe to the fact that its selections are “easy to memorize and chant.” However, they quickly turn to its many failures. First of all, the poems are “quite randomly assembled” and of uneven quality. Second, its representation of verse forms is incomplete, including only regulated verse (lüshi ᕟ䀽) and quatrains

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(jueju ㌩হ), thus neglecting poems in the metrically freer ancient style (gushi স䀽). Finally, within the chapters organized according to these forms, poets of the Tang and Song dynasties are mixed indiscriminately in a “remarkably eccentric format.” It is above all the disorganization of Qianjia shi on which the editors of Tangshi sanbaishou claim they will improve. Dubiously attributed to Song scholars Liu Kezhuang ࡝‫ܟ‬㥞 (1187–1269) and Xie Bingde 䃱ᵟᕫ (1226–89), the Qianjia shi was a fixture in the late-imperial orthodox elementary curriculum. It served as an extension of the program that began with the core primer trilogy of the San Bai Qian ϝⱒग (The three, the hundred, and the thousand): the Sanzi jing ϝᄫ㍧ (Three character classic), Baijia xing ⱒᆊྦྷ (Hundred surnames), and Qianzi wen गᄫ᭛ (Thousand character classic). It is a surprisingly short collection despite its hyperbolic title: Wang Xiang’s ⥟Ⳍ (fl. 1368–99) popular annotated edition includes just 226 poems by 125 poets, slightly over half of which are from the Tang.10 It sorts its selections by line length and then by form, resulting in the following sequence: heptasyllabic quatrains (qijue ϗ㌩), heptasyllabic regulated verse (qilü ϗᕟ), pentasyllabic quatrains (wujue Ѩ㌩), and pentasyllabic regulated verse (wulü Ѩᕟ). Within the sections, there is indeed what the editors of Tangshi sanbaishou describe as “a remarkably eccentric format.” Not only are Tang poets mixed with Song poets, but also works by the same author are scattered about seemingly at random. This relative indifference to authorship is subtly signaled by the title: “thousand” does not denote a precise number but simply a large general quantity. Such a title and its correlated sorting pattern make the argument that what matters for the beginning student of poetry is not the individual “masters” themselves but verse forms and their conventions. The selections and organization of Tangshi sanbaishou are as different as would be expected from its preface. As the title indicates, this anthology includes Tang poems exclusively—almost twice as many as Qianjia shi (310, or slightly more in some later editions). At the same time, it cuts the number of authors in half (77), giving many of them significantly more poems and thus greater prominence. Like Qianjia shi, it categorizes the selections according to poetic form; however, it includes ancient-style poems, 82 of which appear first, followed by 134 regulated poems and 97 quatrains, which come last. Each of these formal categories is subdivided by syllabic count rather than the other way around, as in Qianjia shi. Additionally, following each of these subdivisions (with one exception) there appears a separate section of Music Bureau (yuefu ῖᑰ) poems, bringing the total number of verse forms to eleven. However, perhaps the decisive difference is that within each section the poems are grouped by author and arranged chronologically. The title of this anthology communicates other important information. First of all, the exclusion of Song poetry in a textbook meant to provide a lifelong foundation of essential models was significant in the mid-Qing, as it signaled

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the editors’ affiliation with the conservative Ming archaists and their many followers in the Qing who upheld Tang literary models.11 Second, the “magic number” three hundred invokes Confucius and his perfectly pared-down Shijing 䀽㍧ (Classic of odes), borrowing the prestige of the anthological tradition’s ultimate model (see Hunter, chapter 20). Unlike the “thousand” masters, this canonical number implied precision not only in the act of selection but also in all aspects of the editorial process. However, the title has a less exalted source as well, as the editors make clear at the end of their preface: “According to the proverb, ‘After thoroughly studying three hundred Tang poems, even someone who can’t chant poetry will be able to do so.’  ” The title thus simultaneously alludes to the tradition’s foundational anthology and to a popular saying deployed as a sales pitch: study these three hundred Tang poems and you, too, can recite like a pro. The organizing scheme of Tangshi sanbaishou would seem to deliver on this promise—in particular, by making it easier to locate its poems, poets, and prosodic forms. Qianjia shi provides no help for those who are searching for individual works or authors; these can be found only by scanning the contents of entire sections. Tangshi sanbaishou, on the other hand, is easily searchable, allowing users to skip around and select examples of different forms by authors they admire without having to bookmark or employ other finding aids. The sequencing of forms also makes pedagogical sense, as it introduces the less technically rigorous ancient style first, before moving to the more demanding regulated verse that would be tested on the exams.12 It also helped that the selections, the editors claim, were “works that have pleased all tastes.” Popularity made it likely that students would encounter the poems outside the classroom, thus providing more opportunities for reinforcement and improved retention. How do the anthologies compare in terms of their most prominently featured authors? Best represented within the Tang portion of Qianjia shi are the High Tang “big three”: Du Fu ᴰ⫿ (712–70; twenty-three poems), Li Bai ᴢⱑ (701–62; nine poems), and Wang Wei ⥟㎁ (699–759; six poems). Behind the big three is a second tier made up of Meng Haoran ᄳ⌽✊ (689–740; five poems), Wei Yingwu 䶟ឝ⠽ (737–ca. 792; four poems), Han Yu 䶧ᛜ (768– 824; three poems), and Cen Shen ብগ (715–70; three poems), who are joined rather unexpectedly by early Tang poets Chen Zi’ang 䱇ᄤᯖ (661–702; three poems) and Du Shenyan ᴰᆽ㿔 (c. 645–708; three poems). Below these are single poems by a mass of less familiar names. Tangshi sanbaishou gives the big three even more space, with Du Fu (thirty-nine poems or 12.5 percent) taking the lion’s share and Li Bai tied with Wang Wei for a much closer second place (twenty-nine poems or 9 percent each). Together they occupy almost a third of entire anthology. Remarkably, Li Shangyin ᴢଚ䲅 (ca. 813–58) is allotted twenty-four poems, up from just one in Qianjia shi. In the second tier again are Meng Haoran (fifteen poems) and Wei Yingwu (twelve poems), now joined

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by Liu Zhangqing ࡝䭋॓ (709–85; eleven poems) and Du Mu ᴰ⠻ (803–52; ten poems). Bai Juyi ⱑሙᯧ (772–846) is up to six poems (from one in Qianjia shi), overtaking Han Yu, who has only four. Thus, there is continuity between the two anthologies in the top five authors, but major variation occurs below that—notably, with greater representation in Tangshi sanbaishou of late Tang poets like Li Shangyin and Du Mu. In addition to improving searchability, the grouping of poems by author under each prosodic form in Tangshi sanbaishou implies an important claim: each form has its masters, its models and sources to be emulated, and, conversely, each poet excelled at certain forms but not others. This is evident, for example, in the first section, pentasyllabic ancient-style poems (wugu Ѩস). Here the master is neither Du Fu nor any of the big three but Wei Yingwu, whose seven poems are more than he has in all the other forms combined. More dramatically, dominating the heptasyllabic quatrain are nine poems by Du Mu, who has only one other poem in the entire anthology. Du Mu and, to a lesser extent, Wei Yingwu are thus strongly associated with a single form, defining it as they are defined by it. Of the seventy-seven poets included in Tangshi sanbaishou, forty-nine are similar one-form wonders (and thirty-nine of these have but a single poem to their names) and are overrepresented in the anthology’s largest categories: heptasyllabic quatrains and pentasyllabic regulated verse. Then there are “narrow” poets, mainly but not exclusively identified with a given form. Beyond this, there are various degrees of distribution. Meng Haoran is clearly though not exclusively identified with pentasyllabic regulated verse, while Li Shangyin is a master of both regulated verse and quatrains in the longer line. “Broad” poets, with works in four or more forms, are few. In addition to the big three, they include Bai Juyi, Liu Zongyuan ᷇ᅫ‫( ܗ‬773–819), Cen Shen, Wei Yingwu, and Li Shangyin. Even at the top of the canon, there are interesting gaps: Wang Wei has no heptasyllabic poems in the ancient style (though he has three yuefu); Du Fu has just two quatrains. This vision of Tang poetry, defined by various forms and their masters and designed for pedagogical efficiency, owes a particular debt to Shen Deqian, compiler of the Gushi yuan. A celebrated poet, critic, and anthologist who was on intimate terms with the Qianlong emperor, Shen emphasized the importance for aspiring poets of identifying and emulating the roots and sources (benyuan ᴀॳ) of verse forms. Only by doing so could they ensure that they were on the right track and were not inadvertently straying into heterodoxy. Having sat for the examinations seventeen times before finally gaining a degree at the age of sixty-seven, Shen was particularly attuned to the need for sound pedagogy. Shen Deqian presented his guide to sources of Tang poetic forms in his Tangshi biecai ji, originally published in 1717 and reissued with revisions in 1763, the same year as Tangshi sanbaishou. His anthology includes 1,950 poems by 270 poets, classified by form according to a scheme identical to that of Tangshi

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sanbaishou except it includes a section of pentasyllabic extended regulated verse (wuyan pailü Ѩ㿔ᥦᕟ) and does not provide separate sections of yuefu poems. Roughly 80 percent of the selections in Tangshi sanbaishou are also found here, with substantial overlap in the poets representing each form. Wei Yingwu, for example, is treated similarly as a major figure in pentasyllabic ancient-style verse but little else. Li Shangyin is associated with the same three forms but most of all with heptasyllabic regulated verse, in which he ranks second only to Du Fu. Tangshi sanbaishou can be seen essentially as a children’s version of the Tangshi biecai ji, its selections and exclusions guided by Shen’s moral-aesthetic principles of wenrou dunhou ⑿ᶨᬺ८ (geniality, mildness, honesty, and generosity). For example, Shen selects very few poems by Li He ᴢ䊔 (791–817), the mid-Tang writer known for his ghosts and gothic sensibility. Tangshi sanbaishou omits him entirely while also noticeably snubbing Han Yu, Meng Jiao ᄳ䚞 (751–814), and other suffering geniuses of the kuyin 㢺৳ (bitter chanting) style. Likewise excluded is the “new yuefu” poetry of social criticism associated with Bai Juyi, Yuan Zhen, and their circle—little of it is found in Shen’s collection and none in Tangshi sanbaishou despite its accessibly plain language. The preference overall is for safe, polite, easily digestible fare, exemplified by landscape and farmstead themes and poems expressing affection for family and friends. The same selection bias also decisively shaped the images of individual poets. The consequences are particularly noticeable in the case of a complex, multifaceted corpus like Du Fu’s. Despite numerically dominating both anthologies (both editors claimed him as their poet-ancestor [shi zong 䀽ᅫ]), only a fraction of Du Fu’s singularly extensive topical range is represented in Tangshi sanbaishou. Thus, there are none of his famous exposés of social injustice and none of his meditations on the mundane and the everyday. However, in keeping with the theme of friendship, there are numerous pieces featuring reunions with former members of Emperor Xuanzong’s ⥘ᅫ (r. 713–56) glamorous court, including his famous late quatrain “Jiangnan feng Li Guinian” ∳फ䗶ᴢ 啰ᑈ (“Meeting Li Guinian in Jiangnan”),13 which is now one of the best-known poems in the tradition largely because of the Tangshi sanbaishou. Anthologies manage information not only through selection and sorting but also, and perhaps above all, through practices of excision and deletion (shan ߾) that clear away the weeds and make the flowers visible. According to Shen Deqian, Du Fu’s quatrains were particularly in need of pruning: Shaoling’s [Du Fu’s] quatrains come straight from the heart, which is the natural capacity of a great master. But as for taking them as the “correct sound” [zhengsheng ℷ㙆], well not quite. During the Song, people emulated them poorly, and often lapsed into crudeness. Yang Lianfu [Yang Weizhen ἞㎁Ἴ, ca. 1296–1370] claimed that to study Du one must start with the quatrains— truly, those are words that deceive people.14

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Du Fu’s quatrains are unreliable models, according to Shen, and improper emulation of them can lead the student astray. Accordingly, he includes only six of them in his anthology out of a total of 255 by the poet. Following suit, Tangshi sanbaishou includes just two, one of which is the very uncharacteristic “Meeting Li Guinian in Jiangnan.” It is thus fitting, though paradoxically so, that the title of Shen Deqian’s anthology is itself plucked from a Du Fu quatrain that the anthology excludes. This is the last of the “Xiwei liu jueju” ᠆⚎݁㌩হ (“Six Quatrains Done Playfully”), in which Du Fu cryptically indicates his own strategy for selecting literary models: ᳾ঞࠡ䊶᳈࣓⭥

Of not equaling the former worthies have no further doubt,

䘲Ⳍ⼪䗄ᕽ‫ܜ‬䂄

in succession they model on predecessors, and who comes first?

߹㺕ّ储㽾乼䲙

Excise false forms, stay close to the Airs and Odes,

䔝Ⲟ໮᏿ᰃ∱᏿

even more benefit having many teachers as your own teacher.15

Shen draws on the crucial third line of Du Fu’s quatrain not only in his anthology’s title but also in his preface to the collection, which promises that it will bring his readers “close to the Airs and Odes.”16 It will do so by “excis[ing] false forms.” Shen’s search for the proper, imitable sources of forms thus leads him to excise as “false,” or at least unreliable, the very poem (and series) that is the acknowledged source of his collection’s organizing principle. And, in fact, the third line of Du Fu’s quatrain can serve as a source for Shen’s program only if one “weeds out” the overall message of the poem and series in which it appears. “Six Quatrains” defends poets who were decidedly heterodox during Du Fu’s time and berates their critics as narrow-minded, soon-to-be-forgotten mediocrities. Indeed, the main idea of the series is summed up in the line directly following the one that Shen Deqian plucks out of context: “even more benefit having many teachers as your own teacher.”

Conclusion In sum, Tangshi sanbaishou was a collection of models intended for beginning pupils who would need to write passable poetry not only in everyday polite society but also in the examination hall. It distinguished itself from the popular poetry primer Qianjia shi by offering a more tightly-organized, easilysearchable, all-Tang selection of poets representing all the major verse forms. Its operative organizing principle involved assigning poets as representative models, masters, and sources to each of these forms. Students were thus introduced not only to the full formal repertoire but also, for each, to an orderly canon of authors and works to emulate. This was the principle of Shen Deqian’s

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influential Tangshi biecai ji adapted for an audience of children, the mild, moderate aesthetic tastes of which were also absorbed and accentuated. The result was a highly schematic, simplified picture of individual poets. However, it was precisely by reducing complexity and information—by managing it more effectively than its competitors—that Tangshi sanbaishou delivered on its promise to make classical poetry easy for everyone.

Notes 1. Pauline Yu, “Canon Formation in Late Imperial China,” in Culture and State in Chinese History: Conventions, Accommodations, and Critiques, ed. Theodore Huters, R. Bin Wong, and Pauline Yu (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), 83–104. 2. Paul W. Kroll, “Ch’üan T’ang shih,” in The Indiana Companion to Traditional Chinese Literature, ed. and comp. William H. Nienhauser (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 1:364–65. 3. Chen Bohai 䰜ԃ⍋ et al., eds. Lidai Tangshi lunpingxuan ग़ҷ૤䆫䆎䆘䗝 (Baoding: Hebei daxue chubanshe, 2002), 955. 4. Robert E. Hegel, “Ku-shih yuan,” in Nienhauser, Indiana Companion, 1:491. 5. Surprisingly little has been written in English about this anthology. See Shuen-fu Lin, “T’ang-shih san-pai-shou,” in Nienhauser, Indiana Companion, 755–56; and Anne Birrell, “Canonicity, Micropoetics, and Otherness in the Eighteenth-Century Anthology of Medieval Chinese Poetry, Three Hundred Poems of the Tang,” in One Man’s Canon: Five Essays on Medieval Poetry for Stephen Reckert, ed. Alan Deyermond (London: Department of Hispanic Studies, Queen Mary and Westfield College, 1998), 51–68. The Chinese scholarship is voluminous. For a recent study, see He Yan 䌎Ϲ, Qingdai Tangshi xuanben yanjiu ⏙ҷ૤䆫䗝ᴀⷨお (Beijing: Renmin chubanshe, 2007), 70–93. 6. See the analysis of the winning poem of 1759 by Li Jialin ᴢᆊ味 in Benjamin A. Elman, A Cultural History of Civil Examinations in Late Imperial China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 552–56. 7. See Pauline Yu, “Chinese Poetry and Its Institutions,” in Hsiang Lectures on Chinese Poetry, ed. Grace S. Fong (Montreal: Center for East Asian Research, McGill University, 2002), 2:65–66. 8. Elman, Cultural History of Civil Examinations, 549. 9. Translation based on Yu, “Canon Formation,” 98. 10. Jing Yuanshu ᭀ‫⊁ܗ‬, ed., Xinjiao Qianjia shi ᮄ᷵गᆊ䆫 (Hefei: Anhui wenyi chubanshe, 2003). 11. This point is made by He Yan in Qingdai Tangshi xuanben yanjiu, 74. 12. The benefits of beginning with ancient-style verse were espoused by influential Qing pedagogues. See Charles P. Ridley, “Educational Theory and Practice in Late Imperial China: The Teaching of Writing as a Specific Case” (PhD diss., Stanford University, 1973), 399. 13. Stephen Owen, trans., The Poetry of Du Fu, 5 vols. (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2016), 23.36. 14. Shen Deqian, Tangshi biecai ji (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1979), 657. 15. Owen, The Poetry of Du Fu, 11.15. 16. Chen Bohai et al., Lidai Tangshi lunpingxuan, 911.

CHAPTER 23

LATER IMPERIAL PROSE ANTHOLOGIES TIMOTH Y CLIFFOR D

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ver the course of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, prose emerged as an independent category of literati learning, with the first true prose anthologies appearing during this period (see Tian, chapter 21). In multiple ways, these anthologies established the basic terms and categories of subsequent anthological discourse. First, they assembled the prototypes of prose canons that are now familiar to students of Chinese literature: one finds in Guwen guanjian স᭛䮰䥉 (Key to ancient-style prose) a narrow canon focusing on eight Tang and Song dynasty writers and in Chonggu wenjue ዛস᭛㿷 (Prose techniques that honor antiquity) an expansive canon extending from the eleventh century all the way back to the third century BCE. Second, these anthologies embodied a tension between studying prose as a means to improve one’s civil service examination essays, delineated in a pedantic way through the use of interlinear comments and short stylistic analyses, and studying prose as a means of moral cultivation, a tendency best represented in Zhen Dexiu’s ⳳᖋ⾔ (1178–1235) Wenzhang zhengzong ᭛ゴ ℷᅫ (Orthodox tradition of literary composition). Finally, in terms of their graphic design as woodblock-printed books, these anthologies pioneered the application of a system of visual reading aids called pingdian 䀩咲 (literally, comments and marks; i.e., interlinear comments; emphasis markers such as dots, dabs, and lines; and punctuation) to prose documents (see Galambos, chapter 13, and Hamm, chapter 14). This chapter examines what came after these paradigmatic works. Through a chronological survey of prose anthologies produced during the Ming and Qing

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dynasties, it examines key issues in the form and function of prose anthologies during the later imperial period, such as attempts to refine existing prose canons; to develop new canons of Qin-Han prose, informal prose, and women’s prose; to expand and shrink the system of prose genres; to experiment further with the graphic design of anthologies; and, finally, to fix a common core of prose documents suitable for an ever-expanding student population. This chapter also gestures toward potential connections between these new ways of managing prose documents and broader social, economic, and political changes, such as the exclusion of poetry from the Ming civil examination curriculum, the sixteenth-century revival of commercial printing and expansion of the reading public, the Kangxi emperor’s sponsorship of large-scale editorial projects, and the emergence of a group of books described by Cynthia J. Brokaw as the “ ‘best-sellers’ of the nineteenth century.”1 Information management provides a useful framework for this cluster of issues, directing our attention to specific anthological strategies—practices of archiving, selection, organization, and deletion—as well as the social and political dimensions of these strategies (management by whom, for whom, and for what purpose). Anthologies do not survive in great numbers from the Yuan dynasty and the early Ming, and most of those that do survive are reprints of Song anthologies. Apart from these, there are also commercial compendia of prose composition tips with titles like Xinkan zengru wenquan zhuru aolun cexue tongzong ᮄߞ๲ܹ᭛ ㄠ䃌‫༻ۦ‬䂪ㄪᅌ㍅ᅫ (A trap for prose and comprehensive guide to studying policy essays with profound teachings from various Confucian scholars, newly carved and expanded), demonstrating that examination preparation continued to be a motivating factor in the study of prose documents. The Guwen zhenbao স᭛ⳳᇊ (Genuine treasures of ancient literature), an anthology divided into poetry and prose sections, circulated as far as Japan and Korea, where it became a popular Literary Sinitic textbook, and remained popular through the Ming, even serving as a literary reference in drinking game manuals.2 The reprinting of Song anthologies remained widespread into the sixteenth century. In 1520, for example, Ma Lu 侀䣘 (1477–1544), the education intendant to Shanxi, spearheaded an effort by various provincial officials to reprint the Wenzhang zhengzong for the benefit of students in Shanxi schools. In a preface, the scholar-official Cui Xian የ䡥 (1478–1541) criticized the popular student strategy of attempting to guess the upcoming examination topic and then memorizing answers from examination aids: “To merely rely on diligence in plagiarism and richness of memory, guessing at the topic like a shot in the dark, I have never seen that strategy succeed.”3 Officials like Ma, fearing that students had come to rely too heavily on examination aids, promoted ancient-style prose anthologies from the Song dynasty as supplementary study materials. At the same time, this desire to supplement the examination curriculum drove entirely new prose-anthologizing projects. The first of these was

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an attempt among education officials to construct and promulgate a more period-specific Qin and Han dynasty prose canon. Hu Zuanzong’s 㚵㑬ᅫ (1480–1560) Qin Han wen ⾺⓶᭛ (Qin and Han dynasty prose), printed in 1521, includes over 150 prose documents beginning with “Zu Chu wen” 䀯Ἦ᭛ (A curse on Chu), attributed to King Huiwen of Qin ⾺ᚴ᭛⥟, and ending with Yang Xiong’s ᦮䲘 (53 BCE–18 CE) “Taipu zhen” ໾‫ک‬ㆈ (Admonition to the chamberlain for the imperial stud). In a preface, one of Hu’s students recorded a series of questions addressed to Hu regarding his motivations in compiling the anthology. In response to the first question—“Why did you compile this anthology?”—Hu criticized examination aids in terms similar to Ma Lu’s, noting that “if one requests abridged versions of the classics from officials, one finds that they are riddled with errors, and students repeat these fill-in-blank exercises verbatim, excerpting and copying from these mindless reading materials.” The student then asked Hu, “What’s wrong with Zhen Dexiu’s Wenzhang zhengzong?” to which Hu replied that Zhen’s anthology is “dispersed and not coherent, scattered and not ordered” and argued that this arrangement encouraged overly selective reading: “Scholars check on it for one thing and neglect everything else.” To the final question—“Why didn’t you include anything from after the Han?”—Hu answered that post-Han literary works are generally weaker in form and style, so including them in this anthology would compromise the very basis of student learning.4 The purpose of Hu’s anthology was in effect to distill literary information through selection of a coherent period style, one that Hu believed was superior to everything that came after. Ironically, such attempts to construct a more coherent Qin-Han canon were in turn dismissed by another group of anthologists as partisan, fragmentary, and impractical. Lin Xiyuan ᵫᏠ‫( ܗ‬1481–1565) spoke for this tendency in a 1551 preface to his anthology Guwen leichao স᭛串ᡘ (Ancient-style prose transcribed by category), where he wrote: “Prose has no antiquity or modernity— if it suits practical application then it should be valued. If it suits practical application, then how can you reject it, even if it departs from the Qin and Han?” At the same time, Lin lamented that pre-Ming anthologies, including Wenxuan ᭛䙌 (Selections of Refined Literature), Tang wencui ૤᭛㊍ (Quintessence of Tang literature), Song wenjian ᅟ᭛䨦 (Mirror to Song literature), Guwen guanjian, Wenzhang zhengzong, and Chonggu wenjue were “overabundant, sundry, and lacking order.”5 Like Hu Zuanzong, Lin Xiyuan was attempting to bring order not just to a body of primary documents but also to a body of prior anthologies. But rather than shrink his coverage to a single, supposedly superior period style, as Hu did with Qin-Han prose, Lin opted to retain broad historical coverage (pre-Qin to early Ming dynasty) within a new classification system of twenty-seven genres. Given Lin’s prefatory remarks, this genre-based classification system should be read as a way of foregrounding the practical

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function of studying prose: learning how to write persuasive and effective letters, memorials, treatises, and other texts. The “eight great masters of the Tang and Song” authorial canon was promulgated in its modern form in Mao Kun’s 㣙സ (1512–1601) still well-known Tang Song badajia wenchao ૤ᅟܿ໻ᆊ᭛䟨 (Prose of the eight great masters of the Tang and Song). Most of this canon was already present in the Song anthology Guwen guanjian. Both Guwen guanjian and Tang Song badajia wenchao include sections for Han Yu 䶧ᛜ (768–824), Liu Zongyuan ᷇ᅫ‫( ܗ‬773–819), Ouyang Xiu ℤ䱑ׂ (1007–72), Su Xun 㯛⌉ (1009–66), Su Shi 㯛䓒 (1037–1101), Su Che 㯛䔡 (1039–1112), and Zeng Gong ᳒䵣 (1019–83). The eighth section in Guwen guanjian belonged to Zhang Lei ᔉ㗦 (1054–1114), but in Mao Kun’s anthology, Zhang was replaced with Wang Anshi ⥟ᅝ⷇ (1021–86). In a preface dated 1579, Mao criticized partisans of Tang prose in terms similar to those Lin Xiyuan used to criticize Qin-Han partisans: “Writers of the world often say that the quality of prose varies with historical period, and that after the Tang prose was too weak to be worth mentioning. Alas! They don’t understand that prose follows the Way in flourishing and declining, and that historical period is beside the point.”6 Thus, as more and increasingly disparate types of prose anthologies were produced during the sixteenth-century printing boom, two contrasting but interdependent viewpoints came to characterize literary polemics: (1) some historical period style or grouping of authors produced the best prose and should be imitated by modern writers, and (2) literary values are historically contingent, and no one period style or grouping of authors is intrinsically better than any other. This latter view was pushed in an even more radical direction in the anthologies printed for sale in late Ming urban Jiangnan. Guwen pinwai lu স᭛ક໪䣘 (Ancient-style prose beyond the rankings), attributed to celebrity-literatus Chen Jiru 䱇㑐‫( ۦ‬1558–1639), is a case in point. The initial message in the analogy’s preface, written by Chen’s friend Wang Heng ⥟㸵 (1562–1609), is similar to Lin Xiyuan’s, noting that past anthologists’ selection criteria varied by historical period and that therefore no historical period can be taken as an absolute, universal standard—but Wang soon took an unexpected turn. He wrote that in contrast to Qin Han wen and Guwen leichao, which despite their differing attitudes toward historical literary change were both basically attempting no more than to reorganize long-familiar documents in a more coherent way, Chen Jiru intentionally “selected essays from after the two Han dynasties which had not undergone any previous compiling.” Chen was effectively assembling a new literary archive. Wang also wrote that Chen Jiru’s intent was not to simplify or make more coherent but to dazzle, excite, and amaze students, quoting a statement by Chen: “In doing all of this, my primary desire was that students know that beyond the nine provinces are another nine provinces, and beyond the nine realms are another nine realms.”7 In practical terms, this meant focusing on documents dealing with topics outside of officialdom and the civil service examination curriculum:

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scandal, romance, leisure, humor, esoterica, and women. Take, for example, the second document in the anthology, titled “Wen Shangyuan furen” ଣϞ‫ܗ‬໿Ҏ (Question to the Lady Shangyuan) and attributed to the mythical Queen Mother of the West (Xiwangmu 㽓⥟↡) herself. It presents the reader with a dialogue between the deity Lady Shangyuan and Han emperor Wu ⓶℺Ᏹ (r. 141–87 BCE), in which Lady Shangyuan humorously expresses doubt about the emperor’s ability to achieve transcendence, given his numerous physical, moral, and spiritual defects (which she lists in shockingly explicit terms).8 At the time, to include such a document as an example of ancient-style prose was to undermine the very notion of prose standards. It is significant that the appearance of anthologies like Guwen pinwai lu coincided both temporally and geographically with the appearance of women’s writing in prose anthologies. Guwen pinwai lu itself includes several documents attributed to historical and/or legendary women, such as the Queen Mother of the West’s “Wen Shangyuan furen.” In anthologies like Chen Jiru’s, women’s writing was leveraged to critique conventional examination prose and examination culture more generally. At the same time, not all anthologists of women’s writings were so critical of the civil service examination system and the mainstream values associated with it. Other anthologists of women’s prose chose instead to highlight conventional scholar-official virtues in women’s writing. Zhao Shijie’s 䍭Ϫᵄ anthology Gujin nüshi সҞཇ৆ (Women scholars past and present), for example, begins with Ban Zhao’s ⧁ᰁ (45–116) preface to her didactic work Nüjie ཇ៦ (Lessons for women) and focuses on official genres such as memorials and edicts. In terms of graphic design, pre-Wanli era (1573–1620) prose anthologies, if they included printed pingdian, tended to use a sparing mixture of dabs, dots, and lines. The pingdian key included in the front matter to Tang Shunzhi’s ૤䷚П (1507–60) anthology of Tang-Song examination prose, Tang Huiyuan jingxuan pidian Tang Song mingxian celun wencui ૤᳗‫ܗ‬㊒䙌ᡍ咲૤ᅟৡ䊶ㄪ䂪᭛㊍ (Quintessence of policy and discourse essays by famous worthies of the Tang and Song, selected and annotated by Number One Metropolitan Graduate Tang), is one example. Beginning in the late sixteenth century, however, anthologies punctuated much more heavily with dots and dabs emerge—indeed, it is not uncommon in anthologies from this period for every single character in a given document to be highlighted. The increasingly dense page layout of late Ming books in turn inspired high-end printers such as Min Qiji 䭨唞ӟ (dates unknown) to pioneer the technique of multiwoodblock color printing (taoban ༫⠜ or taoyin ༫ॄ), using multiple colors of ink to more easily and attractively distinguish the main text of a given document from its annotations. Wen zhi ᭛㟈 (Finest specimens of prose), printed by the Min family in 1621 and similar to Guwen pinwai lu in terms of selection strategy, is one example of a prose anthology produced in this way.

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It is a scholarly cliché that the daring literary experimentation of the late Ming came to an end in the early Qing, but in the case of prose anthologies, the cliché is accurate. The most conspicuous example of this conservative turn was Guwen yuanjian স᭛⏉䨦 (Profound mirror for ancient-style prose), commissioned and prefaced by the Kangxi emperor ᒋ❭ⱛᏱ (r. 1661–1722) himself and compiled by a team of Hanlin academicians headed by Xu Qianxue ᕤђᅌ (1631–94). Xu’s team selected and arranged 1,386 prose works chronologically, beginning with excerpts from Zuozhuan Ꮊ‫( ڇ‬Zuo Tradition) and Guo yu ೟䁲 (Dialogues of the states) and concluding with the Northern Song prose masters. In his preface, the Kangxi emperor defined prose in didactic terms as “an instrument for conveying the Way.” Like Lin Xiyuan, he noted the overabundance and disorder not just of primary prose documents but also of prose anthologies themselves. Also like Lin Xiyuan, he emphasized the transdynastic nature of literary history, drawing a distinction between “institutions and laws” whose history “can be delimited by dynasty” and “matters of prose composition” whose history “cannot be delimited by dynasty.” Accordingly, he criticized Tang wencui and Song wenjian for “limiting themselves by historical period.”9 In all these respects, the Kangxi emperor and his academicians were adapting a specific model of prose anthology—the transdynastic, moralistic model of Wenzhang zhengzong and Guwen leichao—to a new political purpose, legitimating Manchu rule through promising the continuity of literati high culture. Cultural continuity was also signified through the use of multiple colors in printing the imperial edition, in which the comments of pre-Qing dynasty scholars were printed in blue, the comments of the Qing Hanlin Academy compilers were printed in red, and comments of the Kangxi emperor himself were printed in imperial yellow. Guwen yuanjian was distributed to government schools across the empire several times over the course of the eighteenth century and was widely read as an imperially sanctioned standard for prose composition. Several anthologies compiled by individual scholar-officials also became popular. None of these anthologies, however, took up the adversarial posture vis-à-vis prevailing canons and stylistic norms that characterized Ming prose anthologists, even when the Qing anthologists were associated with distinct literary “schools” or movements. The principal anthological achievement of Fang Bao ᮍ㢲 (1668–1749), father of the Tongcheng School of ancient-style prose, was an abridged version of Guwen yuanjian titled Guwen yuexuan স᭛㋘䙌 (Abridged selections of ancient-style prose). As the Kangxi emperor did in his preface to Guwen yuanjian, Fang Bao emphasized the compatibility of moral education and examination-focused formal composition training, an approach Fang referred to as yifa 㕽⊩. Yao Nai ྮ哤 (1731–1815) elaborated on Fang’s theory by constructing a new system of thirteen prose genres in his still well-known anthology Guwenci leizuan স᭛䕸串㑖 (Ancient-style phraseology compiled by genre).

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In addition to these anthologies, which were all based on the principle of selecting (xuan 䙌) from an unreadably large corpus of prose documents, the Qing dynasty saw the rise of prose anthologies purporting to contain a complete (quan ܼ) collection of prose from a given dynasty. The most famous of these, Quan Tangwen ܼ૤᭛ (Complete Tang prose) was imperially commissioned and compiled by a large team of Hanlin academicians and other officials, much like Guwen yuanjian. Interestingly, this “complete” collection of Tang prose was compiled from a large number of older partial collections, including collected writings of individual Tang authors (wenji ᭛䲚) recently assembled in Siku quanshu ಯᑿܼ᳌ (Complete writings of the four repositories); comprehensive collections (zongji 㐑䲚) like Tang wencui; and miscellaneous works recorded in various histories, philosophical works, inscriptions, and even the great Ming dynasty encyclopedia Yongle dadian ∌ῖ໻‫( ݌‬Great compendium of the Yongle reign).10 A second example of a “complete” anthology, the expansively-titled Quan Shanggu Sandai Qin Han Sanguo Liuchao wen ܼϞসϝҷ⾺⓶ϝ೟݁ᳱ᭛ (Complete prose of Far Antiquity, Three Ages, Qin, Han, Three Kingdoms, and Six Dynasties), was compiled by the countylevel schoolteacher Yan Kejun ಈৃഛ (1762–1843), who “regretted that he was unable to join the Quan Tangwen compiling team.”11 Thus, in both imperially sponsored projects and the activities of private scholars, the conservative turn in Qing anthologizing expressed itself in a new information-management strategy: the assembling of “complete” period-based literary archives. This chapter concludes with the widely read (but little researched) Qing dynasty prose anthology Guwen guanzhi স᭛㾔ℶ (Pinnacle of ancient-style prose), which brings this account up to the modern era. Guwen guanzhi was compiled by Wu Chengquan ਇЬ⃞ (1655–1719) and his nephew Wu Dazhi ਇ໻㙋 in the late seventeenth century. In their original preface, the two Wus wrote that they assembled the anthology from “a number of pieces that we regularly used in our teaching.”12 It is an anthology of 222 prose documents dating from the fourth century BCE through the mid-seventeenth century and arranged chronologically by dynasty. The Zhou dynasty is the most heavily represented period with fifty-six titles, followed by the Song with fifty-one, the Tang with forty-three, the Han with thirty-one, the Ming with eighteen, the Qin with seventeen, and, finally, the Six Dynasties period with six. Within these dynastic sections, documents are grouped by author or source, with a total of sixty-five authors/sources represented. Thirty-eight of these authors/sources have only one document attributed to them, and another nineteen authors/sources have between two and ten documents attributed. Of the remaining eight authors/ sources with more than ten documents attributed, four are the core of the Tang-Song eight-master canon: Han Yu, Liu Zongyuan, Ouyang Xiu, and Su Shi. The other four are Han and pre-Han dynasty histories: Zuozhuan, Guoyu, Zhanguoce ᠄೟ㄪ (Strategies of the Warring States), and Sima Qian’s ৌ侀䙋

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(ca. 135–ca. 90 BCE) Shiji ৆㿬 (The Grand Scribe’s Records). Zuozhuan is the single most heavily represented source, with thirty-four documents. The first document in Guwen guanzhi is the Zuozhuan narrative “Zheng bo ke Duan yu Yan” 䜁ԃ‫↉ܟ‬ᮐ䛶 (The Earl of Zheng vanquishes Duan in Yan), a record of interfamilial political intrigue, war, and murder focusing on the Earl of Zheng, his mother, and his younger brother Duan. Although the alternative literatures developed in the late Ming are absent, a nod is given in their direction by the inclusion of Yuan Hongdao’s 㹕ᅣ䘧 (1568–1610) biography of the eccentric poet and painter Xu Wei ᕤ␁ (1521–93). In their preface, the two Wus summarized the making of Guwen guanzhi as a process of compiling and fine-tuning previous anthologies rather than selecting from primary sources: Should one make selections of guwen? The answer: It is useless. Good and bad texts are accumulating all the time, so how could one make a selection? Therefore the two of us don’t dare to speak of selecting, but of compiling. How do we compile? In order to compile writings by ancient men, we compile from what ancient and modern men have selected, complementing, systemizing and correcting along the way, exercising extreme caution and relying on many years’ experience.13

The Ming saw the rise of competing period styles and partisan anthologists, each claiming that their selections represented the true standard for prose. The Ming also saw repeated attempts to revamp the classification systems of apparently more neutral transdynastic anthologies like Wenzhang zhengzong and Chonggu wenjue and even to construct entirely new prose canons, as in Guwen pinwai lu and Gujin nüshi. With its two well-defined foci of Tang-Song masters and excerpts from Han/pre-Han histories, Guwen guanzhi represented the most condensed version of what by the late seventeenth century had become an ancient-style prose core curriculum, one that foreclosed the alternative literary histories constructed in the late Ming. It also represented the most successful product of many efforts to create what Yuming He has called “an anthology of anthologies.”14 The role that this “anthology of anthologies” and its core curriculum played in shaping modern notions of the classical prose tradition remains to be seen in chapter 29, on textbook anthologies.

Notes 1. Cynthia J. Brokaw, “Reading the Best-Sellers of the Nineteenth Century: Commercial Publishing in Sibao,” in Printing and Book Culture in Late Imperial China, ed. Cynthia J. Brokaw and Kai-wing Chow (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 189.

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2. Yuming He, Home and the World: Editing the “Glorious Ming” in Woodblock-Printed Books of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2013), 30–31. 3. For this preface, see Guoli zhongyang tushuguan, ed., Guoli zhongyang tushuguan shanben xuba jilu ji bu ೟ゟЁ༂೪᳌仼୘ᴀᑣ䎟䲚䣘䲚䚼 (Taipei: Guoli zhongyang tushuguan, 1994), 6:54–55. 4. Hu Zuanzong, ed., Qin Han wen, 1524 ed., preface. 5. Lin Xiyuan, ed., Guwen leichao, 1551 ed., preface. 6. Mao Kun, Mao Lumen xiansheng wenji 㣙呓䭔‫⫳ܜ‬᭛䲚, Ming Wanli era (1602–20) ed., 14.18a. 7. Chen Jiru, ed., Guwen pinwai lu, Ming ed., preface. 8. Chen Jiru, Guwen pinwai lu, 1.18a. 9. Xu Qianxue, ed., Guwen yuanjian, 1705 ed., preface. 10. Dong Gao 㨷䁹 et al., eds., Qinding Quan Tangwen ℑᅮܼ૤᭛, 1814 ed., 2a. 11. Yan Kejun, ed., Quan Shanggu Sandai Qin Han Sanguo Liuchao wen, 1930 facsimile of the Guangxu era ed., preface, 1a. 12. Jyrki Kallio, “Confucian Education and Enlightenment for the Masses in the Manner of Guwen Guanzhi” (Licentiate thesis, University of Helsinki, 2009), 41. 13. Kallio, “Confucian Education,” 39. 14. He, Home and the World, 39.

CHAPTER 24

RELIGIOUS LITERARY ANTHOLOGIES N ATA S H A H E L L E R

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eligious literary anthologies are those anthologies that collect the literary output of religious figures, either singly or as a collective. They provide information both in the individual texts collected—a poem, for example, serves as a unit of information—and through the organization of the anthology as a whole, with its hierarchical ordering and classification. In the latter sense, information is linked to search and retrieval, as understanding the organization of the anthology facilitates finding a text within it. Religious texts participate in the same literary culture as those that one might deem secular or nonreligious, but they also negotiate different territories. Some claim to have their origins in realms beyond the human or from suprahuman beings. Some texts may be spoken by the Buddha or immortals and have a stage of oral transmission that precedes their written form. In some cases, the words themselves or their sounds are sacred. Religions change over time, and subtraditions have differing ideas about what types of texts should be preserved and in what form. As a means of thinking about the organizational strategies of Buddhism and Daoism, a comparison between Chan ⽾ (Meditation school) literary anthologies and those of Quanzhen ܼⳳ (Complete perfection) Daoism is instructive. The emergence of Quanzhen Daoism in the twelfth century offers a fitting parallel with Chan Buddhism, both because they appeared during the same time frame and because, like Chan, Quanzhen represented a new interpretation of older religious strands. Chan and Quanzhen literary anthologies focus on the individual author, and this is a relatively late development.

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Medieval multiauthor anthologies include Hongming ji ᓬᯢ䲚 (Collection on the spreading of the light; T52n2102), compiled by Sengyou ‫( ⼤ڻ‬445–518), which collects treatises and other texts apologetic in aim; Mingxiang ji ‫⼹ݹ‬ 㿬 (Record of signs from the unseen realm), compiled by Wang Yan ⥟⨄ (b. ca. 454), which collects miracle tales already in circulation; and Zhengao ⳳ䁹 (Declarations of the perfected; CT1016), compiled by Tao Hongjing 䱊ᓬ᱃ (456–536), which preserves writings of the Shangqing Ϟ⏙ (Highest clarity) tradition, including revelations (see Nicoll-Johnson, chapter 49).1 Buddhist and Daoist anthologies show how the process of collecting and circulating texts can be used to form the identity of a tradition by distinguishing it from others and by tying that identity to individuals and genres. That most of our individual literary anthologies from both Chan and Quanzhen traditions date from after the Tang dynasty can be attributed to changes in what was believed to be the source of knowledge and truth and in religious pedagogy. As Buddhism no longer looked exclusively to translated (or purportedly translated) scriptures, native genres gained importance. Much of this can be traced to the rise of Chan Buddhism and its focus on individual teachers as doubles for the Buddha, making their words expressions of an enlightened perspective worth preserving. Daoism, especially the Quanzhen tradition, was influenced by this model, as reflected by its adoption of the genre of yulu 䁲䣘 (recorded sayings) and the interest of its followers and disciples in compiling the writings of their masters. How they conceptualized these writings was quite different.

Chan Anthologies In the case of Chan Buddhism, one can trace a development from yulu to guanglu ᒷ䣘 (broad or expansive records) as the tradition matures, and the preservation of a teacher’s writings became part of the consolidation of a monk’s identity while also shaping his lineage. Beginning with the Linji lu 㞼△䣘 (The Record of Linji; T47n1985), assembled by Yuanjue Zongyan ೧㾎ᅫⓨ (fl. early twelfth cent.), one can identify three sections of the text in the current edition in the Taishō canon: yulu, kanbian ࢬ䕼 (examinations), and xinglu 㸠䣘 (record of activities). Although most of the yulu section is dialogic in form, these conversations happen in the context of sermons. Kanbian are individual dialogues with students, designed to assess what they understood of the teachings. The final section is a record of deeds, a biographical account of Linji Yixuan 㞼△㕽⥘ (d. ca. 866), focused on the instruction he received from his teachers and his attainment of awakening. However, Record of Linji was formed out of materials already circulating, and because the biographical material centered on the exchanges between Linji and his teacher Huangbo Xiyun 咗Ꮰ䘟 (d. 850) appeared in the earlier Tiansheng guangdenglu ໽㘪ᒷ➜䣘 (Extensive

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lamp record of the Tiansheng era; X78n1553), compiled by Li Zunxu ᴢ䙉ࢫ (988–1038), it is placed first. In the context of a denglu (lamp record), this serves to emphasize transmission of a teaching, which is the objective of the genre. Changing the order of the materials, as Zongyan did, moves the emphasis from that transmission to the public role of the Chan teacher, followed by more personal exchanges with students. This organization would prove influential.2 The collection of Dahui Zonggao ໻᜻ᅫᵆ (1089–1163), an influential Song dynasty Chan teacher in Linji’s lineage, has a much stronger sense of literary genres. Dahui Pujue Chanshi yulu ໻᜻᱂㾎⽾᏿䁲䣘 (Recorded sayings of the Chan master Dahui Pujue; T47n1998a) is thirty fascicles (juan ो), a vast expansion compared to the single fascicle of the Linji lu. Like the Linji lu, it opens with sermons, some of which reference raising (ju 㟝) a previous dialogue between master and student; these occupy six fascicles, and their end is marked with the stūpa inscription for Dahui. These are followed by teachings on particular ritual occasions in the Buddhist calendar. The tenth fascicle is songgu ䷠স (eulogizing the ancients), a Chan genre of verse commentary on cases (gongan ݀Ḝ) from past masters. Next are occasional verses of varying lengths, line lengths, and rhyme schemes, followed by general sermons given to a more public audience than the assembly of monks.3 Following that are sermons to named individuals, primarily laymen, and Dahui’s responses to letters sent to him. In sum, the organization of Dahui’s collection begins much like Linji’s—with an emphasis on orality and on documents that refer to the Chan tradition—and then moves to more social forms of texts, from occasional poetry to sermons tailored to individual needs and then to letters. The inclusion of the stūpa inscription following the shangtang Ϟූ (ascending the hall) section marks a kind of stopping point in the same way that Linji’s collection concluded with his biographical record of activities. The core of a Chan master’s collection is the evidence of teaching; if everything after the stūpa inscription were stripped away, this part of Dahui’s career would still remain. The inclusion of letters and occasional verses points to the way in which different types of written documents—not just those associated with Dahui’s public or ritual roles—have come to be seen as representative, meriting both preservation and canonization. This is even more apparent in the literary collection of Zhongfeng Mingben Ёዄᯢᴀ (1263–1323), titled Tianmu Zhongfeng heshang guanglu ໽ⳂЁዄ੠ ᇮᒷ䣘 (Broad records of monk Zhongfeng of Tianmu), in thirty fascicles.4 Note here that the title is a “broad record.” Guang substitutes for yu 䁲, a term that indicates spoken words; guang is also opposed to lüe ⬹ (summary or brief). Mingben’s guanglu is the same length in fascicles as that of Dahui, but it includes more types of texts, and this variety shows more completely the literary roles that monks inhabited. Mingben’s collection opens with sermons, almost all marked by occasion (such as feast days and the beginning and ending of monastic retreats) or location. This is followed by small-group instructions,

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prose and verse commentaries on the cases of earlier Chan masters, sermons for individuals, letters, ritual texts, and painting inscriptions. The next several fascicles consist of freestanding (and separately circulating) collections, as well as materials in the commentarial tradition, followed by commemorations (ji 㿬) for various buildings. The remaining fascicles become much more varied, with different genres combined in the same fascicle. There are admonitions (zhen ㆈ), inscriptions (ming 䡬), and various genres of poetry along with prefaces, explanations (shuo 䁾), and a number of shorter, often informal prose pieces. Mingben’s biography is placed at the end. One can make several observations based on this guanglu: First, although texts associated with oral transmission make up a smaller portion of this text, they can still be found in the form of sermons. Second, one can take the ordering of the collection as indicating how types of documents were prioritized; this order foregrounds Mingben’s public identity as a Chan master. Third, this anthology includes materials that have already been collected and circulated, creating a nesting of collected texts. Finally, one can identify both basic principles and challenges facing the compilers. Beyond the prioritization noted earlier, the compilers have chosen to group materials by genre; there also seems to be a loose preference for prioritizing materials within genre, either by recipient or by subject matter: for example, a letter to a Korean royal appears before a letter to a layman. However, the compilers of this collection are dealing with a considerable amount of material, and their attempts at rationalization appear to break down toward the end of the collection. As with Dahui, they are adding new genres and new types of material that seem important to preserve; such additions cause Mingben’s collection to diverge from earlier yulu, yet a Chan master’s collection remains a different sort of anthology from that of a literatus. To summarize the development of Chan collections, they emerged out of a desire to preserve oral teachings (or the retrospective construction thereof) and over time came to include not just documents related directly to the public role of a Chan master but also occasional literary pieces. The collections prioritize those texts that represent public roles and come to organize texts by genre as much as possible. The literary anthologies of Chan masters are hierarchically inclusive, adding material but conveying degrees of importance through the organization of that material.5

Quanzhen Anthologies Turning to Quanzhen anthologies from the Song and Yuan, one finds that they prioritize poetry over other genres. Both Buddhism and Daoism value poetry as a part of religious teaching, but as poetry can have different pedagogical functions, it is also collected and preserved in different ways. Anthologizing poetry is usually

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treated in this tradition of Daoist texts as an exercise separate from collecting teachings. One can see this in the work of the founder of Quanzhen, Wang Zhe ⥟౲ (1113–70; nickname Chongyang 䞡䱑). The practice-oriented Chongyang zhenren jinguan yusuo jue 䞡䱑ⳳҎ䞥䮰⥝䥪㿷 (Instructions on the golden pass and jade lock of the Perfected One Chongyang; CT1156), attributed to Wang, is a set of thirty-two questions that may have had their roots in oral teachings but have been organized into their present form by his disciples.6 Wang Chongyang’s poetry was collected in Chongyang quanzhen ji 䞡䱑ܼⳳ䲚 (Chongyang’s Quanzhen collection; CT1153), which extended to thirteen fascicles; it was thus much longer than Jinguan yusuo jue. The first fascicle consists of regulated verse (lüshi ᕟ䀽) and longer-form verse (changpian 䭋㆛) organized by line length, with poems in seven-syllable lines preceding those in five-syllable lines. Fascicle two is primarily quatrains (jueju ㌩হ), and fascicles three through eight, as well as eleven through thirteen, are ci 䀲. Fascicle nine includes songs (ge ℠) along with ci and shi 䀽; fascicle ten is entirely shi. Verse here is organized by form and line length, not by topic or addressee. Much of this poetry, including unusual forms such as verses that “hide” the first character (zangtou 㮣丁), points to the social and pedagogical dimensions of poetry.7 These are even more apparent in the anthologies that collect the verses exchanged between Wang Zhe and his disciple Ma Yu 侀䠎 (1123–83). Chongyang jiaohua ji 䞡䱑ᬭ࣪䲚 (Collection of Chongyang’s transforming influence; CT1154) and Chongyang fenli shihua ji 䞡䱑 ߚṼक࣪䲚 (Collection of ten transformations based on Chongyang’s sectioning a pear; CT1155) consist primarily of poems Wang wrote to Ma, to accompany the gift of pear slices, and Ma’s responses to them.8 The division between collections anthologizing sermons or other instruction and those anthologizing verses persisted. Duan Zhijian ↉ᖫෙ of the Yuan dynasty compiled the teachings of his master, Yin Zhiping ልᖫᑇ (1169–1251; nickname Qinghe ⏙੠), a Quanzhen Daoist, and gave the collection the title Qinghe zhenren beiyou yulu ⏙੠ⳳҎ࣫䘞䁲䣘 (Recorded sayings of the northern travels of the Perfected Qinghe; CT1310). Collected while Yin was still alive, the four fascicles record sermons of Yin, prefaced by a sentence or two giving the time, place, and occasion; as is apparent from the work’s title, these sermons take place at Daoist sites in north China. The sermons usually include a questionand-answer portion after Yin’s initial statement, with queries coming from disciples or named interlocutors. Although it is impossible to know how the sermons went from oral to written form, they preserve (like Chan yulu) markers of orality, such as the phrase “the teacher said” (shi yue ᏿᳄). Yin’s collection, titled Baoguang ji 㨚‫ܝ‬䲚 (Collection of concealing the light; CT1146), is almost entirely verse. Fascicle one includes two brief prose pieces: one appears under the heading yulu; the other is described as straight talk (zhiyan Ⳉ㿔) but is otherwise made up of quatrains (jueju), regulated verse (lüshi), and longer-form verse (changpian). Fascicles two and three contain ci 䀲. For Yin Zhiping, what he said and what he wrote are treated differently; they represent different spheres

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of activity—even as they both are part of his Daoist identity—and so are anthologized separately. As collections of verse exchanges show, poetry was social and pedagogical, which motivated the collection of verses of Quanzhen Daoist masters in Minghe yuyin 勈厈们䷇ (Leftover sounds of the calling crane; CT1100). Organized by verse form—rather than chronologically by author or thematically—Minghe yuyin opens with six fascicles of ci 䀲, followed by two fascicles of ci, qu ᳆ (songs), and shi 䀽. The final fascicle includes some prose (wen ᭛ and ji 㿬). Some of these poems were written by spirits, connecting this tradition to texts such as Zhengao and offering a contrast with Chan texts. Although literary anthologizing seems to have been of greatest significance to Quanzhen Daoists, Xianquan ji ወ⊝䲚 (Collection of the mountain spring; CT1311) compiles the writings of Celestial Master (Tianshi ໽᏿) Zhang Yuchu ᔉᅛ߱ (1361–1410), and based on internal dating, it was completed while he was alive.9 Interestingly, it begins with miscellaneous writings (zazhuo 㼡㨫), which are longer discourses on topics such as “Being Cautious About the Origin” (shenben ᜢᴀ), with some in question-and-answer format (“Asking About the Abstruse” ⥘ଣ). The following six fascicles contain other prose genres, including a section of public sermons, followed by five fascicles of verse. This collection does not separate oral from written, public from private, or prose from verse; it also does not prioritize verse—it models a different way of organizing a Daoist literary anthology.

Conclusion Many Daoist and Buddhist texts and collections also appeared in nonreligious anthologies and compilations as well and in these contexts would take on different meanings. Though this chapter surveys only a small subset of religious literary anthologies, even this limited sample shows that when religious texts were organized into anthologies, they were informed by what sorts of writing were considered sacred or divinely inspired. For Chan monks, acting as representatives of their lineage, if not of the Buddha himself, public preaching— which, after all, was what Buddhist sūtras recorded—comes to the fore in the organization of their individual collections. Based on how they organized their collections, Quanzhen masters saw various genres of writing as different parts of their identity, and poetry was of special importance, conveying both religious ideas and social relations. Decisions about which texts to include and which to prioritize reflected judgments about religious roles and the place of writing in the fulfillment of those roles. Without such organizational decisions by compilers and editors, the information transmitted by religious literary anthologies would be raw and incomplete. Selection and organization are a key part of the information strategies of these texts.

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Notes 1. See Robert Ford Campany, Signs from the Unseen Realm: Buddhist Miracle Tales from Early Medieval China (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2012), 24–28. References to Buddhist texts follow the standard format for volume and text numbers; “T” indicates the Taishō Tripi‫ܒ‬aka; “X” indicates Xu zangjing 㑠㮣㍧ (Continuation of the Tripi‫ܒ‬aka); and “CT” indicates the Zhengtong Daozang ℷ㍅䘧㮣 (Orthodox Daoist canon; from Kristopher Schipper’s Concordance du Tao-tsang: Titres des ouvrages [Paris: École Française d’Extrême-Orient, 1975]). 2. Albert Welter, The Linji lu and the Creation of Chan Orthodoxy: The Development of Chan’s Records of Sayings Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 117–22. 3. See Miriam L. Levering, “Ta-hui and Lay Buddhists: Ch’an Sermons on Death,” in Buddhist and Taoist Practice in Medieval Chinese Society: Buddhist and Taoist Studies II, ed. David W. Chappell (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1987), 181–214. 4. Zhongfeng Mingben, Tianmu Zhongfeng heshang guanglu, in Zhonghua Dazang jing Ё㧃໻㮣㍧ ([Taipei]: Xiuding Zhonghua Dazangjing hui, 1965), 1:74. Also in Nihon kōtei Daizōkyō ᮹ᴀ᷵㿖໻㬉㌠, vols. 298–99 (Kyoto: Zōkyō Shoin, 1902–5). 5. For Chan, an individual’s literary collection was not the only way to anthologize texts; old cases and their commentaries were also collected in anthologies such as Biyan lu ⹻ Ꭺ䣘 (The Blue Cliff Record; T48, no. 2003). 6. Louis Komjathy, Cultivating Perfection: Mysticism and Self-Transformation in Early Quanzhen Daoism (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 281. This text may also be a later creation. 7. As Judith M. Boltz explains, “The recipient is expected to derive the first word of each line from a component of the last word in the preceding line, e.g., ৃ or હ from ℠.” Boltz, A Survey of Daoist Literature: Tenth to Seventeenth Centuries (Berkeley: Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California, 1987), 309n353. 8. Boltz, Survey of Daoist Literature, 145–46. 9. Boltz, Survey of Daoist Literature, 193. On Zhang Yuchu, see Vincent Goossaert, “The Four Lives of Zhang Yuchu ᔉᅛ߱ (1361–1410), 43rd Heavenly Master,” Cahiers d’Extrême-Asie 25 (2016): 1–29.

CHAPTER 25

PREMODERN FICTION AND FICTION COLLECTIONS LING HON L A M

Anthologizing Entropy Feng Menglong’s 侂໶啡 (1574–1646) Gujin tangai সҞ䄮ὖ (Talk on general matters, old and new; 1620)—now categorized as a classical tale (wenyan xiaoshuo ᭛㿔ᇣ䁾) anthology—did not find commercial success until it was retitled Gujin xiao সҞュ (Laughter then and now). This made Li Yu ᴢⓕ (1611–80) wonder why the reception was so different.1 The answer may now seem self-evident: the original title sounded too general, offering insufficient information for a potential readership to know what was on offer. But perhaps the picture is upside down. What if it was the case that readers suffered not from information shortage but rather from information overabundance—what Claude E. Shannon called “entropy”—in the range of possible messages that might have been communicated by the title Talk on General Matters?2 In the case of xiaoshuo ᇣ䁾 (now translated as fiction but literally meaning minor talk), it was less a matter that there was “too much to know” than that the category was too unpredictable to exclude any possibility at all. This chapter takes up the question of what might now be termed fiction anthologies in the premodern Chinese context, though as the discussion will make clear, the term fiction is yet another strategy (a most recent one) to delimit the unpredictable nature of xiaoshuo, and an understanding of how xiaoshuo already enacts the collective nature of anthology is necessary to understand what it means to anthologize xiaoshuo.

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Throughout the history of Chinese bibliology, xiaoshuo has been a catch-all term, first referring to leftovers from the masters’ lineages in Liu Xin’s ࡝ℚ (46 BCE–23 CE) Qilüe ϗ⬹ (Seven epitomes; see Nylan, chapter 48) and then expanding in the eleventh century to encompass dubious sources and trivia purged from orthodox historiography.3 Ultimately, in 1589 Hu Yinglin 㚵ឝ味 (1551–1602) declared xiaoshuo to be the epicenter of chaos that collapsed the four bibliographical categories of Classics (jing ㍧), History (shi ৆), Masters (zi ᄤ), and Collections (ji 䲚) into a single class that somehow encompassed the entire taxonomy.4 Hu’s anxiety materialized in Tao Zongyi’s 䱊ᅫ‫( ۔‬1329– 1410) massive and all-inclusive compendium Shuofu 䁾䚯 (Purlieus of discourse), which Hu had consulted.5 In the one extant manuscript copy that is probably closest to Tao’s original design, there are no volume (juan ो) or categorical divisions, though items sharing the same title end-words are arbitrarily grouped together.6 Against the reductive notion of fiction imposed since the May Fourth movement, early and medieval China studies have brought back the concept of xiaoshuo to denote the broad constellation of anecdotes collected and retold within literati communities and for which fiction/history distinctions prove irrelevant. The most radical of these findings goes beyond the narrative expectation of anecdotes and enters the amorphous domain of information. Thus, scholars have recently argued that “the dominant characteristic of xiaoshuo is that it recorded information of lesser importance rather than that it was narrative in form”7 and that “anecdotes and other miscellaneous bits of information” were considered coeval.8 Indeed, a late Ming xiaoshuo anthology might include a great range of genres and forms: verses, an inventory of Daoist mountains and rivers, recipes, a ranking list of soups, a tea guide, manuals of calligraphy and painting, etc.9 A theoretical shift from fiction to “miscellaneous bits of information” highlights xiaoshuo’s ontological status as collection, as always having been collected from somewhere else, blurring the line between the production of an original work of xiaoshuo and the circulation of xiaoshuo through anthologies.10 To push this further, the description of xiaoshuo by Huan Tan ḧ䄮 (43 BCE–28 CE) as “lumping together myriad, fragmentary bits of sayings” (he congcan xiaoyu ড়শ Ⅼᇣ䁲)11 actually depicts the same operation of textual production by which, as William G. Boltz argues, preimperial works were constructed from free-floating pericopes in the third century BCE.12 Given xiaoshuo’s composite and indeterminate nature, being both that which is collected into xiaoshuo and that into which xiaoshuo is collected, the category of xiaoshuo not only envelops the whole taxonomy but also becomes the textual plane on which the levels of informatic organization examined in this volume—word, document, and collection—collapse. As a case in point, one might consider the Southern Song anthology by Zeng Zao ᳒᜹ (ca. 1086–1155). Despite its title, the Leishuo 串䁾 (Categorized discourses) may not have been originally organized by category (lei 串), as a

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surviving volume from a Song edition suggests.13 Probably functioning as a textual aide-mémoire (see Nugent, chapter 30), Leishuo garners names or phrases worth remembering from the Mu Tianzi zhuan 〚໽ᄤ‫( ڇ‬Account of King Mu) and pairs them with a long, coherent excerpt for each tale taken from Chen Han’s 䱇㗄 (fl. 874) Yiwen ji ⭄㘲䲚 (Collected strange hearsay). A list of names and phrases—that is, organization at the level of the word—and extracts from classical tales—or organization at the level of the document—thus are placed on the same textual plane.14 Similar leveling effects happen between the levels of document and collection in the earliest extant printed edition of Shuofu (ca. 1573–1620), where Yuan Zhen’s ‫( 」ܗ‬779–831) “Huizhen ji” ᳗ⳳ㿬 (Record of encountering a transcendent) and Zheng Xi’s 䜁⽻ (fl. 1351) “Chunmeng lu” ᯹໶䣘 (Recounting a spring dream) are presented as stand-alone tales alongside such Tang dynasty tale collections as Ganze yao ⫬╸䃴 (Rumors of seasonable rain) and Jiyi lu 䲚⭄䣘 (Record of collected strange accounts).15 Despite the conspicuous difference in scale between the massive compendium Shuofu and the more concise aide-mémoire Leishuo, their information-management styles are similar. Both span diverse discourses without categorization, and both collapse levels of information, testifying to the entropic nature of xiaoshuo. At the other end of the spectrum from the scholastic Leishuo and Shuofu, similar things happen to a slew of low-brow anthologies dating from the 1580s until the Ming collapse in 1644. Modern scholars tend to see these low-brow works as miscellanies—a medley of poetry and prose of sundry kinds, including vernacular and classical fiction, crammed into a double-register page format.16 Probably the most popular and most often reprinted one, Yanju biji ➩ሙㄚ㿬 (Jottings in leisurely lodging), reinforces such impressions by explicitly using genre labels for categorical headings (lei).17 However, just as Leishuo is not really categorized, neither do the genre labels in Yanju biji mean what they say. The items in the “Poetry Category” (shilei 䀽串) are not poems but their background stories.18 More tellingly, the “Chant Category” (yinlei ৳串) accommodates four such stories and three unrelated, stand-alone chants, rendering irrelevant the distinction between chants and anecdotes about chants.19 This collapse of informatic levels is again symptomatic of xiaoshuo as both the components and the composite underlying textual production itself. Therefore, if xiaoshuo is in the first place a collection of “miscellaneous bits of information,” then the late Ming miscellany is less a medley of genres than the paradigmatic anthology of xiaoshuo as entropy.

Coping with Entropy: A Genealogy Most xiaoshuo collections do not so radically channel entropy, however. The entropy inherent in xiaoshuo collections can instead be seen through the ways

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in which they manage informatic unpredictability. From the dawn of xiaoshuo to the seventeenth-century commercial boom, one can trace a development of four techniques for coping with entropy, moving from comprehensive coverage to focalized exclusion, from elaborated categorization to designs of parallel correspondence. 1. Sorted and Assorted: While writing individual book entries that laid the foundation for Qilüe and establishing xiaoshuo as a bibliographical division, Liu Xiang ࡝৥ (77–6 BCE) compiled several anecdote collections. Self-consciously experimental, he named the first one Xinxu ᮄᑣ (New arrangements; 24 BCE), which groups half of its anecdotes by moral themes. This approach, previously used in Warring States masters’ texts to gather materials for argumentation, now served as an information-management solution for Liu Xiang, who was facing a chaotic assortment of misshapen documents following the destruction of libraries and book collections at the end of the Qin in 206 BCE.20 The “new arrangements” then further expanded to categorize most of the Shuoyuan 䁾㢥 (Garden of persuasions; 17 BCE) but at the same time introduced a chapter titled “Congtan” শ䂛 (Assorted talk), into which nonnarrative aphorisms were placed.21 Thus, in a double gesture Liu Xiang kept entropy at bay by categorizing narrative anecdotes but also acknowledged that categorization had to include within itself a noncategory of that which was not narrative. This legacy was continued in Liu Yiqing’s ࡝㕽ᝊ (403–44) Shishuo Ϫ䁾 (Tales of the age), named after a lost collection of tales compiled by Liu Xiang and now known as Shishuo xinyu Ϫ䁾ᮄ䁲 (A New Account of Tales of the World), with its own history of later imitations.22 Today the Shishuo anecdotes are so familiar that they cannot be read without evoking the collection’s thirty-six categories based on the characters’ temperaments, comportments, and aptitudes. But such categorical labeling was exceptional. If Liu Yiqing adopted the strategy of arresting entropy with taxonomic organization, it was owing to the urgency of “social discernment” in classifying new cultural elites following the Han empire’s collapse.23 This taxonomy that developed from a reappraisal of social actors did not affect other domains of xiaoshuo. Thus, outside the Shishuo tradition, pre-Song xiaoshuo collections of so-called recorded anomalies (zhiguai ᖫᗾ) and transmitted marvels (chuanqi ‫ڇ‬༛) seldom organized and divided items into categories.24 2. A Gourd for a Duck: This lack of organization changed with the tenthcentury Taiping guangji ໾ᑇᒷ㿬 (Wide-ranging records compiled in the Taiping era), which included the kind of material found in the Shishuo and is the main source for anomalous and marvelous tales, with about seven thousand entries divided into over one hundred categories. However, Taiping guangji sets itself apart from other leishu 串᳌ (categorized writings), including its sister compilation, the Taiping yulan ໾ᑇᕵ㾑 (Imperial readings compiled in the

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Taiping era), by creating standard-format titles for the tales it includes: about 80 percent of its tales are named or renamed after a character.25 The seeming homogeneity of content that results from the use of standardized titles is what forges a commensurable field of discourse across the expanse of xiaoshuo. Because xiaoshuo in all their informatic possibility are now commensurable, they can then be categorized and at the unprecedented scale seen in Taiping guangji. The implications of homogenization can be illustrated by an intriguing case related to Su Shi 㯛䓒 (1037–1101), where one of his poems mixes up two stories in Taiping guangji: ϡ㽟ⲻ់ᜢˈ

Haven’t you seen Lu Huaishen,

㪌໎Ԑ㪌勼˛

Who had a gourd steamed the way one would a duck?26

The substitution of a gourd in place of the expected duck is actually found in the story of the thrifty minister “Zheng Yuqing” 䜁们ᝊ and not in “Lu Huaishen” ⲻ់ᜢ, both of which are found in the category of “Frugality” (“Lianlian” ᒝ‫)۝‬.27 The confusion stems from a specific detail shared by both entries: a humble feast that each minister offers his guests. Whereas that is the central scene for Zheng Yuqing’s tale, Lu Huaishen’s dwells more heavily on the fact that Lu revives briefly after his death to report that frugality is not valued at all in the afterlife. The homogenization of titles renders stories commensurable, just as it is possible to trade a gourd for a duck. What gets lost in the transaction (and within Su Shi’s memory) is the distinctiveness of “Lu Huaishen,” which subverts the very notion of frugality; what is gained by losing those contradictory details is a category kept intact. Homogenization may also work in the opposite direction, traversing distant categories and overriding the taxonomy per se. Shen Jiji’s ≜᮶△ (ca. 750–97) “Zhenzhong ji” ᵩЁ㿬 (Record of what was inside the pillow) could have easily belonged to the “Dream Travel” (“Mengyou” ໶䘞) section. Renamed after the immortal figure Lü Weng ਖ㖕, who serves only as a framing device, the tale ends up in the category of “Otherworldly Beings” (“Yiren” ⭄Ҏ).28 The standardized title thus motivates a categorical shift regardless of the story’s actual content. 3. The Transcendental Specific: Taiping guangji inspired a train of comprehensive, categorized xiaoshuo collections.29 But the increasingly partitioned book market during the late Ming saw a new trend that was moving away from such comprehensiveness.30 One example is Jianxia zhuan ࡡִ‫ڇ‬ (Biographies of swordsmen), attributed to Wang Shizhen ⥟Ϫ䉲 (1520–90), which isolates as a stand-alone work the Taiping guangji category of “Swashbucklers” (“Haoxia” 䈾ִ).31 An exclusive focus on one particular category became an effective entropy-coping strategy, given the difficulty of delimiting the whole and the unpredictable scope of xiaoshuo. Boiling “Swashbucklers” down to “Swordsmen”—with the excision of those tales featuring no

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swordplay32—entailed a process of refining a general category toward the specific. Mei Dingzuo ṙ哢⼮ (1549–1615) was especially good at fashioning such refined categories as “Chaste Courtesans” and “Talented Ghosts” for specialized anthologies.33 Paradoxically, a narrowing into such specified terrain allowed categorical ordering to again proliferate, as in the Yanyi bian 䈨⭄㎼ (Compendium of the romantic strange), which Wang Shizhen compiled around 1566.34 The “strange” is made singular through the prism of the “romantic,” and under the sign of such singularity (“romantic strange”), the pathway to plural subdivisions (bu 䚼) is opened. But most subdivision headings were reminiscent of Taiping guangji’s comprehensive system of mapping the world—from “Deities” and “Immortals,” to “Consorts” and “Imperial Relatives by Marriage,” to “Dream Travel” and “Righteous Heroes,” to “Prodigies” and “Ghosts”—and hence were not keyed to the singularity of the “romantic strange.”35 From the 1610s on, however, categorical subdivisions were increasingly expressed through the singular, as testified to by Zhang Yingyu’s ᔉឝֲ Dupian xinshu ᴰ俭ᮄ᳌ (The Book of Swindles; 1617) and Feng Menglong’s Qingshi ᚙ৆ (History of emotion; ca. 1628–37), each having twenty-four categorical headings, all of which, respectively, end with pian 俭 (swindle) or start with qing ᚙ (emotion). The specialized topic of each of these compilations thus turns into a transcendental signifier, “a quilting point” (point de capiton, in Jacques Lacan’s parlance) unifying the subdivisions.36 In Feng’s own words: “Myriad beings scatter like loose coins, / A single thing like emotion strings all them up” 㨀⠽ བᬷ䣶ˈϔᚙ⚎㍿㋶. This should now be understood as a statement about information processing and organization.37 To describe the unifying signifier as transcendental is not to argue that the signifier serves as a universal category encompassing all particulars, which would mean overloading it with infinite probabilities and chaos. Rather, it is to argue that the specificity of the signifier elevates the particular to a transcendental mode—that is, an informatic category that becomes completely predictable precisely because the category consists entirely of a single particular. Thus, though totaling just eighty-four anecdotes, The Book of Swindles features three single-entry categories—“Diubao pian” ϳࣙ俭 (A bag-drop swindle), “Guaidai pian” ᢤᐊ俭 (A kidnap swindle), and “Yinpiao pian” ᓩႪ俭 (A procuring swindle)—in each of which the one-of-its-kind story represents a whole category metonymically connected to the singularity of pian.38 4. Circulation as Production: While Ming-Qing vernacular story (huaben 䁅ᴀ) anthologies did not exactly reject specialization of topic, they made use of it only under certain circumstances.39 More remarkably, they saw no need for categorical divisions. A high degree of homogeneity and predictability could be seen in vernacular story anthologies by the early seventeenth century, rendering unnecessary the aforementioned entropy-coping strategies. What this means is that the vernacular story itself is the subgeneric category of xiaoshuo

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best suited to specialized anthologies.40 This is partially owing to “the surprisingly high degree of uniformity” drawn from the imitated storyteller’s mode.41 Crucially, this uniformity featured in the informatic structure of the anthologies themselves. A case in point is the influential Jingu qiguan Ҟস༛㾔 (Marvelous sightings then and now; ca. 1632–35), whose compiler, Baoweng laoren ᢅ⫩ 㗕Ҏ (Urn-embracing elder), extracted 40 out of 159 vernacular stories from across two series of collections, one by Feng Menglong and the other by Ling Mengchu ‫( ߱▯ޠ‬1580–1644), that were collectively known as the Sanyan erpai ϝ㿔Ѡᢡ (Three words and two slaps). The reanthologized pieces are paired, so that within each pair the story titles form a parallel couplet, and across pairs, the stories are matched by motif to their counterparts in an adjacent pair.42 Take Jingu qiguan’s first eight chapters for instance, shown in table 25.1.43 In place of categorical divisions, Jingu qiguan offers a series of correspondences (rhythmic, syntactic, and semantic) within and between the four pairs of titles. Most of these connections (the pairing of chapters 1–2, 3–4, and 7–8 stem directly from the source materials by Feng Menglong, which contain the same pairings. Extending the same principle of parallelism, however, Jingu qiguan creates new connections among what were hitherto entirely separate: not only do stories no. 9 and no. 32 from Jingshi tongyan 䄺Ϫ䗮㿔 (Accessible words to caution the world; 1624) form a new coupling in Jingu qiguan (chapters 5–6), but also the way chapter pairs are juxtaposed makes resonant motifs across different pairs and sources. In this way, the anthology highlights a commensurability across substitutable components from a finite number of combinatory structures. All these observations about how Jingu qiguan mirrors and extends Feng Menglong’s parallelism between adjacent stories into various levels show that the organization of the anthology brings out the modular mode of production underlying seventeenth-century vernacular stories. To return to an earlier point, the textual production of a given work of xiaoshuo and the informatic processing performed by a xiaoshuo anthology cannot be separated, since xiaoshuo is always already a collection circulating things from somewhere else. However, the entropy of xiaoshuo is maximized when a collection, following the composite nature of xiaoshuo, simply collects any and all data. In contrast to this, Jingu qiguan enacts a form of information management that replicates and even supplants the modular production mode of vernacular fiction itself, so that the only vernacular stories possible are those included in anthologies; whatever is not anthologized can no longer exist. In a paradoxical reversal of history, it is not the Sanyan erpai that makes the Jingu qiguan possible but the Jingu qiguan that delimits the possibilities of vernacular fiction. It was thus no accident that the original Sanyan erpai series disappeared from China in the wake of Jingu qiguan until it was rediscovered abroad in the twentieth century.44 Diametrically opposite to late Ming miscellanies, which are the epitome of entropy, vernacular story anthologies are predictability self-fulfilled.

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Table 25.1 First Eight Chapters of Jingu qiguan

Chapter Number

Story Title

Motif

Source

1

ϝᄱᒝ䅧⫶ゟ催ৡ (Three Filial and Property Incorrupt give up property claims, establishing a good reputation)

Xingshi hengyan, story no. 2

2

ܽ㏷Ҹナ㕽ီᄸཇ (Two magistrates compete for righteousness, betrothing an orphan maiden)

Marriage

Xingshi hengyan, story no. 1

3

⒩໻ል儐ᮋᆊ⾕ (Magistrate Teng, with ghostly wit, settles an inheritance case)

Property

Gujin xiaoshuo, story no. 10

4

㻈ᰝ݀㕽䙘ॳ䜡 (Duke Pei of Jin, out of righteousness, restores a former couple)

Marriage

Gujin xiaoshuo, story no. 9

5

ᴰक࿬ᗦ≜ܿᇊㆅ (Du the Tenth Daughter, enraged, sinks the assorted-jewel box)

Courtesan

Jingshi tongyan, story no. 32

6

ᴢ䃿ҭ䝝㤝౛㸏᳌ (Li the Banished Immortal, drunken, drafts a barbarian-deterrent epistle)

Immortal

Jingshi tongyan, story no. 9

7

䊷⊍䚢⤼ऴ㢅儕 (An oil-peddling lad occupies the top courtesan alone)

Courtesan

Xingshi hengyan, story no. 3

8

☠೦঳ᰮ䗶ҭཇ (A gardenwatering elder meets the immortal lady late)

Immortal

Xingshi hengyan, story no. 4

Like other entropy-coping strategies, vernacular story anthologies both deny and acknowledge the predomination of entropy—just as Liu Xiang inaugurates a new organizational strategy that includes unsorted nonnarrative texts right within the sorting system; or as Taiping guangji forges a homogeneous field for infinite categorical expansion, only to override the very taxonomy it effects; or

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as any example of the transcendental specific, quilting together a definite body of texts, is intended not to be exhaustive but to be unabashedly set against an indefinite background of infinite possibilities. Jingu qiguan squares the production of the vernacular story with its system of information management, but that is a far cry from foreclosing the possibilities of xiaoshuo beyond the vernacular story. In this light, the classical tale and the vernacular story should never be seen as two diametrically opposite subgenres of xiaoshuo. Indeed, the term wenyan xiaoshuo (classical tales) does not exist in the premodern lexicon; rather, it is a misnomer for that indefinite background of infinite possibilities— in other words, full-fledged entropy—from which vernacular stories are marked off as a finite and definite field through anthologization.

Notes 1. Li Yu, “Gujin xiaoshi xu” সҞュ৆ᑣ, in Feng Menglong, Gujin tangai (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 2007). Li’s quip that it is because “people loathe talk but love laughter” is a flop, given that talk and laugh (tanxiao 䂛ュ) are always paired. 2. Claude E. Shannon, “A Mathematical Theory of Communication,” Bell System Technical Journal 27, no. 3 (July 1948): 393–99. 3. Pan Jianguo ┬ᓎ೟, Zhongguo gudai xiaoshuo shumu yanjiu Ё೟সҷᇣ䁾᳌Ⳃⷨお (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 2005), 3–51. 4. Hu Yinglin, “Jiuliu xulun xia” б⌕㎦䂪ϟ, in Shaoshi shanfang bicong ᇥᅸቅ᠓ㄚশ (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1958), 29.374. 5. Chang Bide ᯠᕐᕫ, Shuofu kao 䁾䚯㗗 (Taipei: Wenshizhe chubanshe, 1979), 20–21. 6. Christopher P. Atwood, “The Textual History of Tao Zongyi’s Shuofu: Preliminary Results of Stemmatic Research on the Shengwu qinzheng lu,” Sino-Platonic Papers 271 (June 2017): 12–13. 7. Sarah M. Allen, “Narrative Genres,” in The Oxford Handbook of Classical Chinese Literature (1000 BCE–900 CE), ed. Wiebke Denecke, Wai-yee Li, and Xiaofei Tian (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 283. 8. Jack W. Chen, “Introduction,” in Idle Talk: Gossip and Anecdote in Traditional China, Jack W. Chen and David Schaberg, eds. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014), 10. 9. [Taoyuan jushi ḗ⑤ሙ຿], Tangren baijia xiaoshuo ૤Ҏⱒᆊᇣ䁾, rpt. as Tangren baijia duanpian xiaoshuo ૤Ҏⱒᆊⷁ㆛ᇣ䁾 (Beijing: Beijing tushuguan chubanshe, 1998), “Suoji” ⨷㿬 section. 10. Sarah M. Allen, Shifting Stories: History, Gossip, and Lore in Narratives from Tang Dynasty China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2014), 8–9. 11. Huan Tan, Xinjiben Huan Tan Xinlun ᮄ䔃ᴀḧ䄮ᮄ䂪, ed. Zhu Qianzhi ᴅ䃭П (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 2009), 1. 12. William G. Boltz, “The Composite Nature of Early Chinese Texts,” in Text and Ritual in Early China, ed. Martin Kern (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2005), 50–77. 13. See Miyazawa Masayori ᆂ╸ℷ䷚, Sō Zō no shoshiteki kenkyū ᳒᜹ȃ᳌䁠ⱘⷨお (Tokyo: Kyūko Shoin, 2002), 267–68. 14. Zeng Zao, Leishuo (Beijing: Shumu wenxian chubanshe, 1988), 28.466–79. 15. Tao Zongyi 䱊ᅫ‫۔‬, comp., Shuofu sanzhong 䁾䚯ϝ。, 10 vols. (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1988), 115.5265–5309.

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16. Sun Kaidi ᄿὋ㄀, Riben Dongjing suojian Zhongguo xiaoshuo shumu ᮹ᴀᵅҀ᠔㽟Ё ೟ᇣ䁾᳌Ⳃ (Shanghai: Shanghai zazhi chubanshe, 1953), 171–85. 17. Three recompiled editions of Yanju biji from the late Ming have survived, an outstanding figure compared to other miscellanies of its time. 18. This chapter refers to the earliest extant edition of Yanju biji (between the late 1580s and 1620). See Lin Jinyang ᵫ䖥䱑, comp., Yanju biji, 2 vols. (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1990), 1b–104b. 19. Lin Jinyang, Yanju biji, 2.105b–112b. 20. Tu Chia Chi ᴰᆊ⼕, “Liu Xiang bianxie Xinxu Shuoyuan yanjiu” ࡝৥㎼ᆿᮄᑣǃ䁾 㢥ⷨお (PhD diss., Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1995), 15–16, 46–63. 21. Liu Xiang, comp., Shuoyuan jiaozheng 䁾㢥᷵䄝, ed. Xiang Zonglu ৥ᅫ元 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1987), 383–409. 22. Nanxiu Qian, Spirit and Self in Medieval China: The Shih-shuo hsin-yü and Its Legacy (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2001), 191ff. 23. Jack W. Chen, “Knowing Men and Being Known: Gossip and Social Networks in the Shishuo xinyu,” in Chen and Schaberg, Idle Talk, 55–70. 24. Gan Bao’s ᑆᇊ (276?–336) Soushen ji ᧰⼲㿬 in its original format divided its recorded anomalies into four thematic categories. But this practice was discontinued in its sequel, Soushen houji ᧰⼲ᕠ㿬. See Gan Bao and Tao Qian 䱊┯, comps., Xinji Soushen ji Xinji Soushen houji ᮄ䔃᧰⼲㿬 ᮄ䔃᧰⼲ᕠ㿬, ed. Li Jianguo ᴢࡡ೟, 2 vols. (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 2007), 1:21, 75, 165, 257. Modern scholars speculate that the ninthcentury Yiwen ji might have originally grouped its transmitted marvels by themes. See Allen, Shifting Stories, 251–52. 25. Nishio Kazuko 㽓ሒ੠ᄤ, Taihei kōki kenkyū ໾ᑇᒷ㿬ⷨお (Tokyo: Kyūko shoin, 2017), 14–21. 26. Wu Zeng ਇ᳒ (fl. 1127–60), Nenggaizhai manlu 㛑ᬍ唟⓿䣘, 2 vols. (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1979), 3.65. Although Taiping guangji was suppressed shortly after its compilation, Nishio has argued convincingly that Su Shi and others had access to it. See Taihei kōki kenkyū, 46–53. 27. Li Fang ᴢᯝ (925–96) et al., comps., Taiping guangji, 10 vols. (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1961), 165.1202–3, 1204. 28. Li Fang et al., Taiping guangji, 82.526–28. 29. Song Lihua ᅟ㥝ढ, Ming Qing shidai de xiaoshuo chuanbo ᯢ⏙ᯊҷⱘᇣ䇈Ӵ᪁ (Beijing: Zhongguo shehui kexue yuan chubanshe, 2004), 246–54. 30. Qin Chuan ⾺Ꮁ, Zhongguo gudai wenyan xiaoshuo zongji yanjiu Ё೑᭛㿔ᇣ䇈ᘏ䲚 ⷨお (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 2006), 60–77. 31. Li Fang et al., Taiping guangji, 193.1445–196.1473. 32. Luo Liqun 㔫ゟ㕸, “Jianxia zhuan de banben, zuozhe ji qi yiyi” ljࠥմӴNJⱘ⠜ᴀǃ ԰㗙ঞ݊ᛣН, Huanan shifan daxue xuebao (shehui kexue ban) (2014.5): 152–55. 33. E.g., Qingni lianhua ji 䴦⊹㫂㢅㿬 (1600) and Caigui ji ᠡ儐㿬 (1604). 34. Kim Wԁn-hԃi 䞥⑤❭, Qingshi gushi yuanliu kaoshu ᚙ৆ᬙџ⑤⌕㗗䗄 (Nanjing: Fenghuang chubanshe, 2011), 140–41. 35. Wang Shizhen, comp., Yanyi bian (Yangzhou: Jiangsu Guangling guji keyingshe, 1998). 36. See Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book III: The Psychoses, 1955–1956, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Russell Grigg (New York: W. W. Norton, 1993), 74, 268–69. 37. Feng Menglong, comp., Qingshi (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1990), 8. 38. Zhang Yingyu, Dupian xinshu, reprinted in Guben xiaoshuo congkan সᴀᇣ䁾শߞ, series 35, vol. 3 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1991), 1.1137–40, 3.1400–1410, 4.1493–1503;

Premodern Fiction and Fiction Collections

39.

40.

41. 42.

43. 44.

259

see Zhang Yingyu, The Book of Swindles: Selections from a Late Ming Collection, trans. Christopher Rea and Bruce Rusk (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017). The only area where thematic specialization thrives with vernacular story collections is erotica (Bian er chai ᓕ㗠䟉 for male homoeroticism, Yipian qing ϔ⠛ᚙ for illicit affairs, and Fengniu heshang 乼⌕੠ᇮ for Buddhist transgressions). As for other subgenre categories like “recorded anomalies” and “transmitted marvels,” Ji Yun ㋔ᯔ (1724–1805) demanded collections specialize in one or the other, though Hu Yinglin already saw the two categories as “crossing over to each other’s side with particular ease.” See Ji, Yueweicaotang biji 䮅ᖂ㤝ූㄚ㿬 (Beijing: Zhongguo wenlian chuban gongsi, 1996), 18.408; Hu, “Jiuliu xulun xia,” 374. Patrick Hanan, “The Making of The Pearl-Sewn Shirt and The Courtesan’s Jewel Box,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 33 (1973): 136. Zhao Yinshang 䍭↋ᇮ and Wu Xuezhong ਇᅌᖴ, “Jingu qiguan de bianzuan moshi yu bianzuan tese: yi juanwu zhi juanba de sige xiaoshuo gushi wei zhu” Ҟস༛㾔ⱘ㎼ 㑖῵ᓣ㟛㎼㑖⡍㡆˖ҹोѨ㟇ोܿⱘಯ‫ן‬ᇣ䁾ᬙџ⚎Џ, Zhongguo yuwen luncong 52 (2012): 179–202. Baoweng laoren, comp., Jingu qiguan (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1992). See Sun Kaidi’s 1931 article “Sanyan erpai yuanliu kao” ϝ㿔Ѡᢡ⑤⌕㗗, in Cangzhou ji ⒘Ꮂ䲚 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 2009), 106–37.

CHAPTER 26

PREMODERN DRAMA ANTHOLOGIES A R I E L F OX

D

rama in premodern China presented a unique problem of information management. Neither simply document nor event, the late imperial theatrical experience comprised a vast constellation of textual and embodied practices from the costumed productions of professional troupes to the informal gatherings of aria-singing amateurs, from the actor’s hastily copied script to the scholar’s lavishly illustrated woodblock print. These manifold dramatic forms suffused the spaces of everyday life, with temples and teahouses, private gardens and ornate halls, quiet studies and bustling canals all becoming sites for reading, writing, watching, performing, and thinking about drama. In the late Ming, editors increasingly turned to anthological forms to organize these theatrical materials and experiences. The drama anthologies that appeared over the next two centuries resist easy classification: some reprint whole plays, while others only parts; some include dialogue, while others only arias; some are organized by tune, while others by author or theme. But it is precisely in this diversity that one can see the conceptual problem that drama posed to the late imperial reader and writer and the ways in which the anthology provided a space where the nature of drama could be contested and reconstituted. This chapter takes as case studies two of the most influential premodern drama anthologies: Yuanqu xuan ‫ܗ‬᳆䙌 (Selection of Yuan plays; 1615–16) and Zhuibaiqiu ㎈ⱑ㺬 (A patchwork coat of white fur; 1764–74). Despite their divergent approaches, both of these works participate in a similar project to

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select and not merely to collect, and, through the organization of these selections, to construct an argument about what constituted drama in premodern China. Yuanren baizhong qu ‫ܗ‬Ҏⱒ。᳆ (One hundred plays by Yuan authors), later known primarily as Yuanqu xuan, was compiled and published by the prominent literatus-editor Zang Maoxun 㞻សᕾ (1550–1620), with the first half appearing in 1615 and the rest in 1616. The qu ᳆ (songs) in the titles refers not to the arias alone but is invoked as a metonym for a whole dramatic work— in this case, the zaju 䲰࡛ (northern drama), a theatrical genre that had its origins in the Song and its heyday in the Yuan and early Ming but that had largely disappeared from the stage by the late Ming. Zang was one of several high-profile literati of his time who were deeply invested in shaping the discourse around zaju and theorizing its relation to contemporary dramatic forms and performance practices. As the publishing industry flourished over the second half of the sixteenth century, literati-editors in the lower Yangzi region increasingly brought to market expensively-produced collections of plays and songs. Starting with the Gaiding Yuanxian chuanqi ᬍᅮ‫ܗ‬䊶‫ڇ‬༛ (Revised plays by Yuan masters; ca. 1560), for which Li Kaixian ᴢ䭟‫( ܜ‬1502–68) selected and edited sixteen zaju from his vast collection, a number of zaju anthologies appeared that were aimed at a literati readership. However, Zang’s project stood out for its unprecedented scale and editorial care, such that subsequent anthologies printed for literati consumption were both deeply indebted to and in self-conscious dialogue with Yuanqu xuan. Over the course of the late Ming and beyond, Yuanqu xuan remained the most authoritative voice on what a zaju was and what a zaju could do. The Wanli-era edition of the complete Yuanqu xuan prepared by Zang’s Diaochong guan 䲩㷆仼 (House of Carved Insects) opens with two prefaces.1 In the earliest, dated 1615, Zang describes his project thusly: “Recently while passing through Macheng, I borrowed two hundred plays from Liu Yanbo, who said they were copied from the imperial collection and quite different from those currently available in print. I rearranged and edited them, selecting the finest ones and organizing them into ten volumes numerated in Heavenly Stems.”2 Whether or not any of Zang’s plays actually came from this particular source, most of his base texts appear to have descended from Ming palace editions that had already been revised to suit court requirements and conventions.3 Zang was also quite right that the plays in his anthology are different from those already available in print, in part because a number of plays he included do not appear in contemporaneous anthologies but also because Zang rewrote significant portions of his base texts to accord with his prosodic, aesthetic, and thematic ideals.4 Zang immediately follows up this description of his editorial practices with an assertion that his interventions were minimal, defending himself against the

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charges that he “rashly made emendations.” Rather, he stresses the originary integrity and essential Yuan-ness of the anthologized plays, forging an association between the genre and the dynasty that persists to this day.5 In his second preface, written the following year, Zang lambasts the chuanqi ‫ڇ‬༛ (southern drama) of his time, framing his anthology as a kind of archaist intervention that “by giving full expression to the excellence of the Yuan song” might influence what he saw as the musically-deficient compositions of contemporary writers of chuanqi.6 These prefaces are followed by a table of contents listing the titles of the ten plays in each volume; these titles are abbreviated to three or four characters, which has the effect of making the contents quickly scannable and also creates a formal resemblance to the titles of chuanqi plays. Also appended to the front matter is a two-part volume on dramatic theory, consisting of a series of treatises on drama by Yuan and early Ming writers and a section titled Yuanqu lun ‫ܗ‬᳆䂪 (Theory of Yuan drama). In the latter, material from Zhu Quan’s ᴅ⃞ (1378–1448) Taihe zhengyinpu ໾੠ℷ䷇䄰 (Formulary of correct sounds for an era of great peace) is edited and rearranged in a way that draws a clear line from the page to the stage: an enumeration of the tones, pitches, and modes used in zaju composition and a list of eighty-six playwrights and their plays are followed by a list of thirty-six talented performers and a litany of tips for performance. As extensive as these materials are, they do not ultimately make the collection any easier to navigate, since much of the information in this volume cannot be easily mapped onto Yuanqu xuan proper. These lists of modes and authorial output offer no indication of where (or even if) their contents appear in Yuanqu xuan, which is organized neither by modes nor by author.7 But the density and complexity of the paratext is precisely the point: it is intended not to speed up the reader’s movement through the collection but to slow it down by revealing the myriad aspects of zaju composition and performance that demand careful attention. By framing the anthology with a plethora of lists and essays, Zang trains his readers to see the plays as serious literary and musical objects that merit analysis and appreciation. The finely wrought woodblock illustrations that appear before the plays instantiate similar practices of attentiveness. Each play is represented by two or (less frequently) four illustrations that correspond to a line from that play’s timu zhengming 丠Ⳃℷৡ (topic and title), the summarizing verses placed after the play text. These illustrations depict not the action as staged but the imagination of the play’s action projected into the extratheatrical world: Wang Zhaojun on horseback gazes at a river; three Liangshan outlaws walk down a mountain path. In their adherence to the conventions of illustrations used in high-end chuanqi publications, these images not only bring the content of these “Yuan” texts into the visual language of late Ming elite book culture but also render the zaju visibly commensurate with contemporary chuanqi.

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The plays themselves are preceded by their full title and the author’s name, which is placed alongside Zang’s name and his role as collator. Each play is anthologized in its entirety, employing the kinds of typographical modes used in chuanqi plays published for literati readers. Stage directions, including role type designations and indications of whether lines are spoken or sung, are enclosed in brackets and printed in a delicate half-size font; the half-size font is also employed for all spoken lines, while bracketed tune names and sung lyrics appear in full-size type. This typographical clarity contrasts with the busyness of the cheaper drama miscellanies that were flooding the commercial market at the time. Divided into registers crammed with content like songs, jokes, and drinking games, the noisy pages of those popular miscellanies capture the sensorial and social pleasures of theatergoing.8 In Zang’s anthology, the visual ease of the layout presents the play as deserving of its own space both on the page and in the canon. Finally, after each act, Zang has appended a pronunciation guide (yinshi ䷇䞟) for words that have changed in pronunciation since the Yuan, at once highlighting and bridging the distance of the reader from the literary and performance world of the zaju text. This is after all what Zang claimed was the point of his project—to make zaju come alive for the late Ming reader and, in doing so, to enliven late Ming chuanqi. The boom of expensive and expansive drama anthologies that followed the publication of Yuanqu xuan ended with the general decline of literati publishing in the second half of the seventeenth century. When Qian Decang 䣶ᖋ㪐 published the first volume of his Zhuibaiqiu in 1764, his anthology reflected a print landscape that was increasingly oriented away from the rarefied connoisseur and toward the new demands of an expanding reading public. Whereas Yuanqu xuan takes the play as the anthological unit, Zhuibaiqiu anthologizes close to five hundred zhezixi ᡬᄤ᠆ (excerpted scenes). The chuanqi that emerged as the dominant form of elite dramatic literature in the sixteenth century were usually quite long—some with fifty scenes or more—and thus required several days to be performed in full; by the eighteenth century, the practice of excerpting certain scenes for inclusion on a mixed bill had become the predominant mode of theatrical performance. Qian borrows the name (but not the content) of his anthology from an earlier group of collections, locating his work within an established market for anthologies of zhezixi.9 Lest the reader think this is merely a revision of an older collection, appended to the title is the promise that this is the “first volume of a new collection” of “elegant tunes of the moment.”10 Over the next thirteen years, Qian’s Baorentang ᇊҕූ (Hall of Treasuring Benevolence) publishing house released both new single-volume and ever-expanding multivolume editions, until the publication of the twelfth and final volume in 1774. Due to the anthology’s popularity, competing publishing houses rushed to print their own versions; one version of the twelve-volume edition that was published by Sijiaotang ಯᬭූ

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(Hall of the Four Teachings) in 1777 served as the basis for the first modern print edition of the anthology in 1940.11 However, any treatment of Zhuibaiqiu as a singular and settled document elides the constellation of editorial changes that preceded and succeeded this edition as well as those made by the Sijiaotang publishers themselves, who altered both the form and the content of the materials as they had appeared in previous editions published by Baorentang. But even among those versions published by Qian himself, there is no definitive edition that can be called Zhuibaiqiu; rather, like the living tradition it works to convey, Zhuibaiqiu is better conceptualized as a dynamic group of documents in a state of flux. And this was precisely its selling point. While Yuanqu xuan foregrounded its hard, delimiting boundaries of “one hundred plays of the Yuan” (even if that was not exactly what it contained), readers of Zhuibaiqiu were not promised anything other than a patchwork stitched and restitched together. This quality is particularly apparent in the multivolume editions that extend the patchworking from the scenes themselves to the collection as a whole. The six-volume edition published by Baorentang in 1770 opens with a preface by Cheng Daheng ⿟໻㸵 that casts Qian’s sequential publishing—“first one volume, then two, then three, and with this volume reaching a total of six”—as analogous to the compiling of the dynastic histories. And like those histories, Qian’s project provides not just entertainment but moral edification, “delighting the mind and pleasing the eye at the same time that it encourages goodness and condemns evil.”12 If Yuanqu xuan announces its project as the transformation of its readers’ aesthetics, here Zhuibaiqiu is tasked with transforming the readers themselves. The preface is followed by the table of contents for the entire collection. This structure is repeated across the individual volumes, which generally open with their own preface and table of contents. All of the volumes are divided into four sections and share a similar pattern of organization: the first section opens with a kaichang 䭟จ (curtain opener) consisting of a pair of auspicious illustrations and a fumo ࡃ᳿ (master of ceremonies) lyric, and the last section ends with scenes featuring themes of grand reunion or career success. In this way, the volume as a whole rehearses the structure of chuanqi texts as iterated through zhezixi performance: chuanqi plays generally open with fumo introductions and scenes that place the action of the play in a cosmic or imperial context and conclude with scenes of reunion, success, and transcendence; when scenes were extracted as zhezixi for performance, this general structure is maintained through programming. By making the experience of reading the anthology analogous to watching a zhezixi performance, Qian foregrounds the importance of this particular performance context in his orientation toward his anthological subjects. While the vast majority of the scenes that appear in the collection originally derive

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from late Ming and early Qing plays, Qian treats these scenes neither as representative sections of some larger and more complete work nor as outstanding examples of some past golden age of drama. Indeed, the anthology actively refuses such readings by making the collection impossible to navigate by play, by author, or by time period. Though within each section scenes from the same play are grouped together in the order in which they appear in the play, other scenes from the same play may appear in other sections in the same volume or in other volumes. Thus, a reader looking for all of the scenes from, say, Mudan ting ⠵Ѝҁ (The Peony Pavilion) would need to read through the entire table of contents to find where they are scattered throughout the collection. Furthermore, not only are these scenes not arranged chronologically or by author, but also no names of playwrights appear anywhere in the collection, and no attempt is made to periodize any of the materials. For example, nowhere is it indicated that Mudan ting is a play of the Ming, whereas Qingzhong pu ⏙ᖴ䄰 (Register of the pure and loyal) is from the Qing, or that one was written by Tang Xianzu ⑃乃⼪ (1550–1616) and the other by Li Yu ᴢ⥝ (ca. 1610–after 1667). This was not because Qian or his later editors did not know this information. For Zang Maoxun, assigning an author associated with a specific dynastic period legitimated zaju as a literary genre on par with literati-authored chuanqi. For Qian, however, this information was counterproductive to the anthologizing of these scenes qua zhezixi, as self-sufficient documents that attempt to textualize what was happening on the stages of his native Suzhou. In Zhuibaiqiu, scenes that feature the clowning and action-heavy sequences popular with mid-eighteenth-century theatergoers are overrepresented vis-à-vis the chuanqi corpus and include the kinds of expanded dialogue, detailed stage directions, interjections, and dialectal language that may have been inspired by the choices of contemporaneous actors.13 By omitting the authorial claims of literati playwrights, Qian makes space for an understanding of authorship—of both the scene and the canon—that is produced in part by the interplay of actors and audience. Whereas Yuanqu xuan positions its subjects as simultaneously past and prologue—as historical relics that need to be explained and glossed and as models for writers of new kinds of drama—Zhuibaiqiu locates itself in the ever-changing now, with scenes that present themselves to the reader not as settled texts with authors and histories but as events happening synchronically in the present. However, the textual simulation of simultaneity that invokes the experience of a zhezixi performance does not mean that the scenes as they appear in Zhuibaiqiu should be understood as scripts from or records of actual performances. Zhuibaiqiu encodes similar kinds of information (tune names, dialogue, stage directions) in a typographical language (brackets, variable character sizes) similar to that of Yuanqu xuan, and the presentation and thoroughness of this information in both of these anthologies differ dramatically from

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26.1 Page from an edition of Yuanqu xuan held by

26.2 Page from the 1770 Baorentang edition of

the National Library of China showing scenes and a pronunciation guide from Ma Zhiyuan’s 侀㟈䘴 Hangong qiu ⓶ᆂ⾟ (Autumn in the Han palace).

Zhuibaiqiu showing a scene from Muyang ji ⠻㕞 㿬 (The story of the shepherd).

Source: Zang Maoxun, Yuanqu xuan, zaju 䲰࡛, 20b, in Yuanqu xuan yibaizhong, 40 vols. (Beijing: Guojia tushuguan chubanshe, 2010).

Source: Qian Decang, Jiaoding chongjuan Zhuibaiqiu xinji hebian, feng 乼 8a in Ming Qing guben xiqu xuanben congkan (Beijing: Guojia tushuguan chubanshe, 2017), 19:383.

extant scripts used by professional actors. Indeed, Zhuibaiqiu is not a collection of performance texts per se but a text about performance, a text that makes an argument about how readers should orient their understanding of drama around its concurrent lives on the stage. In many ways, Yuanqu xuan and Zhuibaiqiu represent opposing anthological modes: one drawing on a seemingly dead genre, the other from an ever-expanding corpus; one preserving entire plays, the other selecting individual scenes; one teaching its readers to read drama as literature, the other to read it as performance. The fundamental differences in how these anthologies approach their subjects—how they negotiate the conventions and forms of literary textual production and the embodied practices and social spaces of the

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performance event—show the ways in which drama as a genre remained conceptually unsettled throughout the late imperial period. In the years since their publication, both of these anthologies have succeeded in remaking their subjects in their own image: Zang Maoxun’s revisions of earlier Ming revisions continue to serve as the basis for other anthologies of “Yuan” plays while the subsequent popularity of Qian Decang’s anthology among aficionados and actors made good on its promise to deliver the most in-demand scenes of its time. But in recent years, Yuanqu xuan and Zhuibaiqiu have themselves become anthologized subjects, their placement in multivolume anthologies of premodern drama anthologies making visible the larger field that their works sought to define. As the closures brought into being by these anthologies are restored to their contexts and histories, we are left with a vision of premodern Chinese drama no more settled in our time than in theirs.

Notes 1. There are several extant printings of Yuanqu xuan from the Wanli-era blocks, though these versions vary in their arrangement of the paratextual materials. This description is largely based on a version currently held by the National Library of China. A facsimile reprint appears in Zang Maoxun, comp., Yuanqu xuan yibaizhong ‫ܗ‬᳆䙌ϔⱒ。, 40 vols. (Beijing: Guojia tushuguan chubanshe, 2010). 2. Zang Maoxun, Yuanqu xuan yibaizhong, xu ᑣ, 1.6b–7a. 3. See Sun Kaidi ᄿὋ㄀, Yeshiyuan gujin zaju kao гᰃ೦সҞ䲰࡛㗗 (Shanghai: Shangza chubanshe, 1953), 147–53; and Wilt L. Idema, “From Stage Scripts to Closet Drama: Editions of Early Chinese Drama and the Translations of Yuan Zaju,” Journal of Chinese Literature and Culture 3, no. 1 (2016): 175–202. 4. Stephen H. West, “A Study in Appropriation: Zang Maoxun’s Injustice to Dou E,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 111, no. 2 (1991): 283–302. 5. Patricia Sieber notes that Zang’s emphasis on the fundamental Yuan-ness of zaju was unusual, though the fugu ᕽস (archaist) movement had previously popularized the association of certain genres with certain dynasties. Sieber, Theaters of Desire: Authors, Readers, and the Reproduction of Early Chinese Song Drama, 1300–2000 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 105–6. 6. Zang Maoxun, Yuanqu xuan yibaizhong, xu ᑣ, 1.6b–7b, 2.8b. 7. The precise logic of Zang’s organization remains unclear beyond the general front-loading of the more famous plays by the more lauded playwrights and the conventional placement of an emperor-focused play in the first position. 8. Yuming He, Home and the World: Editing the “Glorious Ming” in Woodblock-Printed Books of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2013), 74–139. 9. The title alludes to a line attributed to Shen Dao ᜢࠄ (ca. 350–ca. 275 BCE): “A robe of pure white fur is not made with the pelt of just one fox.” 10. Qian Decang, comp., Shixing yadiao Zhuibaiqiu xinji chubian ᰖ㟜䲙䂓㎈ⱑ㺬ᮄ䲚߱ ㎼, facsimile reprint in Shanben xiqu congkan ୘ᴀ᠆᳆শߞ, ed. Wang Qiugui ⥟⾟Ḗ (Taipei: Taiwan xuesheng shuju, 1987), 72:1.

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11. Wang Xieru ∾ᘞབ, ed., Zhuibaiqiu ㎈ⱑ㺬 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1940). A new critical edition was recently published that incorporates all extant editions. Huang Wanyi 咗ဝ‫۔‬, ed., Huibian jiaozhu Zhuibaiqu ᔭ㎼᷵䀏㎈ⱑ㺬, 5 vols. (Taipei: Taiwan xuesheng shuju, 2017). 12. Qian Decang, comp., Jiaoding chongjuan Zhuibaiqiu xinji hebian ᷵㿖䞡䧿㎈ⱑ㺬ᮄ 䲚ড়㎼, zongxu 㐑ᑣ, 1b–2a, facsimile reprint in Ming Qing guben xiqu xuanben congkan ᯢ⏙ᄸᴀ᠆᳆䙌ᴀশߞ, ed. Chen Zhiyong 䱇ᖫ࢛, vols. 19–25 (Beijing: Guojia tushuguan chubanshe, 2017). 13. Catherine C. Swatek argues that these changes are evidence of a shift away from the more aria-centered performances of the late Ming. Swatek, Peony Pavilion Onstage: Four Centuries in the Career of a Chinese Drama (Ann Arbor: Center for Chinese Studies, University of Michigan, 2012), 128, 131–32.

CHAPTER 27

MODERN LITERARY ANTHOLOGIES C H A R L E S A . L AU G H L I N

A

n appropriate place to begin a discussion of modern literary collections is the single-volume collection, in which an author collects their works, usually representing a single genre, that have been published piecemeal in literary magazines or the literary supplements of newspapers. These are the basic sources of all larger modern collections even if they in some cases are dismantled and the constituent works rearranged chronologically or by genre. The single-volume collection and the serial publications that feed into them reflect the unique situation of literary publication and distribution amidst the industrialization of print culture in the twentieth century (see part III.C on serial publications).

Selected Works: Xuanji 䙌䲚 The next step beyond the author’s own single-volume collection in the compilation of literary works is the xuanji, conventionally “selected works,” which are meant to be representative of an author’s oeuvre at a given point in time. This representative quality is a key theme in all subsequent levels of aggregation, even the quanji ܼ䲚 “complete works.” Selected works of modern authors with the term xuanji in the title began to appear in the early 1930s, and in addition to providing representative literary works in order of genre and chronology, they include an assessment of the place of the author and the author’s works, written

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by the author or another literary or culture figure, and, in some cases, lists of works and biographical chronologies. An author’s selected works, though often published during their lifetime, are not always compiled by the author. This is an important distinction because new principles of categorization and anthological organization begin to appear at the level of xuanji. Since the beginning of the New Culture movement in the mid-1910s, which took Westernization as one of its leading principles, works of literature have come to be categorized according to the four literary divisions used in Europe: poetry, fiction, drama, and essay. In contrast to traditional Chinese literary hierarchies, in which belles lettres writing such as fiction and drama were conventionally beneath consideration—especially for the purpose of anthologization—modern “selected works” anthologies tend to reflect these categories. While the majority of modern writers distinguished themselves principally in one genre—most commonly, prose fiction—they usually published essays and creative works in other genres as well. Despite writers’ embrace of different forms, however, their collections of selected works were commonly genre specific. The publication of a selected works anthology in twentieth-century China was a career milestone for an author. In the absence of literary prizes or other avenues to popular recognition, anthologies had the effect of differentiating a relatively successful and influential subgroup of writers from the rest of the field. At the same time, a publisher would endeavor to bring out a single-author series of selected works only if it was bankable in the literary market. Access to this milestone, in addition to the literary merits of the author’s works, depended a great deal on the author’s literary social network, particularly relationships with editors and patrons.1

Complete Works: Quanji ܼ䲚 In continuity with tradition, a complete collection of an important writer was to be posthumously compiled as a commemoration of and monument to posterity. The character quan, however, rarely appears in the titles of comprehensive single-author collections of premodern times; instead, the term primarily appeared in zongji 㐑䲚 (comprehensive collections), the designation for multiauthored anthologies defined instead by period, genre, region, or other means, such as the Qing imperially sponsored Quan Tangshi ܼ૤䀽 (Complete Tang poetry; see Patterson, chapter 22). And to distinguish such collections, the comprehensive single-author collection was traditionally referred to as a bieji ߹䲚, where bie denotes “individual” or “differentiated.”2 Unlike their premodern counterparts, however, modern complete works also featured supplementary material such as a prefatory statement of editorial principles

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and the history of the project, afterwords, brief explanatory footnotes or endnotes, a chronological biography of the author, a complete list of publications, and one or more indices. The comprehensive scope implied by the term quan represented a different aim than that of the representative principles underlying the xuanji and zongji. Of course, in practice the actual coverage of any project was necessarily limited: no one would expect a quanji to include every single piece of writing from its author. Comprehensiveness was complicated by a number of common factors such as the availability of materials. War and revolution throughout the twentieth century resulted in destruction and loss, although texts could survive in obscurity (oftentimes because of an undeciphered pen name or their appearance in a small-run publication) and later be rediscovered and republished in a supplemental volume or new edition of a quanji. A second complicating factor was the existence of substantial nonliterary material, particularly for authors who were also scientists or scholars. For example, Guo Moruo’s 䛁≿㢹 (1892–1978) quanji, published in 1982, included literary works, historical studies, and archeological studies; it was thus edited by three separate authorities and copublished by Renmin wenxue chubanshe Ҏ⇥᭛ᄺߎ⠜⼒ (People’s Literature Publishing House), Renmin chubanshe Ҏ⇥ߎ⠜⼒ (People’s Publishing House), and Kexue chubanshe ⾥ᄺߎ⠜⼒ (Science Press). The term quanji can also be applied to collections of primarily nonliterary documents of historical figures such as Li Dazhao ᴢ໻䞫 (1889–1927), Yuan Shikai 㹕Ϫ߅ (1859–1916), and Sun Yat-sen ᄿ䘌ҭ (Sun Zhongshan; 1866–1925), not to mention collected translations of influential foreign figures like Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin. The real milestone in the history of the modern Chinese quanji is that of Lu Xun 元䖙 (1881–1936; pseudonym of Zhou Shuren ਼‍Ҏ), widely acknowledged as one of the greatest authors of the modern period. This, the first proper modern quanji, was initially published in twenty volumes in 1938, only two years after the author’s death. It has since been the most frequently republished among quanji of modern authors, with no fewer than ten separate editions (most recently in 2009), including two Japanese editions.3 Lu Xun had started working on a bieji of his own works before his death but did not complete it. Under the direction of his widow, Xu Guangping 䀅ᒷᑇ (1898–1968), his notes became an important reference for the 1938 edition of his complete works.4 That collection is divided into three major categories: creative works, academic writings, and translations (subsequent editions, except the one or two that modeled themselves on this first edition, do not follow this structure). What most editions have in common, though, are sections on fiction, poetry, essays and drama, theory, and, finally, other kinds of writing, each organized chronologically. At the same time, across these editions one sees changing ideas about what content is appropriate to a modern quanji. One of the most remarkable characteristics of

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these editions is that only two (1938 and 2005) include Lu Xun’s translations, and his diaries were not included until the definitive 1981 edition. The story of the Lu Xun quanji 元䖙ܼ䲚 (Lu Xun’s collected works) is the story of not only the author and his estate but also the broader literary community’s efforts to forge a template for all single-author complete works subsequently compiled during the twentieth century. Looking at this history, a remarkable fact emerges: after Lu Xun’s in 1938, not a single further quanji of a modern author was published until 1980, when quanji for major figures from Guo Moruo to Mao Dun 㣙Ⳓ (1896–1981; pseudonym of Shen Dehong ≜ᖋ匏) and Lao She 㗕㟡 (1899–1966; pseudonym of Shu Qingchun 㟦ᝊ᯹) began to appear.5 One reason is that most of the canonic authors of the Republican period passed away only in the latter half of the twentieth century—that is, during the early years of China’s reform and opening up (gaige kaifang ᬍ䴽 ᓔᬒ) period. A more complex set of reasons arises from how the compilation of quanji—sometimes reaching dozens of volumes—relied on major collective efforts involving the emergent academic community, the author’s family, and still-living writers of the same period, something that was possible only with the stabilization of academic institutions in the post-Mao era. Yet while these kinds of collections became an essential organizing principle of modern literary scholarship literature in the new era on the mainland, a search of major authors indicates that the term quanji is rarely (if ever) used in titles of literary anthological collections in Taiwan and Hong Kong.

Literary Compendia: Zhongguo xinwenxue daxi Ё೟ᮄ᭛ᅌ໻֖ The publication of xuanji and quanji touches on questions of canon formation in modern Chinese literature. When xuanji are published in a planned series (congshu শ᳌ or wenku ᭛ᑿ; see Culp, chapter 54), which has usually been limited to a dozen or so of the most-prominent authors, they begin to outline a broader literary field, though they do not make direct claims as to the constitution of the modern Chinese literary canon. This brings up an entirely different kind of compilation, one that, historically speaking, has a more direct role in shaping literary history. As noted previously, by the early 1930s, there was an observable trend of compilation and consolidation of the literary scene with the publication of many important selected works along with some multiauthor collections of modern literature by genre, region, or literary group. By 1935, one young editor, Zhao Jiabi 䍭ᆊ⩻ (1908–97), saw an opportunity to try to encapsulate New Literature (xinwenxue ᮄ᭛ᅌ) for the first time, thus creating the first influential zongji of modern Chinese literature: what one scholar has compared to the Wenxuan in its importance for literary history.6 Zhao Jiabi’s idea was to publish a multivolume work that would document the achievements of

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modern Chinese literature up to that point in time—this would be the Zhongguo xinwenxue daxi Ё೟ᮄ᭛ᅌ໻֖ (Compendium of New Chinese Literature).7 Zhao himself claimed that his adoption of the term daxi was inspired by its frequent use in modern Japan (taikei in Japanese) for multiauthor compilations, and he deployed it to avoid traditional terms that he saw as inadequate to a comprehensive compilation of this scope and ambition. Zhao was able to recruit the most-important authors and scholars of literature of his time to contribute to this project, including Hu Shi 㚵䘽 (1891–1962), Lu Xun, Zheng Zhenduo 䜁ᤃ䨌 (1898–1958), Mao Dun, Zhu Ziqing ᴅ㞾⏙ (1898–1948), Yu Dafu 䚕䘨໿ (1896–1945), Ah Ying 䰓㣅 (1900–1977), and Hong Shen ⋾⏅ (1894–1955), so that it could be credited collectively to the “literary scene” as much as to Zhao himself. It was agreed as an editorial principle that the contents of the Daxi would be limited to those published in “the first ten years of the New Literature,” beginning at the dawn of the New Culture movement in 1917 and ending with the split of the Communist and Nationalist Parties in 1927. The collection is organized by the four major literary genres (fiction, essays, drama, and poetry, in that order) but also includes volumes on literary debates, general treatises on culture, and historical materials (shiliao ৆᭭). The two volumes of polemical essays precede the volumes of literary works, emphasizing how New Literature had emerged out of vigorous cultural and literary debates. The editorial strategy was to assign each genre to one to three prominent authors who were associated with that genre and who represented either prominent literary societies or geographic regions. Thus, the three volumes of fiction were edited by Mao Dun, Lu Xun, and Zheng Boqi 䜁ԃ༛ (1895–1979), respectively representing contributions from the Literary Research Association ᭛ᄺⷨ お᳗, independents and other smaller groups, and the Creation Society ߯䗴⼒. The two volumes of essays were edited by Zhou Zuoren ਼԰Ҏ (1885–1967) and Yu Dafu, who represented northern and southern authors. Within each genre, works were divided by author, with the author’s importance signaled by the number of works included. Finally, each editor wrote a ten-thousand-character introductory essay to his assigned volume, giving a historical overview of the genre and its place in the emergence of the New Culture movement. At the end of the collection, a volume of historical materials puts the collection on a whole different footing than previous literary collections. By including bibliographies of literary works, scholarship and criticism, tables of contents of major literary journals (see Detwyler, chapter 51), standardized biographies of all 149 authors included in the other volumes, and indices by author name and literary society, this volume allowed the collection’s extensive information to be accessed in different ways (for example, by author as opposed to by genre), making the Zhongguo xinwenxue daxi an extraordinarily useful and flexible resource for academic research on modern Chinese literature.

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Ah Ying, who edited the volume of historical materials, can be said to have helped pioneer the modern Chinese literary reference book. The daxi form not only was extended both to subsequent periods of modern Chinese literary history and back to the period before New Literature8 but also was applied to other cultural taxonomic models, such as wenyi ᭛㮱 (arts and literature), which added children’s literature, folk literature, ethnic minority literature, oral performing arts, television, music, fine art, calligraphy, photography, dance, and acrobatics to the four primary genres. By focusing on a clearly demarcated historical period, the daxi combined the representative principle of the xuanji with the serial quality of a congshu. Compared to the overarching comprehensiveness of literary quanji, the salient characteristic of the daxi is its selectivity and representativeness, which would make it the basis for literary histories and the formation of a canon of modern Chinese literature. From the use of preeminent literary authors of the time to select and contextualize the actual works, to their extended prefaces in which they situate their selected authors in relation to the scene as a whole, to the limited number of authors and literary works included, the very design of the daxi demanded the creation and justification of a hierarchy of literary importance. This hierarchy also excluded thriving forms of popular and traditional-style literary creativity of the time. The original Daxi’s approach to literary collection also reveals substantial changes in the publishing industry. The industrialized print culture that emerged in China since the late nineteenth century, following the rise of technologies of mass production and distribution along with the new forms and practices that such technologies made possible (see part III.C on serial publications), made it easier for an author to gain a large readership and critical attention in a short period of time. Such conditions also made possible the formation of a professional literary community that could aid in the compilation and publication of important multiauthor anthologies, including reference tools for their navigation. The modern publisher played a crucial role in this environment by designing and promoting the production of single-volume collections and selected works alongside more ephemeral publication forms such as journals and newspapers.

Conclusion Before New Literature became a central concern, both the Shangwu yinshuguan ଚࢭॄ᳌仼 (Commercial Press) and Zhonghua shuju Ё㧃᳌ሔ (China Books) had fought over the educational curriculum market, producing hundreds of textbooks for rapidly modernizing elementary and middle schools.9 The sudden emergence of the New Culture movement created a new battleground for the emerging publishing industry, one focused on the New

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Literature. These conditions allowed the evolution of a new literary scene, where like-minded cliques or groups of authors could establish new networks, creating a generalized sense of an autonomous literary community and of literary authorship as a modern, professional career that had not existed before.10 The successive emergence of literary serial publications, single-volume collections, multiauthor selected works, and complete works represents stages of importance and recognition in the market; given the potential market appeal of collections that went beyond the single author, it was only a matter of time before publishers began to produce these comprehensive works. Moreover, the new kinds of supplementary material featured in xuanji, quanji, and especially daxi, including both editorial assessments and reference materials, paved the way for the historiography of New Literature that began to emerge in the 1930s.11 One can see a will to organize and cross-reference the information that had come into existence in the first decades of the twentieth century in Ah Ying’s final volume of historical materials for the Daxi. Of course, modern serial publications with their tables of contents had already set the stage for Ah Ying’s manipulation and analysis of literary texts as cultural historical objects, transforming them into bibliographies and indices. Still, if the progression from authorial single-volume collections to xuanji and quanji marked a progression toward comprehensiveness, it is rather the more selective principle of representativeness, evinced mainly in the xuanji and the daxi, that mattered more, as it shaped the subsequent development of modern literature and gradually established a modern canon.

Notes 1. Michel Hockx, “Playing the Field: Aspects of Literary Life in 1920s China,” in The Literary Field of Twentieth-Century China, ed. Michel Hockx (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1999), 61–79. 2. Xiaofei Tian, “Collections,” in The Oxford Handbook of Classical Chinese Literature (1000 BCE-900 CE), ed. Wiebke Denecke, Wai-yee Li, and Xiaofei Tian (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 219–34. 3. Xu Pengxu ᕤ吣㒾, ed., Zhongguo xiandai wenxue wenxianxue yanjiu Ё೑⦄ҷ᭛ᄺ ᭛⤂ᄺⷨお (Beijing: Zhongguo shehui kexue chubanshe, 2014), 443–45, e-book. 4. Lu Xun, Lu Xun quanji, ed. Lu Xun xiansheng jinian weiyuanhui 元䖙‫⫳ܜ‬㋔ᗉྨવ ᳗, 20 vols. (Shanghai: Lu Xun quanji chubanshe, 1938). 5. Mao Dun, Mao Dun quanji ⶯Ⳓܼ䲚, 41 vols. (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1984–2001); Lao She, Lao She quanji 㗕㟡ܼ䲚, 19 vols. (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1999). 6. Xu, Zhongguo xiandai wenxue wenxianxue yanjiu, 465. On this episode and its importance to the canonization of modern Chinese literature, see Lydia H. Liu, Translingual Practice: Literature, National Culture, and Translated Modernity; China, 1900–1937 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), 214–38.

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7. Zhao Jiabi, ed., Zhongguo xinwenxue daxi, 10 vols. (Shanghai: Liangyou tushu yinshua gongsi, 1935–36). 8. Ma Xueliang 偀ᄺ㡃 et al., eds., Zhongguo jindai wenxue daxi, 1840–1919 Ё೑䖥ҷ᭛ ᄺ໻㋏ˈ1840–1919, 30 vols. (Shanghai: Shanghai shudian, 1990). 9. Christopher A. Reed, Gutenberg in Shanghai: Chinese Print Capitalism, 1876–1937 (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2004). 10. Michel Hockx and Kirk A. Denton, eds., Literary Societies of Republican China (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2008). 11. Yingjin Zhang, “The Institutionalization of Modern Literary History in China, 1922– 1980,” Modern China 20, no. 3 (1994): 347–77.

CHAPTER 28

MODERN DRAMA SCRIPT ANTHOLOGIES TA R RY N L I-M I N C H U N

T

he seismic social, political, and economic changes of the late Qing and Republican era brought concomitant shifts in literary genre, composition, and readership as well as in the cultural technologies that structured the dissemination of texts. Drama proved no exception, as Chinese artists and intellectuals encountered Shakespeare, European opera, realism, and modernism during travels abroad and in translation. These experiences provoked debates over both the value of the Chinese tradition and the method to create a properly modern drama that could simultaneously serve political and aesthetic goals. Liang Qichao ṕଳ䍙 (1873–1929), for instance, advocated a reform of traditional opera that involved creating new, topical content for the stage and turning its primary purpose from entertainment to political galvanization. Hu Shi 㚵䘽 (1891–1962) focused on form as well as content and function and went so far as to suggest the complete replacement of operatic theater with a new genre based on realist plays.1 Dramatist Hong Shen ⋾⏅ (1894–1955)—considered one of the founding fathers of huaju 䁅࡛ (spoken drama)—was also concerned with the entire trifecta of content, form, and function, as well as with legitimizing drama as a literary genre on par with xiaoshuo and even poetry.2 Each of the three also penned and published plays, adding to a much greater corpus of new work written for xiqu ᠆᳆ (opera) and for new genres such as huaju. As urban audiences grew, their appetite for novelty provided impetus for actors and theater entrepreneurs to create new works and publish scripts for popular xiqu forms that had not previously belonged to the realm of the

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literary. Not all performed plays were published, but the concurrent growth of the publishing industry produced many such scripts as well as foreign drama in translation and adaptation. The first authors of huaju scripts were met with skeptical paying audiences but found ample opportunities to publish their work in journals and series edited by May Fourth intellectuals and to have their plays performed by eager amateur groups. And thanks to scholars like Wang Guowei ⥟೟㎁ (1877–1927), late imperial zaju 䲰࡛ (variety plays—i.e., northern drama) and chuanqi ‫ڇ‬༛ (transmitted marvels—i.e., southern drama) took on new significance in relation to the classical literary canon and therefore became worthy of reprinting.3 The changes wrought by the late Qing encounter with the West and rapid modernization thus produced not only the crisis of dramatic content, form, and function that is all too familiar from the standard narrative of modern Chinese literary history but also a crisis of information management. The surfeit of documents—old plays, new plays, and foreign plays as well as practical, technical, and theoretical treatises—wanted for systems that could organize, frame, and transmit them to both theater practitioners and a reading public. And while plays could be, and often were, printed as stand-alone texts or in journals and newspapers, multiplay collections—anthologies, primarily, but also multivolume series—were a key mode of script publication during the formative years of modern Chinese drama. Examining such volumes from the perspective of literary information in turn finds a wide variation in form and function that challenges the stability of the anthology as a concept and demonstrates how the modern drama script anthology took shape as a kind of information technology. Certainly, the idea of compiling dramatic texts was far from new. Collections such as Zang Maoxun’s 㞻សᕾ (1550–1620) Yuanqu xuan ‫ܗ‬᳆䙌 (Selection of Yuan plays) and Mao Jin’s ↯ᰟ (1599–1659) Liushizhong qu ݁क。᳆ (Sixty plays) had long since established the role of the anthology and its literatus-editor in shaping the canon of dramatic literature (see Fox, chapter 26) while the inclusion of plays in larger works such as the Yongle dadian ∌ῖ໻‫( ݌‬Great compendium of the Yongle reign) pointed toward political investment in both the organizing of literary information and the placement of drama within that larger project (see Allen, chapter 31). But what constituted a distinctly modern anthology or made a document a modern script worthy of anthologizing? Indeed, modern drama anthologies might even be rethought on the level of the individual document, as the term script (juben ࡛ᴀ or jiaoben 㝇ᴀ) is a loan word and bespeaks a mode of organizing actors’ lines and stage directions different from that of classical drama. Within anthologies, how were such “modern” documents then selected, organized, and formatted? To answer this question, one might turn to an analysis of bibliographical information for texts published during the Republican era (see Detwyler,

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chapter 51). Recovering all the relevant texts is now impossible, but recent bibliographical projects and digitization—themselves forms of information management—at least offer a representative sample. In fact, bibliographies such as the literature volume of the Minguo shiqi zongshumu ⇥೑ᯊᳳᘏкⳂ (Complete bibliography of the Republican period), which covers 1911–49, and the drama volume of the more recent Zhongguo xiandai wenxue zongshumu Ё೑⦄ҷ᭛ᄺᘏкⳂ (Complete bibliography of modern Chinese literature), which covers 1920–49, prove far more extensive than similar texts published during the Republican era. In some cases, the making of a modern drama anthology involved the assertion of new editorial control over old texts. A number of the documents included in premodern anthologies were reprinted during the Republican era, in formats ranging from shorter collections of select plays to a “complete” anthology of Yuan dynasty zaju, the eight-volume Yuanren zaju quanji ‫ܗ‬Ҏ 䲰࡛ܼ䲚 (Complete anthology of zaju by Yuan authors) compiled by Lu Jiye 㯚‫ݔ‬䞢 (1905–51). The various anthologies suggest differing selection principles at work; some, like the Yuanren zaju quanji, aim for completeness, while others, such as Ming zaju xuan ᯢ䲰࡛䙌 (1937; also by Lu Jiye) and Yuanqu jinghua ‫ܗ‬᳆㦕㧃 (Best of Yuan drama), were slimmer volumes that seem more concerned with providing (perhaps unfamiliar) readers with a digestible, representative group of plays. The presence of seemingly opposite selection principles, even among volumes with the same editor, points to a desire both to preserve a vast amount of literary information in its entirety and to exercise control over emblematic texts. At the same time, some modern editions mirrored the style of earlier woodblock-print anthologies, and influential collections such as Yuanqu xuan were reprinted in their entirety, suggesting that respect for the format and contents of the received canon coexisted alongside comprehensiveness and control. If reprinting classical zaju and chuanqi texts in new compilations and formats for modern readers might be considered a modernization, for other genres the very act of printing scripts was itself a modernizing move. Jingju Ҁ࡛ (Peking opera) offers one such example: prior to the twentieth century, the dialogue, arias, and conventional gestures for a given play were largely transmitted from teacher to student. When written down, play texts most often took the form of manuscripts rather than print. This began to shift in the late nineteenth century, and the first decades of the twentieth saw the first widely popular mass-market printing of a jingju anthology, the Xikao ᠆㗗 (Research into plays). Containing over five hundred scripts, Xikao was first published in forty installments between 1912 and 1925 (and later reprinted in various configurations) and included scripts (primarily but not exclusively jingju), introductory essays to plays, and photographs of popular actors. In his work on the textualization of jingju, David L. Rolston notes that although the use of the term

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kao was related to a drive to elevate the status of indigenous theater—similar to Wang Guowei’s arguments for proper recognition of zaju and other theatrical forms as literature—there was no clear editorial plan to the Xikao. Rather, the contents of the installments changed over time to reflect popular interest in new types of plays (e.g., serial plays) and rising stars such as Mei Lanfang ṙ㰁㢇 (1894–1961).4 As a collection of scripts, it therefore was more a reflection of popular taste than a systematic attempt to organize those documents. In the realm of huaju, both Chinese and foreign, the modern drama anthology was much more likely to mark itself as such with the term new (xin ᮄ) or modern (jindai 䖥ҷ or xiandai ⧒ҷ) in its title. Many of the first anthologies to do so were compilations of foreign scripts in translation, such as the 1924 three-volume Xiandai dumuju ⧒ҷ⤼ᐩ࡛ (Modern one-acts), the 1927 Jindai Ou-Mei dumuju xuan 䖥ҷℤ㕢⤼ᐩ࡛䲚 (Contemporary Euro-American one-acts), and the 1929 Xiandai duanju yicong ⧒ҷⷁ࡛䅃শ (Modern short drama in translation). The selection of texts in these foreign drama anthologies is eclectic and at times differs wildly from the standard canon of modern Euro-American drama. One such case is the Xiandai duanju yicong, which was a translation of a 1920 anthology entitled Short Plays by Representative Authors and edited by Alice M. Smith, “Teacher of English, Franklin Junior High School, Minneapolis, Minnesota.” Aside from Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941), Anton Chekhov (1860–1904), and perhaps Lady Augusta Gregory (1852–1932), none of the other playwrights included can be considered canonical, and even the Chekhov play is one of his lesser-known works. While only one example, this curious case demonstrates the editorial challenge of mediating a vast foreign corpus and disrupts the idea of a clear connection between anthology and canon. Anthologies of huaju by Chinese playwrights became more common beginning in the 1930s, with volumes such as the 1933 Xiandai Zhongguo xiju xuan ⧒ҷЁ೟᠆࡛䙌 (Selections of modern Chinese drama), the 1934 Xiandai xiju xuan ⧒ҷ᠆࡛䙌 (Selections of modern drama), and the first volume of the 1939 Xiandai zuijia juxuan ⧒ҷ᳔Շ࡛䙌 (Best of modern drama), all from publishers based in Shanghai. Of such anthologies, the most famous is undoubtedly the drama volume of the Zhongguo xinwenxue daxi Ё೟ᮄ ᭛ᅌ໻㋏ (Compendium of New Literature in China), edited by Hong Shen and first printed in 1935 (see Laughlin, chapter 27). The Daxi drama volume includes only eighteen plays, but it is prefaced with a hundred-page introduction that contextualizes modern drama in relation to politics, literary movements, and theater reform. At more than three times the length of any of the other Daxi introductions, the sheer page count of Hong’s document makes a bid for the importance of drama among other modern literary genres. It also strongly signals that the volume is meant to be read, as do the overall length of 426 pages and the format of the documents included therein. The characters

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are printed vertically in a small size relative to a small page (21 cm), and the format echoes that of many drama journals by arranging the text of each page horizontally in two registers. As in other volumes of the Daxi, the table of contents is organized by author, with the name of the playwright in a larger font than the title of each corresponding play. Here the ordering of the playwrights and plays is worth noting: the authors and plays are not listed chronologically but instead are implicitly grouped by their approach to dramatic composition and theatrical production, with pride of place going to those whom Hong saw as having made the greatest contributions to the political and literary reform of drama. These four volumes seem to do exactly what one would expect an anthology to do: make an evaluative selection of texts from a larger corpus with an eye to literary canonization. They are further unremarkable for the consistency of the playwrights and even texts included therein. All, for instance, include plays by Xiong Foxi ❞ԯ㽓 (1900–1965), Ouyang Yuqian ℤ䱑ќ‫( ׽‬Ouyang Liyuan ℤ䱑ゟ㹕; 1899–1962), Tian Han ⬄⓶ (Tian Shouchang ⬄໑ᯠ; 1898–1968), and Ding Xilin ϕ㽓ᵫ (Ding Xielin ϕ⟂ᵫ; 1893–1974); two of the four also include Zheng Boqi 䜁ԃ༛ (Zheng Longjin 䜁䱚䄍; 1895–1979), Guo Moruo 䛁≿㢹 (1892–1978), and Hong Shen. These playwrights would go on to become well-known figures in modern drama history, and their plays were frequently included in subsequent anthologies, due at least in part to their inclusion in influential collections like the Daxi. Examined through the retrospective lens of literary history, with a focus on content, these anthologies therefore would seem only to confirm the expected relationship among anthology, canon, and corpus. Moreover, as Dietrich Tschanz has noted, they contribute to a literary-historical narrative that privileges May Fourth intellectuals’ version of events—and one that Lydia Liu in her work on the Daxi has rightly pointed to as a cliché.5 If one looks beyond volumes that are explicitly marked as modern anthologies, however, one finds that a more complex story about literary history is told in the way play scripts are organized and framed. The drama volume of the Zhongguo xiandai wenxue zongshumu, for instance, lists 1,457 titles published between 1920 and 1949, of which 444 are multiplay volumes. Many of these bear a general, poetic title or the name of only one of the plays that they include. Others that are clearly marked as anthologies, but not as new or modern, are typically titled by author, function, or topical theme. The playwrights who received eponymous anthologies overlapped to a large extent, but not entirely, with those included in the canonizing anthologies. Alongside Tian Han, Ding Xilin, Hong Shen, Guo Moruo, and Xiong Foxi, playwrights such as Song Chunfang ᅟ᯹㟿 (1892–1938), Li Jianwu ᴢ‫ع‬਒ (1906–82), Yu Shangyuan ԭϞ≙ (1897–1970), and Dong Meikan 㨷↣៵ (1907–80) also published collections of their plays. The emphasis on playwrights in both the

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Daxi and these anthologies suggests that at least for modern drama scripts, the evolving canon was a canon of authors as much as it was a canon of texts. If single-play volumes that were part of series (ji, congkan, or congshu) are included, the number of “anthologies” rises even higher (on such publications, see Son, chapter 53, and Culp, chapter 54). Examples of this include single-author series by playwrights such as Zheng Boqi, Li Jianwu, Cao Yu ᳍⾎ (Wan Jiabao 㨀ᆊᇊ; 1910–96), and Wu Zuguang ਇ⼪‫( ܝ‬1917–2003), which continue the trend of authorial focus, and multiauthor series such as the Juben congkan ࡛ᴀশߞ (Play script series) published by Shanghai-based Shijie shuju Ϫ ⬠᳌ሔ (World Book Company) between 1944 and 1955. Many anthologies were further nested within larger series. Of the anthologies discussed previously, the Xiandai dumuju was part of the Dongfang wenku ᵅᮍ᭛ᑿ (Eastern repository), Xiandai Zhongguo xiju xuan was published in Wenxue jiben congkan ᭛ ᅌ෎ᴀশߞ (Basic literature series), and Xiandai xiju xuan was included in Zhongxue Guoyu buchong duben Ёᅌ೟䁲㺰‫ܙ‬䅔ᴀ (Supplementary reading for middle school Mandarin). The framing of these series parallels the place of the Daxi drama volume within the larger compendium and indicates the frequent presence of epistemological projects structuring the publication of play scripts. The organization of play scripts in relation to each other and the potential formation of a specifically dramatic canon therefore seem to have been less important than placing scripts in relation to larger cultural categories (modern literature) and broader social functions (education). The utilitarian nature of the modern drama anthology takes even clearer primacy in the body of anthologies titled by their primary use, such as xuanchuan ᅷ‫( ڇ‬propaganda), or theme, such as kangzhan ᡫ᠄ (War of Resistance) or jiuguo ᬥ೟ (national salvation). In such anthologies, a central selection principle was not which plays were best or most representative but rather which were most efficacious. In the two-volume Kangzhan dumuju xuan ᡫ᠄⤼ᐩ࡛䙌 (Selected one-acts of War of Resistance) published in 1937 and 1938, for example, editor Ah Ying 䰓㣅 (Qian Xingcun 䣶ᴣ䙼; 1900–1977) prefaces the first volume by laying out specific practical intentions for the volumes: he has selected plays from among topical one-acts published in newspapers and journals after the Battle of Shanghai for the use of theater troupes and schools, with editorial criteria emphasizing variety, staging requirements, and the effectiveness of performance. The preface to the second volume reiterates these basic principles while also noting an added emphasis on street theater to respond to the “objective circumstances of performance.” An earlier anthology, the Kang Ri jiuguo xijuji ᡫ᮹ᬥ೟᠆࡛䲚 (Anti-Japanese national salvation drama anthology), printed by the KMT Hebei Province Party Affairs Committee in 1933, offers an even stronger case for pure function and contrasts with the author-driven canon discussed earlier: its table of contents does not even list playwrights alongside play titles, and the volume’s afterword notes that some plays were

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reproduced without the permission of the playwright. In both, format follows function, with actors’ lines printed in large characters and with only ten to twelve lines of dialogue per page, making the scripts easy to read or read aloud. These topical and functional anthologies are further significant because they suggest an alternative canon to the one established by the Daxi—but one that is less concerned with canonization per se. Far more important is the ability to politically galvanize audiences. This fundamentally challenges the concept of the anthology as a collection of texts to be read that contributes to the establishment of a literary canon as well as of the literary nature of texts themselves. Indeed, the anthology is in such cases a collection of documents to be used, with a much shorter half-life than one might expect. In this, it functions as a system for the dissemination of information on current affairs—with a political spin— and thus embodies an early form of modern information technology.

Notes 1. Hu Shi 㚵䘽, “Wenxue jinhua gainian yu xiju gailiang” ᭛ᅌ䘆࣪㾔ᗉ㟛᠆࡛ᬍ㡃, Xin Qingnian ᮄ䴦ᑈ 5, no. 4 (1918): 308–21. 2. Hong Shen ⋾⏅, “Daoyan” ᇢ㿔, in Xiju juan ᠆࡛ो, ed. Hong Shen, vol. 9, in Zhongguo xinwenxue daxi Ё೟ᮄ᭛ᅌ໻᠆, ed. Zhao Jiabi 䍭ᆊ⩻ (Shanghai: Liangyou tushu yinshua gongsi, 1935), 52. 3. See Wang Guowei, “Song Yuan xiqu shi” ᅟ‫᠆ܗ‬᳆৆, first published in serial in Dongfang zazhi ᵅᮍ䲰䁠 from 1913 to 1914 and later in book form by Shangwu yinshuguan in 1930. 4. David L. Rolston, Inscribing Jingju/Peking Opera: Textualization and Performance, Authorship and Censorship of the “National Drama” of China from the Late Qing to the Present (Leiden: Brill, forthcoming). 5. Dietrich Tschanz, “The New Drama Before the New Drama: Drama Journals and Drama Reform in Shanghai Before the May Fourth Movement,” Theatre InSight 10, no. 1 (Spring 1999): 49; Lydia H. Liu, Translingual Practice: Literature, National Culture, and Translated Modernity; China, 1900–1937 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), 227.

CHAPTER 29

TEXTBOOK ANTHOLOGIES M ICH A E L GIBBS HI L L

A

t the heart of modern debates about language reform lies the question of whether written Chinese can convey the information that makes up the building blocks of modern knowledge, which in turn are needed to form a modern state and people. Textbook anthologies, which provide selections of model writings for students above the elementaryschool level, played a decisive role in attempts both to broaden the reach of Classical Chinese in the late Qing period and to introduce and stabilize the written vernacular, known variously as baihua ⱑ䁅, baihuawen ⱑ䁅᭛, or yutiwen 䁲储᭛, after its use was mandated in primary schools by the Republic of China Ministry of Education in 1920. All of the textbook anthologies discussed here teach guowen ೟᭛, which can be translated as the “national language” or “national literature.”1 Textbook anthologies inherited and actively engaged in an ideological role that had been played by xuanben 䙌ᴀ anthologies (which selected literary works from a larger corpus) at least since the Song dynasty, when they served both as study aids for the imperial examinations and as tools for establishing and reproducing the intellectual orthodoxies of the moment. As with the primary-school textbooks that were intended to bring students to basic literacy, textbook anthologies directed toward students in lower and upper middle schools formed an important part of the publishing business through the late nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth. Some twentieth-century textbook anthologies were heavily indebted to earlier xuanben, especially for the unabashed intellectual partisanship put on display in their choices of model texts. The ten-volume Zhongxue guowen duben

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Ёᅌ೟᭛䅔ᴀ (National language readers for middle schools; 1908), edited by cultural impresario Lin Shu ᵫ㋧ (1852–1924) for the Commercial Press (Shangwu yinshuguan ଚࢭॄ᳌仼), offered a new format that diverged from that of many earlier xuanben but made plainly partisan choices in selecting materials that gave pride of place to the literary and critical agenda of the Tongcheng School of ancient-style prose (Tongcheng guwen pai Ḥජস᭛⌒).2 The arrangement of the Zhongxue guowen duben was unusual for the time: rather than beginning with early writings, such as Zuozhuan Ꮊ‫( ڇ‬Zuo Tradition), the textbook placed writers from the Qing dynasty (or, because the Qing was still in power, the current dynasty [guochao ೟ᳱ]) at the opening of the collection. Each volume went further back in time, until arriving at selections from early periods that emphasized texts like Zuozhuan. The section of works from the current dynasty opened with pieces by Fang Bao ᮍ㢲 (1668–1749), Yao Nai ྮ哤 (1732–1815), and Zeng Guofan ᳒೟㮽 (1811–72), three of the most wellknown guwen writers from the Qing. Virtually all of the authors and texts chosen for the Qing dynasty volumes of the Guowen duben are found in two anthologies compiled by Wang Xianqian ⥟‫ܜ‬䃭 (1842–1918) and Li Shuchang 濗ᒊᯠ (1837–97), both of which bore the same title: Xu guwenci leizuan 㑠স᭛䖁瀞㑖 (Sequel to Ancient-style phraseology compiled by genre). As their shared title indicates, these anthologies billed themselves as following Yao Nai’s 1779 Guwenci leizuan স᭛䖁 瀞㑖 (Ancient-style phraseology compiled by genre). These collections and their authors were closely associated with the Tongcheng School, whose work remained elevated in late-Qing educational policy that held up guwen as “the most precious” mode of writing.3 Here the pedagogical design of the textbook bolsters the cultural ideology of the editor and of state policy: it makes sense to begin with more recent prose writings, as opposed to some of the more abstruse lines of Zuozhuan, for example, which can be very difficult to read without extensive explanatory notes. At the same time, by going backward in time from modern to ancient, Lin Shu’s textbook could create a lineage of fine prose writing that drew a direct connection between the orthodox ancientstyle prose of the Qing dynasty (guwen) and prose in the national language (guowen). Lin Shu’s textbooks handily ignored other important branches in the history of prose literature—especially parallel prose (pianti wen 侶储᭛)—in establishing his own preferred mode of writing as the new, national, and modern form of communication.4 Given the triumph of the baihua vernacular in the 1920s and 1930s, one might ask how, other than by adopting a simple, recalcitrant conservatism, it was possible to argue for an equivalence between guwen and guowen. Setting aside Lin Shu’s personal views, opinions held at this time about the innate flexibility of Classical Chinese as a medium of communication cannot be underestimated.5 Like Ottoman Turkish and Arabic, languages with vast cultural and

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administrative reach, in the late nineteenth century Classical Chinese had already begun to function as a medium that was compatible with modern communications technologies, whether in newspapers or through the translation of foreign texts that demonstrated the language’s ability to render works from languages such as French and English.6 For Lin Shu and like-minded intellectuals, guwen could easily incorporate foreign vocabulary and transmit modern ideas, so they saw little need to present any great distance between a “modern” Chinese language and what had already shown itself to be suitable to the task. In the Guowen jiaokeshu ೟᭛ᬭ⾥᳌ (National language textbook) published by the Zhonghua Book Company (Zhonghua shuju Ё㧃᳌ሔ) shortly after the 1911 revolution, there is a greater tension between the question of the utility of guowen to society and its relationship to the canon. This tension may reflect the ongoing debate over the importance of reading the Confucian classics as part of the curriculum determined by the state.7 The book’s editor, Pan Wu ┬℺ (n.d.), organized each of the book’s two volumes into two sections. The first section was devoted to belletristic writing (wenxue ᭛ᅌ) and the second to more practical knowledge (zhishi ⶹ䄬).8 Such literature tilted heavily toward the Ming-Qing period, which took up well over half of the ninety-eight selections in this category; only twenty selections came from the Tang period or earlier. All of the literary selections were arranged according to familiar categories such as travelogues and “little prose pieces” (xiaopinwen ᇣક᭛), formal prefaces (xu ᑣ) and letters (shu ᳌), and argumentative essays (lun 䂪 and shuo 䁾) as well as selections from classic historical works such as Zuozhuan. In the first volume, there is a clear connection between the literary- and practical-knowledge-oriented sections of the book. The literature section includes pieces such as extracts from Mengzi ᄳᄤ (Mencius) on the theory of the “original heart-mind” (benxin ᴀᖗ), an essay by Qian Daxin 䣶໻ᯩ (1728–1804) on filial piety that stresses the importance of balancing private morality against the public good,9 and the final piece in the section, a version of the “Mulan ci” ᳼㰁䖁 (“Ballad of Mulan”). All of these selections relate morality, patriotism, family, and governance to one another, easily lending themselves to civics-oriented education for the newly founded Republic of China through guowen. These selections are then followed by short original essays on the state, society, local autonomy, the French Revolution, and the like. Although nonpolitical topics such as the use of natural gas are included, the political themes that connected the literature and knowledge sections would be noticeable to most readers familiar with the canonical materials. Similarly, the second volume includes three essays by Dai Mingshi ᠈ৡϪ (1653–1713), who was executed by the Qing state for sedition, as well as a piece titled “Shuo ziyou” 䁾㞾⬅ (On freedom) by Zhang Binglin ゴ⚇味 (1868–1936), who was known both for his staunch support for the new Republic of China and for his anti-Manchu politics. The original essays in the

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second volume include pieces on Poland and Egypt, which had been seen as key examples of the importance of maintaining national sovereignty in the face of foreign incursions since the late Qing.10 Although the cues from the textbook are not explicit, the thematic connections between at least some of the pieces center on political freedom and self-determination of the state. The national elements of the national language, then, take a prominent role throughout the collection. The nation-oriented political overtones of guowen seem less important in the Kaiming xinbian guowen duben 䭟ᯢᮄ㎼೟᭛䅔ᴀ (Kaiming new national language readers), published from 1946 to 1948, after the conclusion of the Second Sino-Japanese War. Kaiming Press, founded in 1926, was known for its connection to May Fourth scholars, which made the publishing house an important part of what Ling Shiao has called “the business of Enlightenment.”11 The Kaiming Duben was a nine-volume set edited by key New Culture and May Fourth figures Ye Shengtao 㨝㘪䱊 (1894–1988), Guo Shaoyu 䛁 ㌍㰲 (1893–1984), Zhou Yutong ਼ќৠ (1898–1981), and Tan Bitao 㽗ᖙ䱊 (n.d.). Through the format of the anthology, Kaiming chose another way to frame the problem of guowen by separating vernacular- and classical-language pieces from one another entirely. Part one, which consisted of six volumes, was devoted to pieces composed in baihua, while part two, made up of three volumes, held all of the selections in wenyan ᭛㿔 (Classical Chinese). According to the editors, the division of baihua and wenyan was necessary because they believed that intermingling the two would result in confusion for readers.12 Throughout the Kaiming Duben, there is a version of Chinese and world literature that varies greatly from the textbook anthologies discussed thus far. The opening pages of part one include many of the writers who had already been canonized as New Culture and May Fourth greats and their inheritors— Lu Xun 元䖙 (1881–1936), Ba Jin Ꮘ䞥 (1904–2005), Xiao Hong 㭁㋙ (1911–42), Liu Fu ࡝ᕽ (1891–1934), and Zhu Ziqing ᴅ㞾⏙ (1898–1948)—as well as intellectuals and educators such as Cai Yuanpei 㫵‫ܗ‬෍ (1868–1940) and Tao Xingzhi 䱊㸠ⶹ (1891–1946). These authors had become canonized in part because of earlier Kaiming textbooks that featured their work prominently.13 Unlike with the other readers discussed here, a large number of selections—more than 10 percent of the total—were translations from foreign languages, with all but two of the selections appearing among other baihua texts in part one. The eighth text in the first volume of the Kaiming Duben, for example, is a short extract from Mark Twain’s The Innocents Abroad, or The New Pilgrim’s Progress (1869) that describes the gondoliers of Venice and their customers.14 Without a clear statement from the editors, one can only speculate as to why they included so many translations. Although they may have included these items simply for the sake of variety, a second possibility should not be overlooked: the long-standing practice of using translation to establish and confirm the legitimacy of particular styles and registers of writing.

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For readers who had been educated in Classical Chinese with Lin Shu’s Zhongxue guowen duben, the version of wenyan presented in the Kaiming Duben would have been barely recognizable in terms of the authors and the types of texts presented. Aside from their brevity—most selections take up no more than one full page in a recent reprinted version—what is striking about the selections from wenyan is the number of late Qing and early Republican era writers who are included. Although the wenyan selections begin with a well-known passage from Fusheng liuji ⍂⫳݁㿬 (Six Records of a Life Adrift) by Shen Fu ≜ᕽ (b. 1763), subsequent pieces engage with the world beyond China, including “Tuo’ersitai linzhong shishi” ᠬ⠒ᮃ⋄㞼㌖ᰖџ (Events surrounding the death of Tolstoy) by Hu Shi 㚵䘽, “Xinjiapo Hongjia huayuan” ᮄࡴവ⋾ᆊ㢅೦㿬 (A visit to the Hong family gardens of Singapore) by Guo Songtao 䛁ጽ⟒ (1818–91), and “Guan Bali youhua ji” 㾔Ꮘ咢⊍⬿㿬 (Viewing oil paintings in Paris) by Xue Fucheng 㭯⽣៤ (1838–94), which also mentions Xue’s visit to a wax figure museum (larenguan 㷳Ҏ仼). Although expected authors like Han Feizi 䶧䴲ᄤ (d. 233 BCE) and Sima Qian ৌ侀䙋 (ca. 135–ca. 90 BCE) do appear in the wenyan section, pieces from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries take up significant space, including those by writers such as Lu Xun; Cai Yuanpei; Jiang Weiqiao 㫷㎁஀ (1873–1958), an important editor for the Commercial Press and an authority on Buddhism; and Sun Yuxiu ᄿ↧ׂ (1871–1922), also an important editor for the Commercial Press. Compared with the textbook anthologies edited by Lin Shu and Pan Wu, the presentation of wenyan (Classical Chinese) in the Kaiming Duben seems downright irreverent. Nonetheless, the more recently written selections highlight the flexibility of wenyan in addressing modern topics and foreign lands, which would be a remarkably charitable view of Classical Chinese after it had been so utterly condemned by many May Fourth writers. In their work to provide a guide to the enormous archive of Chinese literature, guowen textbook anthologies from the first half of the twentieth century capture the shifting roles of educators and intellectuals in relation to both the nation (guo) and the work of writing (wen). To get a sense of the continued importance of textbook anthologies, one might look to the year 2013, when a decision by textbook editors in the People’s Republic to remove one essay by Lu Xun from middle-school textbooks led to public discussions about the content of literature and the ultimate purpose of teaching it.15 In defending these changes, Zhang Yuming ᓴ⥝ᯢ of the Zhengzhou No. 7 Middle School said that texts like Lu Xun’s “Fengzheng” 乼ㅣ (The kite) were too difficult for middleschool students because of the problems they encountered with understanding the historical context. He further argued that despite the deletion of this work by Lu Xun, the addition of classical-language poetry to other parts of the middle-school curriculum meant that the overall teaching of Chinese language nonetheless “transmitted information that emphasized classical

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culture” (chuandale zhuzhong gu wenhuade xinxi ‫ڇ‬䘨њ⊼䞡স᭛࣪ⱘֵᙃ).16 Here the term information seems to appeal to an utterly depoliticized version of culture that is transmitted through literature—an ideal that has been attacked relentlessly in modern Chinese history since the New Culture movement. As with all media, one often can only guess at how textbook anthologies affect the students who pore over them, memorize them, and (the books’ editors hope) take them as a model for their own writing, but one can be sure that these books will continue to be subject to close scrutiny as they guide students through the vast archive of Chinese literature.

Notes I would like to thank Thea Xinyi Gu for her valuable research assistance on this project. 1. On the history of textbooks, see Limin Bai, Shaping the Ideal Child: Children and Their Primers in Late Imperial China (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 2005); Wang Jiarong ∾ᆊ❨, Minzu hun: jiaokeshu bianqian ⇥ᮣ儖˖ᬭ⾥᳌䅞䙋 (Beijing: Shangwu yinshuguan, 2008); and Peter Zarrow, Educating China: Knowledge, Society, and Textbooks in a Modernizing World, 1902–1937 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). 2. This set of books for the Commercial Press was one of many textbooks and anthologies that Lin Shu published over his career. For a full list of Lin’s anthologies and textbooks, see Michael Gibbs Hill, Lin Shu, Inc.: Translation and the Making of Modern Chinese Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 164. 3. See Elisabeth Kaske, The Politics of Language in Chinese Education, 1895–1919 (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 253–65. 4. For a more detailed discussion, see Michael Gibbs Hill, “National Classicism: Lin Shu as Textbook Writer and Anthologist, 1908–1924,” Twentieth-Century China 33, no. 1 (2007): 30–37. 5. See Zhou Zhongming ਼Ёᯢ, Tongcheng pai yanjiu Ḥජ⌒ⷨお (Shenyang: Liaoning daxue chubanshe, 1999), 401–3. 6. For a discussion of Ottoman Turkish and modern media, see Nergis Ertürk, Grammatology and Literary Modernity in Turkey (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 34–45. 7. See Kaske, Politics of Language, 392–98. 8. “Bianji dayi” ㎼䔃໻ᛣ, in Guowen jiaokeshu ೟᭛ᬭ⾥᳌, ed. Pan Wu (Shanghai: Zhonghua shuju, 1913), 1–2. 9. For a recent reprint, see Qian Daxin 䣶໻ᯩ, “Yuan xiao” ॳᄱ, in Jiading Qian Daxin quanji ௝ᅮ䣶໻ᯩܼ䲚, 10 vols. (Nanjing: Jiangsu guji chubanshe, 1997), 9:270–71. 10. See Rebecca Karl, Staging the World: Chinese Nationalism at the Turn of the Twentieth Century (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 33–38, 178–81. 11. See Ling Shiao, “Printing, Reading, and Revolution: Kaiming Press and the Cultural Transformation of Republican China” (PhD diss., Brown University, 2009). 12. “Jiazhong ben xu” ⬆。ᴀᑣ, in Kaiming xinbian guowen duben, ed. Ye Shengtao et al., 2 vols. (1946–48; repr., Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 2011), 1. 13. See Robert J. Culp, “Teaching Baihua: Textbook Publishing and the Production of Vernacular Language and a New Literary Canon in Early Twentieth-Century China,” Twentieth-Century China 34, no. 1 (2008): 31–39.

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14. “Weiniside xiaoting” ࿕ሐᮃⱘᇣ㠛, trans. Liu Zhengxun ࡝ℷ㿧, in Kaiming xinbian guowen duben, 1:21–22. 15. For one account, see Liz Carter, “China’s War on Deep Thinking,” The Atlantic, September 5, 2013, https://www.theatlantic.com/china/archive/2013/09/chinas-war-on-deep -thinking/279384/. 16. Guo Qingyuan 䛁⏙ၯ, “Renjiaoban yuwen jiaocai da tiaozheng: songzou Lu Xun, yinglai Shi Tiesheng” Ҏᬭ⠜䁲᭛ᬭᴤ໻䂓ᭈ˖䗕䍄元䖙ˈ䖢՚৆䨉⫳, Sohu xinwen ᧰⢤ᮄ㘲, September 4, 2013, http://news.sohu.com/20130904/n385808035.shtml.

SECTION B

ENCYCLOPEDIAS E DITED BY CHR ISTOPH ER M . B. N UGE N T

U

ntil the twentieth century, the Chinese works that most closely corresponded to Western ideas of encyclopedias were those broadly known as leishu 串᳌, which in the most basic sense meant “writings arranged by category.” This is a term, however, that did not appear until the Song, when it was used to indicate the class of such categorized writings in the bibliographical treatise of the Xin Tangshu ᮄ૤᳌ (New history of the Tang).1 Moreover, even after it came into wider usage in later bibliographical writings, there were never any actual attempts to define the term.2 Indeed, the editors of the Siku quanshu ಯᑿܼ᳌ (Complete writings of the four repositories) ironically found “writings organized by category” difficult to categorize, at least within the traditional bibliographical schema. They wrote that “books of matters organized by category combine together the four bibliographical groupings, but they are neither classics nor histories, neither masters texts nor literary collections. Within the four bibliographical groupings, there is no category they can be settled in.”3 Unfortunately, the Siku editors are the norm rather than the exception, and contemporary scholars have also failed to agree on a definition. Wang Sanqing ⥟ϝᝊ has reviewed some of the definitions and groupings that others have offered and concludes that they fall into two general categories: those who use a broad definition that includes the specific works that have been categorized as leishu in traditional bibliographies and those who use a stricter definition, accepting only works that were created after writers began using the bibliographical category of leishu and that specifically involve “separation

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of content by categories” (leishi 串џ). Wang’s own definition is quite broad, accepting almost anything that consists of excerpts that preserve the general wording of their original sources and are arranged, in part, with an eye toward ease of consultation.4 Xiaofei Tian similarly acknowledges the historical vagueness of the term, noting that essentially everything from Erya ⠒䲙 (Approaching the elegant) and Shijing 䀽㍧ (Classic of odes) to Wenxuan ᭛䙌 (Selections of Refined Literature) has been categorized as a leishu at some point. She follows Sun Yongzhong ᄿ∌ᖴ (who follows Wang Sanqing) in recognizing that such works tend to contain a range of contents that are put into a “certain order of arrangement and classification.”5 As for the English term encyclopedia, this has its own complicated history that maps imperfectly onto that of leishu. As used in contemporary English, an encyclopedia typically is a work that consists primarily of original writings created for that work. Its full scope may be broad (as with the Encyclopedia Britannica or Wikipedia) or narrow (as with encyclopedias that focus on a specific topic, be it tennis or cheese), but in most cases, the reader expects to find original writings. Historically, encyclopedia has a wider semantic range. The term itself is a child of the European printing press, with its earliest attested uses dating to the last decades of the fifteenth century. This is, intriguingly, not long after the first attested use of information in English. Encyclopedia was typically given the etymological definition of “the circle of subjects” and was a genre closely tied to the explosion of textual production facilitated by the rapid spread of movable-type printing. Interestingly, the development of what would later be called leishu was similarly connected to an explosion of textual production facilitated by the widespread use of a relatively new technology: that of paper. As with leishu, there are many works that scholars today consider to be encyclopedias that were produced before the term itself existed. One important aspect of the overlap between leishu and encyclopedia is the importance placed on comprehensiveness and use, especially early on. European encyclopedic texts contained knowledge that was not to be merely stored and archived but rather to be put to use. As Robert L. Fowler puts it, “The encyclopaedia is a fundamentally moral project: it is a collection of useful knowledge.”6 Not only must the knowledge be useful, but also it had to be put in an organizational structure that facilitated that use. In their discussion of biblical distinctiones, verbal concordances to the Christian scriptures, and similar encyclopedia-like research tools from the thirteenth century, Mary A. Rouse and Richard R. Rouse see “a significant change in attitude towards written authority” with new tools to “search written authority afresh, to get at, to locate, to retrieve information.” They further describe this new attitude toward the written heritage as “more assertive, even aggressive.”7 This shift comes about, in part, because the proliferation of texts pushed up against the limits of human memory. The new works were not, however, intended to render memory obsolete (as is sometimes claimed of technologies

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like Google Search) but rather to serve as extensions of and aids to memory. Indeed, the forms these texts took were often strongly influenced by preexisting mnemonic structures. Again, these shifts in textual attitudes and the new works they engendered occurred prior to the use of the term encyclopedia, just as the new attitudes toward the literary inheritance indicated by early leishu preceded the bibliographical use of that term. Also, this section on encyclopedias extends well into the twentieth century and covers works that were never known as leishu, such as the baike quanshu ⱒ⾥ܼ᳌ (all writings from the numerous classes), a term coined by Mitsukuri Rinshō ㅩ԰味᳌ (1846–97) and imported into Chinese by Kang Youwei ᒋ᳝⚎ (1858–1927).8 These are more like encyclopedias in the modern sense of the English word and thus consist of ostensibly original writing on various topics. One characteristic shared by many of the Chinese works discussed in the chapters that follow is that they were meant to be used. For the medieval encyclopedia, a key issue is accessibility. Before the widespread use of print, building a library with all the sources one might want to consult for study or literary composition was much more difficult. That the major medieval encyclopedias were compiled by scholars with access to the imperial library is not a coincidence. These encyclopedias thus claim to include the most important parts of those collections in a form that, though still quite large, is far more accessible. Many later works have been created with similar goals in mind. Whether late imperial vernacular encyclopedias or online wikis, they aim to provide readers with quick and easy access to a broad range of information. At the same time, this goal was not always accomplished and could be superseded by other, unstated goals. The Yongle emperor is recorded as commissioning the massive Yongle dadian ∌ῖ໻‫( ݌‬Great compendium of the Yongle reign) to bring together what has been “scattered in a multitude of books” ᬷ䓝䃌᳌㆛ so that “consulting it will be as easy as taking things from a bag” 㗗㋶П֓བ᥶ಞপ⠽㘇.9 It may indeed have accomplished this, but because of its massive size, it was never printed and was made available only to a limited number of scholars (those in the Hanlin Academy) some three hundred years after it was compiled. As Benjamin A. Elman has argued, the point was not so much to make the information easy to access and use as to define and to control it.10 In a similar vein, Xiaofei Tian writes that a leishu is supposed to present “an organized system of knowledge of the world, reflecting an orderly universe in its comprehensive, structure[d] arrangement of ideas, concepts, and things. Its compilation, imperially commissioned, is also a means of demonstrating the state’s cultural power, and political legitimacy.”11 One can see this same goal in such contemporary encyclopedic endeavors as the Zhonghua dadian Ё㧃໻‫݌‬ (Chinese collectanea), funded by the government of the People’s Republic and completed not long ago. Any effort to gather and categorize information will inevitably reflect the ambitions and concerns of the powers that sponsor and authorize it.

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Notes 1. In Ouyang Xiu ℤ䱑ׂ et al., comps., Xin Tangshu, 20 vols. (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1975), 59.1509, 1564. The related term leishi 串џ had been used in the same context in the Jiu Tangshu 㟞૤᳌; see Liu Xu ࡝᯿, ed., Jiu Tang shu, 16 vols. (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1975), 47.2046. 2. This is noted in Tang Guangrong ૤‫ܝ‬ᾂ, Tangdai leishu yu wenxue ૤ҷ串᳌㟛᭛ᅌ (Chengdu: Ba Shu shushe, 2008), 15. 3. Ji Yun ㋔ᯔ et al., comps., Siku quanshu zongmu tiyao ಯᑿܼ᳌㐑Ⳃᦤ㽕, 4 vols. (Shanghai: Shangwu yinshuguan, 1933), 2781. 4. Wang Sanqing, Dunhuang leishu yanjiu ᬺ✠串᳌ⷨお (Kaohsiung: Liwen wenhua shiye gongsi, 1993), 4. In contrast, Zhang Dihua ᔉ⒠㧃 broadly notes that leishu are a kind of reference book, but most of his discussion focuses on excluding certain works (including, it might be noted, the Taiping guangji). See Zhang Dihua, Leishu liubie 串᳌ ⌕߹ (Taipei: Shangwu yinshuguan, 1958), 4–5. 5. Xiaofei Tian, “Literary Learning: Encyclopedias and Epitomes,” in The Oxford Handbook of Classical Chinese Literature (1000 BCE–900 CE), ed. Wiebke Denecke, Wai-yee Li, and Xiaofei Tian (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 133. 6. Robert L. Fowler, “Encyclopaedias: Definitions and Theoretical Problems,” in Premodern Encyclopaedic Texts: Proceedings of the Second COMERS Congress, Groningen, 1–4 July 1996, ed. Peter Binkley (Leiden: Brill, 1997), 10. 7. Richard H. Rouse and Mary A. Rouse, Preachers, Florilegia and Sermons: Studies on the Manipulus florum of Thomas of Ireland (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1979), 4. 8. Milena Doleželová-Velingerová, “Modern Chinese Encyclopaedic Dictionaries: Novel Concepts and New Terminology (1903–1911),” in Chinese Encyclopaedias of New Global Knowledge (1870–1930): Changing Ways of Thought, ed. Milena Doleželová-Velingerová and Rudolf G. Wagner (Berlin: Springer, 2014), 12. 9. Quoted and translated in Endymion Wilkinson, Chinese History: A New Manual, 5th ed. (self-pub., 2018), 1082. 10. Benjamin A. Elman, A Cultural History of Civil Examinations in Late Imperial China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 122. 11. Tian, “Literary Learning,” 136.

CHAPTER 30

MEDIEVAL ENCYCLOPEDIAS CHR ISTOPHER M . B. N UGE N T

A

s indicated by the Chinese term leishu 串᳌ (categorized writings)—often used to label the works discussed in this chapter—the most basic way that medieval encyclopedias produced in China organize information is by placing that information into categories. There are, however, a number of other structural aspects of medieval encyclopedias that stand out as important innovations in the history of information management in China. In her discussion of similar works from early modern Europe, Ann M. Blair has a useful, “nontechnical” description of information: “information typically takes the form of discrete and small-sized items that have been removed from their original contexts and made available as ‘morsels’ ready to be rearticulated.”1 Decontextualization and organization to facilitate ease of use (rearticulation) are indeed the two definitive characteristics of the medieval Chinese encyclopedia. The first is true of almost all traditional Chinese encyclopedias, which typically consist of excerpted writings; the second is achieved in quite different ways and with differing degrees of success depending on the work in question. This chapter contends that certain medieval encyclopedias organize the information they contain to facilitate use by maximizing mnemonic efficiency. An impulse to increase ease of use is found in the most important encyclopedias compiled around the first century of the Tang period. In his preface to the Yiwen leiju 㮱᭛串㘮 (Collection of literature arranged by categories), Ouyang Xun ℤ䱑䀶 (557–641) connects difficulty of textual access with overabundance: “In the Stone Canal [Imperial] Library, the shelves store a profuse

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accumulation; spreading in all directions from distant sources, they are so difficult to thoroughly explore.”2 He further opines that the work of previous anthologists—including the compilers of the first work to be widely acknowledged as a leishu, the Huanglan ⱛ㾑 (For imperial perusal)—has not improved the situation: some chose literary works (wen ᭛), while others just recorded factual matters (shi џ), “their conceptions of literature being different, and they were difficult to consult together.” The emperor thus commanded Ouyang to “compile literary works and facts, [but] get rid of the flotsam and jetsam and cull the redundant.”3 The goal was thus to increase the range of information available in a single work while simultaneously reducing the burden extraneous information might impose on the reader. In the case of another encyclopedia from the period, the Chuxue ji ߱ᅌ㿬 (Record of early learning), one finds an explicitly stated desire on the part of a ruler for a solution to the problem of ease of use. An entry in Da Tang xinyu ໻૤ᮄ䁲 (New account of the great Tang; early ninth cent.) describes Tang emperor Xuanzong’s ⥘ᅫ (r. 712–56) request as follows: Xuanzong said to Zhang Yue: “My sons want to study literary composition. They need to examine historical events and peruse generic examples. The sections and chapters of works like the Imperial View are vast, and searching through them is rather difficult. I would like you and some other scholars to compile important facts and writings and group them by category, aiming for simplicity and convenience so that my sons will more easily find success.”4

As portrayed here, Xuanzong’s concern was how to organize important information, be it historical or literary, in a manner that it would be useful to his sons in their own attempts to compose literary works. He expresses discontent with existing leishu-type works, such as the Imperial View (yulan ⽺㾑), for being too long and difficult to use. As in Ouyang Xun’s preface, that difficulty is located specifically in the act of searching (xun ᇟ). This implies reading for specific goals and recalls Mary A. Rouse and Richard R. Rouse’s claim that thirteenth-century Europe witnessed a new desire to “search written authority afresh, to get at, to locate, to retrieve information.”5 As portrayed here, this is precisely what Xuanzong desires: a new work that will structure the content of earlier materials in a way that makes the information in them easier to find and use. Though both were compiled with ease of use as an explicit goal, the Yiwen leiju and Chuxue ji differ in ways that give a good sense of the range of organizational strategies at play in encyclopedias compiled in the first half of the Tang. The most obvious difference is length. Though it was intended to be highly selective, including only what Ouyang Xun’s preface describes as the quintessence (jinghua ㊒㧃) and what is essential (zhiyao ᣛ㽕), the Yiwen leiju consists of well over a million characters, divided into 100 juan, with 46 bu 䚼

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and 727 individual entries. The Chuxue ji, in comparison, is closer to six hundred thousand characters and contains only 30 juan, 23 bu, and 313 entries.6 The authors of the Siku quanshu zongmu tiyao ಯᑿܼ᳌㐑Ⳃᦤ㽕 (Catalog with critical abstracts of the Complete writings of the four repositories) identify a more qualitative difference as well, writing that though the Chuxue ji “does not match the Yiwen leiju in breadth, it surpasses it in [selecting] the essence” मϡঞlj㮱᭛串㘮NJˈ㗠㊒ࠛࢱП.7 Jing ㊒ is a term with a wide range of meanings; here it indicates “the quality of being quintessential.” The claim is that the Chuxue ji does a better job of selecting and organizing literary information in a way that brings out what is essential about a given topic than does the Yiwen leiju. A more detailed look at a specific entry shows some of the differences between these two works and provides a clearer understanding of how the Chuxue ji, in particular, organizes literary information. Consider the entry on the moon ᳜, found in the larger section on “Tian” ໽ (The heavens) in both the Chuxue ji and the Yiwen leiju. First, the numbers. Total characters8 Yiwen leiju

2,142

Chuxue ji

2,040

Descriptive section/Account of the matter9 Yiwen leiju

728 characters

24 sources

32 passages

Chuxue ji

241 characters

3 sources

5 passages

Yiwen leiju

464 characters

4 sources

Chuxue ji

226 characters

2 sources

Yiwen leiju

947 characters

21 sources

Chuxue ji

587 characters

11 sources

Fu 䊺 (rhapsodies)

Shi 䀽 (poems)

Shidui џᇡ (parallel matters) Yiwen leiju

None

Chuxue ji

980 characters

25 sources

33 passages

One can see that the entries on the moon in these two works contain nearly identical amounts of textual context; that is, the total character counts are very similar, with the Yiwen leiju providing only about 0.5 percent more text than the Chuxue ji. The key differences are to be found in how each work organizes this information. The Yiwen leiju focuses substantially more attention on descriptive

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passages that tell the reader specific facts about the moon. It has over three times as much of this sort of content in its opening descriptive section as does the Chuxue ji’s “account of the matter” section and a much broader range of quoted sources. The “account of the matter” section in the Chuxue ji seems almost an afterthought in comparison; almost everything found there appears in the Yiwen leiju as well. Moreover, the latter appears to be much more accurate in its citations in terms of both naming the proper source and giving the content of the quoted passage accurately (at least as far as one can tell in comparison to received versions of these earlier works). Much of the “account of the matter” section in the Chuxue ji is more akin to paraphrase, with some other parts likely copied directly from the Yiwen leiju itself (which was likely a major source text for the Chuxue ji). When the Yiwen leiju does abridge its source passage and the same passage is cited in the Chuxue ji, the latter will often duplicate these abridgments. The reader of the Chuxue ji’s “account of the matter” will get a basic notion of some important facts about the moon: the origin of its name, its physical nature, the names of its different stages, its movement through the sky, and one of its mythological associations. But clearly this section functions more as a brief introduction than as a thorough account. The differences in other sections shared by the Yiwen leiju and the Chuxue ji (as full works) follow a similar pattern, though they are less extreme. Each work concludes entries with a series of generic exemplars. Overall these cover a wide range of genres, thirty-seven altogether in the case of the Chuxue ji. The genres of the exemplars vary substantially depending on the entry. Some have as many as seven or eight genres represented, while others have only one or two. The entry on the moon is of the latter sort, with only shi- and fu-style poetic exemplars given in both works. Again, one finds far more content in the Yiwen leiju, which has about twice as many examples of both fu and shi. In terms of the volume of text, this ratio holds as well, with the Yiwen leiju at 1,411 characters in these two sections combined, compared to the Chuxue ji’s 813. Not surprisingly, given the evidence that the Chuxue ji is based in part on the Yiwen leiju, there is substantial overlap between the two. Both of the exemplary fu in the Chuxue ji—Xie Lingyun’s 䃱䴜䘟 (385–433) “Yuan xiaoyue fu” ᗼ᱕᳜䊺 (“Rhapsody on Resenting the Dawn Moon”) and Xie Zhuang’s 䃱㥞 (421–66) “Yue fu”᳜䊺 (“Rhapsody on the Moon”)—are included in the Yiwen leiju’s selections as well. Xie Lingyun’s piece, which is comparatively short, is the same in both works. The substantially longer fu by Xie Zhuang is a more interesting case in terms of what it shows about the relationship between these two leishu and the ways in which they present earlier literature. Xie Zhuang’s piece is 443 characters long in the version of the work that comes down through the early sixth-century Wenxuan ᭛䙌 (Selections of refined literature) anthology. Both the Yiwen leiju and the Chuxue ji shorten it substantially. The Yiwen leiju version is only 188 characters long (keeping 42 percent of the original), and the Chuxue ji

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version is even shorter, at only 162 characters (keeping 36 percent of the original). Crucially, this truncation is nearly the same in both cases. All of the text left out in the Yiwen leiju is also left out in the Chuxue ji. The Chuxue ji version is not an independent abridgment but a further truncation of the Yiwen leiju’s. How might one understand this abridgment? A possibility that must always be considered when discussing works from this period is alteration in the course of transmission, accidental or otherwise. Yet in this case, the changes are too substantial to be accounted for by ordinary manuscript alterations. It is also possible that the compilers of these two encyclopedias simply did not have access to the full version of the rhapsody as it had come down in the Wenxuan. Given the circumstances under which these works were compiled—that is, in response to imperial command and thus with access to the substantial textual holdings of the central state—this is unlikely. A more plausible explanation is that the compilers simply did not bother to include the portions of the piece they did not consider necessary to achieve their goals. When Ouyang Xun states in the preface to the Yiwen leiju that he “desires to pick out the quintessence, select what it essential,” he is taking as his smallest unit not the single full literary work but the phrases with in it. The same holds true for the compilers of the Chuxue ji. Such similar abridgments are common between the two works, giving further indications that the compilers of the Chuxue ji frequently used the Yiwen leiju as their base text. An additional telling example is found in the entries for “Sanyue sanri” ϝ᳜ϝ᮹ (“Third Day of the Third Month”). Both the Yiwen leiju and the Chuxue ji included in their selection of exemplary prefaces (xu ᑣ) Wang Xizhi’s ⥟㖆П (321–79) “Lanting ji xu” 㰁ҁ䲚ᑣ (“Preface to the Lanting Collection”).10 In both cases, only the first third of the full preface is given, ending with “it was true joy” ֵৃῖг in the Chuxue ji and the variant “it was truly sufficient joy” ֵ䎇ῖг in Yiwen leiju. Again, it is inconceivable that the compilers did not have access to the full preface, as it was one of the best known pieces of writing and calligraphy from the Six Dynasties period. Rather, the Yiwen leiju compilers chose only the portion that they considered essential; the Chuxue ji compilers followed suit. Returning to our focal concern here of how these works organize the literary inheritance, they clearly do so with a very free hand and with little concern for the integrity of the literary works they contain as coherent wholes. Both Xie Zhuang’s “Rhapsody on the Moon” and Wang Xizhi’s “Preface to the Lanting Collection” were prominent, even canonical, literary works at the time. Moreover, neither is a particularly lengthy example of its genre. Yet both the Yiwen leiju and the Chuxue ji present substantially truncated versions that in each case include no more than half of the original. In the case of “Rhapsody on the Moon,” even sections of the piece that are specifically about the moon, the topic of the entry in which they appear, are omitted. While the compilers considered

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them model or exemplary works, the value they found in them was apparently based more on their parts than on their coherence as full works. The goal of the Chuxue ji was not to help Xuanzong’s son learn and set to memory the full “Rhapsody on the Moon” or the “Preface to the Lanting Collection” but rather to use portions of these works as examples of how to write about these topics (based on how others had written about them). Despite the overall similarities between the Yiwen leiju and the Chuxue ji, there are differences as well. The most important for our purposes here is that the Chuxue ji uses a more complex method of organizing the literary inheritance that shows a sophisticated understanding of mnemonic structures. Recall that although the entries on the moon in both these works are approximately the same length, the opening descriptive section and the exemplary works section of the Yiwen leiju are considerably longer than those in the Chuxue ji. The Chuxue ji makes up the difference with its middle section, entitled shidui џᇡ (parallel matters), which is about the length of the other two sections. In every one of the Chuxue ji’s 313 entries, the shidui section is the largest of the three sections. Moreover, in many cases it is twice or even three or four times the length of the other two sections combined in a given entry. In other words, the bulk of the Chuxue ji’s content is found in the shidui sections. They also represent the primary structural innovation that sets this work apart from its known predecessors such as the Yiwen leiju, which lacks a similar section. The basic structure of the shidui section is the same for all entries. It consists of a series of paired compounds or phrases, the majority of which have two characters for each side of the pair, though some entries include pairs of three- or four-character phrases as well. These pairs are always parallel, though they do not seem to follow any set patterns with rhyme or tonal alternations. Each pair is followed by short passages from a wide range of works that either contain the words in the pair in that same form or include the words in some other order. The pairs themselves almost never contain the word or words for the subject of the full entry (e.g., moon). In Song printings of the Chuxue ji, the characters for the pair are given in larger type, about twice the size of the text of the quoted passages.11 A few examples can demonstrate the range of the section. The first shidui pair for the moon entry is as follows: Water’s qi metal’s essence. The Huainanzi says: “The sun and the moon are agents of heaven. The cold qi of accumulated yin eventually becomes water. The essence of water’s qi becomes the moon.” The Yellow River Diagram for Imperial Reading Pleasure says: “The moon is the essence of metal.”12

This is a basic example of the form. “Water’s qi” (shuiqi ∈⇷) and “metal’s essence” (jinjing 䞥㊒) are parallel pairs that give the reader small bits of

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information about the moon’s physical nature; the quoted passages put those bits in a slightly fuller context. The first binome is repeated in that same form in the first cited passage, while the second appears divided only by a possessive particle (zhi П). One finds here a number of important concepts connected with the moon: it is the essence of different elements, its nature is yin (rather than yang), and so forth. This is information that the Yiwen leiju provides in its descriptive section. Indeed, this same passage is quoted with the same source cited in the descriptive section of the Yiwen leiju’s entry on the moon. However, this passage does not appear in the text of the received Huainanzi ⏂फᄤ (Master of Huainan), giving further indication that the Chuxue ji is drawing material directly from the Yiwen leiju. But, again, the difference here is telling. This same information is presented in a different structure in the Chuxue ji. Specifically, it is tied to the shidui pairs in a way that makes that information easier to remember and access for the reader/learner. The apparent gaps in the “account of the matter” section highlight the fact that the true value in this work is found in the “parallel matters” section. Another example conveys common lore about the moon: Residing toad gazing hare. The Annals of Primal Destiny’s Bud says: “As for the moon being called ‘that which wanes’ and being arrayed with a toad and hare, it is that the yin and yang forces both reside there, with bright yang producing yin, and yin relying on yang.” The Verses of Chu say: “What virtue has the night’s glow, that it dies and is born again? What advantage is there, that it has a gazing hare in its belly?”13

Here again one finds that information given earlier about the moon—that it is called “that which wanes”—is put in a more structured and informationally rich context. Both these passages deal with common questions about the moon: How does it regenerate, and how can it contain both a toad and a hare? The first passage combines linguistic issues and physical ones, explaining that the coexistence of the yin and yang forces and their mutually generative relationship account for both the toad-hare cohabitation and the waxing and waning of the moon. The second passage, from the “Tianwen” ໽ଣ (“Heavenly Questions”) section of the Chuci Ἦ䖁 (Verses of Chu), addresses a similar issue and is quoted by the Yiwen leiju as well. In structural terms, these are easily recallable compounds that convey common lore (likely already known by almost any intended reader) tied to more complex cosmological explanations and a famous passage from an important early text. Other examples from this section have more purely literary functions. Rather than informing the reader about the nature of the moon as a natural body or about the legends surrounding it, these pairs help the reader learn and recall exemplary mentions of the moon from the literary inheritance.

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Northern hall    western garden A poem by Lu Shiheng [Lu Ji] says: I sleep peacefully in the northern hall; The bright moon enters my window. It shines there with lingering brightness; I grasp at it, it doesn’t fill my hands.

A poem by Cao Zhi says: On a clear night I wander in the western garden; Flying canopies follow one after another. The bright moon makes a pure light, And the constellations are just now scattered here and there.14

The first passage here is from Lu Ji’s 䱌″ (261–303; style-name Shiheng ຿㸵) “Ni ‘Mingyue he jiaojiao’ ” ᫀᯢ᳜ԩⱢⱢ (“Imitating ‘How Bright the Moon’ ”), one of the “Gushi shijiu shou” স䀽कб佪 (“Nineteen Old Poems”). Both the original and Lu Ji’s imitation are found in the Wenxuan. The second, by Cao Zhi (192–232), is included in the Wenxuan as well, under the category of “Gongyan shi” ݀䅠䀽 (State banquet poems) but also without a separate title. Again, there is nothing specific about the moon itself in these two passages, but they contain well-known examples of associations that would become ubiquitous in the Tang. Both of the terms in this shidui pair appear many dozens of times in Tang poems about the moon, so often that they might be said eventually to have reached the level of cliché. The content and structure of Yiwen leiju and Chuxue ji support two important conclusions about managing literary information in the medieval period: (1) there were common methods of learning important texts that did not rely on raw memorization of past works, and (2) there was a clear willingness to treat the literary inheritance as information to be divided up, decontextualized, and used. To return to the central argument of this chapter, these conclusions are both tied to an implicit awareness of mnemonic structures. Scholar Mary J. Carruthers has written as follows of memorial arts in medieval Europe: The fundamental principle is to “divide” the material to be remembered into pieces short enough to be recalled in single units and to key these into some sort of rigid, easily reconstructable order. This provides one with a “random-access” memory system, by means of which one can immediately and securely find a particular bit of information, rather than having to start from the beginning each time in order laboriously to reconstruct the whole system.15

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While there is substantial evidence from medieval China indicating that the dominant mode of study was rote memorization achieved through constant verbal recitation of texts, works such as the Chuxue ji (in addition to other encyclopedic works) show that there were other methods of approaching textual learning. Carruthers’s description here is not far from the kind of format one finds in the Chuxue ji and the Yiwen leiju. These works also divide material into smaller segments that are more easily recalled. While the sections with exemplary works in different genres often contain full works, many are short or, in the case of even slightly longer works, shortened. More to the point, the other two primary sections, the descriptive opening section and, in the Chuxue ji, the shidui, do precisely what Carruthers describes: they divide texts into smaller bits that are specifically applicable to the topic at hand and are easier to recall. As for the second part of Carruthers’s description, dealing with a “random-access” memory system that allows one to search for specific items rather than recite an entire text to find the applicable portions, this is what the structure of the shidui section of each entry in the Chuxue ji facilitates. It creates an indexical system through which larger chucks of information are linked to shorter bits more easily recalled—in this case, the parallel pairs. Moreover, each member of every pair is linked to the other member by this very parallelism; remembering one member makes remembering the other easier. Just as with parallelism, rhyme, and tonal alternations in regulated poetry, here parallelism utilizes “semantic-context” limitations to reduce the number of possibilities in the second position, making accurate recall much more likely.16 One shidui term leads to the other, and both then lead to passages of text that contain the terms in each unit in some fashion. Depending on how far the reader were  to take their studies, these passages of text could then connect to their fuller context, such as the entire poem from which they were taken. As Carruthers writes, “One of the fundamental principles for increasing mnemonic recollective efficiency is to organize single bits of information into informationally richer units by a process of substitution that compresses large amounts of material into single markers.”17 Rather than being just a compendium of common literary conventions, the Chuxue ji is also a sophisticated example of managing literary information, information about texts specifically. In most cases, the Chuxue ji cites the work from which an excerpt is taken and identifies the author of that work. There is a meaningful difference between simply telling a reader that “one may mention ‘northern hall’ in poems about the moon” and giving the phrase “northern hall” with a parallel phrase used in similar contexts, followed by identified excerpts from poems by different authors that do so. This is not to deny that the term northern hall in a poem about the moon is a convention but rather to note that the way the Chuxue ji presents this convention allows the reader to make

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informed allusions to specific earlier poems rather than simply using conventional images unconnected to any previous textual substantiations. While none of the passages describing the compilatory goals of the encyclopedias discussed here use a term that is a clear equivalent of information, the texts use such terms as shi (facts, matters) and wen ᭛ (literary writings) or yaoshi 㽕џ (important facts) and yaowen 㽕᭛ (important writings)—all of which appear in the Da Tang xinyu passage on the Chuxue ji—in such a way that they exhibit the same semantic range as information. Ouyang Xun uses similar terminology in the Yiwen leiju preface. These works contain individual decontextualized units that a user of the work could put to use. In this context, it is interesting that many of the descriptions in the Yiwen leiju and Chuxue ji are self-contradictory: they give mutually exclusive “facts” about the moon. These works do not ultimately tell their readers what the moon is. They instead convey to them the different ways that writers in the past have written about the moon. This is information that is meant to be used, not necessarily knowledge that is “true.”

Notes 1. Ann M. Blair, Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information Before the Modern Age (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010), 2. 2. Ouyang Xun, comp., Yiwen leiju, 4 vols. (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1982), 27. 3. Ouyang Xun, Yiwen leiju, 27. 4. Liu Su ࡝㙙, Da Tang xinyu ໻૤ᮄ䁲 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1984), 137. 5. Mary A. Rouse and Richard H. Rouse, Authentic Witnesses: Approaches to Medieval Texts and Manuscripts (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1991), 221. 6. For fuller descriptions of the contents of the Chuxue ji and Yiwen leiju, see the entries on them by Alexei K. Ditter and Jessey J. C. Choo, respectively, in Early Medieval Chinese Texts: A Bibliographical Guide, ed. Cynthia L. Chennault et al. (Berkeley: Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California, 2015), 52–57, 454–464. See also descriptions in Xiaofei Tian, “Literary Learning: Encyclopedias and Epitomes,” in The Oxford Handbook of Classical Chinese Literature (1000 BCE–900 CE), ed. Wiebke Denecke, Waiyee Li, and Xiaofei Tian (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 137–40. 7. Ji Yun ㋔ᯔ (1724–1805) et al., comps, Siku quanshu zongmu tiyao, 4 vols. (Shanghai: Shangwu yinshuguan, 1933), 2786. 8. These figures include section headings such as “Shi” 䀽 (poems) but do not include any punctuation from the typeset editions. All figures that follow likewise do not include punctuation. 9. This is not labeled in the Yiwen leiju. In the Chuxue ji, the corresponding section is labeled as “account of the matter” (xushi ᬬџ). These figures do not include section headings. The figures here for numbers of cited sources are based solely on the sources cited by the texts themselves. In fact, many of the passages do not appear to be from the cited sources. While this is important to take into account in other aspects of an examination of the Chuxue ji, it is less so for the current discussion. 10. The Yiwen leiju titles it “Sanri Lanting shi xu” ϝ᮹㰁ҁ䀽ᑣ (“Preface to the Third Day Lanting Poems”), and the Chuxue ji uses ““Sanyue sanri Lanting xu” ϝ᳜ϝ᮹㰁ҁᑣ

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11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

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(“Third Day of the Third Month Lanting Preface”). See Ouyang Xun, Yiwen leiju, 71, and Xu Jian ᕤෙ et al., comps., Chuxue ji (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 2010), 73. Modern typeset editions follow a similar format, and evidence from Dunhuang from similar works indicates that this format was almost surely used in manuscripts as well. Xu Jian et al., Chuxue ji, 8. Xu Jian et al., Chuxue ji, 9. Xu Jian et al., Chuxue ji, 9. Mary J. Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 7. See David C. Rubin, Memory in Oral Traditions: The Cognitive Psychology of Epic, Ballads, and Counting-Out Rhymes (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 78. Carruthers, Book of Memory, 84.

CHAPTER 31

MIDDLE PERIOD IMPERIAL ENCYCLOPEDIAS SAR AH M. ALLEN

L

ike medieval encyclopedias, the imperially-sponsored encyclopedias (leishu 串᳌ “categorized writings”) of the Song and Ming dynasties are compilations of existing text grouped by topic. The information they contain is textual, not practical: rather than offering their own explanation of a given topic, these encyclopedias tell users what prior works have said. In contrast with some earlier encyclopedias, however, these later compilations are more suited to leisurely perusal than to easy access to and reuse of information, both because they contain larger amounts of text and because that text is processed and formatted less than in medieval encyclopedias. Viewed through the lens of Ann M. Blair’s definition of information as “small-sized items . . . made available as ‘morsels’ ready to be rearticulated,” these encyclopedias are better described as repositories of accumulated knowledge than as reference works providing information as discrete units of data prepared for new applications.1 But in the broader sense of information as meaning-bearing distinctions made within an environment, they create systems of information by first identifying topics worth including and then selecting the most meaningful utterances—the stuff most worth knowing about a given topic—from the vast universe of available documents. Those utterances then become the defining explanations of a given topic. This chapter discusses the three general-reference imperial encyclopedias compiled during the Song and Ming. Two of these compilations, the late tenth-century Taiping yulan ໾ᑇᕵ㾑 (Imperial readings compiled in the Taiping era) and the early fifteenth-century Yongle dadian ∌ῖ໻‫( ݌‬Great

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compendium of the Yongle reign) draw on a wide range of works in many genres—the classics, masters’ texts, literary collections, histories, and, in the case of Yongle dadian, a variety of other genres as well—to build a composite understanding of each topic. The other, the tenth-century Taiping guangji ໾ ᑇᒷ㿬 (Wide-ranging records compiled in the Taiping era), is unique among medieval-and middle-period encyclopedias in being limited to anecdotes and other informal narratives, but it also provides a multifarious depiction of how the included topics are treated in multiple works. In conception, then, all three of these imperial encyclopedias offer their users a comprehensive historical overview—such as an emperor might hope to command—of the diverse ways in which the world at large was described in texts of the past. In practice, all three have likely been more often put to use reconstructing the works out of which they were originally compiled.

Taiping yulan and Taiping guangji Taiping yulan and Taiping guangji were conceived of as complementary works from their inception, their compilations ordered by Song emperor Taizong ໾ᅫ (r. 976–97) in the same edict in 977. The defining difference between them was to be the material they incorporated. A fragment of the Song shilu ᆺ䣘 (veritable records) indicates that Taizong mandated that one of the new works draw on Yiwen leiju 㮱᭛串㘮 (Collection of literature arranged by categories) and two other encyclopedias, as well as other works, and divide that material by category into one thousand juan; this became Taiping yulan. The other, which became Taiping guangji, was to be half that length and to draw on unofficial histories (yeshi 䞢৆), accounts (zhuanji ‫ڇ‬㿬), minor stories (xiaoshuo ᇣ䁾), and other miscellaneous compilations (zabian 䲰㎼).2 This difference in sources led to other differences as well—in the categories into which material was divided in the two compilations and the degree to which the included text was processed relative to its original source. Both compilations are organized as topical hierarchies, as was typical of earlier encyclopedias as well. Taiping yulan employs a two-tiered structure, with fifty-five top-level divisions altogether, beginning with the heavens, the seasons, and the earth; moving to human-related subjects with divisions such as emperors and kings, punishments, disease, boats, and barbarians; and, finally, shifting beyond the human to animals and plants of different types. These fifty-five divisions are further subdivided into 5,363 categories: under the heavens, one finds (among others) primordial ether, the moon, and rain; under earth, one finds the names of mountains and rivers; and under boats, one finds general discussions of boats, as well as barges and other types of boats, and boat parts such as rudders and oars.3 The neat structure creates an ordered universe in which each

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topic’s (or item’s) place within that universe is defined by the top-level division to which it belongs. Surveying the entire work leads the reader on a tour of the world, from the heavens to the center to the increasingly peripheral. Thus, part of the information Taiping yulan provides is a conceptual map of the world as seen through its constituent elements. Accessing information on any individual topic requires, conversely, an understanding of the organizing system (or the patience to hunt), since its principles are not articulated within the work. The topical categories are explicated through quotations, many containing only a few sentences, taken from a wide variety of sources, including dictionaries such as Xu Shen’s 䀅ᜢ (ca. 58–149) Shuowen jiezi 䁾᭛㾷ᄫ (Explaining simple graphs and analyzing complex graphs), canonical texts such as Shijing 䀽㍧ (Classic of odes), masters’ works such as Liezi ߫ᄤ (Master Lie), histories such as Shiji ৆㿬 (The Grand Scribe’s Records), and individual poems. Many of the included quotations appear to have been copied directly from earlier encyclopedias, saving the editors the trouble of hunting down suitable examples and allowing Taiping yulan to incorporate extracts from works that were not available in the imperial library (likely because they no longer survived). These inherited excerpts were supplemented with additional material from other books in the library’s collection.4 In the texts it draws on and the brevity of many of its citations, Taiping yulan resembles surviving medieval encyclopedias such as Chuxue ji ߱ᅌ㿬 (Record of early learning) and Yiwen leiju. But it departs from them in format, omitting the subdivisions that organize each entry in the earlier works. The proportion of literary texts such as poetry or belletristic prose included also appears smaller than in either of those earlier compilations. Taiping yulan thus provides an orderly survey of the various things that make up the world—natural and human-made, physical and conceptual— using a broad range of textual sources where they have been described or invoked. That is, textual information becomes a way to describe and see the world around one. The lack of indexing and generic labeling within each entry makes it difficult to scan a given entry for a particular type of usage. Instead, the information itself takes priority: what is said is important, not the particular form or genre in which it is said. In Yiwen leiju, Ouyang Xun ℤ䱑䀶 (557–641) sought to improve upon the convenience of other encyclopedias by incorporating facts (shi џ) and belles lettres (wen ᭛) in the same volume but retaining separate sections within the entries for each.5 Taiping yulan further erases the distinction between the two types of texts by treating everything it incorporates as “fact.” Taiping guangji also presents a way of looking at the world and its contents as constructed through a selection of texts, but that world is constituted differently because of the different documents on which it is based. The compilation employs a single-tier organizational structure comprised of over

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one-hundred categories, only a minority of which are further subdivided. As in Taiping yulan, these categories trace a hierarchical trajectory: in this case, beginning with “divine transcendents” and other sorts of remarkable people and moving through phenomena such as divine responses to human acts, to various categories of remarkable human behavior such as honesty and stinginess, and to dreams, ghosts, resurrection, and strange examples of plants, animals, and barbarians.6 These categories reflect the works on which Taiping guangji draws; the world it conjures is accordingly oriented toward the arcane and anomalous. Taizong’s request for an encyclopedia consisting entirely of anecdotes and unofficial narratives suggests that he regarded them as a distinct and important form of knowledge. There was nothing quite like Taiping guangji in the prior encyclopedia tradition, and one might wonder if what Taizong had in mind in ordering a compilation built on unofficial histories and anecdotes was in fact something akin to Liu Xiang’s ࡝৥ (77–6 BCE) Shuoyuan 䁾㢥 (Garden of persuasions) or Liu Yiqing’s ࡝㕽ᝊ (403–44) Shishuo xinyu Ϫ䁾ᮄ䁲 (A New Account of Tales of the World), both of which assemble anecdotes exemplifying types of human actions, positive and negative, and are more squarely centered on the human realm. But there is no record of Taizong’s reaction upon receiving Taiping guangji and so no telling whether he was surprised (pleasantly or unpleasantly) by its contents. Beyond the uniqueness of its content, Taiping guangji’s entries, which consist of discrete narratives, also set it apart from other encyclopedias. The information each narrative presents inheres in a sequence of statements that describe changes or developments over time, requiring that the full arc of the narrative—beginning, middle, and end—be preserved. As a result, where other encyclopedias frequently excerpt only a key sentence or passage from a longer work, Taiping guangji tends to preserve full narratives (themselves typically drawn from collections comprised of several or even hundreds of tales). Similar narrative arcs may be found across different individual narratives, both within and across categories. A given category may contain multiple narratives recounting the same basic events, reinforcing the message in each: for example, the eight juan on tigers include four narratives about a man who is reunited with his bride or wife, thanks to the help of a tiger. Though the narratives are set in different times and places, feature different protagonists, and give different explanations for the tiger’s actions, collectively they suggest that sometimes tigers will perform this service.7 However, this conclusion is not explicitly articulated: readers must read the narratives and deduce the pattern themselves. Taiping guangji is thus an atypical encyclopedia in format as well as content: its organization as a “categorized book” underscores its intended function as a storage space for information, yet the narrative material that constitutes it resists reduction to morselized units of information.

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Yongle dadian Yongle dadian, compiled under the direction of Xie Jin 㾷㏝ (1369–1415), is the most ambitious of the three imperial encyclopedias considered here—in size, the scope of works consulted, and the structuring of each entry. It is at once a two-part reference work, comprising both dictionary entries with exemplary quotations and a filing system for much longer and more varied chunks of text than are found in prior encyclopedias. The work’s ostensible purpose, as stated in the Yongle emperor ∌ῖⱛᏱ (Ming Chengzu ᯢ៤⼪; r. 1402–24) commissioning edict of 1403, was to make the overwhelming wealth of accumulated textual material accessible by gathering it together by topic.8 But its enormous length made it unwieldy, and there is no evidence that Chengzu, or others in the imperial palace where the sole copy was stored, actually made use of it. Like other encyclopedias, Yongle dadian is a compilation of segments of text drawn from existing sources and arranged according to topic. But instead of employing a schematic hierarchy, Yongle dadian is organized according to the rime category of individual graphs, so that each graph constitutes a topic heading. The compilation adopts the order used in the fourteenth-century dictionary Hongwu zhengyun ⋾℺ℷ䷏ (Correct rimes of the Hongwu reign), which divides graphs by tone and then by rime category within each tone category.9 The individual graphs, ordered by pronunciation, become the main subject headings under which everything included in Yongle dadian is subsumed, with multigraph compounds located under one of the graphs comprising them. The Yongle emperor’s stated reason for mandating rime as the organizational scheme was the easy access it would provide to the compilation’s contents, but he also offered a philosophical justification by drawing a line from qi ⇷ (breath, ether: the fundamental building block of the universe) to sound, to the words that name the things within that universe: the implication is that the rime-based organization scheme will provide a location for all of the things that collectively constitute the universe.10 Yongle dadian’s vision of the world and its contents thus differs fundamentally from that of other encyclopedias: it still consists of text organized by topic, but it eliminates the valuations of the world’s constituent components inherent in prior encyclopedic organizational schemes. The Yongle emperor mandated that Yongle dadian be all-encompassing. His preface to the work boasts that it “encompasses the vastness of the universe, integrating the different and the same from antiquity through the present; the gigantic and the minuscule, the fine and the coarse: [all] are brilliantly clear and complete.”11 One aspect of this comprehensiveness is the breadth of titles quoted, which extends far beyond what is typically found in earlier encyclopedias. Yongle dadian’s user guide (fanli ޵՟) claims that “the writings drawn upon were absolutely comprehensive; the immensity of the compilation has never before been seen,” noting that sources used include classics, histories,

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masters’ works, literary collections, Daoist and Buddhist texts, medical and divination manuals, and other assorted works, ranging in date from remote antiquity to the present day;12 the compilation also cites manuals on agriculture and geomancy, geographical treatises, and dramas. In expanding the range of sources used, Yongle dadian vastly expanded the types of information presented as worth knowing. Instead of limiting the text to the most important statements made about each topical heading, it purports to include everything relevant to that topic. And at 22,877 juan, plus a 60-juan table of contents, Yongle dadian dwarfed earlier encyclopedias. A second aspect of Yongle dadian’s comprehensiveness lies in the scope of the individual entries, which incorporate a broader range of materials than is found in prior encyclopedias, often quoted at greater length.13 The first section of each entry functions as a composite historical dictionary of single-graph words. It begins with the pronunciation and definition(s) for the word given in the Hongwu zhengyun, Shuowen jiezi, and other dictionaries and rhyme books, followed by variant orthographies in different script types. This composite dictionary section allows quick access to information about different ways the word has been explained and written; it is the one element common to all the entries examined here, and some entries include only this section. In incorporating this dictionary section, Yongle dadian foregrounds information about the written graph. Many entries also contain one or more additional sections. Some follow the dictionary section with a section labeled “general account” (zongxu 㐑ᬬ), which contains brief quotations pertaining to the headword. For example, in the entry on oil (you ⊍) the dictionary section is followed with a general account comprised of Yuan texts on longevity and agriculture.14 Entries for more frequently used graphs include a section on phrases containing the entry headword, which is found either after the general account if there is one or after the dictionary section if there is not. Each phrase is then explained through quotations from prior texts. For example, under the entry you ␌ (swimming), one finds the following in the subentry for shanyou ୘␌ (skilled at swimming): “Huainanzi: Water-eaters are skilled at swimming and withstand the cold. (Note: This means fish.)”15 Though these quotations do not provide definitions per se, they illustrate the phrase’s meaning and, through that, the meaning of the main headword under which the compound is found. They are thus “factual” rather than “literary” insofar as they provide information about the word and the compound rather than just examples of usage. The sources drawn on vary from entry to entry but tend to be texts that can be mined for information (even if information is not all they offer): histories, anecdote collections, canonical classical works, prior encyclopedias, and agricultural and medical treatises. Literary examples related to a given topic are relegated to a separate section of poetry and prose (shiwen 䀽᭛) or sometimes one of only poetry or only

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prose. This portion of the entry gathers passages drawn from literary works that concern the entry word in some way: thus, the entry on oil has a brief section that includes an anecdote from Hong Mai’s ⋾䙕 (1123–1202) Rongzhai suibi ᆍ唟䱼ㄚ (Jottings from Rong Studio) about a poem Hong Mai had once seen about oil besmirching white clothing and a poem by Lu You 䱌␌ (1125–1210) on buying oil.16 This separation of factual and literary texts under each entry implies a perception of qualitative difference between the two categories of texts. Many entries follow these sections on basic factual information and usage and literary texts with additional subentries consisting of compounds containing the main headword, such as individual people or places or other discrete things: for example, the entry for you ␌ includes biographical accounts about people surnamed You ␌.17 Drawing on very different materials, the entry for er ‫ܦ‬ (child) has a subsection on curing ailments in children (xiaoer zhengzhi ᇣ‫ܦ‬ 䄝⊏), which is further divided by disease: for each disease, there is a set of discussions (lun 䂪) of the disease drawn from various texts and another set of prescriptions (fang ᮍ).18 Not all of the information included here or in the sections described previously is textual: some entries contain maps or other images, such as illustrations of civilian officials (wenchen ᭛㞷) accompanying their stories in the accounts of loyalty (zhongzhuan ᖴ‫)ڇ‬, found under the entry for zhong ᖴ (loyalty), or pictures of different designs for doors, found under men 䭔 (door, gate).19 As these descriptions suggest, this flexible array of sections and subentries, as well as the expansion in the types of sources consulted, allows for a much broader range of types of information than is found in the other encyclopedias discussed in this volume. The information in Yongle dadian’s entries is at once both less accessible than the shorter snippets found elsewhere because the long entries require more time to read and are closer to the type of treatment found in a modern encyclopedia in their inclusion of sustained narratives. Yet the length of the excerpts quoted, sometimes extending to several juan, makes it simultaneously a topical filing system for texts of all sorts. This dual status—as reference work and as textual repository—makes Yongle dadian suitable for two different types of uses, learning what has been said about a given subject and accessing a specific text on a particular topic.

Conclusions All three of these imperial encyclopedias turn documents, literary and otherwise, into information. They separate out discrete chunks of text, short or long, from the surrounding text that once gave those texts context and depth, reducing the source to its most important statement regarding the topic at hand.

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Though in many cases the encyclopedias draw on the same document repeatedly, the source itself is lost in the dissection the encyclopedia performs on it. The breadth of sources cited—greatest for Yongle dadian—also means that each topic is presented through multiple perspectives, with no one definition or explanation granted primacy. The information these compilations present is thus extensive rather than intensive, its value measured by its breadth rather than its judicious selection. Moreover, because they are constructed of quotations from texts, the worlds the encyclopedias portray are correspondingly textual, as illustrated by the example of Taiping guangji’s “truth” that tigers may help men find their brides. They tell us not what the world is really like but how it has been described. If information exists to be put to use, however, the relative lack of both indexing within individual entries and processing of the quoted excerpts limits how easily these encyclopedias can be used as sources of information on diverse topics. How much any of them were actually used in the way they were ostensibly intended is unclear. Song emperor Taizong is said to have personally read through Taiping yulan at the rate of three juan per day after its completion in 982 (the compilation was granted its name, Imperial Readings Compiled in the Taiping Era, after he finished), but it is not known if it was also printed or further circulated at the time, and the earliest known printing dates to the late twelfth century.20 Whether Taizong also read Taiping guangji, completed four years earlier, is also unknown. Printing blocks for the latter were ordered carved in 981 but were then shelved because its contents were considered inessential, and it is not known how many copies, if any, were put into circulation at the time.21 Bibliographical listings and scattered references in other sources22— in addition to the fact that both survive today—indicate that both Taiping encyclopedias were in circulation during the Southern Song and thereafter, but one cannot know how widely. Yongle dadian appears to have seen even less use. It was never printed, its enormous length making that impractical, and only two fair copies were ever made. The first was initially stored in the imperial palace in Nanjing and then moved to Beijing when the capital was shifted in 1421. A second copy was completed in 1567, but Endymion Wilkinson suggests that Hanlin academicians did not have access to it until the early eighteenth century, and only one Ming emperor (Shizong Ϫᅫ, the Jiajing ௝䴪 emperor, r. 1521–67) is known to have consulted it.23 Beyond Taizong’s perusal of Taiping yulan, it is possible that all three encyclopedias were used only rarely as general reference works. All three have, however, been used for reconstructing and correcting the documents on which they drew, in a reversal of the extraction process that created them. Taiping yulan, for example, is deemed a treasure-house for recovering lost texts by Hu Daojing 㚵䘧䴰 while Wilkinson dismisses other uses entirely, writing that “its value lies in its quotations from over 2,000 sources,

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70–80 percent of which have since been lost.”24 Taiping guangji and Yongle dadian have also been extensively mined for the fragments of texts they preserve.25 These encyclopedias thus remain sources of information to this day: information not about the topics that comprise them but about the sources from which they were compiled.

Notes 1. Ann M. Blair, Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information Before the Modern Age (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010), 2. 2. Wang Yinglin ⥟ឝ味 (1223–96), Yuhai ⥝⍋, 8 vols. (Taipei: Dahua shuju, 1977), 54.34a/b. 3. Li Fang ᴢᯝ (925–96) et al., comps., Taiping yulan (Taipei: Taiwan shangwu yinshuguan, 1967), mulu Ⳃ䣘 1.22–15.129; Hu Daojing 㚵䘧䴰, Zhongguo gudai de leishu Ё೑ সҷⱘ㉏к (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1982), 121. 4. Chen Zhensun 䱇ᤃᄿ (fl. 1211–49), Zhizhai shulu jieti Ⳉ唟᳌䣘㾷丠 (Shanghai: Shanghai guiji chubanshe, 2015), 2.225; Hu Daojing, Zhongguo gudai de leishu, 118–20. 5. Ouyang Xun, comp., Yiwen leiju, 4 vols. (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1982), 27. 6. Li Fang et al., comps., Taiping guangji, 10 vols. (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1961). 7. Li Fang et al., Taiping guangji, 428.3481–82, 428.3484–85, 428.3485, 431.3502–3. 8. Guo Bogong 䛁ԃᙁ, “Yongle dadian kao” lj∌ῖ໻‫݌‬NJ㗗, in Yongle dadian yanjiu ziliao jikan ∌ῖ໻‫ⷨ݌‬お䊛᭭䔃ߞ, ed. Zhang Sheng ᔉᯛ (Beijing: Beijing tushuguan chubanshe, 2005), 12 (hereafter YLDDYZJ). 9. User guide to the Yongle dadian, quoted in Guo Bogong, “Yongle dadian kao,” 93, and Yue Shaofeng ῖ䷊勇 et al., Hongwu zhengyun, (Ming) Liu Yijie ed., digital reproduction at https://iiif.lib.harvard.edu/manifests/view/drs:17564135$1i. 10. Guo Bogong, “Yongle dadian kao,” 12, 17. 11. Guo Bogong, “Yongle dadian kao,” 13, 17. 12. Guo Bogong, “Yongle dadian kao,” 93. 13. Only something less than 4 percent of the original Yongle dadian is known to be extant; see Zhang Sheng, “Yongle dadian xiancun juan mubiao” lj∌ῖ໻‫݌‬NJ⧒ᄬोⳂ㸼, in Deguo Bolin minzuxue bowuguan cang Yongle dadian ᖋ೟ᶣᵫ⇥ᮣᅌम⠽仼㮣lj∌ ῖ໻‫݌‬NJ, 4 vols. plus supp. (Beijing: Guojia tushuguan chubanshe, 2017), supp. 1a–9b (hereafter DBMBCY). 14. Xie Jin 㾷㏝ et al., comps., Hafo Yanjing tushuguan cang Yongle dadian જԯ➩Ҁ೪᳌ 仼㮣lj∌ῖ໻‫݌‬NJ, ed. Hafo Yanjing tushuguan જԯ➩Ҁ೪᳌仼 and Guojia tushuguan chubanshe ೟ᆊ೪᳌仼ߎ⠜⼒, 3 vols. plus supp. (Beijing: Guojia tushuguan chubanshe, 2013), 3:8841.1b (hereafter HYTCY). 15. Xie Jin et al., HYTCY, 3:8842.2a. 16. Xie Jin et al., HYTCY, 3:8841.13b–14a. 17. Xie Jin et al., HYTCY, 3:8842.5b–8843.23b. 18. E.g., Xie Jin et al., HYTCY, vol. 1, juan 981 and 1033; in Zhang Sheng, DBMBCY, vol. 2. 19. Xie Jin et al., comps., Yongle dadian, 10 vols. (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1986), 485.6a– 17b, and Yongle dadian: juan 3518–3519 ∌ῖ໻‫݌‬: ोϝगѨⱒकܿПϝगѨⱒकб, ed. Yao Guangxiao ྮᒷᄱ et al. (Beijing: Shumu wenxian chubanshe, 1983), 3518.4a– 15a, 17a–18b. 20. Wang Yinglin, Yuhai, 54.34b; Hu Daojing, Zhongguo gudai de leishu, 129. 21. Wang Yinglin, Yuhai, 54.35a.

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22. E.g., Chen Zhensun, Zhizhai shulu jieti, 1.325, 2.425. 23. Zhang Sheng, “Qianyan” ࠡ㿔, in Zhang Sheng, YLDDYZJ, 2; Wilkinson, Chinese History: A New Manual, 5th ed. (self-pub., 2018), 1083; see also the passage from Shizong shilu Ϫᅫᆺ䣘 quoted in Guo Bogong, “Yongle dadian kao,” 110. 24. Hu Daojing, Zhongguo gudai de leishu, 125; Wilkinson, Chinese History, 1081. 25. Taiping guangji has been extensively used in the reconstruction of pre-Song anecdotal and tale collections. Zhao Wanli 䍭㨀䞠 lists many books recovered from the Yongle dadian (“Yongle dadian nei jichu zhi yishu mu” lj∌ῖ໻‫݌‬NJܻ䔃ߎПԮ᳌Ⳃ, in Zhang Sheng, YLDDYZJ, 609–53).

CHAPTER 32

LATER IMPERIAL VERNACULAR ENCYCLOPEDIAS C Y N T H I A B RO K AW

T

he late imperial period (roughly the fourteenth through the nineteenth centuries) marks a transformation not only in the perception of what knowledge was but also in the understanding of who acceptable recipients of knowledge were. The commercialization of the late Ming economy, fueled by the influx of silver from the Americas and Japan, and the growth of urban populations stimulated both a high demand for texts and a dramatic increase in commercial publishing. The newest intellectual movement of the day, by celebrating the moral potential of each man to become a sage, sparked an effort on the part of both idealistic literati and commercial publishers to produce texts accessible and useful to a broad population, including but now no longer limited to educated and wealthy elites. With these economic, social, and intellectual changes came a larger understanding of what was worthy of being considered “knowledge.” Perhaps no texts illustrate this expansion in the scope and nature of knowledge more clearly than the popular encyclopedias of the late Ming. Building on Song and Yuan precedents, these works, as “complete collections of myriad treasures” (wanbao quanshu 㨀ᇊܼ᳌), purported to provide the reader with all he (and to some extent she) needed to know in a world overflowing with information. “The number of books is now boundless as the ocean—how can one read them all?” asks Yu Xiangdou ԭ䈵᭫ (fl. 1588–1609), compiler of the encyclopedia Xinke Tianxia simin bianlan Santai wanyong zhengzong ᮄࠏ໽ϟ ಯ⇥֓㾑ϝৄ㨀⫼ℷᅫ (Santai’s infinitely useful [guide to] how to do everything right for the convenient consultation of all the four classes under heaven,

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newly cut; 1599). “If the hundred schools and multitudinous techniques are not collected and summarized, how can they be transmitted?” ⱒᆊⴒᡔП㐕䴲 ㇵ㎼ࠛᅄ䓝ᅄ‫ڇ‬. He assures the reader that his work answers this question: “Everything in the world necessary for daily use has been searched out and included” ޵ҎϪ᠔᳝᮹⫼᠔䳔ϡ᧰㕙㗠ࣙᣀП.1 Earlier encyclopedic works often made similar claims; from their earliest appearance, they were understood to be “possess[ing] in miniature the dimensions of the cosmos.”2 What makes the late imperial popular encyclopedias different is the extent to which they expanded the scope and indeed the very nature of this cosmos. While continuing to give pride of place to the conventional topics of acceptable “elite” knowledge found in earlier encyclopedias (heavenly patterns, earthly forms, human affairs, times and seasons, Confucian teachings, official ranks, etc.), they added a host of other topics, including but not limited to merchant travel, mathematical calculations, gambling, alchemy, medicine, pregnancy and childbirth, astrological fate calculation, physiognomy, geomancy, auspicious times, livestock raising, jokes, board games, drinking games, and brothel etiquette. Earlier Tang and Song encyclopedias might collect pieces of information—that is, citations from earlier works— about, for example, government offices and, by putting them together, form a body (or what the encyclopedias referred to as a men 䭔 “gate”) of knowledge labeled “Guanzhi” ᅬ㙋 (Official positions). The compilers of the late Ming daily-use encyclopedias constructed—or at least textualized for what seems to have been the first time—new bodies of knowledge by collecting pieces of daily-use information—for example, about how to play kickball or how to cure childhood diseases—and organizing these data into men titled “Cuju” 䑈䏬 (Kickball) and “Huyou” 䅋ᑐ (Protecting children). (Note that this knowledge does not necessarily form a system but rather is a hierarchically ordered collection of data. That is, in these texts the pieces of information are not connected to one another and woven into a tightly coherent system; they are interrelated only in that they are relevant to the same men of knowledge.) Equally important, the daily-use encyclopedias put these categories of mundane knowledge together with long-established, respectable categories of “real” knowledge—heavenly patterns, earthly forms, human affairs, etc.—in single texts, thereby granting legitimacy to mundane knowledge. Thus, what is striking here is not so much the significant increase in the number of topics in the popular encyclopedias as the change in the nature of the information transmitted and the implicit assumption that this information was worthy of collection into categories of knowledge meriting dissemination in print. Information for “daily use,” drawn from knowledge of the “hundred schools and multitudinous techniques,” as Yu Xiangdou puts it, was not the concern of the true scholar, the Confucian junzi ৯ᄤ (superior man). What constituted knowledge for him was the eternal moral and ethical truths of the Classics and great works of

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literature and history; the information of the “hundred schools and multitudinous techniques” was irrelevant (or, in the case of categories like brothel etiquette and drinking games, actively damaging) to understanding the Way. By insisting on the importance of everyday information and placing it in the same textual space as knowledge of the heavens, Confucianism, and official ranks, Yu Xiangdou and like-minded commercial publishers were implicitly challenging the hegemony of elite knowledge. Largely the products of commercial publishers in the major publishing sites of the late Ming—Jianyang (Fujian) and the cities of Jiangnan—working with professional writers (often failed examination candidates) as editors, these works celebrate, at least in their titles, the currency (they are “newly cut” or “revised”), convenience (bianyong ֓⫼), and usefulness (liyong ߽⫼) of the information they contain. They are for all four classes of people under heaven (tianxia simin ໽ϟಯ⇥) but were compiled by scholars (wenlin ᭛ᵫ, hanyuan 㗄㢥, yantai ➩㟎) who scoured (souluo ᧰㕙) the empire for sources. They contain in fact everything precious, everything marvelous (wanbao 㨀ᇊ, miaojin ཭䣺, wanjin 㨀䣺)—everything worth knowing. The new prominence the wanbao quanshu gave to mundane practical knowledge also recontextualized literary information, implicitly granting it an expanded use and social value. When literary information in the form of citations of phrases from time-honored texts—the phrases that formed the contents of previous encyclopedic works—appeared together with excerpts from guides on merchant travel and charms for the expulsion of disease, it, too, became a form of daily-life knowledge. It became, then, by implication as accessible to “all under heaven”—or at least those under heaven who were literate in the simple Classical Chinese that was the language of most of these texts—as to the well-educated elites who had formed the exclusive audience for the medieval and middle imperial officially or privately published encyclopedias. These encyclopedias also expanded the scope of literary production by incorporating samples of a range of documents, forms, and letters relevant to the everyday interactions. Chapters titled “Minyong” ⇥⫼ (For the use of the people) or “Tishi” 储ᓣ (Forms) provided model contracts (for the sale or rental of land and buildings, the hire of transport, the sale of women and children, community compacts, etc.) and model forms for official or family documents (petitions, testimonies, division-of-property documents, etc.). Validating the claim that these encyclopedias were for “all four classes of the people,” editors often identified documents as being for use by a particular status or occupational group. In Dingqin Chongwenge huizuan shimin wanyong zhengzong buqiuren 哢䢳ዛ᭛䭷ᔭ㑖຿⇥㨀⫼ℷᅫϡ∖Ҏ (Guide to all that is useful and correct for scholars and the common people, collected by the Chongwenge, newly cut; 1607), for example, the category providing models for family division documents notes which are for Confucians, which for officials,

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and which for petty functionaries.3 “Correspondence” categories were similarly attentive to the expression of social and status distinctions, even those of the most elementary kind. Thus, one work explains that a son or grandson writing to a father or grandfather should refer to himself as unworthy (buxiao ϡ㙪), a fraternal nephew to an uncle as ignorant (yu ᛮ), and a younger brother to an elder brother as untalented (bucai ϡᠡ)—surely the kind of information unnecessary for an adult member of the literati class.4 From a strictly orthodox viewpoint, the wanbao quanshu could be—and apparently were—blamed for debasing literary information, particularly as it was used in the practice of the most disreputable and frivolous of the “multitudinous techniques”: drinking games and jokes. Proficiency in both depended on knowledge of classical texts, for skill was often demonstrated by clever subversion or humorous reversal of the meaning of phrases from the Four Books and other canonical works. Moreover, citations from these respectable texts might be juxtaposed with colloquial phrases or citations from noncanonical vernacular—and very popular—contemporary works like Xixiang ji 㽓ᒖ㿬 (Story of the Western Wing).5 Here new literary information, often of the sort ostensibly judged disreputable in elite circles, was inserted into the encyclopedias at the same time that “old” literary information became fodder for comic reversals of meaning. Thus, the wanbao quanshu, while making partially educated commoners privy to elite literary knowledge, also affirmed the value to the literary canon of vernacular works typically scorned by the elite. These texts were marketed as popular encyclopedias, but they were closer in spirit to the specialized literary encyclopedias of earlier times. Works devoted entirely to the composition of all different forms of social communication or rhymed couplets, for example, provided extensive models for imitation. Xinke Hanhui shanfang jizhu gujin qizha yunzhang ᮄࠏ৿䓱ቅ᠓䔃䀏সҞଳᴁ䳆ゴ (Hanhui Studio-edited and -annotated elegant models for ancient and modern correspondence, newly cut), attributed to Chen Jiru 䱇㑐‫( ۦ‬1558–1639) and Chen Menghong 䱇໶㱍 (perhaps one of the many poor scholars Chen Jiru employed to churn out such works), included nineteen types of zha ᴁ (communications to superiors) in its major lower register and sixteen types of qi ଳ (family or community communications) in its narrower upper register. Each register had models for different kinds of letters; for example, “Zha” included “greetings to superiors,” “announcing a visit,” “seeking a reference,” and “expressing gratitude.” These general types were then more finely subdivided: “expressing gratitude” included, for example, “thanking a person for his favor,” “responding to a gift with thanks,” and “thanking a person for a recommendation,” among others.6 Model replies were provided when appropriate. All the models were punctuated, and allusions or difficult characters were fully explained in (also punctuated) interlinear comments. This work purported to provide the literary information its owner needed to master all forms of

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communication as an educated member of society. It even contained a section on rhymed couplets (duilian ᇡ㙃) appropriate for different statuses and occasions, hierarchically ranked from those for Confucians on down to those for wine shops, and a section on Tang poetry, presumably to supply the reader with famous lines to drop in their letters and couplets. Encyclopedias that collected and categorized allusions, the concise phrases that encapsulate the point of a historical or moral anecdote (gushi ᬙџ or “story”) in just a few characters, were particularly popular. Xinke leiji gushi tongkao pangxun ᮄࠏ串䔃ᬙџ䗮㗗ᮕ㿧 (Comprehensively researched and categorized allusions with sideline notes, newly cut; 1608), attributed to the noted late Ming writer Tu Long ሴ䱚 (1542–1605), explains allusions drawn from the literary and historical tradition. For example, in the “Wenxue” ᭛ ᅌ (Literature) category, the compiler explained the meaning of the allusion “sweating oxen, full to the rafters” (∫⠯‫ܙ‬ẳ), a phrase commonly used to describe a large book collection, as follows: “[From] Yunfu [qunyu] ䷏ᑰ[ 㕸⥝] ([Assembled jade] of the treasury of rhymes). The books of Lu Wentong 䱌᭛䗮 reached to the rafters of his house and, when transported, made oxen and horses sweat.” At points to the right of this brief (and slightly bungled) citation from the Yunfu qunyu are additional, very simple explanations printed in small characters. Thus, the sentence “ ‘[Having] many books’ is called ‘sweating oxen, full to the rafters’ ” is printed just to the right of the four-character entry, and down the column, “full to the rafters” is fleshed out to “piled up to fill [the house] to the rafters.”7 These encyclopedias could serve as treasuries of information for readers hoping to acquire the cultural polish that came with knowledge of the literary tradition. In his Qie pangzhu shilei jielu 䤹ᮕ䀏џ串᥋䣘 (Quick guide to all categories of things, cut with sideline notes; 1603), Deng Zhimo 䛻ᖫ䃼, a professional writer in the employ of a Jianyang commercial publishing house, listed all his sources so a reader might see just how comprehensive a review of the tradition he was providing. But these encyclopedias functioned most effectively— and doubtless earned their great popularity—as aids to composition, as literary thesauruses that could provide just the right phrase or allusion for authors struggling to express themselves in a suitably elegant or learned style. Their primary audience was students: Deng Zhimo states that Qie pangzhu shilei jielu was designed to “enlighten the ignorance of my sons and others of their age.”8 Such works were particularly useful to boys who needed to memorize the “ethical axioms, historical references, obscure allusions, and hints, poetical, biographical, and historical,” that they were to piece together to produce the “literary mosaic” that was the late imperial examination essay.9 Medieval encyclopedias also listed allusions and their sources in the major works of the literary tradition. What makes Xinke leiji gushi tongkao pangxun or Qie pangzhu shilei jielu different—that is, what makes them popular

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encyclopedias for “all four classes of the people” rather than for the elite—is the paratexts added to make their contents accessible to readers with limited literacy. Such paratexts, at least ostensibly designed to aid all readers in both navigating and understanding the texts, proliferated in late Ming encyclopedias. Tables of contents were often quite detailed, listing not only men titles but also the subdivisions within each men. Topic headings were set off in circles or printed intaglio, presumably as finding aids. Punctuation marked sentence breaks, and emphasis markers (blacked-in tear-shaped “commas” or open circles) highlighted the important sections of a citation or allusion. In some texts, personal names were indicated with a black vertical line. Interlinear, sideline, or “eyebrow” commentary provided simple explanations of allusions or characters, as in the example from Xinke leiji gushi tongkao pangxun given earlier. Multiple registers might contain related information to make searching for a specific topic easier; thus, Xinke Hanhui shanfang jizhu gujin qizha yunzhang stacked model letters to family members and communities on top of models for communication with superiors. Illustrations—of heavenly bodies, foreign peoples, plants and animals, etc.—broke up and enlivened the text. In the correspondence-model encyclopedias, illustrations showing the proper format for formal invitations or charts defining the hierarchical relationships dictating terms of address helped the reader visualize the information in the text. The change of dynasty altered the nature of the popular encyclopedias. Commercial publishers of the Qing continued to revise and print wanbao quanshu through the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, but these volumes appeared in somewhat tamer form, stripped of both the racy categories and the elaborate constellation of paratexts that characterized the late Ming versions. More compact—and doubtless more affordable—the most commonly published popular encyclopedias of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries tended to be even more determinedly “popular” than their late Ming predecessors. To be sure, in the spirit of the earlier wanbao quanshu the Choushi jinnang 䜻Ϫ䣺ಞ (Precious guide to social intercourse) was billed in its preface as “not only a guide to all proper actions [of daily life], but also the oar needed to cross the vast waters of the sea of learning.”10 Yet its concept of daily life was limited to family rituals, correspondence and contract models, terms of address, composition of duilian, and—in some versions of this much-published work—descriptions of merchant routes. It no longer included information on heavenly patterns, earthly forms, human affairs, or official positions. Although it contained some information that might be of use to shengyuan ⫳વ (provincial examination candidates), it was most clearly targeting modestly literate shopkeepers, farmers, and traders. Employing even further simplified versions of the annotations and commentarial aids of the late Ming popular encyclopedias, it eschewed, however, the elaborate (and doubtless expensive to cut) paratexts of the earlier works.

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Another of these encyclopedias, the Huizuan jiali tieshi jiyao ᔭ㑖ᆊ⾂ Ꮺᓣ䲚㽕 (Collected essentials of family rituals and model forms), provided a radically popularized version of the literary thesaurus offered in late Ming works like Qie pangzhu shilei jielu. It opened with lists of names of things and events organized in fairly conventional categories: months, seasons, festivals, teas and wines, grains and food, flowers and trees, etc. Under each, it provided fancy phrases for mundane items. “Terms for grains,” for example, begins: “ ‘Uncooked rice’ (mi ㉇) is called ‘white feast’ (baican ⱑ㊆) when cooked; it is called ‘the king’s kernel’ (yuli ⥟㉦) . . .”11 Presumably these entries helped upwardly-mobile literate peasants, petty merchants, and lower gentry learn how to speak but, most particularly, how to write—that is, to know what euphemisms or ornamented phrases to use, even about subjects as homey as rice, in conversation or correspondence with their better-educated acquaintances. Of course, these were precisely the social goals of the late Ming wanbao quanshu. In the Qing, however, they were adapted by commercial publishers and their hired editors to suit the more modest social aspirations and limited purchasing power of the rapidly expanding population of at least partially literate men and women. The Qing editors and publishers retained much of the new daily-use information (and the knowledge categories into which it was collected) introduced in the late Ming encyclopedias, but they recontextualized it anew. Separated from the orthodox knowledge categories (heavenly patterns, earthly forms, etc.), it was repackaged as relevant not to “all four classes of the people,” as it once was, but to readers who had little hope of hobnobbing with the elite yet who nonetheless wished to know “how to do everything right.”

Notes 1. Yu Xiangdou, ed., “Yin” ᓩ, 1a, in Xinke Tianxia bianlan Santai wanyong zhengzong ([Jianyang] Yushi Shuangfengtang ԭ⇣䲭ዄූ, 1599), in Zhongguo shehui kexueyuan Lishi yanjiusuo Wenhua shi Ё೟⼒᳗⾥ᅌ䰶⅋৆ⷨお᠔᭛࣪ᅸ, ed., Mingdai tongsu riyong leishu jikan ᯢҷ䗮֫᮹⫼串᳌䲚ߞ, 16 vols. (Chongqing: Xinan shifan daxue chubanshe, 2011), 6:211 (hereafter MDTSRYLSJK). 2. Xiaofei Tian, “Literary Learning: Encyclopedias and Epitomes,” in The Oxford Handbook of Classical Chinese Literature (1000 BCE–900 CE), ed. Wiebke Denecke, Wai-yee Li, and Xiaofei Tian (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 136. 3. Yang Longzi 䱑啡ᄤ, ed., Dingqin Chongwenge huizuan shimin wanyong zhengzong buqiuren ([Jianyang] Tanyang Yu Wentai ╁䱑ԭ᭛ৄ, 1607), 5.2ab, in Zhongguo shehui kexueyuan Lishi yanjiusuo Wenhua shi, MDTSRYLSJK, 9:265. 4. Yang Longzi, ed., Dingqin Chongwenge huizuan shimin wanyong zhengzong buqiuren, 6.1ab, in Zhongguo shehui kexueyuan Lishi yanjiusuo Wenhua shi, MDTSRYLSJK, 9:268. 5. Yuming He, Home and the World: Editing the “Glorious Ming” in Woodblock-Printed Books of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2013), 21–29.

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6. Chen Jiru and Chen Menghong, eds., Xinke Hanhui shanfang jizhu gujin qizha yunzhang ([Jianyang] Tanshui Xiongshi ╁∈❞⇣, Ming), 1.1a–43b, esp. 1:26b–32b, in Zhongguo shehui kexueyuan Lishi yanjiusuo Wenhua shi, MDTSRYLSJK, 14:26–47, esp. 14:39–42. 7. Tu Long, ed., Xinke leiji gushi tongkao pangxun (Zhan Shengze 䁍㘪╸, 1608), 5.3b, in Zhongguo shehui kexueyuan Lishi yanjiusuo Wenhua shi, MDTSRYLSJK, 9:92. Yunfu qunyu is a rime encyclopedia by Yin Shifu 䱄ᰖ໿ (fl. thirteenth cent.). The phrase “ ‘[Having] many books’ is called ‘sweating oxen, full to the rafters’ ” (“Han niu chong dong” ∫⠯‫ܙ‬ẳ) is from Liu Zongyuan’s ᷇ᅫ‫( ܗ‬773–819) epitaph for Lu Chun 䱌⏇ (d. 805), “Wentong xiansheng Lu jishi mubiao” ᭛䗮‫⫳ܜ‬䱌㌺џ๧㸼. See Liu Zongyuan, Liu Zongyuan ji ᷇ᅫ‫ܗ‬䲚, 4 vols. (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1979), 9.208–11. 8. Deng Zhimo, ed., Qie pangzhu shilei jielu ([Jianyang] Yushi Cuiqingtang ԭ⇣㧗ᝊූ, 1603), 5b, in Zhongguo shehui kexueyuan Lishi yanjiusuo Wenhua shi, MDTSRYLSJK, 7:295. 9. John L. Nevius, China and the Chinese (Chicago: Missionary Campaign Library, 1882), 65. 10. Zou Tingyou and Zou Jingyang, eds., “Choushi jinnang quanji xu,” 1ab, in Yunlin bieshu xinji Choushi jinnang quanji 䳆ᵫ߹๙ᮄ䔃䜻Ϫ䣺ಞܼ䲚 [Yunlin Villa complete collection of the precious guide to social intercourse, newly edited], comp. Zou Jingyang 䛦᱃᦮ (Liaomotang 㘞๼ූ, preface 1771). 11. Jiang Haoran ∳⌽✊ and Jiang Jianzi ∳‫ع‬䊛, comps., Huizuan jiali tieshi jiyao (preface 1810), 1.1a–2b.

CHAPTER 33

QING DYNASTY IMPERIAL ENCYCLOPEDIAS S T E FA N O G A N D O L F O

T

he Qing dynasty was the heyday of premodern encyclopedic projects aimed at organizing knowledge by collecting and ordering the amassed textual universe.1 More large-scale publications were produced during the Qing than during any other dynasty, and among them, the eighteenth-century encyclopedias Gujin tushu jicheng সҞ೪᳌䲚៤ (Collected writings and illustrations, past and present) and Siku quanshu ಯᑿܼ᳌ (Complete writings of the four repositories) and its derivative projects stand apart in the grandness of their vision and the endurance of their cultural significance.2 While both of these encyclopedias were imperially sponsored, they were of different kinds: the first is a leishu 串᳌ (categorized writings) and the latter a congshu শ᳌ (collectanea), which is to say that the first is composed of textual excerpts ordered by topic, while the latter is a collection of texts reproduced in full. In the case of the Siku quanshu, the collection is so large that it constitutes a library in its own right. This chapter introduces the organization of these two projects and accounts for their main structural features. By showing how the Siku quanshu was envisioned in part as a response to the Gujin tushu jicheng, it aims to complicate our understanding of the term encyclopedia in the Chinese context and show that the boundaries between leishu and congshu are more porous than generally conceived. In probing the decision of how to order the Siku quanshu, the chapter argues that on top of the customary sociopolitical understanding of imperial projects—that all decisions were primarily motivated by questions

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of legitimacy and orthodoxy—a theoretical layer that takes into consideration aspects of information organization must be added.

Two Orders of Knowledge The Gujin tushu jicheng had an unprecedented structure, unmatched in its precision.3 It was composed of six main categories—astronomy (lixiang Ლ䈵), topography (fangyu ᮍ䔓), ethics (minglun ᯢ‫)׿‬, investigation of objects (bowu म⠽), studies on principle (lixue ⧚ᅌ), and administration (jingji ㍧△)—which were composed of thirty-two sections in turn composed of more than six thousand subsections. Nothing was outside the purview of the encyclopedia—or at least nothing of significance from the compilers’ perspective—with entries ranging from heavenly bodies (qianxiang ђ䈵) and mountains and rivers (shanchuan ቅᎱ) to classical texts (jingji ㍧㈡), music (yuelü ῖᕟ), and rituals (liyi ⾂‫)۔‬. What particularly distinguished the Gujin tushu jicheng, however, was not only its outstanding number of divisions but also its classification of information by type. Thus, for each topic one could find different kinds of textual excerpts such as comprehensive treatises (zonglun 㐑䂪), images (tu ೪), selected literary phrases (xuanju 䙌হ) and biographies (liezhuan ߫‫)ڇ‬, among others.4 This dual organization of material, based on content and type, is the reason why the order of the Gujin tushu jicheng has been described as a close-knit warp and weft.5 Following a systematic order, the two principles work coextensively to facilitate the search and retrieval of different types of information for all kinds of topics, reflecting Qing scholars’ apprehension, sensitivity, and inventiveness vis-à-vis matters of information management. The Siku quanshu, on the other hand, was based on the fourfold classification (sibu ಯ䚼) that developed over fourteen hundred years before its compilation and was adapted to meet the needs of Qing dynasty scholarship. The four sections have been historically misunderstood in Western scholarship as analogues to modern disciplines: jing ㍧ as sacred scriptures, shi ৆ as history, zi ᄤ as philosophy, and ji 䲚 as literature. While more recent scholarship has moved away from this disciplinary anachronism and has surfaced their documentary—and not disciplinary—character, the momentum of past translations endures.6 The four main sections were composed of forty-four subsections, which were further composed of over seventy subsubsections. With a three-tiered division totaling almost 120 groupings, the Siku quanshu represents the most complex and mature organization of knowledge following the fourfold order.7 The Siku quanshu compiled and reproduced texts in their entirety, differentiating it from the Gujin tushu jicheng, which compiled only excerpts. Rarely mentioned is the fact that the Siku quanshu’s congshu format was envisioned as

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a direct response to the Gujin tushu jicheng. In his inaugural edict, the Qianlong ђ䱚 emperor (r. 1735–96) noted that because of its leishu format, the Gujin tushu jicheng compiled only excerpts and “could not record texts in full.” This, the emperor continued, “forced readers to trace the flow [of learning] back to its source and authenticate the origins [of excerpts] one by one.”8 The emperor’s words reflect a concern, typical of late imperial scholarship, that a broader framework was needed for compiling and ordering textual information. They also embody confidence in the scholarly bureaucracy’s capacity to undertake projects marked by complexity and information overload. Furthermore, as Yao Mingda ྮৡ䖒 (1905–42) has pointed out, the decision to name a book collection like the Siku quanshu was atypical, an action usually reserved for leishu compilations.9 The decision to bestow a name on the project is a statement in itself, reflecting the significance attached to the project and the desire to merge the content of a congshu anthology with the naming practices of leishu, thereby merging and transcending both genres.10 The Siku quanshu aimed to represent the breadth of Chinese knowledge accumulated up to the Qing while also capturing its most essential facets. It was a negotiation between completeness and selectivity, exhaustiveness and essence, and the project quickly expanded into derivative ventures, some of which aimed for more broadness, while others sought further simplicity. The Siku quanshu zongmu tiyao ಯᑿܼ᳌㐑Ⳃᦤ㽕 (Catalog with critical abstracts of the Complete writings of the four repositories) included bibliographical introductions that recorded key facts on a work’s physical composition, content, and author for well over ten thousand titles. Thus, it included many texts that were considered valuable enough to be noted but not valuable enough to be reproduced. Responding to the massive scale of the Siku quanshu zongmu tiyao, the Siku quanshu jianming mulu ಯᑿܼ᳌ㇵᯢⳂ䣘 (Simplified catalog of the Complete writings of the four repositories) included bibliographical notes only for copied texts. The compromise between comprehensiveness and redaction required a subtle balancing act. Regardless of size, however, the Siku quanshu derivative catalogs closely resemble encyclopedias, since (1) they consist of original pieces providing basic information and (2) they are organized with the intent to facilitate users’ navigation of the sprawling textual universe. The Siku quanshu project in all its manifestations was an exercise in harnessing information and making it manageable and useful.

The Siku quanshu in Context As an imperially sponsored project, the Siku quanshu was conceived as a guide to governance, a tool to be consulted by emperor and scholar-officials alike. On the one hand, effective governance required a systematic ethical cultivation

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of the self. In his inaugural edict, the Qianlong emperor called for the collection of texts that “clarified the essentials of governance and illuminated human nature and the morals and manners of the world.”11 Likewise, Zhu Yun ᴅㄴ (1729–81), one of the most prominent scholars of his time and one of the minds behind the compilation’s formation, called for the creation of a project that would surface the sages’ vision of the world in order to revive the ethico-political structures of a long-lost antiquity. On the other hand, effective governance required broad yet specialized learning. Narrower fields of knowledge such as calendrics, astronomy, mathematics and mensuration, irrigation, agriculture, and cartography had emerged as mature and rich spheres of inquiry. Echoing this concern for an examination of the external world, Zhu Yun further called for the collection of texts examining the interactions of heaven and earth.12 In the interest of improving governance, ethical wisdom was to be complemented with knowledge and information of the physical world. The two centuries prior to the compilation of the Siku quanshu saw the emergence of a new kind of scholarship of received texts that examined them under a philological (xiaoxue ᇣᅌ) lens. The driving concern behind this new scholarly movement was to establish which sections of the classics were the original words of the sages and which were the additions and adulterations of later scholars. The realization that the received texts did not represent the original thought of antiquity unleashed a critical and inquisitive stance toward them. Their significance was never questioned; instead, this kind of philological work was geared toward increasing their value by restoring textual accuracy. One of the most significant outcomes of this method was the recognition of the value of texts as documents containing information necessary to understand the unfolding of scholarship as a historical process. Texts were not exclusively seen as carriers of wisdom but were also perceived as documents bearing valuable information about the development of scholarly theory and praxis.13 During the Qing dynasty, many scholars felt that “books are so vast they resemble a deep ocean.”14 There were so many texts and so many different kinds of texts that information overflow had become an acute problem. Understanding how different pieces of writing were related to each other— chronologically and conceptually—was becoming increasingly taxing. Finding a solution to this problem, a way to assist scholars in their effort to understand the origins and development—literally, source and flow (yuanliu ⑤⌕)—of different streams of scholarship, had become essential. How could all of learning be organized in a systematic whole? And what framework would work best in assisting scholars in understanding the breaks and continuities in the realms of knowledge? The significance Qing scholars placed on questions of information and knowledge management is reflected in the rise of bibliographical studies

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(muluxue Ⳃ䣘ᅌ). During the High Qing, the field was among the most developed and esteemed lines of scholarship. In the words of Wang Mingsheng ⥟勈ⲯ (1722–98), an eminent scholar of the time: “Within learning, bibliographical studies are of utmost importance; it is necessary to apply oneself here first and only then will one be able to find one’s way into the fields of learning.”15 Imperially sponsored, private, and for-profit compilations of all kinds of texts— from sūtras to poems—were flourishing and, with them, different types of arrangements for different kinds of textual information.16 Despite the diversity of their contents, all compilations aimed to confer order on the seemingly boundless ocean of texts. The Siku quanshu was the consummate response to the scholarly—indeed existential—concerns of late imperial literati. It was an exercise in organizing knowledge in a manner that would provide a comprehensive intellectual history from antiquity down to the present. In its vision to provide a broad overview of the source and flow of all scholarship—and arguably in its capacity to deliver on that vision—the Siku quanshu differed from the Gujin tushu jicheng and overcame its limitations. Unlike its earlier counterpart, the Siku quanshu was envisioned as the encyclopedic project that would be the final answer to the confluence of High Qing scholarly questions on ordering knowledge and harnessing invaluable information.

The Order of the Siku quanshu The Siku quanshu has been hailed as the emblematic instantiation of the fourfold classification; its name (translated as “four treasuries” or “four repositories”) ensures the connection is readily explicit. Yet at the embryonic stages of the compilation, the adoption of the fourfold classification was far from obvious. In his memorial to the throne, Zhu Yun proposed to follow either the organization in the Han dynasty bibliographical project Qilüe ϗ⬹ (Seven epitomes) or the fourfold classification.17 His suggestion to use the Qilüe organization—which had been abandoned for well over a millennium—was bold and radical, since it required a major reconfiguration of the knowledge universe. Zhu Yun’s motivations were undoubtedly tied to his commitments to Han Learning (Hanxue ⓶ᅌ), a new, dominant form of scholarship18 that advocated returning to Han dynasty scholarship and institutions, since they were perceived as the gateway to reviving sagely antiquity.19 The suggestion, however, also reveals that, contrary to common assumptions, Zhu Yun and considerable sections of the scholarly community were not wed to the fourfold classification and seriously considered questions pertaining to the organization of textual information.20 The sibu was not considered the apex of all bibliographical systems or an orthodox tradition that had to be upheld. In fact, by the time the Siku quanshu was produced, many imperial and private

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collections of the Song and Ming dynasties had used organizing systems different from the fourfold order that better met the necessities of an evolving knowledge landscape.21 This has led some modern scholars to argue that the choice of the fourfold classification constituted a revival. However, the fourfold classification was never fully abandoned, as the Qilüe organization had been, but rather coexisted for several centuries with other organizing systems reflecting the richness and plurality of information-management schemes in late imperial China.22 To understand why the Siku quanshu compilers believed the fourfold classification was superior to alternatives, one needs to determine for whom the Siku quanshu was made. While the answer might seem straightforward, as the compilation and its encyclopedic overviews were collected for the Qianlong emperor and all his successors, it is complicated by the fact that the production of the Siku quanshu had a strong public dimension. Hundreds of editors from across the empire—and not just the palace—were enlisted to sift through a virtually inexhaustible trove of texts. The collective nature of the Siku quanshu compilation meant that the project as a whole came to represent the concerns of a broad cross section of scholars. Simultaneously, the eventual decision to reward the southern provinces for their contributions with three copies of the Siku quanshu highlights the fact that the intended users were not only members of the imperial house but also those in the broader scholarly community. The broadening of the Siku quanshu was influenced by scholars such as Zhou Yongnian ਼∌ᑈ (1703–91) who were calling for the formation of a Confucian canon (Ruzang ‫ۦ‬㮣) along the lines of the Buddhist and Daoist canons. Zhou argued that the purpose of such a project was not only the preservation and transmission of texts but also the enrichment of scholarly pursuits and the improvement of state governance. By ordering knowledge and making valuable information more readily accessible, emperor and scholar-officials alike were in a better position to govern. Even though the term Ruzang was never used to describe the Siku quanshu explicitly, it became the de facto Confucian canon through its ubiquitous use among the wider scholarly community. For a public project to be used by as many scholars as possible, the language of the fourfold classification was no doubt the most widely accessible. The historical longevity of the fourfold order and its use in both imperial and private compilations meant that its vocabulary and internal logic were broadly known. This was not the case with the Qilüe organization, which had long been abandoned. While the sections of the Qilüe were arguably fitting for the Han intellectual environment (or, rather, fitting for the purposes of Han imperial scholars), they were rather awkward choices for Qing scholarship. For example, the creation of an independent section for historical writings in the early medieval manifestations of the fourfold classification was a response to the increase in surviving documents from the past and about the past. By the

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fourth century CE, when the fourfold classification emerged, there was a lot of history and a lot of writing about history, which created the bibliographical necessity to prioritize such texts with their own group, one that would not be upended after the Chunqiu ᯹⾟ (Annals), as the Qilüe had been. In other words, the Qilüe organization had been completely superseded by alternative structures that responded to the changing realities of scholarly production. It is therefore not clear how Zhu Yun’s suggestion to adopt the Qilüe fits with the intention to create a project that would provide a comprehensive account of the source and flow of scholarly learning and offer a useful arrangement of textual information. Furthermore, the Siku quanshu was perceived by its makers as a great synthesis between the two main approaches of Confucian scholarship, Song “philosophical” deliberation (Songxue ᅟᅌ) and Han “philological” exegesis (Hanxue). One of the most fundamental intents behind the project was “purging biased, individual intentions and instead expressing a public principle” ⾕ᖗ⼯㗠݀⧚ߎ.23 Adopting the Qilüe organization—a product of Han dynasty scholarship—would unambiguously send the wrong signal. The intent to create a public and indeed ecumenical project that could function as a framework under which all scholars could operate precluded the use of the Qilüe.24 The order of knowledge had to be as widely accessible and as broadly acceptable as possible, and the fourfold order greatly outmatched the Qilüe in this regard. Organization structures from the Song and Ming dynasties—both private and imperial—were also found problematic, although for different reasons. These organizations afforded a much higher degree of granularity and cognitive independence to the various fields of knowledge. One of the most prominent of such structures—and one of the most heavily criticized by the makers of the Siku quanshu—was that developed by Zheng Qiao 䜁  (1104– 62), which had twelve main sections and over five hundred subsections and subsubsections. His divisions afforded a level of precision that the compilers of the Siku quanshu explicitly wanted to avoid. They criticized it for having too many sections, which ultimately lead to confusion. They argued that the divisions used in the Siku quanshu, which are fewer in number and less detailed, assisted readers with searching through the catalog, since in their eyes they had dispensed with the taxonomical hypertrophy of excessive and trivial distinctions.25 The fourfold order was seen as superior precisely because it employed fewer divisions: it was easier to use and therefore better suited as a tool for emperor and scholars to consult. The fourfold classification was adopted because it cohered with the theoretical purposes the makers of the Siku quanshu had in mind: guiding and advising the emperor and scholars in ethical and effective governance and providing an intellectual history that explained the source and flow of knowledge. The

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comprehensive format of the Siku quanshu ensured it overcame the inherent limitations of the Gujin tushu jicheng, and its derivative catalogs ensured that information was readily obtainable. In achieving these two main goals, the fourfold classification was deemed better than the alternatives at hand because it provided an information structure that was accessible, ecumenical, and straightforward to use. What the Siku quanshu makers’ decisions show is that explanations appealing to political legitimacy and orthodoxy cannot provide the full picture, for they do not explain why the fourfold order was considered more “orthodox” than the order of the Qilüe. Sociopolitical explanations also fail to take into consideration what the makers of the project stated with regard to past orders of knowledge. In the compilers’ underlying motivations, one can see a special consideration for the priorities and needs of intended users—not much different from contemporary modes of reasoning among library and information scientists. The fourfold order was a successful ordering scheme not because it was orthodox but because it facilitated carrying out fundamental goals in a way that appealed to the largest number of potential users.

Notes 1. Albert Feuerwerker, State and Society in Eighteenth-Century China: The Ch’ing Empire in Its Glory (Ann Arbor: Center for Chinese Studies, University of Michigan, 1976), 32; Mark C. Elliot, Emperor Qianlong: Son of Heaven, Man of the World (New York: Longman, 2009), 118, 164. 2. For more on the size and organization of the Gujin tushu jicheng, see Howard S. Galt, A History of Chinese Educational Institutions: To the End of the Five Dynasties (A.D. 960) (London: Arthur Probsthain, 1951), 44. For a translated index on the contents of this encyclopedic collection, see Lionel Giles, An Alphabetical Index to the Chinese Encyclopedia Ch’in Ting Ku Chin Tu Shu Chi Ch’eng (London: Trustees of the British Museum, 1911). Ahead of his times, Giles indicates that Western terms and conceptual categories may not be well suited to capture or render Chinese terms. 3. By comparison, the Cefu yuangui ‫ݞ‬ᑰ‫ܗ‬啰 (Prime exemplars from the literary storehouse) had thirty-four sections with 1,104 subsections (men 䭔). For more such comparisons, see Liu Jiaoqian ᷇䕗ђ and Chen Xiuying 䰜⾔㣅, “Gujin tushu jicheng fenlei ji bianpai tili shuping” সҞ೒к䲚៤ߚ㉏ঞ㓪ᥦԧ՟䗄䆘, Shiyan daxue xuebao (zhexue ban) 2 (1992): 49. 4. The ten categories are collated investigations (huikao ः㗗), comprehensive treatises (zonglun 㐑䂪), images (tu ೪), charts (biao 㸼), biographies (liezhuan ߫‫)ڇ‬, literary writings (yiwen 㮱᭛), selected literary phrases (xuanju 䙌হ), factual records (jishi ㋔џ), miscellaneous records (zalu 䲰䣘), and external compilations (waibian ໪㎼). 5. Lin Zhongxiang ᵫӆ␬, “Bianzhi Gujin tushu jicheng suoyin de shixian he lilun” 㓪ࠊ সҞ೒к䲚៤㋶ᓩⱘᅲ⦄੠⧚䆎, Guangxi daxue xuebao (zhexue shehui kexue ban) 2 (1994): 94–102. 6. Cheryl Boettcher Tarsala, “What Is an Author in the Sikuquanshu? Evidential Research and Authorship in Late Qianlong Era China (1771–1795)” (PhD diss., UCLA, 2001), 140. The chapters dedicated to the four bibliographical sections in The Oxford Handbook of

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7. 8.

9.

10.

11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

17. 18. 19. 20.

21.

22.

23.

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Classical Chinese Literature (1000 BCE–900 CE), ed. Wiebke Denecke, Wai-yee Li, and Xiaofei Tian (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), follow a similar translation, with the only major difference being that shi ৆ is rendered as “Histories.” The fourfold order was not alien to the Gujin tushu jicheng, as some of its sections did follow its spirit. Zhongguo diyi lishi dang’anguan Ё೑㄀ϔग़৆ḷḜ佚, ed., Zuanxiu Siku quanshu dang’an 㑖ׂಯᑧܼкḷḜ, 2 vols. (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1997), 1.1 (hereafter Dang’an). Yao Mingda, Zhongguo muluxueshi Ё೑Ⳃᔩᄺ৆ (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 2011), 199. R. Kent Guy also refers to Yao Mingda’s suggestion in The Emperor’s Four Treasuries: Scholar and the State in the Late Ch’ien-Lung Era (Cambridge, MA: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University, 1987), 78. For more on the relation between the Siku quanshu and the Gujin tushu jicheng, see Pei Qin 㻈㢍, “Gujin tushu jicheng yu Siku quanshu” ljসҞ೒к䲚៤NJϢljಯᑧܼкNJ, Neimenggu minzu shiyuan xuebao (zhexue shehui kexue Hanwen ban) 1 (1990): 11–15. Zhongguo diyi lishi dang’anguan, Dang’an, 1.2. Guy, Emperor’s Four Treasuries, 57. See Zhu Yun’s proposal in Zhongguo diyi lishi dang’anguan, Dang’an, 1.20–21. Zhongguo diyi lishi dang’anguan, Dang’an, 1.54. Original quotation found in Endymion Wilkinson, Chinese History: A New Manual, 5th ed. (self-pub. 2018), 1059. Translation by author. For a detailed account, see Joseph P. McDermott, A Social History of the Chinese Book: Books and Literati Culture in Late Imperial China (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2006); and Cynthia J. Brokaw, “On the History of the Book in China,” in Printing and Book Culture in Late Imperial China, ed. Cynthia Brokaw and Kai-wing Chow (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 3–54. Zhongguo diyi lishi dang’anguan, Dang’an, 1.20–21. Guy, Emperor’s Four Treasuries, 49–56. On-Cho Ng, “The Epochal Concept of ‘Early Modernity’ and the Intellectual History of Late Imperial China,” Journal of World History 14, no. 1 (2003): 37–61, esp. 45–47. Renowned scholar Zhang Xuecheng ゴᅌ䁴, a student of Zhu Yun, was arguably the figure most opposed to the fourfold classification, arguing that “it had made the learning of the world increasingly tangled and it lacked a guiding principle and order.” In Zhang Xuecheng, “Hezhou zhi, er” ੠ᎲᖫѠ, in Zhangshi yishu ゴ⇣䙎᳌ (Beijing: Wenwu chubanshe, 1985), 557a. For example, two imperial projects of the Ming dynasty, the Wenyuange shumu ᭛⏉ 䭷᳌Ⳃ (Catalog of the Literary Depths Library) and the Xinding neige cangshu mulu ᮄᅮܻ䭷㮣᳌Ⳃ䣘 (New catalog of the Library of the Grand Secretariat) consisted of twenty and eighteen main sections, respectively. Song dynasty scholar-extraordinaire Zheng Qiao broke away from the fourfold pattern, as did Jiao Hong ⛺ゥ in the late sixteenth century. For example, the Chongwen zongmu ዛ᭛㐑Ⳃ and the bibliographical treatises (“Yiwen zhi” 㮱᭛ᖫ) of the Songshi ᅟ৆ and Mingshi ᯢ৆ were organized according to the fourfold classification. Twelfth-century private compilations such as the Junzhai dushu zhi 䚵唟䅔᳌ᖫ, the Suichutang shumu 䘖߱ූ᳌Ⳃ, and the Zhizhai shulu jieti Ⳉ唟᳌䣘㾷丠 also used the fourfold classification. “Jingbu zongxu” ㍧䚼㐑ᬬ, in Siku quanshu zongmu tiyao ಯᑿܼ᳌㐑Ⳃᦤ㽕, comp. Ji Yun ㋔ᯔ et al., 4 vols. (Shanghai: Shangwu yinshuguan, 1933), 1.

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24. The Siku quanshu is traditionally seen as a Han Learning “headquarters,” a view derived from Liang Qichao ṕଳ䍙. While it is true that many of the Siku quanshu “encyclopedic” entries reveal the Han Learning tendencies of many of its compilers, new research suggests that, at least within the scope of the Siku, the Han-Song Learning polarity has been overstated. See Zhang Chuanfeng ᓴӴ䫟, Siku quanshu zongmu xueshu sixiang yanjiuljಯᑧܼкᘏⳂNJᄺᴃᗱᛇⷨお (Shanghai: Xuelin chubanshe: 2007), 326, 338–39; and Liu Fengqiang ߬亢ᔎ, Siku quanshu fawei ಯᑧܼк佚থᖂ (Lanzhou: Lanzhou daxue chubanshe, 2015), 7, 155–58, 161–70, 201. 25. “Siku quanshu fanli” ಯᑿܼ᳌޵՟, in Ji Yun et al., Siku quanshu zongmu tiyao, 1–2. The stated target of the critique is Jiao Hong, but given that he effectively used Zheng Qiao’s subdivisions in toto, there is nothing to preclude the extension of this critique to the latter’s organization.

CHAPTER 34

TWENTIETH-CENTURY VERNACULAR ENCYCLOPEDIAS J OA N J U D G E

The proper composition of couplets [yinglian Ὅ㙃], inscribed panels [bian’e ऒ両], letters [jiantie ㇵᏪ], deeds [qiju ༥᪮], elegiac addresses [jiwen ⽁᭛], funeral odes [wanshi 䓧䀽], and birthday poems [shoushi ໑䀽] is extremely complex. If you ask someone else to write them for you, they certainly would not be able to convey your true meaning. This book has carefully chosen from famous new and old works for convenient use when the need arises.1

T

he author of this quote from the introduction to a 1914 daily-use encyclopedia asserts that his text should be the prime source of literary information for his projected audience of common readers.2 He understood that such readers did not seek aesthetic knowledge of the literary arts per se; rather, they needed information that would help them appear literary in their written social interactions by enhancing their ability to compose letters, eulogies, or birthday wishes with the proper command of poetry or prose. This chapter focuses on such daily-use encyclopedias produced in the first half of the twentieth century—a period of particular interest from the point of view of information management for a range of interrelated reasons. First of all, this was an increasingly secular age of new learning spurred by the cultural and epistemic fallout from the violent mid- to late nineteenth-century encounters

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with foreign military powers and by institutional changes that followed the abolition of the Confucian-based civil service examination system in 1904 and 1905. These historic shifts led to the valorization of science, technology, and common knowledge together with the broadening of an inquisitive reading public with an appetite for new forms of knowledge (and old knowledge in new forms). An unprecedented expansion of commercial publishing both fueled and satisfied this appetite. While commercial versions of practical, daily-use texts had been produced from the Song dynasty (see Brokaw, chapter 32), the proliferation of late Qing and early Republican publishers availing themselves of newly available print technologies to meet the increased demand for practical information was unmatched in earlier periods. Finally, editors conceptualized and organized this information in new ways—a change exemplified by the shift from wanbao 㨀ᇊ (myriad treasures) to the Western-influenced, Japanese-derived, and science-inflected baike ⱒ⾥ (one hundred branches of learning) in the title of encyclopedias.3 The works examined here integrated material from various other texts into compilations organized by categories. Even the new-style baike quanshu ⱒ⾥ ܼ᳌ (comprehensive compendia of the hundred fields, typically translated as “encyclopedia”), which began to appear from the early twentieth century, continued to organize information according to a shifting set of categories rather than according to discrete entries or alphabetical order as in Western encyclopedias. For these various generic, historical, and cultural reasons, ways of classifying, storing, and transmitting literary information in early twentieth-century encyclopedias were extremely fluid. Common readers would have found literary information dispersed across a plethora of categories and subcategories, as outlined shortly. Some of these readers would have consulted the familiar wanbao quanshu 㨀ᇊܼ᳌ (comprehensive compendia of myriad treasures), a genre of daily-use texts in print from the late Ming dynasty. They would have found, however, that the shorter, early twentieth-century editions were not as rich as their late imperial predecessors in literary-laced sections on leisure-time activities such as drinking games.4 The literary information that did remain could be found in sections on jokes (“Xiaohua men” ュ䁅䭔) and correspondence (“Wenhan men” ᭛㗄䭔). In addition to offering tips on proper conventions for presenting gifts and writing letters, the latter section deepened appreciation for good writing in a subsection entitled “Wanjin jiashu” 㨀䞥 ᆊ᳌ (Family letters worth ten thousand measures of gold)—an allusion to a famous Du Fu ᴰ⫿ (712–70) poem.5 Material on the aesthetic qualities of letter writing continued to be a key source of literary information in the successors to wanbao quanshu: Republican period daily-use encyclopedias (from which references to jokes and drinking games had all but disappeared). The most common rubric under which such information was organized was “Chidu” ሎ⠬ (Letters), which sometimes

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appeared as the more colloquial “Shuxin” ᳌ֵ. The category could be ordered by topic, such as how to strike the right tone and find the correct turn of phrase for letters expressing congratulations, consolation, or thanks; or by recipient, whether a member of one’s family, school community, or the broader society. The category could also include regulations for letter writing, polite set phrases for letters (chidu taoyu ሎ⠬༫䁲), and forms of address.6 A similar kind of literary information was often listed under the category of “Choushi” 䝀Ϫ (Social interactions). In his editor’s preface to a 1928 compendium, Yao Yong ྮ䦲 boasted that his volume contained over 620 kinds of poems to assist those wishing to send congratulations or condolences. Readers would only have to turn to the detailed subsection on poems (shiwen 䀽᭛) in the “Choushi” chapter.7 Other subsections offered instruction in writing couplets (lianyu 㙃䁲), letters (handu ߑ⠬), and invitations (jiantie ᷀Ꮺ).8 Entire choushi texts devoted to the art of social interactions for various demographics offered the same kinds of material.9 Information on couplets and letter writing could also be found under the category of “Wenyi” ᭛㮱 (Literate composition, in this context),10 which includes letter-writing regulations and examples of various forms of elegies, laments, and congratulatory poems for a spectrum of individuals and occasions. In one such text, the section offers thirty-one pages of examples of old couplets and four of couplets with a new Republican flavor.11 Similar material occasionally appears under the category “Wenjian men” ᭛ӊ䭔 (Documents), which generally referred to more official kinds of correspondence such as contracts and petitions.12 Literary information on composition that went well beyond couplets and letter writing appeared under the rubric of “Xueshu” ᅌ㸧 (Learning) in certain daily-use encyclopedias. This was not textbook learning for school students but continuing education for low-level scholars and merchants who wanted to assume a more literary mantle. This section in a 1922 compendium includes a subsection on “Wenzhang zhuzuo fa” ᭛ゴ㨫԰⊩ (Methods for writing essays) that introduces readers to a wealth of literary information on the parallel prose (pianwen 侶᭛) form; it provides both texts for better understanding the form’s history and principles of tone and rhyme, such as Li Zhaoluo’s ᴢ‫⋯ܚ‬ (1769–1841) Pianti wenchao 侶储᭛ᡘ (Selections of parallel prose; 1821), and books ideal for practicing pianwen, including the Chen Siwang ji 䱇ᗱ⥟䲚 (Collection of works by Prince Si of Chen [Cao Zhi ᳍ỡ, 192–232]).13 Attuned to the shifting literary landscape circa the New Culture and May Fourth movements of the late 1910s, this compendium includes an entry on baihua wen ⱑ䁅᭛ (vernacular prose) immediately following the one on pianwen. The entry quotes Luo Jialun’s 㕙ᆊ‫( ׿‬1897–1969) definition of wenxue ᭛ᅌ (literature), explains that baihua is a distinct literary form, and introduces

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new-style punctuation (see Hamm, chapter 14).14 The following subsections revert back to information on long-standing prose and poetic forms.15 Certain daily-use encyclopedias that share this same presentist—if somewhat jumbled—sense of literary forms use the names of these forms themselves as categories rather than subsume them under other general categories. A 1922 text presents literary information under the rubrics “Guwen xue” স᭛ᅌ (Ancient-style writing), “Ge tiwen” ৘储᭛ (All literary forms), “Baihuawen” ⱑ䁅᭛ (Vernacular writing), and “Waiguowen” ໪೟᭛ (Foreign writing).16 The latter two sections marked the greatest departure not only in literary content but also in textual form. The vernacular literature section includes four tables that contrast Vernacular and Classical Chinese characters, differentiate the use of function words (xuzi 㰯ᄫ) in the two registers, visually depict and explain new-style punctuation, and symbolically represent the sounds of the vernacular.17 Entries in the final chapter on reading, writing, and translating foreign fiction include foreign words in, for example, a brief outline of Western literature from “Homeros” to Oscar Wilde.18 By the late 1910s, daily-use works that adopted the Japanese-derived title baike quanshu began to present specific kinds of literary information under a new category: “Wenxue” ᭛ᅌ, based on the recent Japanese translation of the Western term literature.19 While expansive in its alignment with the foreign notion of literature as creative writing with an aesthetic purpose, this new conception of wenxue simultaneously limited what had been “a highly diverse stylistic horizon . . . spread over most genres of writing” to specific genres considered central to the Western canon.20 Daily-use baike quanshu did continue to feature various kinds of literary information in chapters on letter writing and couplets, for example, and the “Wenxue” chapter itself did include information—on various essay forms, for example—that overlapped with entries dispersed in other daily-use texts.21 At the same time, however, the “Wenxue” rubric introduced a number of distinctly new kinds of literary information. First and foremost, entries under the title “Wenxue” signified global literary information. A 1919 text includes subsections on the Manchu, Mongolian, Tibetan, and Muslim alphabets; keys to the pronunciation of major Western and East Asian languages together with Esperanto; and information on shorthand in Chinese, English, and Japanese.22 “Wenxue” looks radically different again by the 1930s. Information on foreign literature is woven into each of the sections of a 1934 text that includes references from Plato to Henry S. Pancoast, explanations of such terms as novel and narration, and long entries on world literature and comparative poetry.23 While it is uncertain how useful this kind of literary information would have been to a lowly clerk hoping to compose a birthday wish for their boss, it signaled the new world of literary information that would define the twentieth century and beyond.

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Coda The conditions that made for a richly chaotic field of encyclopedias in the early twentieth century—an unbridled proliferation of commercial print under a weak state coupled with profound semantic flux—have disappeared in the early twenty-first century. While there are few points of comparison between the daily-use works examined here and the recently completed Zhonghua dadian Ёढ໻‫( ݌‬Chinese collectanea), a colossal state project, it is instructive to note the tenacity of the category of wenxue. The title of the second of the twenty-four dian ‫( ݌‬standard collection), “Wenxue” has been naturalized and sinicized in this moment of high nationalism: it now encompasses not foreign genres and theorists but Chinese writing from the pre-Qin era (pre-221 BCE) through the twentieth century.24

Notes 1. Gonghe bianyiju ݅੠㎼䅃ሔ, ed., “Liyan” ՟㿔, in Riyong baojian ᮹⫼ᇊ䨥 (Shanghai: Shanghai gonghe bianyiju, 1914), 1:2a–2b. 2. For a definition of the common reader in this period, see Joan Judge, “In Search of the Chinese Common Reader: Vernacular Knowledge in the Age of New Media,” in The Edinburgh History of Reading: Common Readers, ed. Jonathan Rose (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020), 218–37. 3. See Joan Judge, “Myriad Treasures and One-Hundred Sciences: Vernacular Chinese and Encyclopedic Japanese Knowledge at the Turn of the Twentieth Century,” in Reexamining the Sinosphere: Transmissions and Transformations in East Asia, ed. Nanxiu Qian, Richard J. Smith, and Bowei Zhang (Amherst, NY: Cambria Press, 2020), 329–69. 4. These sections still appeared in Mao Huanwen ↯✹᭛, comp., Zengbu wanbao quanshu ๲㺰㨀ᇊܼ᳌, 4 vols., Guiwentang 䊈᭛ූ, 1828; preface 1739. 5. Qixin shuju ଳᮄ᳌ሔ, ed., Zuixin huitu zengbu zhengxu wanbao quanshu ᳔ᮄ㐾೪๲ 㺰ℷ㑠㨀ᇊܼ᳌ (Shanghai: Qixin shuju, ca. 1912), 5.20a–24b. 6. See, for example, Guangwen shuju ᒷ᭛᳌ሔ, ed., Xinbian Riyong wanquan xinshu ᮄ ㎼᮹⫼㨀ܼᮄ᳌ (Shanghai: Guangyi shuju, 1921), 6.1a–36a; and Shijie shuju Ϫ⬠᳌ ሔ, ed., “Chidu,” in Riyong kuailan ᮹⫼ᖿ㾑 ([Shanghai]: Shijie shuju, 1924), 1–5. 7. On shiwen as aesthetic literature, see Theodore Huters, “Wenxue and New Practices of Writing in Post-1840 China” (paper presented at the conference “Rethinking Time in Modern China,” Tel Aviv University, May 2017). 8. Yao Yong, comp., “Bianji dayi” ㎼䔃໻ᛣ, in Guomin riyong baojian ೟⇥᮹⫼ᇊ䨥 (Shanghai: Wenming shuju, 1928), 1. 9. See, for example, chapter 2 in Sun Zhongfeng ᄭᖴዄ, Riyong choushi daguan ᮹⫼䝀 Ϫ໻㾔 (1911; repr., Shanghai: Shijie shuju, 1935); and chapter 10 in Saoye shanfang ᥗ㨝 ቅ᠓, ed., Riyong wanshi baoku choushi bixu ᮹⫼㨀џᇊᑿ䝀Ϫᖙ䳔, vol. 5 (Shanghai: Saoye shanfang, 1929). 10. “Wenyi” could also appear as a separate category, as in Guangwen shuju ᒷ᭛᳌ሔ, ed., Jiaoji daquan Ѹ䱯໻ܼ (Shanghai: Shijie shuju, 1925).

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11. Riyong yaolan ᮹⫼㽕㾑, 2 vols. (Shanghai: Shanghai tongsu bianyi she, 1915), 1a–47a. See also Gonghe bianyiju, Riyong baojian, 2:1a–47a. 12. See, for example, Xinhua shuju ᮄ㧃᳌ሔ, ed., Riyong baishi quanshu ᮹⫼ⱒџܼ᳌ (Shanghai: Xinhua shuju, 1925), 5:7.102–8, 9.112–13. 13. Xinhua shuju ᮄ㧃᳌ሔ, ed., Riyong wanshi quanshu ᮹⫼㨀џܼ᳌ (Shanghai: Xinhua shuju, 1924), 13.4a–4b. 14. Xinhua shuju, Riyong wanshi, 13.4b. 15. Xinhua shuju, Riyong wanshi, 13.4b–5b. 16. Guangwen shuju ᒷ᭛᳌ሔ, ed., Changshi baike quanshu ᐌ䄬ⱒ⾥ܼ᳌ (Shanghai: Shijie shuju, 1922). 17. Guangwen shuju, Changshi baike quanshu, 94–107. 18. Guangwen shuju, Changshi baike quanshu, 108–20. 19. Chapter 7 in Chen Duo 䱇䨌 et al., eds., Riyong baike quanshu ᮹⫼ⱒ⾥ܼ᳌, 2 vols. (Shanghai: Shangwu yinshuguan, 1919); chapter 27 in Huang Shaoxu 咗㌍㎦ et al., eds., Chongbian riyong baike quanshu 䞡㎼᮹⫼ⱒ⾥ܼ᳌, 3 vols. (Shanghai: Shangwu yinshuguan, 1934). Wenxue had been used as a rubric in earlier texts such as early Republican wanbao quanshu but in the sense of new regulations. 20. Huters, “Wenxue,” 1. 21. See Chen Duo et al., Riyong, chaps. 11–14; and Huang Shaoxu et al., Chongbian, chap. 28. On the essay forms, see Chen Duo et al., Riyong, 69–82; and Huang Shaoxu et al., Chongbian, 5444–59. 22. Chen Duo et al., Riyong, chap. 7. 23. Huang Shaoxu et al., Chongbian, chap. 27. 24. “Zhonghua dadian” Ёढ໻‫݌‬, https://baike.baidu.com/item/Ёढ໻‫݌‬.

CHAPTER 35

ONLINE ENCYCLOPEDIAS AND WIKIS S H AO H UA G U O

I

n August 1993, Zhongguo dabaike quanshu chubanshe Ё೑໻ⱒ ⾥ܼкߎ⠜⼒ (Encyclopedia of China Publishing House) published the first edition of Zhongguo dabaike quanshu Ё೑໻ⱒ⾥ ܼк (The Encyclopedia of China), a landmark event in the history of modern Chinese-language encyclopedias. A state-funded project launched in 1978, the compilation and publication of Zhongguo dabaike quanshu conveyed the belief of the scholars who proposed this project after the end of the Cultural Revolution that knowledge would help enlighten the people.1 The first edition of Zhongguo dabaike quanshu has a total of seventy-four volumes. It covers sixty-six subjects, including philosophy, social sciences, literature and arts, culture and education, and natural sciences. In terms of literary content, there are two volumes dedicated to the categories of Chinese literature and foreign literature. Adhering to the principle that “the most suitable person should write the most suitable entry,” leading experts and academics in specialized fields were responsible for writing, revising, and editing entries.2 More than twenty thousand contributors and one thousand editors participated in the compilation of the project.3 Renowned literary scholars and writers, such as Cao Yu ᳍⾎ (1910–1996), Ji Xianlin ᄷ㕵ᵫ (1911–2009), and Xia Yan ໣㸡 (1900–1995), were on the chief editorial board while well-established researchers and intellectuals, as represented by Fan Jun ῞偣 (1930–2011), Qian Zhongshu 䪅䩳к (1910–1998), Wang Yuanhua ⥟‫( ࣪ܗ‬1920–2008), and Zhou Zhenfu ਼ᤃ⫿ (1911–2000), edited all entries related to literature.4

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The compilation process of Zhongguo dabaike quanshu involved hundreds of ministries and commissions, universities, and research institutions in China, highlighting the importance of credibility and authority for print encyclopedias. Well-established academics and senior editors served as gatekeepers of information and guarantors of quality contributions. At the same time, the publication of Zhongguo dabaike quanshu took place alongside China’s digital revolution. In 1994, China opened up to the global internet, and as of December 31, 2018, it had 829 million internet users.5 In line with the digital era, Encyclopedia of China Publishing House has released over ten CD-ROM versions of the encyclopedia, launched a subscription-based online version in 2011, and developed mobile applications. In 2017, more than twenty thousand contributors from universities and research institutions were invited to participate in compiling the online edition of Zhongguo dabaike quanshu. As China’s largest publication project to date, this forthcoming edition is intended to “guide and lead the public and society.”6 It hopes to compete with the Chinese-language Wikipedia for authority and global popularity despite the latter’s inaccessibility in China at the time of writing.7 This brief history of Zhongguo dabaike quanshu illustrates the multifarious role that the Chinese state plays in the process of information management: as a funder, censor, and participant that constantly adapts to new challenges. More importantly, the several editions of Zhongguo dabaike quanshu, in their diverse forms, exemplify both continuity and change regarding information management and reception. Electronic encyclopedias largely build on practices of print encyclopedias. They transfer the content in print to emergent delivery platforms like CD-ROMs, computers, and the Web through digital publishing. Thus, electronic encyclopedias rarely change the categorization, compilation methods, and writing style of print encyclopedias. Meanwhile, technological features embedded in electronic encyclopedias bring forth new experiences of accessing information—such as hyperlinks and multimedia elements that use visual and audio material—to craft a more immersive experience for users. In contrast to electronic and print encyclopedias, which invite experts in specialized fields to compile information, encyclopedias in the age of Web 2.0 decentralize the process of knowledge production. The wiki model showcases a collaborative process, during which every internet user may contribute or edit entries. The Chinese counterparts of Wikipedia, while adopting its collaborative model, exhibit several distinctive characteristics. As mentioned earlier, the Chinese state plays a crucial role in determining what kinds of information are available as well as how and by whom this information is being accessed. Encyclopedia entries regarding politically sensitive issues are subject to the careful scrutiny of web administrators and state censors. In addition, unlike Wikipedia, founded by the nonprofit organization Wikimedia, Chinese online

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encyclopedias are typically hosted by commercial companies. For example, Baidu baike ⱒᑺⱒ⾥ (Baidu encyclopedia; https://baike.baidu.com/) is an important feature provided by the Chinese search engine and web portal Baidu; Sogou baike ᧰⢫ⱒ⾥ (Sogou encyclopedia; https://www.sogou.com) is an added feature of Sogou, an IT company that offers a wide range of services, including Chinese pinyin input, a search engine, and hardware products. Despite the need to negotiate between political and commercial interests, online encyclopedias in China have developed rapidly since 2005. Literary information constitutes a subcategory of culture on such comprehensive encyclopedia sites as Hudong baike Ѧࡼⱒ⾥ (Interactive encyclopedia; https:// baike.com/), Baidu baike, and Sogou baike. (Despite the flourishing of websites that aggregate literary works and promote creative writing, encyclopedia sites that are solely dedicated to the comprehensive collection of literary information have not yet emerged.) Under the category of literature, users may click on various subcategories, ranging from writers and literary history to magazines and award-winning masterpieces.8 Each subcategory in turn includes numerous entries for readers to browse. Search-based access to literary information enhances the efficiency of retrieving information. Meanwhile, the structure, categorization, and writing style of online encyclopedias lack coherence, as each entry is independent of other entries and contributors’ styles often vary. This differentiates online encyclopedias from traditional encyclopedias. In addition to adopting the conventional subcategories of literature, online encyclopedias incorporate an emerging category into their collection: internet literature (see Feng, chapter 58). Since the birth of the Chinese internet, the growth of literature websites that publish original creative writing as online installments has been both rapid and extensive. Encyclopedia sites keep close track of these works in progress and offer updated summaries of them. These entries broaden the definition of literature in its traditional sense and illustrate the power of popular readership. As of early 2019, Baidu baike had published nearly sixteen million articles and recruited six million volunteers. Hudong baike, the major competitor of Baidu baike, attracted more than thirteen million internet users who contributed to generating nearly nineteen million entries. The flourishing of user-generated content helps internet corporations carve out a niche in the face of fierce market competition, thus capitalizing on the attention economy. The attention economy has redefined the role that information plays in a postindustrial economy.9 If attention is the “focused mental engagement on a particular item of information,”10 the primary driving force of the internet economy is the competition for attention rather than the offering of information. This counterbalancing dynamic of information and attention redefines attention as the most valuable commodity in the digital era. The practical need of internet businesses to monetize user attention, the technological features of

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new media, and the individual’s desire for self-expression foreground the significance of attention in the digital age. Online encyclopedias implement the rules of the attention economy to engage users in several aspects. While internet users may browse web content at will, they must register before posting or editing entries on encyclopedia sites. This allows commercial corporations to gather user data and sell advertising space in a targeted manner. To incentivize user participation, most encyclopedia sites adopt a point-based system and grant users both real and symbolic privileges based on assessment of their contributions. These mechanisms recognize volunteers’ labor by creating an author-like entity. Hudong baike grants one hundred points to users who create a new entry and thirty points to contributors who edit an entry. These points may be converted into rewards, such as gift cards and computers. User ranks on the website, ranging from intern editor to editor-in-chief, reflect their accumulated points, and each of these positions indicates a different level of job responsibilities and privileges. Contributors’ work is also ranked by the website on a weekly basis. Top contributors receive recognition in Zhou renwu daren bang ਼ӏࡵ䖒Ҏὰ (Contributors of the Week). Both the ranking system and the point-based system aim at maximizing the length of time a user stays on the page. As the collaborative (and anonymous) authorship makes verifying the credibility of information challenging, issues related to copyright infringement and false information are prevalent. To adress these issues, encyclopedia sites have begun to stress the importance of professionalism and classify content contributors into different categories. The zhuanye renzheng zhiyuanzhe ϧϮ䅸䆕ᱎ ᜓ㗙 (professionally-certified volunteers) on Hudong baike, for example, carry a symbol v that authenticates their contribution. These volunteers’ real names and work-related information are posted on the site. The literature section of Hudong baike gathers together more than 370 certified volunteers, whose professions range from freelancers, poets, and internet writers to editors and researchers. In addition, well-established figures in specialized fields, ranging from literature to the sciences to medical fields, are also invited to compile and edit entries or to serve as consultants for online encyclopedias.11 In order to stay competitive in the marketplace, online encyclopedias constantly integrate emerging cultural and technological trends into existing platforms. Encyclopedia sites adopt some of the features of social networking by granting contributors individual home pages where other users may check user data, pay visits, and leave comments. This community effect is further enhanced by offline gatherings that these sites organize on a yearly basis to foster bonds among quality content contributors. In line with the popularity of short-form videos, Baidu launched Miaodong baike ⾦ពⱒ⾥ (Understanding encyclopedia entries within seconds) in 2016. Miaodong baike aims at integrating knowledge production into short-form videos and thereby adds to

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the existing content offering of Baidu baike and diversifies the ways in which information is presented. As of December 2018, daily visits to Miaodong baike numbered close to fifty million.12 In conclusion, online encyclopedias and wikis constitute a crucial cultural site for multifarious players—corporations, the state, and individuals—to compete for popularity and authority. Primarily commercially driven, internet companies play a significant role in encouraging peer production and shaping the ways in which literary information is produced, managed, and disseminated. This commercial logic, however, exhibits downsides. Despite these encyclopedia sites’ claims of “objectivity, equity, and professionalism,”13 they have been shown to surreptitiously manipulate algorithmic design and ranking systems and violate copyright laws for commercial purposes.14 The Chinese state also plays an increasingly proactive role to enhance its visibility online—not only as censor but also as participant to steer online conversations. In addition, advances in digital technologies, as represented by “automated content agents”15 and software programs that are used to verify information accuracy, will continue to reshape our understanding of the remediation of encyclopedias.

Notes 1. Stephen Chen, “China Taking on Wikipedia with Its Own Online Encyclopaedia,” South China Morning Post, April 30, 2017, https://www.scmp.com/news/china/policies-politics /article/2091140/china-taking-wikipedia-its-own-online-encyclopaedia. 2. Gong Li 啮㥝, “Zhongguo dabaike quanshu shi ruhe dansheng de”ljЁ೑໻ⱒ⾥ܼкNJ ᰃབԩ䆲⫳ⱘ, People’s Daily Ҏ⇥᮹᡹, June 11, 2019, http://www.chinawriter.com .cn/n1/2019/0611/c419387-31129316.html. 3. Zhang He ᓴ䌎 and Tian Li ⬄Б, “Zhongguo dabaike quanshu chubanshe 40 zhounian: Bainian mengxiang yibushu” Ё೑໻ⱒ⾥ܼкߎ⠜⼒40਼ᑈ: ⱒᑈṺᛇϔ䚼к, Renminwang Ҏ⇥㔥, November 23, 2018, http://ip.people.com.cn/n1/2018/1123/c179663-30417259 .html. 4. Gong, “Zhongguo dabaike quanshu shi ruhe dansheng de.” 5. China Internet Network Information Center, “Disishisanci Zhongguo hulian wangluo fazhan zhuangkuang tongji baogao” ㄀43⃵Ё೑Ѧ㘨㔥㒰থሩ⢊‫މ‬㒳䅵᡹ਞ, February 28, 2019, http://www.cac.gov.cn/wxb_pdf/0228043.pdf. 6. Chen, “China Taking on Wikipedia.” 7. Cao Zexi ᳍⋑❭, “Zhongguo mingnian jiang tuichu xinban zaixian baike quanshu fuzeren: Mubiao chaoyue Weiji baike” Ё೑ᯢᑈᇚ᥼ߎᮄ⠜೼㒓ⱒ⾥ܼк䋳䋷Ҏ: Ⳃᷛ䍙䍞㓈෎ⱒ⾥, May 7, 2017, http://www.guancha.cn/Media/2017_05_07_407133.shtml. 8. “Weibaike: wenxue” ᖂⱒ⾥˖᭛ᄺ, Baidu baike ⱒᑺⱒ⾥, http://fenlei.baike.com/᭛ᄺ. 9. Michael H. Goldhaber, “The Value of Openness in an Attention Economy,” First Monday 11, no. 6 (June 5, 2006), http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm /article/view/1334/1254. 10. Thomas H. Davenport and John C. Beck, The Attention Economy: Understanding the New Currency of Business (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2001), 20.

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11. See, for example, “Xinzhishe” ᮄⶹ⼒, Hudong baike, http://xinzhishe.baike.com. 12. Ning Meng ᅕ㧠, “Baidu Baike shipinhua: Miaodong baike duanshipin ri bofangliang jin 5000 wan” ⱒᑺⱒ⾥㾚乥࣪: ⾦ពⱒ⾥ⷁ㾚乥᮹᪁ᬒ䞣䖥5000ϛ, TechWeb, December 29, 2018, http://www.techweb.com.cn/internet/2018-12-29/2718780.shtml. 13. “Bangzhu zhongxin” ᐂࡽЁᖗ, Baidu baike, https://baike.baidu.com/help; Hudong baike, http://www.baike.com. 14. Gehao Zhang, “The Copycat of Wikipedia in China,” in Global Wikipedia: International and Cross-Cultural Issues in Online Collaboration, ed. Pnina Fichman and Noriko Hara (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014), 135–46. 15. Sabine Niederer and José van Dijck, “Wisdom of the Crowd or Technicity of Content? Wikipedia as a Sociotechnical System,” New Media and Society 12, no. 8 (2010): 1368–87.

SECTION C

HISTORIES E D I T E D B Y A N AT O LY D E T W Y L E R

H

istories and biographies organize information into successive or causal accounts of the past. Like anthologies and encyclopedias—the other two forms included at the level of the document—historiography works to fix its object of knowledge, making it available for consultation, study, and argument. As a documentary practice, the primary function of historiography is not so much the preservation of texts or textual information per se as the provision of evidence in the establishment of facts: an official’s meritorious deeds, for example, or the influence of one genre on another.1 Broad in scope, historiography’s domain of knowledge has precipitated a suite of practices and forms for managing information in specific ways. For instance, historical experience and social memory accrue progressively over time, resulting in expanding scales of material to cover and requiring new ways of sorting and distilling relevant knowledge. By the same token, the modularity of historiography’s typical subjects—individuals, groups, and polities— helps stabilize the forms by which their arcs are traced. But what makes historiography particularly information rich is its wealth of details—the events, names, places, dates, and minutiae that constitute the historeme, or elemental unit of a historical fact.2 Details have a particularly granular quality—indeed, a given account’s evaluative or narrative elements can be overwhelmed by the volume of information on which it is constructed— which makes them particularly mobile, transferable from one document to the next. These qualities of the historeme invite parallels with modern data, observations, or other bits of information that can be aggregated into larger

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sets of commensurate units. Like data, the rhetorical force of the historical detail is established on the basis of its status as knowledge presupposed, something drawn from outside the text.3 In the case of historiography, this privileged position imparts an account with a sense of realism and epistemic authority. In recent years, critics have called into question the very possibility of “raw” (or unprocessed) data, pointing out that data are inherently a product of the system of knowledge in which they are deployed. Similarly, historical details are not simply a resource to be placed along an unfolding time line of development; rather, like data, they are born “cooked” through an intricate process of composition. In other words, histories and biographies generate information as much as they manage it: the raw grain of historical stuff (liao ᭭) is imagined retroactively following the production of historical material (shiliao ৆᭭). This section investigates the “production lines” of historiographical information in China’s exceptionally rich tradition of histories and biographies.4 At the center of this tradition are the major works chronicling individual dynasties, which came to be known as the standard histories (zhengshi ℷ৆). Supported by the state, the compilation of these large-scale works involved a bureaucratic apparatus that coordinated the labor of historians, record keepers, and other court officials in copying, selecting, synthesizing, and otherwise engaging with a range of documents to create authoritative historical accounts. Making up this system of representation are several basic historiographical forms—annals (benji ᴀ㋔), biographies (zhuan ‫)ڇ‬, monographs (zhi ᖫ), and tables (biao 㸼), discussed in the chapters that follow—that interact with one another in a complex manner, oftentimes framing overlapping information in different ways with varying rhetorical effects. Predictably, the accumulation of the standard histories, along with the growth of supplementary and unofficial accounts, further precipitated secondary forms for managing their historical information, such as the summaries (gangmu ㎅Ⳃ) of the Song that aimed to condense the standard histories’ lengthy narratives, the extensive tables of genealogical and historical geographical data composed in the Qing, and the subsequent method of “historical statistics,” proposed in the 1920s, that aspired to systematically extract such data and explore them in graphic form.5 A reader might wonder how historiographical information pertains to literary information. Delineating the two is a tricky task for several reasons. First, on a theoretical level, one must confront the formal and structural convergence between historical and literary narratives, famously articulated by Hayden White a generation ago.6 Many historical accounts can be read as a kind of literature. The ambiguity that arises when accounts of the same historical episode diverge invites close reading and contemplation regarding the ways each narrative warps the patterning of history.7 Second, on a historical level the overlap between literature and historiography runs through much of the course of the Chinese written tradition. To appreciate this fact, one needs to look no further

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than Sima Qian’s ৌ侀䙋 (ca. 135–ca. 90 BCE) Shiji ৆㿬 (The Grand Scribe’s Records), emblematically the fountainhead of both narrative history and prose fiction. Since the completion of the work in the second century BCE, these two modes of writing have developed in symbiotic ways, making them impossible to separate in a precise or consistent manner.8 With its focus on public knowledge rather than private or individual experience, historiography, particularly the official standard histories, has had a higher level of cultural prestige than literary writing, though both have equal access to cosmological or moral truths. At minimum, history and literature remediate one another in content, style, and form. Beyond such generic blurring, histories and biographies embed a range of literary information both directly and indirectly. While this is certainly the case with histories of literature or culture, important forms of relevant information appear even in historiographical works that aren’t expressly focused on the literary field. Histories regularly quote from literary and quasi-literary texts, including fragments from anecdote collections and poetry anthologies. This practice of quotation is especially pronounced in standard histories’ biographies of prominent literati, in which a focus on individual figures rather than affairs of the state makes appropriate the incorporation of private, literary source material. Defending the regularity and importance of quotation against criticism of it as nothing more than a mechanical form of “scissors-andpaste” composition, scholars have not only reconstructed such information management as a purposeful and careful process but also pointed out that in the absence of the original or alternative sources, such embedment has the additional virtue of preserving many texts that have since been lost.9 In closing, one final point must be made regarding the stakes of historiographical information management: perhaps more than any other form featured in this volume, histories and biographies are documents of political power. This much is clear in the institutionalization of the standard histories, especially following the creation of a Bureau of Historiography (Shiguan ৆仼) during the Tang. Symbolically, histories’ coverage and interpretation of dynastic cycles and state affairs make them into instruments of political legitimation. Officials involved in the compilation of the standard histories came to see events as the state itself would, playing the emperor’s “noetic double” by presiding over the territory of the past.10 Their praise and censure of historical events and historical personages were intended to be morally edifying and made histories appropriate material for the civil service examinations. Histories of literature and author-indexed dictionaries involve the dispensation of other kinds of power—the former producing and enforcing the boundaries of the literary canon, the latter adapting to state censorship and the growth of anonymous authorship during the Republican period. In sum, historiographical information—literary or otherwise—has rarely, if ever, been inspired solely by antiquarian impulse.

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Notes 1. A point borrowed from Suzanne Briet’s expansive definition of document. Briet, What Is Documentation?, trans. and ed. Ronald E. Day and Laurent Martinet with Hermina G. B. Anghelescu (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2006). 2. Joel Fineman, “The History of the Anecdote: Fiction and Fiction,” in The New Historicism, ed. H. Aram Veeser (New York: Routledge, 1989), 57. 3. See Daniel Rosenberg, “Data Before the Fact,” in “Raw Data” Is an Oxymoron, ed. Lisa Gitelman (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013), 15–40. 4. The image of Chinese historiography as an assembly line is from Denis Twitchett, The Writing of Official History Under the T’ang (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 34. 5. On tables and “historical statistics,” see Liang Rengong ṕӏ݀ [Qichao ଳ䍙], “Lishi tongji xue” ⅋৆㍅㿜ᅌ, Chenbao fukan, November 28–30, 1922, 7–14. 6. Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973). 7. See Jack W. Chen, “Blank Spaces and Secret Histories: Questions of Historiographic Epistemology in Medieval China,” Journal of Asian Studies 69, no. 4 (2010): 1071–91. 8. Andrew H. Plaks, “Toward a Critical Theory of Chinese Narrative,” in Chinese Narrative: Critical and Theoretical Essays, ed. Andrew H. Plaks (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977), 309–52. 9. Sarah Schneewind, “Reduce, Re-use, Recycle: Imperial Autocracy and Scholar-Official Autonomy in the Background to the Ming History Biography of Early Ming ScholarOfficial Fang Keqin (1326–1376),” Oriens Extremus 48 (2009): 103–52; Endymion Wilkinson, Chinese History: A New Manual, 5th ed. (self-pub., 2018), 663. 10. Chen, “Blank Spaces and Secret Histories,” 1076.

CHAPTER 36

EARLY HISTORIES G R I E T VA N K E E R B E RG H E N

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he Zuozhuan Ꮊ‫( ڇ‬Zuo Tradition; compiled fourth cent. BCE), Shiji ৆㿬 (The Grand Scribe’s Records; ca. 100 BCE), and Hanshu ⓶᳌ (History of the Han; first cent. CE) are commonly regarded as the earliest histories produced in China. Even though the term history is itself loaded with comparative meanings and expectations, the chronological organization of these texts, coupled with their engagement with the past as a series of complex events, readily qualifies them as such. All three texts select, represent, and organize information garnered from a variety of sources, most often from other texts. This chapter will trace how the organization of historical information changed from Zuozhuan to Shiji to Hanshu. As will be shown, Shiji, in particular, presents major innovations in how it organizes and makes accessible its information, innovations that were then adopted in Hanshu and developed in subsequent dynastic histories. At the same time, the simple court chronicle that contains the information culled by Zuozhuan continues to structure later accounts: all three historical texts employ chronological schemes of organization structured around the prevailing political hierarchy. This chapter will present a case study of one particular item of information, a story about a regicide in the polity of Zheng 䜁 that appears in all three of the histories, in order not only to explore how the placement of the same item in a different organizational context affects the informational value it conveys but also to illustrate what information-management strategies are particular to each text.

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Zuozhuan Of the three works, Zuozhuan’s structure, consisting of a single chronology, is the most straightforward. Zuozhuan is made up of passages of varying length that are, in the received version, correlated with entries of Chunqiu ᯹⾟ (Annals), a chronicle of the polity of Lu 元 between 771 and 479 BCE. Chunqiu consists of short entries that document the main events involving the ruling house of Lu (marriages, travel, deaths, and accessions) along with noteworthy events in other polities. While the received Chunqiu may have undergone more or less extensive editing, at its core it relies on rule-based reporting practices (perhaps of the Lu ruling lineage to its ancestors) that were common to many of the polities that made up the Eastern Zhou interstate order. While the bulk of Zuozhuan expands on Chunqiu entries using narrative passages—moved forward by agents who both speak and act—Zuozhuan’s text is also interspersed with commentary of two types: (1) comments on the passage at hand by either the noble man (junzi ৯ᄤ) or Confucius (Kongzi ᄨᄤ or Zhong Ni ӆሐ) and (2) commentarial remarks that relate not to the main Zuozhuan passages but to the Chunqiu, either pertaining to specific instances mentioned therein or outlining reading strategies that apply to a wider group of Chunqiu entries. Table 36.1 displays the variety of forms Zuozhuan uses. It provides the sequence of various items in the Zuozhuan text, starting with the incorporated Chunqiu entry and ending with Zuozhuan’s exegesis; quotations from the text are indicated by quotation marks and summaries by parentheses.1 The Chunqiu entry here concerns a regicide in Zheng in year four of the reign of Lord Xuan of Lu 元ᅷ݀ (r. 608–591 BCE). Zuozhuan fleshes out the circumstances of the assassination, starting its account with a short scene involving two protagonists: Gongzi Guisheng ݀ᄤ⅌⫳, the assassin mentioned in Chunqiu, and Gongzi Song ݀ᄤᅟ, who is not mentioned in Chunqiu but who turns out to be the driving force behind the murder. As Gongzi Song and Gongzi Guisheng were walking to court one day, Gongzi Song’s index finger started moving involuntarily; this, he told his companion, was a sign of an extraordinary taste experience to come. When the pair arrived at court, a large turtle brought to Zheng by representatives of another state was about to be cooked, and Gongzi Song and Gongzi Guisheng, recognizing this as the fulfillment of the sign of Gongzi Song’s twitching finger, shared a laugh. But then Yi ་, the ruler of Zheng, annoyed by their laughter, refused to let Gongzi Song taste the turtle. The latter then dipped his finger in the cauldron uninvited and went on (with Gongzi Guisheng) to plot and eventually carry out the regicide. Through this literary evocation, the Zuozhuan passage not only explains the chain of events that prompted the murder of the ruler but also makes the event memorable, no doubt drawing on storytelling traditions that cannot have failed to recognize the humor in the situation. In addition, Zuozhuan incorporates

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Table 36.1 Organization of Information on the Regicide in Zheng in Zuozhuan Chunqiu, Lord Xuan ᅷ 4.2

“In summer, in the sixth month, on the yiyou Э䜝day (26), Gongzi Guisheng ݀ᄤ⅌⫳of Zheng assassinated his ruler, Yi ་.”

Chunqiu, Lord Xuan ᅷ4.3–4.7

(Five other entries)

Zuozhuan on Chunqiu, (Critical assessment of the interstate attack described in Lord Xuan 4.1 Chunqiu, Lord Xuan ᅷ4.1) Zuozhuan on Chunqiu, A narrative passage with Lord Xuan 4.2 dialogue and action

(Gongzi Song ݀ᄤᅟ, snubbed by his lord over a gifted turtle he was not allowed to taste, forces Gongzi Guisheng to cooperate with him in assassinating Yi)

Type 2 commentary, specific

“The text says, ‘Gongzi Guisheng of Zheng assassinated his ruler, Yi’: this is because he fell short in weighing the odds.”

Type 1 commentary, junzi, “the noble man”

“The noble man said, ‘To be benevolent without martial valor is to achieve nothing.’ ”

Type 2 commentary, nonspecific

“In all cases when a ruler is assassinated, naming the ruler means that he violated the way of rulership; naming the subject means that the blame lies with him.”

various lines of commentary that are applicable either to this specific event or to regicides in Chunqiu generally; scholars argue about when in the process of compiling Zuozhuan the commentarial entries were fused with the narratives.2 Evident in this instance, as in Zuozhuan more generally, is an editorial hand that draws together material from oral and written sources, chronologically arranging it about specific events by matching it to precisely dated entries from the chronicle of Lu. However, these pieces of information on a topic are simply juxtaposed and not reconciled with one another. Thus, what is strangely absent from this example—at least to our modern eyes—is an acknowledgment of

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the seeming discrepancy between Chunqiu’s focus on Gongzi Guisheng as the assassin and Zuozhuan’s presentation of Gongzi Song as the main driver of events. Equally absent is any explication of how the narrative and its lines of commentary—the latter certainly not easy to understand—reinforce or contradict one another. The chronological scheme of Zuozhuan also creates informational disjointedness on a larger textual level. As story lines often cannot be contained within a single date, longer stories are broken up into discrete units that are sometimes far removed from one another. Reading one such unit usually requires an understanding of previous events, but no cross-referencing mechanism is provided. The same is true for names: characters are almost always referred to by more than one name, and there is no cross-referencing to indicate that a person named in one way in one entry is in fact the same person named differently elsewhere.3 Unlike with Shiji and Hanshu, there is not much known about the processes through which Zuozhuan was formed. The scholarly consensus is that Zuozhuan was completed by the end of the fourth century BCE,4 but the interspersing of its material with the text of Chunqiu could be a later development, dating from possibly as late as the first century CE.5 If one imagines an editorial hand behind Zuozhuan, that entity would have been mostly concerned with the selective preservation of sources and items of information dear to them (undoubtedly leaving other material aside); besides the incorporation of these sources and items within a chronological arrangement, there is a notable absence of further information-management strategies.

Shiji In the case of the Shiji, scholars have a clearer idea of the authors behind the text. The final chapter, which serves as its postface, provides a genealogy of the Sima family that ends with the lives of Sima Tan ৌ侀䂛 (d. 110 BCE), who, according to the postface, started work on the Shiji, and his son Sima Qian ৌ侀䙋 (ca. 135–ca. 90 BCE), who completed it. In this chapter, Sima Qian explicitly names Chunqiu as the primary inspiration for his Shiji, drawing parallels between it and Chunqiu (with its commentarial traditions) and between himself and Confucius (who by then was widely believed to be the author of Chunqiu). Summaries of each of Shiji’s 130 chapters are also found here, as are notes on the rationale behind the five sections that structure the work and on the intentions and aspirations of the text as a whole. Whereas postfaces also appear in other texts of the early imperial period, Shiji’s is the first one in which the authorial voice—as the end of a long genealogical chain—comes through so strongly.

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Sima Qian’s claim to authorship does not come with the implications of originality associated with authorship today. Shiji is a patchwork of numerous other sources, known or unknown to us. It has an exceptionally long chronological span, starting with the Yellow Lord (Huangdi 咗Ᏹ) and ending with the present reign of the emperor at whose court the Simas worked.6 This long time span is a reflection of the new political realities since the establishment of the unified empire in 221 BCE: an all-encompassing empire required the construction of an all-encompassing past. But the Simas tell this lengthy story in large part through other sources. Whereas Shiji sometimes provides direct quotes from sources and sometimes discusses its sources, most often the materials are incorporated into the text without attribution. The novelty of the Simas’ authorial interventions lies, first, in the assessments that conclude each chapter, marked by “the Lord Grand Scribe speaks” (໾৆݀᳄; a reference to the position that Sima Tan and Sima Qian successively held at Emperor Wu’s court) and, second, in the manner in which the information is organized, creating an intricately structured text; that structure, as the postface states, was devised mostly by Sima Qian after the death of his father in 110 BCE.7 Shiji is organized into five sections, in the following order: “Annals” (benji ᴀ㋔; twelve chapters), “Tables” (biao 㸼; ten chapters), “Monographs” (shu ᳌; eight chapters), “Hereditary Houses” (shijia Ϫᆊ; thirty chapters), and “Arrayed Traditions” (liezhuan ߫‫ ;ڇ‬seventy chapters). Chronology remains the main organizational device of Shiji: each chapter is, at least in part, ordered by chronological time; moreover, with the exception of “Monographs,” the overall arrangement of the chapters within each section is largely chronological. Another indication of the chronological impulse behind the work is that in some individual chapters, the narrative appears to be drawn from sources such as trial records or speeches; in such cases, the information tends to be separated, unacknowledged, into distinct events that are distributed chronologically over the chapter. The basic temporal arc is laid out in the “Annals” section, the only part of Shiji in which a continuous chronology is maintained throughout all of the constituent chapters. This section is designed to expose an unbroken link between a very distant past and the present, showing how the Han dynasty is heir to a long succession of epochs, dynasties, and rulers. By ruling over time, the “Annals” section simultaneously rules over space: it constructs a center and a periphery for past and present China by including some ruling houses while relegating others to elsewhere in the Shiji. The ruling houses in “Hereditary Houses” are lower on the hierarchy than those incorporated in “Annals,” and those in “Arrayed Traditions” tend to have a political problem (e.g., rebellion on the part of one of their members). Of note is that the chronology deviates from its unified format in two places. “Zhou benji” ਼ᴀ㋔ (Basic annals of Zhou) are followed by “Qin benji” ⾺ᴀ㋔ (Basic annals of Qin), even though

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both chapters cover the same period and Qin’s ritual position in the Zhou order was certainly not higher than that of Lu (treated in the “Hereditary Houses” section); moreover, the period from the decline of Qin in about 210 BCE until the demise of Xiang Yu in 202 BCE is covered in both “Xiang Yu benji” ䷙㖑 ᴀ㋔ (Basic annals of Xiang Yu) and “Gaozu benji” 催⼪ᴀ㋔ (Basic annals of Gaozu). Given how intertwined the life events of Xiang Yu and Liu Bang ࡝䙺 (256/247–195 BCE) (Gaozu, the founder of the Han Dynasty) are, some redundancy between the two “Annals” chapters is necessary in order to keep each narrative intelligible. That this is done at all differentiates Shiji from Zuozhuan. Elsewhere, Shiji resorts to summarizing information already provided in the previous chapter rather than repeating it outright. Thus, Shiji does more than arrange information according to time or topic, smoothing the narrative by repeating information where necessary, often in abbreviated form. Shiji incorporates the episode of the turtle-inspired assassination in its chapter on the hereditary house of Zheng (“Zheng shijia” 䜁Ϫᆊ). There is some linguistic variation between the versions of Shiji and Zuozhuan (the former is more explicit and refers to the protagonists by different names) but little semantic difference; of note is that here Shiji excludes the commentary that Zuozhuan links to this story, likely in order to smooth out the narrative. Thus, as compared to Zuozhuan, not only is the story more appropriately placed within the overall structure of Shiji (which, just because of its wider gaze and hierarchical organization, allows for more precise arrangement than Zuozhuan), but also it is trimmed of information deemed less relevant. “Arrayed Traditions,” with its seventy chapters, is the largest section of Shiji. As in “Annals” and “Hereditary Houses,” the account remains chronological for each person or group accorded a chapter (or part therein). These subjects stood out because of certain deeds or speech acts (rather than simply high birth), though even here a connection with the court is almost always present. Just as Zuozhuan fleshes out the annals of Lu with memorable stories drawn from various polities other than Lu, Shiji enlivens and enriches its tale of political turnover (of both central and peripheral ruling houses) by focusing on the deeds and words of advisers to the throne, authors of texts, jesters, foreign peoples, merchants, and more. However, none of the protagonists in the aforementioned murder episode receives any further attention in Shiji’s “Arrayed Traditions.” This may simply be due to the fact that little further information was available to the Simas. The regicide itself is mentioned, in a generic way, in the last chapter of Shiji when Sima Qian refers to the thirty-six regicides that occur in Chunqiu. The eight chapters in the “Monographs” section of Shiji cover topics like ritual, astronomy/astrology, and water management. Along with a theoretical treatment of the topic, they always contain a chronologically-arranged part that develops its subject against the backdrop of rulership.

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Using a system of columns and rows to present complex historical information, “Tables” is perhaps the most interesting of all the Shiji sections from the point of view of information management. There is plenty of archaeological evidence that in early China, complicated formats like tables were produced either on strips of bamboo or wood or on silk and were used to represent historical time,8 but Shiji applies the technology on a much larger scale. According to Sima Qian’s postface, “Tables” was meant to reconcile the calendars of the various ruling lineages incorporated therein. That seems to imply that the content was conceived to represent the multipolity geopolitical dynamics of the Eastern Zhou period and perhaps also of the Qin-Han transition. Reconciling the various calendars maintained by the competing ruling houses of this period was indeed necessary to the more comprehensive overview that Shiji sought to achieve. But Shiji also extends the table format to both earlier and later eras: for the period before 841 BCE, where firm dates are few and far between, it develops a genealogical format, essentially merging the ruling houses that succeeded one another into one large extended family with the Yellow Lord as its progenitor; for the Han dynasty itself, it creates tables for that dynasty’s regional lords and for the nobles who, despite encroaching centralization of the ruling house, retained the right to count the years by their own dynastic cycles. More innovatively, Shiji provides an additional table for Western Han that tabulates the appointment dates of the members of the court’s highest executive body against, in the top row, important events in the course of the dynasty. Representing discrete units of time (often years but sometimes months or generations) rather than narrative time, the table format is conducive to the inclusion of information for which there might be no room in the other chapters. For example, the tables on Han nobles (liehou ߫փ) provide the names and dates of all successive heirs to a particular noble house, whereas the narratives in the other chapters tend to focus only on the founding members and the deeds that prompted the ruler to grant them noble status. The tables also contain much information that is redundant with other sections of Shiji, though they regularly create small contradictions (e.g., regarding the precise year of an event). Such instances show that Shiji is not completely in control of the information provided in the various hooks and niches of its grand structure. Many contemporary scholars use “Tables” precisely because it provides additional detail that is useful for cross-checking facts elsewhere in the work; in doing so, they sometimes forget that each table should also be looked on as a holistic text in and of itself and was designed with its own rhetorical purposes. The turtle episode appears in the Shiji’s second table, “Shi’er zhuhou nianbiao” कѠ䃌փᑈ㸼 (Annual table of the twelve regional lords); the column headings consist of the successive Zhou reigns, and the rows list the major ruling houses (including Lu and Zheng) that operated within the Zhou order. (For lack of archaeological evidence, this observation about the rows and columns

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is based on modern editions of Shiji.) The assassination of Yi is entered in the column for the second year of the reign of King Ding of Zhou ਼ᅮ⥟ (r. 606–586 BCE) and in the row for Zheng, as follows: “The first year of Lord Ling of Zheng, Yi. Gongzi Guisheng, because of the turtle, murdered Lord Ling” 䜁 䴜݀་‫ܗ‬ᑈ݀ᄤ⅌⫳ҹ哓ᬙ↎䴜݀.9 Here, unlike in Zuozhuan, the explicit claim is that the murder happened because Gongzi Guisheng was not allowed to taste the turtle; also, the reader not only is told that Yi was murdered within a year of his accession as ruler of Zheng but also can visually spot that a new reign had just begun. An alert reader may speculate that Yi’s newness to the throne made him so vulnerable to assassination at the hands of his former peers. The visual format of the table makes this piece of information stand out, whereas in Zuozhuan, it was not available at all (as the murdered Yi was not a member of the Lu ruling house).

Hanshu Compiled by Ban Gu ⧁೎ (32–92 CE) and others, Hanshu considers a much narrower time span than Shiji, covering the roughly two centuries starting with Liu Bang’s establishment of Han in 202 BCE and ending with the fall of Wang Mang ⥟㦑 (45 BCE–23 CE) in 23 CE. Shiji not only is one of Hanshu’s major sources (the two texts overlap one century) but also provides the model for its structure. The latter omits the section on “Hereditary Houses”—by the time of its compilation, political centralization had proceeded apace, making such a section redundant—and renames “Monographs” as “Treatises” (zhi ᖫ). As was the case with Shiji, it matters under which section a subject is treated. The clearest example is the three-part chapter devoted to Wang Mang and his founding of the short-lived Xin ᮄ dynasty (9–23 CE). Rather than being in “Annals,” this chapter comes second to last in “Arrayed Traditions,” a clear reflection of Ban Gu’s disgust with someone that he, as subject of a restored Han dynasty, viewed as a usurper. Hanshu has one hundred chapters; its last, like Shiji’s, is a postface consisting of a genealogy of the Ban family, chapter summaries, and general notes on the text’s composition. Much more often than Shiji, Hanshu incorporates material through direct quotation (poems, memorials, and essays), giving the impression of wanting to preserve its sources relatively intact—or at least marking them as such. For example, a large part of the biographical chapter on Wei Xian 䶟䊶 (fl. 76–67 BCE) is taken up by four poems that are (it would appear) fully rendered.10 Also of note is that Hanshu, far more than Shiji before it, regularly (148 times) provides cross-references to other sections of the text using a standardized format: “The full account is in ‘Annal’/‘Treatise’/‘Tradition’ X” (䁲೼ X ㋔ / ‫ ڇ‬/ ᖫ). This is evidence perhaps that historians were acquiring more mastery over their

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own bulging texts or had become more concerned with their readership. Even though this formula at times comes across as somewhat stiff, such a system of cross-references points to the assuring presence of an authorial hand and lends coherence not only to the individual chapters but also to Hanshu as a whole. Given Hanshu’s focus on the first two centuries BCE, one might be surprised to find the regicide of Yi of Zheng in 605 BCE referred to directly in two chapters of the text: the “Wuxing zhi” Ѩ㸠ᖫ (Treatise on the five phases) and the “Gujin ren biao” সҞҎ㸼 (Table of figures, past and present). This latter table, often ascribed to Ban Gu’s sister, Ban Zhao ⧁ᰁ (ca. 45–116 CE), organizes many past figures (including those of the pre-Han period) into nine categories of descending worth, ranging from sages (shengren 㘪Ҏ) to idiots (yuren ᛮҎ).11 Gongzi Guisheng, Yi’s murderer, receives a higher ranking in the table (category six) than Yi himself, who, in category eight, comes dangerously close to being considered an idiot, perhaps an implicit statement that his assassination was justified.12 Certainly, this shows that distant events continued to matter and that the evaluation of historical figures—known only from texts—continued to be a topic of debate. In the “Wuxing zhi,” the regicide in Zheng is mentioned three times, always as part of a series, and each is presaged by a sign from heaven—a comet, an earthquake, or a solar eclipse—sent down as an indication of something amiss in the ruler’s relationship with his subjects.13 Here the regicide is reduced to mere precedent, available to advisers wishing to persuade their rulers to change their ways in light of ominous signs. If Zuozhuan and Shiji still recognized the humor in the tale of regicide “because of a turtle,” Hanshu most definitely does not.

Notes 1. See “Lord Xuan 4” in Zuo Tradition/Zuozhuan: Commentary on the “Spring and Autumn Annals,” trans. Stephen Durrant, Wai-yee Li, and David Schaberg, 3 vols. (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2016), 606–13; see also Newell Ann Van Auken, The Commentarial Transformation of the Spring and Autumn (Albany: SUNY Press, 2016), 131–32. 2. Newell Ann Van Auken, “Judgments of the Gentleman: A New Analysis of the Place of Junzi Comments in Zuozhuan Composition History,” Monumenta Serica 64, no. 2 (2016): 277–302. Van Auken rejects the idea that these comments by “the noble man” or Confucius were later additions to the Zuozhuan; in The Commentarial Transformation of the Spring and Autumn, she sees the specific and general comments as earlier, independent texts that were incorporated into Zuozhuan. 3. In their translation of the Zuozhuan, Durrant, Li, and Schaberg solve these problems for the modern reader by inserting summaries and cross-references and by adopting uniform naming practices. 4. Durrant, Li, and Schaberg, Zuo Tradition/Zuozhuan, xxxix. 5. Wai-yee Li, The Readability of the Past in Early Chinese Historiography (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2008), 33–36.

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6. Sima Qian, Shiji, annot. Pei Yin 㻈俄, Sima Zhen ৌ侀䉲, and Zhang Shoujie ᔉᅜ㆔, 2nd ed., 10 vols. (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1962), 130.3303. 7. Sima Qian, Shiji, 130.3300. 8. Michael Loewe, The Men Who Governed Han China: Companion to the Biographical Dictionary of the Qin, Former Han, and Xin Periods (Leiden: Brill, 2004), 208–50; for a discussion of an archaeologically retrieved predecessor to Shiji’s “Tables,” see Griet Vankeerberghen, “The Tables (biao) in Sima Qian’s Shi ji: Rhetoric and Remembrance,” in The Warp and the Weft: Graphics and Text in the Production of Technical Knowledge in China, ed. Francesca Bray, Georges Métaillé, and Vera Dorofeeva-Lichtmann (Leiden: Brill, 2007), esp. 297–301. 9. Sima Qian, Shiji, 14.612–13. 10. David Zebulon Raft, “The Beginning of Literati Poetry—Four Poems from First-Century BCE China,” T’oung Pao, 2nd ser., 96, no. 1–3 (2010): 74–124. 11. Michael Nylan and Dai Meike ᠈ṙৃ, “Mapping Time in the Shiji and Hanshu Tables 㸼,” East Asian Science, Technology, and Medicine 43 (2016): 91–95. 12. Ban Gu et al., comps., Hanshu, 8 vols. (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1962), 20.915–16. 13. Ban Gu et al., Hanshu, 27.1452, 1487, 1511.

CHAPTER 37

EARLY MEDIEVAL HISTORIES ZEB RAFT

C

onnections between historiography and literature in early medieval China are close and manifold. The histories deliver information that provides context for our understanding of writers and their work, they create or preserve many vignettes and anecdotes that are of intrinsic literary interest, and they include recognized masterpieces in the literary tradition. It is the last of these connections that raises a broader issue of special significance: that beyond the masterpieces, the early medieval histories derive much of their bulk from the quotation of literary documents in full or at great length. This feature is very apparent in the annals (ji ㋔) of the dynastic histories, where a terse record of events at court is liberally interspersed with imperial edicts (zhao 䀨), a genre not at all devoid of literary qualities. The presence and impact of documentation is greatest, however, in the biographical sections (zhuan ‫)ڇ‬. The biographies will be the focus of this chapter, which takes a primarily quantitative approach. Figure 37.1 gives an overview of the importance of literary documentation in early medieval historiography. Shown are the percentages of documents in selected biographies, derived by using the standard typeset histories as digitized in the Scripta Sinica database and applying two overlapping criteria to identify documents—those passages regarded by modern editors as integral works and thus presented in indent and single quotations longer than two hundred characters. The twenty historical works analyzed span some fifteen hundred years, starting with Shiji ৆㿬 (The Grand Scribe’s Records) and Hanshu ⓶᳌ (History

37.1 Documents in biographies, first century BCE to fourteenth century CE, ordered by date of completion (left) and by percentage (right).

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of the Han)—the Han exemplars discussed in the preceding chapter—and continuing through Songshi ᅟ৆ (History of the Song), completed in 1358.1 A clear precedent for a document-laden approach to historiography was created by the Hanshu, where documents constitute more than a quarter (27 percent) of the text of the biographies; that tendency was already evident to a lesser degree (18 percent) in Shiji. This became a dominant trait in the major historiographical works of the early medieval period. As shown in the graph on the right, Songshu ᅟ᳌ (History of the Liu-Song), compiled in 488, represents the high-water mark, its proportion of documents reaching nearly one-third (30 percent) of the total text.2 Just after Hanshu is Jinshu ᰝ᳌ (History of the Jin), in which documents make up one-quarter of the text; it reached its current form in the Tang (hence its lower placement in the graph on the left), but it was based on early medieval compilations. Of the six works that follow, all except Shiji are early medieval histories in which documents make up a minimum of 17.5 percent of the total text. As for those works in which documentation is a relatively less important component, two factors in particular explain its diminution. First, the model eroded with the passage of time; thus, documents make up just 9 percent of the biographical sections in the last history on our list—less than a third of the Hanshu proportion. A second, more local factor is that document-based historiography was particularly susceptible to reduction by editing. Comparison of Nanshi फ৆ (History of the Southern Dynasties; completed in 659) with the works on which it was largely based—the histories of the Song, Qi, Liang, and Chen dynasties—provides a good example of this. Documentation in those works ranged between 30 and 14 percent but was reduced in Nanshi to a paltry 5 percent. Putting these two factors together, the pairs of “old” and “new” histories of the Tang and Five Dynasties period are at once edited down and representative of a transition into a less document-oriented approach: the proportion of documents in Jiu Tangshu 㟞૤᳌ (Old history of the Tang; 17.5 percent) is halved in Xin Tangshu ᮄ૤᳌ (New history of the Tang; 9 percent), as is the already small amount of documentation in Jiu Wudaishi 㟞Ѩҷ৆ (Old history of the Five Dynasties; 2 percent) in Xin Wudaishi (New history of the Five Dynasties; 1 percent). A qualitative version of this story is told by the Tang historical critic Liu Zhiji ࡝ⶹᑒ (661–721), who devotes two chapters in his Shitong ৆䗮 (General principles of historiography) to discussion of documentation’s proper place in the writing of history.3 The importance of the issue is signaled by the prominent placement of the first of these, “Zaiyan” 䓝㿔 (On including speeches), which is the third chapter in his work. There Liu affirms one of the principles that sanctioned the inclusion of a documentary record in historiographical works—the idealized division between zuoshi Ꮊ৆ (scribes of the left) and youshi ে৆ (scribes of the right), one tasked with recording words and the

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other deeds—and recognizes Shangshu ᇮ᳌ (Esteemed documents), a repository of speeches purported to have been delivered by the ancients at pivotal historical moments, as the classical paradigm for the documentary tradition. The second relevant chapter in Liu’s work, “Zaiwen” 䓝᭛ (On including writing), similarly begins with a general principle: observing that wen ᭛, which originally meant “pattern” but had long since come to mean “literary writing,” was a potent source of historical significance, Liu affirms that literature, when it accurately reflects reality, does belong to the same stream (liu ⌕) as historiography. In both chapters, however, Liu’s point is to underscore the tension between history and documentation. In “Zaiyan,” he excoriates the dilution of historical narrative that results from excess documentation, proposing that special treatises (shu ᳌) be established and attached to the histories to accommodate edicts, memorials, and poetic writing. In the latter chapter, he assails the historian who would blithely accept and transmit his sources when he ought rather to determine and discard those that are (to use Liu’s categories) false, impudent, not genuine, self-contradictory, or boilerplate. His arguments center on the early medieval tradition, which he sees as beholden to an indulgence for vapid documentation, but he is ambivalent about the Han models as well, criticizing Shiji and Hanshu for including long policy speeches like those of Jia Yi 䊜䂐 (200–168 BCE) and the grand rhapsodies (fu 䊺) of Sima Xiangru ৌ侀Ⳍབ (179–117 BCE) and his literary progeny. In the end, Liu Zhiji’s view won out, the document becoming less integral to historiography. Why might this have occurred? Setting aside Liu’s not unreasonable critique, two possible factors are changes in the publication environment and a shift in the political orientation of the literate class. In the manuscript culture of early medieval China, the circulation potential of a written work was fairly limited, and the political culture of this period was to a significant degree centered around the court. In such a context, it was highly meaningful for a writer to have his essay included in the court-compiled history and for the compilers of these histories to carry out this practice. By the eleventh century, however, the scope of culture had shifted: it was no longer so court oriented, and with the advent of the printed book, there were many opportunities beyond the standard histories both for publishing and for reading a fuller documentary record. Literary information became more dispersed and more accessible, in contrast to the high concentrations found in the historiography of the early medieval period (see Shields, chapter 38). Where figure 37.1 provides a sort of aerial view of documentation in historiography, the following two figures, which plot the percentages of documentation across the biographical scrolls (juan ो, akin, if not equivalent, to “chapters”) of individual histories, descend to a ground view of the historiographical landscape. The first, figure 37.2, juxtaposes the two highest-scoring works on our documentary scale, Songshu and its model, Hanshu. At least three salient points emerge

37.2 Percentage of documents per scroll in the biographical sections of Songshu and Hanshu.

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from this profile view of the paradigm and its greatest likeness. First, this perspective reveals the prominence of “skyscrapers” in the relationship of document to historiography. In the Songshu, a full 84 percent of the biography of Xie Lingyun 䃱䴜䘟 (385–433; in scroll 67) is comprised of the protagonist’s writings, including an exhaustive, not to say bloated, rhapsody on the poet’s mountain estate. Four other biographies rise above 60 percent. The slightly longer Hanshu is similarly built up, with eight scrolls over 60 percent, including the aforementioned treatment of Jia Yi (scroll 48; 86 percent) and Sima Xiangru (scroll 57; 77 percent). At the other end of the spectrum, balancing these towering biographies are pockets of open space—biographies where there is little or even no documentation, as, in particular, in the case of military men (e.g., Songshu scroll 76), who relied on the rhetorical skills of their more cultivated adherents. Finally, and perhaps most significantly, the density of the mid- and even lower-rise range stands out—indicating the many biographies in which substantial portions of the historical narrative are supplied through the quotation of primary sources. Figure 37.3 compares the Songshu with the Nanshi, the history in which Southern Dynasties documentation was excised and pared down. The tallest structure in Nanshi is one-third documentation: scroll 59, comprising the biographies of the famed writers Jiang Yan ∳⏍ (444–505) and Ren Fang ӏᯝ (460–508), who are quoted at length, and Wang Sengru ⥟‫ڻ‬ᅎ (465–522), who is not. This maximum value pales in comparison to Songshu, and in that sense, one might perceive a great contrast. At the same time, one-third documentation is hardly a negligible proportion, and later histories, while largely freed from the documentary impulse, will continue to let important figures speak in their own words. More telling is the differential of open space and mid-range density. While only about half (37 out of 70) of the Nanshi scrolls feature any documents at all according to the standard used here, the proportion in Songshu approaches 90 percent (53 out of 60); meanwhile, the average length of a Songshu document (about 1,500 characters) is more than double the Nanshi average (635). Thus, literary passages, and sometimes long ones, do appear from time to time, but the document-light history is no longer chock full of them. The “feel” of historiography has changed. This feeling or texture may be the most significant difference between a historiography that draws heavily on documents and one that does not. Its best index is found at the linguistic level. Comparing the vocabulary most commonly used in documents, on the one hand, with those lexical items more commonly encountered in the plain historical narrative, on the other, one finds both association within the two groups and distinction between them. Taking Songshu as an example, words like general (jiangjun ᇛ䒡), prefect (taishou ໾ᅜ), governor (cishi ࠎ৆), and adviser (canjun গ䒡) dominate in the narrative sections as well as in posthumous references to the dynasty’s two most important emperors, Gaozu 催⼪ (r. 420–22) and Taizu ໾⼪ (r. 424–53). These are

37.3 Documents per scroll, Songshu and Nanshi.

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substantive words directly implicated in the political history of the period, and the other medieval histories use corresponding sets of words in their narratives of their own eras. Turning to the vocabulary of the documents, the key words are not substantives but modal words that show how historical actors engaged with their political culture, and the relevant set of words is largely shared across the early medieval histories. Thus, while the top documentary word in Songshu is still (exceptionally) general, the other common items are not substantives but terms of rhetorical action, like should not (buke ϡৃ, second on the list), cannot (buneng ϡ㛑, fifth, and bude ϡᕫ, tenth), thus (suoyi ᠔ҹ, fourth), and therefore (shiyi ᰃҹ, seventh). Such words evoke people reasoning their way through the world, and they are paired not with historical references to specific emperors, as in the narrative, but with the term of direct address your Highness (bixia 䰯ϟ): in the third position in Songshu, it is second in Hanshu and is the most common documentary word in Hou Hanshu ᕠ⓶᳌ (History of the latter Han) and Sanguo zhi ϝ೟ᖫ (Record of the Three Kingdoms). These are a few ways of observing at scale the outsize presence of literary information in early medieval historiography. And what effects might this phenomenon have had on the readers and the writers of this historiography? For the reader, the differential just noted between the vocabulary of the document and that of the historical narrative would have created a subtle but significant feature in the experience of these works, with the distinctive linguistic register of the document quotations lending “punctuation” and “paragraphing” to texts that, in early medieval manuscripts and in premodern printed versions, were generally presented in homogenized columns. At the level of the document itself, the scholar-official reader was presented with model specimens of the kinds of literary documents he would need to be able to produce in two of his chief roles, those of active bureaucrat and cultured gentryman (or sometimes gentrywoman). In this sense, the histories served as a kind of anthology, and the works selected for inclusion can be considered to have been “canonized.” It is difficult to know, however, to what degree this canonization affected the reception of specific works and, in an opposite and arguably more important sense, to what degree the historical document served as a model to its readership: the readers of the histories were themselves writers, and the inclusion of documents was not only a look back into the literary tradition but also, as noted earlier, a gaze forward into a potential venue of “publication” for the historical reader’s own writings. For the compiler of a history, documentation provided an established mode of delivering historical information. The tradition of documentation was not just established but authoritative: in putting documents into the historical record or simply leaving them there where he found them, the historiographer was dutifully adhering to the Confucian principle of “transmitting, not creating” (shu er buzuo 䗄㗠ϡ԰).4 It is certainly possible to join Liu Zhiji in his criticism of this

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tradition: a historian, not a mere historiographer, would often do better justice to his material and his readers by summarizing, synthesizing, and evaluating the information in the primary sources. “Not creating” could be less a principle than a strategy, indemnifying the historian from responsibility for the conclusions of a historical account or excusing him from drawing conclusions at all. But the irony of Liu Zhiji’s appraisal is that his prescriptions account poorly for the simple historical fact that documentation was the dominant mode of historiography in early medieval China. By contrast, the value of the tradition is much clearer when considered from the standpoint of information. Information is medium-specific. Translating the content of these documents into the discursive forms of summary and analysis might have had benefits in some respects—but only with the sacrifice of the information bound up in the literary dimension of the document and of much historical detail to boot. All of this turns on a broad conception of the literary. While there is nothing inherently wrong with setting some standard for fine literature and searching for its best representatives in the extant corpus of early medieval writing, such a narrow view will not do justice to the literary culture of early medieval China. The documents of historiography include many speeches and essays associated with matters of governance—border affairs and court protocol are among the most prominent topics—but to make a sharp distinction between literary and not-so-literary documents—or, as Liu Zhiji did, between speech and writing or between pragmatic and artistic subjects—would be to introduce a false dichotomy, one that is at odds with the course of literary history, where many works later appreciated as literary monuments began as speeches or writings closely involved in historical events. The documents are all in their own ways specimens of literary writing—or what might better be described as the early medieval art of rhetoric. These specimens of literary information had an effect on the reader and on the compiler, but in the most general sense, they can be said to “inform” the historiography itself. Documents render the early medieval histories largely mimetic, showing rather than retelling the unfolding of historical events. The formal and stylistic distinctions of the literary document grant an elegant décor to the historical “stores” that hold them. And most of all, the histories are thereby imbued with the deeper literary qualities that tie these documents together—the subjective experience of events and the individual’s ethical response to them.

Notes 1. For the data and methods used here, see David Zebulon Raft, Ruben G. Tsui, and MingFeng Ho, Docanalysis, https://github.com/zebraft/docanalysis, developed with support from Taiwan’s Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST 106-2420-H-001-018-MY2).

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2. These histories also quote many shorter documents and excerpts. As an example, a closer examination of the Songshu reveals that in addition to the 254 documents presented at length, about 400 more appear in shorter form. 3. For the text and a translation, see Liu Zhiji, Traité de l’historien parfait: chapitres intérieurs, trans. Damien Chaussende (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2014), 26–28, 111–19. 4. Lunyu 䂪䁲 7/1; Lunyu zhushu 䂪䁲⊼⭣, 7.1a, in Chongkan Songben Shisanjing zhushu fu jiaokanji 䞡ߞᅟᴀकϝ㍧⊼⭣䰘᷵ࢬ㿬, ed. Ruan Yuan 䰂‫( ܗ‬1764–1849) (preface 1815).

CHAPTER 38

DYNASTIC HISTORIES FROM TANG TO SONG A N NA M. SHIELDS

I

n their overview of the historiography of Tang dynasty China, Charles Hartman and Anthony DeBlasi note:

Many scholars accept the dynastic histories as “primary sources.” Yet in reality the surviving standard histories from this period are vast cornucopias of text many rewritings, reworkings, and recombinations away from their origins and original contexts as primary documents.1

The kinds of “primary documents” referred to include sources such as court diaries, genealogies, epitaphs, memorials, legal codes, and other texts that were regularly excerpted, embedded, and recombined in Chinese historiography. After the Tang dynasty creation of a sophisticated bureaucracy for state historiography that employed increasing numbers of officials, Chinese elites became more self-aware and critical of their own processes of working with this range of texts. Like many of their medieval predecessors, Tang and Song dynastic histories used a composite form that included the four categories of annals (ji ㋔), treatises (zhi ᖫ), tables (biao 㸼), and biographies (zhuan ‫ ڇ‬or liezhuan ߫‫ڇ‬, “arrayed biographies”). Each of these components of dynastic history evolved unique, characteristic ways of excerpting and embedding documents that revealed different indexical relationships among source texts and broader historical accounts.

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In the dynastic histories of the Tang and Song, literary information was not a privileged source but rather one type among a wide range of sources to be recombined in new historical works. Documents that fell into the broad category of literary writing (wenzhang ᭛ゴ), which included both public, official documents and belletristic writing, were essential to the compilation of dynastic history since its beginning in the Han dynasty, though in ways that became less and less visible over the course of the Chinese tradition. The Tang and Song dynasties mark an important shift in the use of literary works for reasons related to the proliferation of texts, the emergence of new bureaucratic practices for the compilation of historical records, and an increased emphasis on ideological narratives in the production of history. In historiography from the Han through the Song, two linked principles of Chinese historiography shaped the ways documents were used. The first is that despite their reliance on primary sources, from at least the Tang onward, Chinese scholars compiled dynastic histories in ways intended to disguise their processing of documents of all types in order to have the histories themselves stand as new, autonomous texts with a special claim to political and moral truth. To a degree unlike medieval encyclopedias and anthologies, in other words, dynastic histories sought to erase the traces of their making—they extracted and embedded documents in order to create seamless chronicles, bodies of information, and biographical narratives. Though dynastic history’s claim to truth ultimately derived from the classical model of Confucius’s compilation of Chunqiu ᯹⾟ (Annals), this feature of Chinese historiography is more usefully filiated to the strong figure of Sima Qian ৌ侀䙋 (ca. 135–ca. 90 BCE), discussed earlier in this volume, and his ambitious compilation of China’s first universal history, the Shiji ৆㿬 (The Grand Scribe’s Records). The uses of documents in dynastic history are closely tied to history’s claim to authority in traditional Chinese culture. As an account of an entire dynastic period compiled after its fall, a dynastic history derived its power from the fact that its principal charge was to correctly apportion praise and blame (baobian 㻦䊊), explicating the lessons of human affairs for readers. One of the principal goals of a dynastic history was to correctly trace political legitimacy—the transmission of the Mandate of Heaven in the zhengtong ℷ㍅ (orthodox lineage)— from one era to the next. Etienne Balazs’s famous dictum regarding Chinese history—that it was “written by officials for officials”—underscores the political utility of the dynastic history as a “mirror” for the rulers and the officials in charge of state policy.2 These political goals and assumptions surrounding dynastic history shaped readers’ views of the relationship between history’s authority and its sources. Medieval readers of dynastic histories assumed that historians regularly consulted and incorporated diverse relevant documents that had been preserved by the state, but they tended to see the histories, once completed, as independent—though definitely not flawless—texts.

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As a consequence of both the upheaval of dynastic transitions from the early medieval period through the Song, which frequently involved the destruction of imperial libraries, and this attitude toward the textual independence of dynastic histories, original source documents were often lost or discarded after the compilation of the predecessor dynasty’s history, while the dynastic histories endured as privileged accounts. By the same token, in the case of histories whose quality was questioned in later generations, later scholars generally did not create new histories from scratch or seek out new narratives with which to challenge existing accounts. More commonly, they sought to revise the existing histories by supplementing, reorganizing, and reframing their contents.

Changing Uses of Literary Information in Tang and Song Dynastic Histories In the state-sponsored dynastic histories of Tang and Song— specifically, Jiu Tangshu 㟞૤᳌ (Old history of the Tang; comp. 945), Xin Tangshu ᮄ૤᳌ (New history of the Tang; comp. 1060), and Songshi ᅟ৆ (History of the Song; comp. 1345)—a few key trends in state historiography affected the use and display of literary information. The first was the bureaucratization of history writing on multiple levels, from officials’ daily practices to their attitudes toward the veracity and use of sources. The second was a growing interest in using dynastic history to articulate ideological arguments aligned with contemporary debates, a trend that increased under the influence of the Learning of the Way (Daoxue 䘧ᅌ), also known as neo-Confucianism. The early Tang establishment of bureaucratic offices, staff, and practices for writing history had a profound effect on historians’ use of documents. The discrete responsibilities for composing, collecting, and editing documents were assigned to a complex of court offices, most notably (after 629) to the new Historiography Office (shiguan ৆仼). In accordance with some older principles of division of labor between historians and court diarists, intended to preclude the emperor’s interference with the historical record, the duties of recording court activities and later of compiling the histories for individual reigns, as well as for the comprehensive state history, were kept distinct. The Tang and Song bureaucratization of history was not merely an organizational effort: as Jack W. Chen has noted, this move toward increasing systematization was fundamentally “an attempt to control the reliability and truthfulness of the historical record.”3 The bureaucratic approach to writing dynastic history also influenced historiographical officials’ views of their source texts. While compilers of dynastic histories sought to make their accounts both independent and authoritative, comparisons of extant Tang

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primary texts to Tang and Song historical accounts that absorb or excerpt those texts reveal that historians respected the authority of original documents in the compilation process. That is, the practices of copying, extracting, and embedding documents—rather than rewriting texts or writing accounts de novo—became the chief mechanism of state-sponsored historiography. Though for Shiji and indeed most pre-Tang dynastic histories, it is difficult to determine patterns of selection and editing due to the loss of sources, this difficulty lessens from the Song onward, when the rise of printing allowed more primary sources to survive. Such comparative study also allows one to see the power of rhetorical framing and argumentation in the practice of selective quotation. Analysis of framing devices such as chapter prefaces, historians’ concluding judgments (zan 䋞), and organizational techniques within sections of the history can also illuminate historians’ manipulation of extracted passages.4 The general respect for original sources did not, of course, guarantee the veracity of those primary accounts—historians always understood that their predecessors and contemporaries could write specious and inflated reports of things they experienced personally and that there were incentives to exaggerate for posterity. Rather, this practice simply underscores the attitude historians took toward the source documents they had at their disposal, which allowed them to excerpt and embed rather than rewrite. However, as the events and people that had to be covered in dynastic history grew in number and documentary complexity after the eleventh century and as the advent of printing increased the available source documents, official historians faced new challenges in managing their voluminous materials. In the face of that shift, they were increasingly required to rely on their sources, excerpted and arranged in more economical fashion.5 Trust was not merely a traditional attitude but became to some extent a practical necessity. Given scholars’ attitudes toward their sources and the complex bureaucratic processes of state historiography that might seem to have guaranteed impartial practices, one might wonder how Tang and Song historians manipulated dynastic history for ideological and presentist ends. One answer can be seen in their work to standardize the generic templates for discrete components of dynastic history. As historians developed more consistent conventions for each section, successive generations of scholars had structurally and morally normative models to follow, including clearer templates for didactic messaging, which allowed them to more readily embed ideological arguments across different sections. The early Tang compilation of dynastic histories for the period of division between the fall of the Han and establishment of the Tang was a critical watershed for these developments. In that moment, the scholars who compiled the histories debated their methods and viewpoints and produced a

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set of histories for the early medieval period that were structurally and rhetorically consistent.6 In Tang and Song dynastic histories, for which there is a wealth of surviving primary texts for comparison, one discovers that the influence of source documents on history was not unidirectional. Stabilizing the genre conventions for dynastic history influenced the literary genres that fed into it. For example, in the case of the biographies of prominent officials from the Tang, in primary documents such as official accounts of conduct (xingzhuang 㸠⢔), political biographies of officials that were composed after death and submitted to the state, and entombed epitaphs (muzhiming ๧䁠䡬), the structural and thematic similarities between posthumous biographical accounts and dynastic biographies increase over the course of the dynasty. Since the greatest honor for a member of the elite was to be included in the state history, Tang and Song writers came to see incentives in composing posthumous accounts that could be easily copied or excerpted in the dynastic record. Standard templates and source texts that were shaped by the conventions of dynastic history gave Tang and Song historians tools for consistency over time. Two other trends in Tang and Song historiography affected the use of literary information: scholars’ interest in abridging history for ease of study and their decreasing quotation of belletristic writing. This move toward simplification also increased the ideological potential of state history. For example, in his ruthless reduction of the annals of Jiu Tangshu and his rewriting and reduction of Jiu Wudaishi 㟞Ѩҷ৆ (Old history of the Five Dynasties), Northern Song historian Ouyang Xiu ℤ䱑ׂ (1007–72) demonstrated that abridgment could be a powerful tool for advancing arguments about the relative moral worth of different rulers, officials, and events. As Charles Hartman has demonstrated, Southern Song historians used abridgments of earlier histories to communicate a “grand allegory” of Song history that made heroes and villains more visible and one-dimensional and that more clearly articulated, among other things, a “teleological trajectory of moral rectitude.”7 With respect to the quotation and embedding of literary texts, on the other hand, which had always been one of the historian’s strategic weapons, from Jiu Tangshu through Songshi there is an overall decline not only in primary source quotations but also in the stylistic and generic variety of source texts that were quoted even in biographies of individuals, where they had most frequently appeared in pre-Tang histories. The breadth of literature quoted in biographies compiled in the early Tang, let alone in Jiu Tangshu, shrinks to a narrow political range of memorials and other submissions to the throne in Song historiography. This decreasing reliance on belletristic writing thus flattened discrete events and individual voices and simplified the didactic lessons of dynastic history across the board.

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Literary Information in the Annals, Treatises, and Tables of Tang and Song Dynastic Histories Annals, treatises, tables, and biographies each displayed information in quite different ways (and, in the case of treatises, information display varied widely depending on the topic). However, in contrast to the longer narratives of biography and the more concise annals, treatises and tables rarely extracted and embedded other documents explicitly in the form of quotation. Instead, within the dynastic history they were the most streamlined forms of representing different types of political, social, economic, cultural, and intellectual information. In general, historians first hierarchized and stratified the types of documents that fed into the histories and processed them in different ways. The record of a given emperor’s reign in the annals, for example, was compiled through texts such as court diaries, daily court calendars, records of administration, and memorials and edicts, most of which were documents generated or circulated internally at the imperial court. Biographies, on the other hand, were compiled in part from some sources that were internal, such as the record of service (a personnel dossier, which collected information on political service), but they also relied on external evaluations, such as posthumous commemorations and biographies compiled by individuals’ families, sources that valued literary style and embellishment more than other types of sources, as well as selected quotations from other sources such as the subject’s collected works (wenji ᭛䲚) or anecdotes. Second, Tang and Song historiography was fundamentally a collective endeavor at every stage of the process, at least ideally: documents passed through multiple sets of hands over decades and even centuries as they were edited and compressed. This collective nature of historiographical practice was by no means universally admired. Historian Liu Zhiji ࡝ⶹᑒ (661–721) famously criticized its inefficiency and inconsistency and the lack of accountability among staff historians as well as their intellectual mediocrity (see Raft, chapter 37).8 Finally, there were always potential choke points or moments of crisis. The destruction of documents for certain reign periods or important figures, for example, could lead to gaps in the records of individual reigns, which were compiled in documents known as veritable records (shilu ᆺ䣘), a Tang innovation, and later in the state history (guoshi ೟৆) and then the dynastic history. Chinese historians’ reliance on documents for dynastic history is revealed by the impact of those crises: where source documents did not exist, the later accounts are largely silent. In Tang and Song dynastic histories, as in their medieval predecessors, annals are organized as entries on discrete events placed in chronological order, noting (at a minimum) the dates, the names of the actors and their titles, the location of events, and an outcome. More embellished versions of entries include excerpts from documents, usually presented as utterances of the actors,

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whether those were originally presented orally or in a text (in a memorial or policy statement, for example). Historians’ judgments are normally conveyed through the events chosen for inclusion and the final evaluations of reigns rather than within or between entries. Genre conventions helped historians standardize entries, which in turn gave the annals consistency and the impression of reliability; in the barest of annals, they also minimize the traces of source documents such as court diaries or memorials. An entry from the Xin Tangshu annals for Tang emperor Xuanzong’s ⥘ᅫ (r. 712–56) reign, recording the momentous events at Mawei Post-station (when the emperor fled the sack of the capital Chang’an during the An Lushan Rebellion in the summer of 756), is an example of the potentially extreme concision of annals. On the dingyou day [of the sixth month of 756], [the imperial entourage] halted at Mawei, and the Left General-in-chief of Longwu Chen Xuanli killed Yang Guozhong, the Censor-in-chief Wei Fangjin, and the Chief Minister of the Court of Imperial Sacrifices Yang Xuan. [The emperor] allowed Precious Consort Yang to die [commit suicide].9

In this example, there is no trace of the documents that fed into this account and no utterances attributed to any of the actors. The entry has become fundamentally indexical: by refusing narrative elaboration, it merely gestures toward the large body of knowledge about this event (one of the most famous episodes in Tang history) that any Song reader would possess. Ouyang Xiu was in fact later criticized for his ruthless cutting of the older account, and Sima Guang ৌ侀‫( ܝ‬1019–86), in his Zizhi tongjian 䊛⊏䗮䨥 (Comprehensive mirror for aid in governance), expanded this entry to two pages. The dynastic history treatises were accounts of discrete bodies of knowledge, such as astronomy, ritual, the calendar, geography, law, and literary work, and they varied significantly in their classification and display of information. In the Jiu Tangshu treatise on geography (“Dili zhi” ഄ⧚ᖫ), for example, the bulk of the text was composed of lists of locations organized by region, prefecture, and county, interspersed with chronologically ordered comments on changes (to names or geographical features, for example) without visible citation or incorporation of sources. Other treatises, such as those for the calendar (“Li zhi” Ლᖫ) and state ritual (“Li zhi” ⾂ᖫ), regularly quoted state documents such as memorials, policy discussions, and edicts, often with attribution to a specific, named author. Issues that were politically or morally sensitive required appeals to respected precedents and authority. With regard to literary information, the bibliography treatise (“Yiwen zhi” 㮱᭛ᖫ) was the most important: it was a catalog of literary information organized at the first level by the fourfold classification (sibu ಯ䚼) of Classics (jing ㍧), Histories (shi ৆),

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Masters (zi ᄤ), and Collections (ji 䲚) and secondarily by chronology. Its subsections were sometimes prefaced or summarized by brief discussions of literary genres written by the compiling historians, but they were otherwise made up of lists of titles, authors, and numbers of chapters in works. Finally, the tables of dynastic histories, chronological tables of official service and genealogy, were the most compressed displays of complex information. Though simpler forms first appeared in Shiji and Hanshu, they were discontinued in the early medieval histories; they were then reintroduced in Jiu Tangshu and continued to appear in its Song revision and in dynastic histories thereafter. Tables and certain kinds of treatises (such as those for geography and literary works) turned documents into information that was digested, sorted, and reorganized according to each section’s template and conventions. From the compilation of the two versions of the Tang history and thereafter, annals, treatises, and tables tended to contain fewer obviously excerpted documents (memorials, essays, and court debates) and more condensed information.

Literary Information in Dynastic History Biographies: A Case Study Tang and Song dynastic history biographies use documents in some consistent and characteristic ways, sometimes foregrounding their extraction of documents in attributed quotations (to a text with a given title and author, for example) and sometimes embedding excerpts in order to create seamless narratives. Though it is important to distinguish among types of use and degrees of visibility, one can discern a general rule: given the streamlining practices of Tang and Song historians, the excerpting of literary documents in the form of explicit quotation was a strategic choice, not an incidental one. Literary documents appeared in dynastic biographies for very particular reasons, most commonly to impart authenticity as well as moral or emotional authority to the narrative. The evolution of a standard template and conventions for biography were critical for simplifying compilers’ editorial choices. Attributed quotation of primary source texts, for example, is generally limited to a few sections of the biography, while silent excerpting of documents (to the extent they can be traced) appears in others. Since dynastic history biographies are intended to be authoritative accounts, they were often later copied, excerpted, and otherwise adapted as new “primary sources.” The larger principle of authority found in dynastic history, in other words, applied equally to its individual biographies: the goal is to create a coherent, sufficient account of a subject’s career. These are not, in other words, biographies in the post-eighteenth-century European definition, and though many include comments on a subject’s character or disposition, they tend not to explore a subject’s psychology or social world in detail.

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Biographies’ use of literary documents ranges along a spectrum from the most visible and prominent use, where an author (most commonly the subject of the biography) directly quotes a named source; to the “silent” use of a literary document, where extracts from the literary document are copied into the biography without attribution; to the inclusion of a paraphrased and rewritten source document, the most difficult type to identify; and, finally, to the mere recycling of basic information, such as death dates or titles, whose sources one may or may not be able to discern. Though for most pre-Tang dynastic histories there are not adequate primary sources to distinguish these uses clearly (other than identifying obvious quotation), from the Tang and Song there are many more sources that trace the ways that different types of documents are incorporated. Table 38.1 is a maximal list of the components of the biography of a prominent figure as well as the common source documents for each component and the relative likelihood of a quotation (whether overt or silent) or paraphrase.10 The middle sections of a biography, focusing on an individual’s career, occupy the largest proportion, and excerpts from documents most commonly appear in those sections. Table 38.1 shows that the composition of a dynastic biography is modular: the template dictates the required elements, but “episodes” within those sections can be moved about strategically in order to foreshadow a later event, for example, or to provide supplementary evidence of a character trait attested earlier in the biography. This list suggests a few practices that developed for the use of literary information in the biographies. Information presented as simple fact, such as political offices, titles, genealogy, descendants, and titles of works, is rarely given in embedded documents. Conversely, documents that are explicitly quoted (either by title or given in the text as the subject’s speech) are used to amplify a point of the text rather than introduce new information. Next, excerpted documents not composed by the subject or someone in a position of power or with authority to wield judgment, such as the emperor or a bureaucratic superior, often appear as silent quotation or paraphrase. That is, they are treated as reliable primary sources that do not need to be isolated or distinguished from the main text but can be integrated without comment. Such sources often include generous posthumous evaluations of a subject—funerary texts such as epitaphs, or an official account of conduct, or, as in the following example, the preface to a subject’s collected works, often written posthumously. Finally, historians often manipulate the placement of excerpted documents within the biography to advance strong positive or negative points about a biographical subject. An example from Xin Tangshu, the biography of mid-Tang writer Liu Zongyuan ᷇ᅫ‫( ܗ‬773–819), illustrates the powerful messages literary information could convey when embedded within biographies.11 In Liu Zongyuan’s case, the traditional framework of the biography, intended to focus on

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Table 38.1 Conventional Components of a Dynastic History Biography

Component of Biography

Common Documentary Use of Quotations Sources (not an exhaustive list)

Genealogy and regional origins

Personnel record; funerary texts

N

“Youthful nature” (early signs of character/talent)

Funerary texts; accounts of conduct; anecdote collections or notebooks (ㄚ㿬)

Y (usually brief and rarely from named sources)

Early career

Personnel record; funerary texts; collected works

Y (often subject’s compositions)

Key events of career, in Personnel record; court diaries/ chronological order calendar/annals; funerary texts; collected works

Y (often subject’s compositions; can also include others’ evaluations of subject)

End of life; death; posthumous title

Personnel record; funerary texts; discussion of honorific title

N (rarely)

General discussion of character, nonpolitical achievements

Funerary texts; anecdotes; notebooks; collected works

Y (usually brief)

Legacy or descendants

Funerary texts; descendant biographies

N (rarely)

Historian’s evaluation

Compiling historian

N (rarely—intended to be compiling historian’s authoritative conclusion)

the subject’s official career, is inadequate for the purpose, and literary documents are used to flesh out and defend a problematic career. Northern Song historian Song Qi ᅟ⼕ (997–1061), who revised the Jiu Tangshu biographies, was an admirer of Liu Zongyuan’s writing and his philosophy, but in revising Liu Zongyuan’s biography, he faced a challenge: though dynastic history biographies were intended to focus on political careers, in 805, while a young man, Liu Zongyuan had been drastically demoted to a lowly position in the far southern provinces (and was lucky not to be executed) for what was considered

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a treasonous plot against the emperor. He spent the rest of his life in exile, unable to vindicate himself and regain a position at the capital. However, when he died in 819, he left a rich and complex literary collection. Song Qi did not have much of a political story to tell, and in order to vindicate and defend Liu Zongyuan, he needed to quote extensively from Liu’s own works. Where the Jiu Tangshu biography of Liu Zongyuan is only 460 words long and contains no direct quotations, Song Qi’s 4,500-word revision in Xin Tangshu contains 4,000 words quoted from Liu Zongyuan’s works. Of the remaining 500 words, about two-thirds are taken silently from the admiring epitaph for Liu written by Han Yu 䶧ᛜ (768–824), Liu’s late-life friend and correspondent who shared many of his literary and philosophical views. The biography thus follows the conventional framework, but it foregrounds the literary documents boldly. More important, however, are the types of texts Song Qi selects: all four of the long passages are taken from texts in which Liu Zongyuan speaks directly to the reader in order to explain his actions, his philosophical commitments, his beliefs about literary writing, and his acceptance of destiny. These four texts include the preface to one long essay on fate, two letters explaining his conduct written to patrons in the capital, and a long self-critical rhapsody. Song Qi thus strategically excerpts Liu’s literary documents to create for Liu a strong authorial voice in which to defend his conduct. While the structural and polemical role that the large excerpts from Liu’s own compositions play in the biography is clear even to a casual reader, the final few sentences of the biography offer a complex and dense use of documents, one worth unpacking: In his youth, Liu Zongyuan cherished advancement, and said he could achieve a record of merit. After his demotion, he was not stirred [to action]; however, his talent was truly lofty, and his name dominated the age. Han Yu evaluated his writing as: “Heroic and profound, refined and robust, he was just like Sima Xiangru, whom neither Cui [Yin] and Cai [Yong] could surpass.” After his death, the people of Liu held him in their hearts, and it was said he had descended to the local shrine, and those who were lax in honoring him would die. A temple for him was set up in Luochi, and Han Yu wrote a stele to substantiate the story.12

In this conclusion, Song Qi paraphrases the conclusion to Han Yu’s epitaph for Liu (noted here in roman type). However, when he appears to be quoting Han Yu’s evaluation of Liu Zongyuan’s writing (in bold type), in fact Song Qi is relying on a preface written by Liu Yuxi ࡝⾍䣿 (772–842), another of Liu Zongyuan’s friends and fellow exile, where Liu Yuxi quotes Han Yu’s words—we do not see this evaluation in Han Yu’s own extant collection, though it may have appeared there originally.13 The final comment (in italic type) refers directly to yet another text by Han Yu, his stele inscription for Luochi Temple, which is

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found in his collection. This example reveals the care and sophistication with which Song Qi plumbed the literary documents at his disposal and incorporated them in his admiring biography.

Conclusion This chapter traces certain literary documents to what have been silently presented as their “sources,” implicitly privileging the collected works of a given writer or perhaps even the individual documents within those works with an autonomy separate from the histories they entered. This surely misrepresents the view of premodern Chinese historians, who relied mostly on their judgments of veracity and reliability in choosing to include sources and create new, independent accounts. Literary documents belonging to the sphere of wenzhang were all equally available for adoption, paraphrase, or quotation; the historians’ charge was to select judiciously among them to serve the immediate purposes of the chronicle or treatise or biography to be compiled. Unlike anthologies and encyclopedias, however, which imposed explicit or implicit hierarchies of value on their selected or extracted literary documents, dynastic history embedded documents in narrative structures in variable ways—but ones that consistently tended to erase their existence in other documents or frames of reference. From the Song dynasty on, the tendency in biographies was to reduce explicit quotation and embedding of belletristic works and to excerpt briefly from politically oriented texts, such as memorials and policy debates, in a given subject’s corpus. Moreover, as biographies shrank in length, historians more commonly copied, condensed, and transformed primary source documents into information. This transformation of source material was not only unproblematic but also persuasive as a compositional strategy to Chinese readers. And dynastic history’s energetic recycling and repurposing of literary documents certainly influenced other forms of narrative such as the novel after the Yuan, during the late imperial period. At the same time, the growing size and complexity of the Chinese state made the compilation of histories of the state an increasingly complicated and contested enterprise.

Notes 1. Charles Hartman and Anthony DeBlasi, “The Growth of Historical Method in Tang China,” in The Oxford History of Historical Writing, vol. 2, 400–1400, ed. Sarah Foot and Chase F. Robinson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 27. 2. Etienne Balazs, Chinese Civilization and Bureaucracy, ed. and trans. Arthur F. Wright (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1964), 132.

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3. Jack W. Chen, “Blank Spaces and Secret Histories: Questions of Historiographic Epistemology in Medieval China,” Journal of Asian Studies 69, no. 4 (2010): 1077. 4. See Charles Hartman, “A Textual History of Cai Jing’s Biography in the Song shi,” in Emperor Huizong and Late Northern Song China: The Politics of Culture and the Culture of Politics, ed. Patricia Buckely Ebrey and Maggie Bickford (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2006), 517–64. 5. For a late imperial case study, see Sarah Schneewind, “Reduce, Re-use, Recycle: Imperial Autocracy and Scholar-Official Autonomy in the Background to the Ming History Biography of Early Ming Scholar-Official Fang Keqin (1326–1376),” Oriens Extremus 48 (2009): 151. 6. David L. McMullen, State and Scholars in T’ang China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 165–70. 7. Charles Hartman, “Song History Narratives as Grand Allegory,” Journal of Chinese History 3, no. 1 (Jan. 2019): 39. 8. See E. G. Pulleyblank, “Chinese Historical Criticism: Liu Chih-chi and Ssu-ma Kuang,” in Historians of China and Japan, ed. W. G. Beasley and E. G. Pulleyblank (London: Oxford University Press, 1961), 135–66; and On-Cho Ng and Q. Edward Wang, Mirroring the Past: The Writing and Use of History in Imperial China (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2005), 122–24. 9. In addition to being too terse (in the eyes of later readers), Ouyang Xiu appears to get the date wrong—the Jiu Tangshu gives the day as bingchen ϭ䖄 (an error for bingshen ϭ⬇), and the Zizhi tongjian records the date of arriving at Mawei as the previous day, bingshen ϭ⬇ of the sixth month, or July 15, 756. In Ouyang Xiu ℤ䱑ׂ et al., comps., Xin Tangshu ᮄ૤᳌, 20 vols. (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1975), 5.152. 10. This list of eight elements is similar to that of Denis Twitchett (“Chinese Biographical Writing,” in Beasley and Pulleyblank, Historians of China and Japan, 111), who gives seven—here his “details of marriage” is included in the Legacy or descendants section. 11. Ouyang Xiu et al., Xin Tangshu, 168.5132–41. 12. Ouyang Xiu et al., Xin Tangshu, 168.5142. The debate over the Luochi Temple Stele of Liu Prefecture can be found in Luo Liantian’s 㕙㙃⏏ collected notes to Han’s texts. Han Yu 䶧ᛜ, Han Yu guwen jiaozhu huiji 䶧ᛜস᭛᷵⊼ᔭ䔃, ed. Luo Liantian (Taipei: Dingwen shuju, 2003), 3:2464–75. 13. Liu Yuxi, Liu Yuxi ji jianzheng ࡝⾍䣿䲚ㅟ䄝, ed. Qu Tuiyuan ⶓ㳏೦ (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 2009), 1:513–14.

CHAPTER 39

LATE IMPERIAL HISTORIES DEV I N FITZGER A L D

Standardizing the Standard Histories The genre of history encompassed many different types of writing in the late imperial period, and because many histories directly and indirectly extracted and classified writing from earlier sources, an examination of their classification and functioning allows for a consideration of their importance to information management. The most prestigious types of histories in the imperial period belonged to the category labeled standard histories (zhengshi ℷ৆; sometimes translated as “official histories”). Most scholars presume that these are almost exclusively the histories produced by a victorious court in the wake of a dynastic transition. Their compilation marked the legitimacy of the new regime while also signaling its place as an inheritor of the Mandate of Heaven from a previously legitimate regime that had lost its right to rule. This conventional understanding of the standard history is not entirely wrong, but it requires significant emendation. Already in the Tang, a working definition of standard histories had started to emerge. According to Tang liudian ૤݁‫( ݌‬Six institutions of the Tang), all histories that included “annals, tables, monographs, and biographies” could be called standard histories.1 Court sponsorship appears not to have mattered. As will be seen here, the “standard” (zheng) of standard histories (zhengshi) can thus be seen to mean not only “orthodox” but also “complete” on account of its inclusion of multiple genres of historical writing. Through much of the late imperial period, this bibliographical category remained fluid and encompassed several different genres, including (1) histories

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of the current dynasty (guoshi ೟৆), (2) histories of single dynasties such as the Songshi ᅟ৆ (History of the Song), and (3) highly-regarded chronicles (biannian ㎼ᑈ).2 Many Ming and Qing library catalogs illustrate the wide-ranging meaning of zhengshi. For example, Qianqingtang shumu ग䷗ූ᳌Ⳃ (Catalog of Thousand-Acre Hall), compiled in the early Qing by Huang Yuji 咘㰲》 (1629–91) in preparation for the Mingshi ᯢ৆ (History of the Ming), illustrates how a scholar grappled with notions of historical standards with an eye toward government-sponsored historiography.3 The Histories section (shibu৆䚼) of his catalog is organized in the conventional manner of a late Ming bibliography. It begins with the most authoritative categories, dynastic histories (guoshi lei ೟ ৆串) and standard histories, before proceeding to the fifteen other classifications that constitute bibliographically defined history. These first two sections reveal a nuanced approach to classifying texts and reinforce the important fact that government sponsorship was only a secondary concern in the classification of standard histories.4 Huang Yuji, following Ming historians before him, gave priority to the category of dynastic history. Ming dynastic histories were generally chronological accounts compiled from government documents produced by the central court. Huang’s category included all of the veritable records (shilu ᆺ䣘) of the Ming, records prepared at the end of each emperor’s reign when court archival materials were gathered together, summarized, and edited to serve as the basis for the most authoritative summary. Veritable records were instrumental for other sorts of major court compilations, too, such as Minglun dadian ᯢ‫׿‬໻‫݌‬ (Grand institution for illuminating relationships), a text that was compiled in support of the Jiajing emperor’s position during a rites controversy in which he, the cousin of the previous emperor, demanded that his father be posthumously recognized as emperor in imperial rituals. The court-sponsored nature of dynastic history is confirmed by examining Huang’s choices for materials from the Liao, Jin, and Yuan dynasties. The bulk of the titles are veritable records or texts, like imperial remonstrations (baoxun ᇊ㿧), that were compiled at the court during the dynasty in question. Dynastic histories overwhelmingly reflected the imperial word and imperial court compilations. Here the conception of dynastic histories shows that imperial sponsorship alone was not enough to grant a text the status of standard history. Rather, state sponsorship was something that required its own bibliographical category. Turning to Huang’s section on standard histories, classification becomes more nuanced. The compilations listed for the Song, Jin, and Yuan are unsurprising, as they include works such as Toqto’a’s 㛿㛿 (1314–56) histories of the Song, Liao (Liaoshi 䙐৆, “History of the Liao”), and Jin (Jinshi 䞥৆, “History of the Jin”). Ming standard histories, on the other hand, are heterogeneous. Since there was no court-produced standard history for the Ming, Huang made a series of decisions about this genre for the fallen regime. One of the works Huang included,

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Deng Yuanxi’s (1529–93) 䛻‫ܗ‬䣿 Huang Ming shu ⱛᯢ᳌ (Book of the August Ming), has a 1606 preface that quoted a 1593 memorial to the throne by Chen Yubi 䱇Ѣ䰯 (1545–97), in which he plainly states the problem with Ming standard histories. In the memorial, Chen complains that “over two hundred years have passed and we (the Ming) have not made a standard history.”5 For Chen, works like veritable records are not standard histories because they consisted of only one type of writing (discussed shortly). As the preface relates, Chen asked the Wanli emperor to establish a National Historiography Office (guoshiguan ೟৆仼) modeled on the Tang precedent. The emperor granted his request, but when palace fires burned the drafts a few years later, the standard history project and corresponding institution were both abandoned. Despite Chen’s comments about a lack of standard history, Huang felt no compunction when classifying many Ming texts as standard histories. If just two works put in this category are considered, a rough typology of features begins to emerge. Zhu Guozhen’s ᴅ೟⽢ (1557–1632) Huang Ming shigai ⱛ ᯢ৆ι (Summary history of the August Ming) and Yin Shouheng’s ልᅜ㸵 (1549–1631) Huang Ming shiqie ⱛᯢ৆ゞ (Historical outline of the August Ming) are compilations with more than one genre of historical writing in them. Yin’s work includes annals, monographs, and biographies. Zhu Guozhen’s text includes both annals and biographies—but no other genre.6 Despite their differences, on reading both works one is struck by their adherence to the norms of the subgenres (annals, biographies, etc.) found within standard histories. The annals maintain the distant voice of the chronicler inspired by classical texts like Zuozhuan Ꮊᇜ (Zuo Tradition). The biographies, likewise, stay close to classical models such as those provided by Ban Gu ⧁೎ (32–92) in Hanshu ⓶᳌ (History of the Han). Huang’s bibliography reveals that within the context of the Ming and early Qing, the person deciding whether to categorize a work as a standard history thus paid more attention to a compilation’s contents and style than to official sponsorship. Authority could be constructed by carefully comparing and collating information from multiple sources and maintaining the style appropriate to the specific historiographical genre. Despite the fact that Ming authors did not frequently discuss the definitions of standard histories, in practice the Tang notion of a standard history as a mixed-genre text adhering to stylistic norms established by Zuozhuan, Sima Qian ৌ侀䙋 (ca. 135–ca. 90 BCE), and Ban Gu held sway. However, despite this, the mere existence of Chen Yubi’s proposal reveals that a court-centered definition of standard histories did influence some scholars. For Chen, merely mixing genres under a single title was not enough to create a standard history. Chen implicitly argued that standard histories came from the labor of sponsored court historians. After all, the Ming court had been a major publisher of works that were indisputably understood as standard histories. During the dynasty, standard histories from previous dynasties were

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printed at court offices. These histories, including Songshi and Yuanshi ‫ܗ‬৆ (History of the Yuan), officially became the Ershiyi shi Ѡकϔ৆ (Twenty-one histories) when the Jiajing court edited and issued the texts together.7 The availability of this grouping of texts influenced later ideas about standard histories, especially when the historiographically activist Qing court came to dominate discussions of history. The Qing state, unlike the Ming, prioritized historical compilation without interruption from the rise of the later Jin (1616–36) until the end of the dynasty in 1911. Indeed, dynastic histories (guoshi ೟৆; Manchu: gurun i suduri) and standard histories were a major preoccupation of the regime, as suggested by the creation of the new Manchu word for “history,” suduri, in the 1630s. As Qiao Zhizhong Ш⊏ᖴ has shown, by the Qianlong reign the Qing had institutionalized historical compilation to an unprecedented level. The reestablishment of the National Historiography Office as a permanent office during the Qianlong reign satisfied both state and scholarly demands for the systematic management of political writings and biographical information of officials.8 The return of the office also neatly coincided with the editorial activities of the Siku quanshu ಯᑿܼ᳌ (Complete writings of the four repositories) project. As seen elsewhere in this volume (see Gandolfo, chapters 33 and 50), one aim of the Siku project was to create new bibliographical standards for the classification of known texts. The history section of the index to the Siku quanshu begins with standard histories, and it is here that the genre assumes its modern definition. Standard histories include those texts compiled under court sponsorship after the end of a dynasty that followed the multigenre model of the early histories. The editors included only the histories now known as the Ershisi shi Ѡकಯ৆ (Twenty-four standard histories) and the texts that corrected errors within the standard histories. In their discussion of the genre, the editors note: The name “standard history” appeared in the “Sui Treatise.” Coming to the Song, their number was fixed at seventeen. The Ming published an official edition which included the four histories of the Song, Liao, Jin, and Yuan, making them twenty-one in number. Our august emperor approved the History of the Ming and also commanded the inclusion of the Old History of the Tang to make the number twenty-four. . . . The form of the standard histories is exalted, and their implications pair with those of the classics. They are not [texts] which publish all commands and institutions, yet none dare to privately add to them. Therefore, they differ from unofficial histories and records from beyond the court.9

Here the “Sui Treatise” refers to the “Jingji zhi” ㍧㈡ᖫ (Treatise on bibliography) in Suishu 䱟᳌ (History of the Sui), which, although it never explicitly defines standard history, marks the first appearance of the term in a

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bibliographical treatise. Despite the absence of explicit definitions, the monograph does mention mixed genres: annals, biographies, and monographs (but not tables, for unknown reasons). Moreover, the Siku editors made it clear that the imperially sponsored and published groupings—seventeen, twenty-one, and twenty-four—were the most important marks of the standard history genre. This genre differed from all other types of historical writing not only because the volumes included contained different forms of writing but also because “none dare to privately add to them” 㥿ᬶ⾕๲. The standard histories represented the final word of the state in its attempts to define the history of a previous regime. The Siku editors thus brought together the previously loosely associated notions of the standard history, state sponsorship and mixed genres, and fixed the definition for later ages.

Histories and Compression While standard histories were subject to mutable forms of classification, they were also tools that managed information. As Huang’s bibliography of sources of Ming history illustrates, broad reading was required for any historian. Officials charged with compiling histories extracted material from a vast sea of available texts, in the process rendering relevant information legible for purposes generally outlined in paratextual discussions. There were many reasons for compiling histories: some historical texts had a legal function because they allowed users to trace imperial edicts, while others were compiled in order to morally educate readers by drawing models of behavior from past figures. Despite such differences, however, histories were in effect the distilled summary of mountains of notes that presented what compilers viewed as the most essential political information of a historical period. It is arguable in fact that many chronicles had their roots in attempts to process larger archives of information into usable, chronologically-arranged abstracts that made legal precedent easily retrievable. In order to make this claim concrete, it is useful to examine one example of Qing attempts to manage Ming information by considering Chen Yubi’s memorial on Ming standard history. Tracing the multiple versions of Chen Yubi’s memorial brings our attention to two key features of state-centered textual management: textual compression and retrievability. Because standard histories were charged with the textual burden of representing an entire dynasty, compilers had to carefully consider how to parse larger texts into manageable and useful pieces of information. Because standard histories also compressed decades’ (or centuries’) worth of historical information into a comprehensive, navigable textual body, they needed to support the retrievability of that information. Using Chen Yubi’s memorial as a hypothetical case allows a view of the

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process by which a reader, without access to digitized texts, could discover and recover original texts using Mingshi. Chen Yubi’s memorial is found in only one location in Mingshi. Because the basic annals mostly record imperial actions, when the Wanli emperor approved the Ming standard history project in 1594, nothing of Chen’s memorial is quoted.10 To find information about the content of his proposal, the reader is forced to turn to biographies. Because Chen Yubi is mentioned several times in text surrounding the emperor’s history project edict, it can be presumed that diligent researchers would eventually find his biography if they were interested in more context regarding the rather short note in the annals. His biography contains a version of his memorial advocating for court sponsorship of a Ming standard history project. Owing to the bare-bones brevity of annals, biographies were an important place to store information to contextualize political events. Chen’s request to the throne, provided in abridged form, fills in details absent from the annals. His memorial notes: Your official has investigated the methods of the historian. Annals, tables, monographs, and biographies are standard histories. Since the Song dynasty is proximate to our own, we can investigate their regulations. During the Dazhong xiangfu era of emperor Zhenzong, Wang Dan et al. compiled and submitted the standard histories for Taizu and Taizong to the court. During the Tiansheng era of Renzong, Lü Yijian et al. added the Zhenzong court [in the compilation]. It was called Sanchao guoshi ϝᳱ೟৆ [National history of the three courts]. This is clear evidence that the officials and rulers of that dynasty compiled the standard history of their court. The historical records of our dynasty are limited to only the Veritable Records. That a standard history is lacking goes without saying.11

This memorial, as quoted in Mingshi, summarizes the sentiments held by some of the Ming scholars about the state of Ming history. It outlines precedents for court-sponsored standard histories, describes the dire state of Ming practices, and elsewhere points out the overabundance of unofficial accounts of the state while beseeching the emperor to allow his officials to compile a credible history (xin shi ֵ৆). As noted earlier, although Chen Yubi’s memorial is not directly mentioned in the basic annals, the record of the project’s establishment would have given readers a chronological anchor, and the mention of his name shortly after the event would have provided information on contemporary officials of import. While assumptions such as these lead to as many disappointments as productive links, the interwoven structure of standard histories like Mingshi allowed its compilers opportunities to move information between sections of texts in ways that are coherent to readers familiar with the genre conventions and

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literary styles of the subsections of standard histories. If a reader was still unsatisfied with the small amount of text the standard history provided, they could use its chronological clues as a foothold for searching beyond the text for longer and more detailed accounts. Retrieving a less condensed version of Chen Yubi’s memorial, given the information provided by Mingshi, is straightforward for those who understand the relationship between Ming record-keeping practices and the standard histories. As Chen Yubi himself notes, the Ming shilu ᯢᆺ䣘 (Ming veritable records) were the only sources consistently compiled by the Ming state and are therefore one of the most important sources for state-centered Ming history. Veritable records were supposed to represent a total record of important events during an individual’s reign period. Since the text quoted in these records reflected imperial will and court debates that had effects as long as the dynasty that created the text continued, veritable records were legally binding historical chronicles. At the same time, however, because of their anticipated use in compiling either state histories or other forms of historical records, they were understood to be historical texts that had to reflect the “true” historical events of a period. Because of their documentary importance, veritable records were often the most important source for historians writing about the past. Almost any historian in the present and in premodern China would assume that some portion of the memorial—and greater context for the Wanli standard history project—is provided in Ming shilu. Linking Ming shilu to the annals section of Mingshi is relatively straightforward, but finding Chen’s memorial within the former is a bit more difficult. Turning in Ming shilu to the date of the emperor’s edict establishing the standard history project, the twenty-fifth day of the third month of the twenty-second year of Wanli (May 14, 1594), does not turn up Chen’s memorial, but it does provide an edict establishing the standard history project. The next day of the Shilu notes Chen Yubi’s appointment to the project, but again it does not mention his undated memorial.12 At this point, some readers might declare that Ming information storage and retrieval lack practicality, but with minimal effort, the clues given in the Mingshi biography of Chen Yubi do successfully lead the reader to his memorial in the Shilu. Chen Yubi’s biography places the memorial between two dates: sometime after the nineteenth year of the Wanli reign (1591) and prior to his promotion to the project in the twenty-second year of Wanli (1594). Presuming access to a decent copy of the Shilu (which would not have been too uncommon in the late Ming), one could simply work back in time from the memorial establishing the project with the hope of finding a paper trail of proposals that inspired the imperial edict.13 This may sound impractical, but within the space of only 113 pages (out of 11,450 for the entire Wanli reign), there is a longer copy (1,292 characters rather than 179) of the memorial quoted in Chen Yubi’s biography as well as several other texts on the Wanli standard history project. While this

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method of retrieval is by no means ideal, it does illustrate that Mingshi should be conceived of as both a textual source for the history of the Ming and a finding aid for longer and less navigable sources of Ming history, such as the Shilu. While the reader may be satisfied with finding the text in the Shilu, it is also the case that the Shilu were, like Mingshi, conceived of as condensed versions of archival materials deemed practical or important for governance. Like standard histories, veritable records supported information retrieval by registering the important aspects of the political archive for a single reign, thus serving as a guide for readers to begin envisioning materials that were less condensed than the versions found therein. The reasons why certain details were selected are fully explained in the compilation principles (fanli ޵՟), which note that the materials included in the Shilu are often those that caused a legal or institutional shift. Their legal nature meant that these materials needed to be extracted from the many archives administered by Ming government offices for record-keeping purposes. This documentation process both helped with managing governance and laid the foundation for the transfer of important information from veritable records to the basic annals (benji ᴀ㋔) of the standard history. Unlike the link between standard history and veritable records, however, there was no generally agreed on place to find the sources for the veritable records because these records were theoretically compiled directly from state archives (see Chen, chapter 43). Those archives were formally closed to scholars, although materials such as memorials and edicts did also live public lives as reprinted and circulated materials.14 Consider, for example, two compilations where one expects to find overlap with the Wanli shilu 㨀Ლᆺ䣘 (Wanli era veritable records). The 1610 Wanli shuchao 㨀Ლ⭣䟨 (Copies of Wanli memorials) contains hundreds of memorials from the two decades before its publication, including Chen Yubi’s memorial in 2,896 characters. Here it can be seen that the copy preserved in print during the Ming was more than twice as long as the Shilu version. The text is also found in a second Ming compilation, juan 426 of Chen Zilong’s 䱇ᄤ啡 (1608–47) massive Huang Ming jingshi wenbian ⱛᯢ㍧Ϫ᭛㎼ (A compilation of statecraft writing from the August Ming), published in 1638. This copy appears to have been based on the Wanli shuchao edition, but since these compilers would have had access to a wide array of different source materials, determining the actual origin of both versions of the memorial requires further research.15 Comparing these longer memorials to the shorter version in Mingshi provides several insights. One of the most outstanding traits to emerge from comparison is the Mingshi editors’ reflection of Qing preferences for unadorned literary style. Many Qing scholars promoted classical prose that evoked the style of the guwen স᭛ (ancient-style prose) masters of the Tang, Han Yu 䶧ᛜ (768–824) and Liu Zongyuan ᷇ᅫ‫( ܗ‬773–819). The simplicity and directness of their style served as an implicit critique of overwrought and loquacious

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Ming writing. Ming style, while respected for its ornate refinement, was seen as indicative of moral failure because of its perceived superficiality. While Chen Yubi’s original prose was by no means decadent, it was heavily ornamented. For example, where the Mingshi editors wrote, “Since the Song dynasty is proximate to our own, we can investigate their regulations,” the original version of the memorials noted that “we can investigate their especially brilliant [you biaobing ᇸᔾ⚇] regulations.”16 Cutting these rhetorical flourishes was relatively straightforward for Qing editors, since they almost never impacted meaning. In addition to imposing a writing style more in line with Qing aesthetic preferences, the editors made choices about the sorts of evidence that mattered for making arguments. In the full version of the memorial, Chen’s argumentation layers example after example to justify the importance of a state-sponsored standard history. He lists a number of Ming titles, such as the popular unofficial history Wuxue bian ਒ᅌ㎼ (Compendium of my studies), the memorial collection Mingchen jingji lu ৡ㞷㍧△䣘 (Records of management by notable officials), and several geographies, to point out that scholars were already producing materials describing the state even as the state was failing to produce histories about itself. While this section of his memorial is certainly interesting, Qing editors, who were more concerned with documenting Chen’s role in establishing the Ming standard history project, saw no need to include this litany of Ming failures. In their mind, the argument needed only (1) clear precedent, which they provided by retaining the Song example, and (2) a single example of Ming failure, which they also retained. While the Qing editors obscured much of the sense of crisis in Chen’s original memorial, they retained its basic rhetorical form. In sum, while the editorial choices of the Mingshi could be debated, there can be no doubt that the text does a superb job of selecting the most important parts of Chen’s text without unduly causing damage to its original meaning. In other words, at least as far as many historical compilations are concerned, late imperial historians were fastidious and intelligent when they made editorial choices. Their editorial choices also reveal the emergence of literary values in reading government forms. Guwen aesthetics created sparse but clear prose. Historical editors gave each word careful consideration before choosing to retain it. While this may not seem literary in the same way as a poem or travelogue, histories engaged with literary concerns while also trying to balance the demands to record “truth” for later ages.

Conclusion In this brief overview of standard histories, this chapter has attempted to make the reader aware of three things. First, standard histories needed to be standardized as a genre. This standardization process has had repercussions for our

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understanding of Chinese historical genres down to the present. It was also part of canon making. When Qing scholars decided that only the twenty-four standard histories counted as standard histories, they were passing judgment on the value of all other types of historical writing. Second, standard histories were not just texts that compressed information efficiently and accurately; they were also finding guides that could be used to recover longer versions of texts in other source materials. Chronological arrangement explicitly linked these works to other chronicle-style texts, such as veritable records. Moreover, their mix of genres provided readers with several different types of research anchors. While late imperial readers undoubtedly engaged with standard histories as books that were read, they also undoubtedly saw them much as they are seen today—as first-order tools to be used when conducting research. Finally, this chapter demonstrates how the compilation of standard histories engaged with the prevailing literary preferences of their period of compilation. Standard histories were the melting pot of many different forms of writing, including memorials, edicts, biographies, and essays, all of which were recognized by late imperial readers as important forms of literature (wen). As texts that recorded wen, they often sought to celebrate and emulate models of good wen. As other chapters in this volume show, that was sometimes done by directly recording literature. But as this chapter demonstrates, it was also done through the editorial choices of the historian’s brush.

Notes 1. Li Linfu ᴢᵫ⫿ et al., comp., Tang liudian, ed. Chen Zhongfu 䱇ӆ໿ (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1992), 10.299. 2. Endymion Wilkinson, Chinese History: A New Manual, 5th ed. (Self-pub., 2018), 689. 3. Yan Zuozhi ϹԤП, Jin sanbainian guji muluxue juyao 䖥ϝⱒᑈস㈡ⳂᔩᄺВ㽕 (Shanghai: Huadong shifan daxue chubanshe, 2008). 4. Huang Yuji, Qianqingtang shumu (fu suoyin) ग䷗ූ᳌Ⳃ˄䰘㋶ᓩ˅, ed. Qu Fengqi ⶓ勇䍋 and Pan Jingzheng ┬᱃䜁 (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 2001), 4.109–16. 5. Deng Yuanxi, “Xu” ᑣ, in Huang Ming shu, 1b, in Xuxiu siku quanshu 㑠ׂಯᑿܼ᳌, ed. Xuxiu Siku quanshu bianzuan weiyuanhui lj㑠ׂಯᑿܼ᳌NJ㎼㑖ྨવ᳗, vol. 29 (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1995–2002). 6. Yin Shouheng, Huang Ming shiqie, in Xuxiu Siku quanshu bianzuan weiyuanhui, Xuxiu siku quanshu, vols. 316–17; Zhu Guozhen, Huang Ming shigai, in Xuxiu Siku quanshu bianzuan weiyuanhui, ed., Xuxiu siku quanshu, vols. 428–31. 7. Zhongyang yanjiuyuan Lishi yuyan yanjiusuo Ё༂ⷨお䰶⅋৆䁲㿔ⷨお᠔, ed., Ming shilu: fu jiaokanji ᯢᆺ䣘˖䰘᷵ࢬ㿬, 183 vols. (Nankang: Zhongyang yanjiuyuan Lishi yuyan yanjiusuo, 1962–68), 179.3845–46. 8. Qiao Zhizhong, Zhongguo guanfang shixue yu sijia shixue Ё೑ᅬᮍ৆ᄺϢ⾕ᆊ৆ᄺ (Beijing: Beijing tushuguan chubanshe, 2008).

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9. Ji Yun ㋔ᯔ et al., comps., Siku quanshu zongmu tiyao ಯᑿܼ᳌㐑Ⳃᦤ㽕, 4 vols. (Shanghai: Shangwu yinshuguan, 1933), 972. 10. Zhang Tingyu ᔉᓋ⥝ et al., comps., Mingshi, 28 vols. (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1974), 12.276. 11. Zhang Tingyu et al., Mingshi, 217.5731–32. 12. Zhongyang yanjiuyuan Lishi yuyan yanjiusuo, Ming shilu: fu jiaokanji, 271.5038–40. 13. Xie Gui’an 䇶䌉ᅝ, Ming shilu yanjiu ᯢᅲᔩⷨお (Wuhan: Hubei renmin chubanshe, 2003). 14. Emily Carr Mokros, “Communication, Empire, and Authority in the Qing Gazette” (PhD diss., Johns Hopkins University, 2016); Hilde De Weerdt, Information, Territory, and Networks: The Crisis and Maintenance of Empire in Song China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2016). 15. Wu Liang ਇ҂ (jinshi 1601), comp., Wanli shuchao, in Xuxiu Siku quanshu bianzuan weiyuanhui, Xuxiu siku quanshu, 468:9.10a–18a; Chen Zilong, comp., Huang Ming jingshi wenbian, in Xuxiu Siku quanshu bianzuan weiyuanhui, ed., Xuxiu siku quanshu, 1655:426.25a–33a. 16. Huang Ming jingshi wenbian, in Xuxiu Siku quanshu bianzuan weiyuanhui, ed., Xuxiu siku quanshu, 1655:426.25b.

CHAPTER 40

LITERARY HISTORIES T H E O D O R E D. H U T E R S

S

cholars generally agree that the formal genre of literary history in China had its beginnings in the early twentieth century, motivated by pedagogical needs and following upon a series of post-1896 recommendations for the “new learning” (xinxue ᮄᅌ) curriculum at the recently established Capital University (predecessor to Peking University).1 Eminent scholar Chen Pingyuan 䰜ᑇॳ has devoted an enormous amount of scholarly attention to the institution of literary history over the past two decades, and as he points out, these educational reforms received much of their impetus from new—and, following the defeat by Japan in 1895, suddenly urgent—ideas regarding the importance of the scientific spirit, the notion of evolution, and efforts to create “systematic methodologies” (xitong fangfa ㋏㒳ᮍ⊩).2 There was assuredly also a material basis for these new efforts in taxonomy and the organization of information: throughout the late imperial period, there had been a consciousness of information overload and a sense there were too many texts for any properly educated person to digest, but the growth of print capitalism and new technologies of mass printing and circulation that began in the late nineteenth century and exploded in the twentieth could only have augmented this old anxiety.3 The first work of its kind, the Zhongguo wenxueshi Ё೟᭛ᅌ৆ (Literary history of China), was published in 1904. Its author, Fujian scholar and Capital University lecturer Lin Chuanjia ᵫ‫( ⬆ڇ‬1877–1922), acknowledged that he based it on an earlier Japanese work of the same name by Sasakawa Taneo ㄍᎱ。䚢 (1870–1949). Capital University’s second official curriculum, produced in 1903,

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even notes: “There is a Literary History of China in Japan, and we can model it in our own compilation and instruction.”4 There is evidence that the book began as Lin’s lecture notes on the topic, making the pedagogical purpose of the work explicit. Chinese literary history at the beginning thus was doubly beholden to foreign ideas: as a key portion of a new literary curriculum, it was based on Western pedagogical models while its first specific instantiation was frankly based on Japanese precedent. In fact, the notion of literary history is triply beholden to foreign ideas, as it came into being as a discursive category at almost the same time that the term now conventionally used to designate aesthetic writing, wenxue ᭛ᅌ, was being adopted from its Japanese usage as a translation for the English word literature to characterize belles lettres in China as well. The question of the place of literature in a newly reformed educational system was fraught because of both China’s long literary tradition and the sense that the Reform era should not be burdened by it. Thus, in the first draft curriculum of 1898, the position of literature in the academy was not regarded as important.5 Given the emphasis by education theorists of the time on maintaining parity between Chinese and Western ideas, on the surface this deemphasizing of the literary tradition may seem something of a paradox. It makes sense, however, in the context that the new learning meant to be incorporated in the higher education curriculum was ultimately to be based on that of the West, and by the time of the tumultuous late 1890s, epistemic practices too much embedded in the domestic tradition were coming to be seen as suspect. Such doubts about the efficacy of domestic learning were only to become more entrenched in the decades that followed. In the first draft of the education policy, literature was slighted as being something that was not an actual discipline and thus did not require teaching, although that was almost certainly because it was understood as being nothing more than a means of teaching people the technical procedures of how to write in orthodox classical style, something not deemed an appropriately academic subject, particularly if it involved instruction in how to write poetry. In other words, the utilitarian impetus behind the new educational initiatives made it difficult to accommodate either aesthetics or creative writing within its purview. More than anything else, however, the underlying motif of systemization solidified literary history in an effort, at least its initial Chinese manifestations, to create a body of positive knowledge about letters, a domain that had theretofore been a somewhat disorderly bundle of individual aesthetic judgments (as expressed, for instance, in the genre of shihua 䀽䁅 “colloquies on poetry”; see Fuller, chapter 16), personal and family memory (as represented by family initiatives to publish an illustrious member’s wenji ᭛䲚 “literary collection”), and informal traditions maintained by various affinity groups (such as the Tongcheng School Ḥජ⌒ of ancient-style prose), often over many generations.

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The very origins of this new discursive field created a point of tension that has persisted throughout the career of literary history: where to draw the line between the new imperative to systematically purvey information and the sense that literary education should above all be a matter of aesthetic edification. If the focus is on the latter, then it becomes difficult to define it as an academic field in the modern sense. In the words of Chen Pingyuan, “ ‘wenxue’ could be a matter of personal cultivation, but [thus] could not become a specialized field of study in itself.”6 If, however, the emphasis falls on literary study as information, the fear persists that its essential aesthetic qualities will be left by the wayside. The great scholar of the history of literary criticism Guo Shaoyu 䛁㌍㰲 (1893–1984) expresses this as early as 1922 in his remarks on critics (pipingjia ᡍ 䀩ᆊ): “[Literary criticism] is for the sake of satisfying [one’s desire] for knowledge, but forgetting true feeling; it very much gets in the way of the inspired interest of the aesthetic.”7 Since much of the new curriculum was created by following Western educational models and all Western higher education curricula included the study of literature, it had to be included in China’s new pedagogical schemes—even though there was little enthusiasm for literary training, reflected in local attempts to deemphasize it.8 And since there was a sense that Western literary education was based on literary history—as opposed to training in the mechanics of how to write and create literature—that subject became almost by default the vector through which literary education was introduced. In fact, as early as 1928 scholar Liu Yongji ࡝∌△ (1887–1966) claimed that “[our] modern educational system is in imitation of the West; the discipline of literary study [thus] straightaway established specialized [literary] histories.”9 Another complicating factor in the evolution of modern literary education was that during the initial period when the university curriculum was being established, there wasn’t even a clear sense of what the term wenxue actually signified. Missionary Young J. Allen ᵫῖⶹ (1836–1907) and his Chinese collaborator Ren Tingxu ӏᓋᯁ (n.d.) made notable use of the term in their 1896 Chinese translation of a book originally published in English and subsequently translated into Japanese. This book was a compendium of letters regarding modern education that the special Japanese envoy to the United States, Mori Arinori Ể᳝⾂ (1847–1889), had solicited from major figures in the American educational establishment.10 Mori arranged for the publication of the letters in New York in 1873 and, in his preface to that volume, he lays out his agenda: “I came to investigate all matters having to do with education [wenxue], and to seek out everything concerned with the vitalization of our country.”11 Of most interest is that the Japanese version and the subsequent Chinese translation were both titled Wenxue xingguo ce ᭛ᅌ㟜೟ㄪ (Strategies for the vitalization of the country through wenxue) and that throughout the collection the translation of the English word education is wenxue. When Mori first

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compiled his work, the modern word for education in both Japan and China, jiaoyu ᬭ㚆, was not yet current, and there had not been time for wenxue to have become the standard term for literature in either place. However, that was hardly the case when the Chinese rendering was produced in 1896: by that year, wenxue was just starting its career in China as the portmanteau word for literature, having long since served that purpose in Japan. Given the upsurge of interest in Western ideas following China’s defeat in the first Sino-Japanese war (1894–95), this short work became quite influential. Its use of wenxue to translate education just as that term was being imported from Japan to stand as a translation for literature thus could not help but augment the correspondence between literature and pedagogy that was soon to be embodied in the new genre of literary history. It must have caused considerable confusion during a period when the new sense of wenxue was gaining currency. In an essay written in Chinese about the same time, Allen stressed that “in order to develop human talent, it is first necessary to vitalize wenxue, and in order to vitalize wenxue, it is necessary to first establish schools on a broad scale.”12 It is generally recognized that the premodern sense of wenxue meant something quite broad, more or less equivalent to the humanistic tradition as a whole, but Allen’s usage seems distinct from that. Regardless, both meanings are at some remove from a notion of aesthetically charged written texts, and even as the new curricular guidelines scanted the study of wenxue, the changing definitions of the term taking place at the time set up a contradictory current in which the older understanding of the word, so evidently suffused with the most profound cultural significance, stood to influence the eventual weight with which the newer understanding of the term was freighted: the result was a palimpsest effect that arguably lay behind the crucial importance that wenxue was to play in all spheres of twentieth-century intellectual life. The stakes for rendering the history of wenxue were correspondingly raised. As Chen Pingyuan also notes: The focus of literary education moving from the training in [writing] technique of “belles lettres” to the accumulation of knowledge of “literary history” was not the result of decisions based on the interests and tastes of individual men of letters and scholars, but was rather an organic part of the entire process of Chinese modernization. “Literary history” as a system of knowledge played a major role in expressing national consciousness, in the cohesion of the national spirit, as well as the absorption of foreign culture and the course of entering into “world literature.” As for the recognition of the essence of domestic literature and the passing on of literary technique, these were not its most important functions.13

In short, the stakes involved in the creation of this new academic rubric were regarded by all parties concerned as being quite high.

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The ties of literary history to pedagogy have continued down through the present, following Lin Chuanjia’s pioneering work. For instance, the Zhongguo xiandai wenxue shi Ё೑⦄ҷ᭛ᄺ৆ (History of modern Chinese literature), compiled by a group of distinguished scholars from some of China’s most eminent institutions of higher learning and published by China Renmin University Press in 2000, features the bilingual supertitle on its cover of 䴶৥21Ϫ㑾䇒 ⿟ᬭᴤ / Textbook Series for the 21st Century (see Hill, chapter 29).14 These pedagogical origins and links have another important implication: since these curricula originated from institutions that were both government funded and ultimately government regulated, coloration by political agendas was virtually impossible to avoid. As Chen Pingyuan notes: “At the end of the day ‘literary histories’ written in a clean style, with an orderly narrative, and with an integrated structure were produced to satisfy educational needs. This was decisive in the ease with which the writing of them was subject to control by educational and political authority, and thus becoming an important constituent of the national ideology. . . . The national compilation of teaching materials worked to the benefit of establishing the authority of ‘literary history.’ ”15 For all the foreign modeling in his literary history, Lin Chuanjia followed the traditional taxonomy of Chinese letters in not including fiction and drama within the purview of his survey. That was also the case with Qian Jibo’s 䣶෎म (1887–1957) influential Xiandai Zhongguo wenxue shi ⧒ҷЁ೟᭛ᅌ৆ (History of literature in modern China; 1936), which does not mention fiction and drama but deals almost exclusively with poetry and prose written in Classical Chinese in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.16 The book itself is also written in Classical Chinese, as was Lu Xun’s 元䖙 (1881–1936) Zhongguo xiaoshuo shilüe Ё೟ᇣ䁾৆⬹ (A Brief History of Chinese Fiction), first published in 1923.17 This work derived from a course on Chinese fiction Lu Xun taught at Peking University, beginning in the fall of 1920, illustrating yet again the links between literary history and pedagogy.18 Beyond that, for all the impetus behind the advent of the new scholarly genre of literary history, the tug of the traditional canon and its forms of expression remained extremely powerful. In contrast to Qian Jibo’s work, Liu Dajie’s ࡝໻ᵄ (1904–77) Zhongguo wenxue fazhanshi Ё೟᭛ᅌⱐሩ৆ (History of the development of Chinese literature), probably the most influential of the twentieth-century literary histories, does include drama and fiction within its scope, although fiction is treated quite differently from works that would also have been included in the traditional canon. A textbook written and revised over a number of decades beginning in 1939, Liu’s work illustrates the tension over how to evaluate the canon described previously. In general, in its discussion of works that were part of the traditional canon such as poetry and the essay, it follows a set pattern: brief introductions of prominent writers in the format of traditional historiography, followed by short evaluative comments and then a sample selection from what

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Liu regards as the writer’s “representative” work.19 The analysis of drama more or less follows this pattern, also including a good number of quotes from the works under examination. What is more interesting, however, is how the modern agenda of adding new information to the traditional canon is rather poorly integrated with the highly traditional view of the canon’s composition. In a section leading his discussion of Ming dynasty literature, entitled—in good twentieth-century fashion—“Jiuti wenxue de shuaiwei” 㟞储᭛ᅌⱘ㹄ᖂ (The decline of the old forms of literature), for instance, Liu seems to get knotted up in the contradiction between the traditional dominance of classical forms and the need to acclaim the maturation of a rising vernacular: From the mid-Tang on, owing to the development of the commercial economy, cities prospered and an urban stratum expanded continuously. By the time of the Ming this situation was even more evident, precipitating the development of an urban literature made up of a great variety of new forms of drama and fiction that suited the demands of this new way of life. They were lively and flourishing and virtually came to replace the position of the older forms of ancient-style prose, poetry, and the song lyric to become the dominant modes in the literary history of China’s recent antiquity. At the same time, in their past period of maturation, the older forms of ancient-style prose, poetry, and the song lyric have seen a vast output of outstanding works thanks to the creative efforts of numerous talented authors; whether in respect to content, style, form, or technique, they achieved a high level of achievement.20

Two quite distinct categories of information collide here, and the author seems at a loss as to how to reconcile them: while stressing the primacy of the new vernacular forms under the subhead of the decline of the old, he abruptly switches gears in midcourse to point out the continued development in the quality of those old forms he had seemed initially to condemn as having become obsolete. In Liu’s discussion of Ming and Qing fiction, however, the pattern changes, with each work, lengthy as it is, thus being granted considerably more attention, although there are virtually no quotes from the fictional texts themselves included in his accounts of the works.21 And for all Liu’s statements concerning the vibrancy of new forms of fiction and drama, the space he devotes to discussion of these forms, at least in his account of Qing literature, is no more than he gives to poetry and the essay (for the Qing, 98 pages is devoted to poetry and the essay versus 96 for fiction and drama; for the Ming, however, the space given to fiction and drama, 129 pages, compared to 54 for poetry and the essay lends substance to his claims for the importance of the new forms). While the accounts of drama do include fairly generous samples of important portions of the work, the conspicuous absence of substantial portions of text in

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his descriptions of fiction does in effect set that genre apart from all the others, at least in his mode of evaluation: the genres of the old canon are accorded one form of analysis, while fiction is treated with another. Drama seems to lie somewhere in between the old and the new, probably because it had been much closer to the canon than fiction, due in large part to the substantial amount of classical verse incorporated in it, not to mention the widespread participation of established scholars in its creation. When taking up Sanguo yanyi ϝ೟ⓨ㕽 (The Romance of the Three Kingdoms), Liu brings to bear the notion of constant progress and refinement of the novel form, the idea that the novel represents a thorough critique of the flaws of old society, and the sense that, however progressive it might be, the text is still hindered by its being encumbered by old ideology. The first point is illustrated by his statements that the Luo Guanzhong 㕙䉿Ё (1320–1400) recension of the work had made much “progress” over those that had preceded it, while the Mao Zonggang ↯ᅫያ (1632–1709) version of the following Qing dynasty represented in turn considerable progress over that of Luo. Most scholars would probably agree with this assessment, but what is significant is that Liu uses the word jinbu 䘆ℹ (progress) to characterize the changes in editions over time, thereby fitting his evaluation squarely into a modern teleological scheme.22 The second point is illustrated by a long list of particulars in which the novel critiques the social order of the time in which it is set: for instance, how it “quite faithfully describes the fierce struggles and complicated internal contradictions among the feudal ruling group during the Three Kingdoms period.” Perhaps most interesting, however, is the third category, where Liu offers an ultimate critique of the novel’s limitations owing to its being saturated by the backward ideology of the time: “But it is necessary to point out that the book adopts an attitude of opposition and vilification toward the Yellow Turban peasant uprising. The depiction of Cao ᳍᪡ (155–220) as being so treacherous, and of Liu Bei ࡝‫( ٭‬161–223) as being so kindly in The Romance of the Three Kingdoms is actually contrary to historical fact. This is the reflection in popular literature of a type of thinking of the feudal ruling class; it is the reflection in literature about history of a traditional historical conceptualization of the feudal period.”23 For Liu, no matter how talented premodern writers of social critique may be, they cannot transcend the limitations of the historical period in which they lived, perhaps like the pre-Christian luminaries of antiquity who were trapped in limbo in the first circle of Dante’s Inferno because they were born before Christ and thus were beyond Christian salvation. Liu’s inclusion of the novel, along with his insistence that the form represented the high point of Ming-Qing literature, has since become a commonplace in literary histories and would seem to serve a highly important purpose in the national narrative of which literary histories are a vital part. If in the years before the 1890s the general perception of canonical work like poetry and

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prose shared Liu’s notion of post-Tang “decline,” this was hardly suitable for the narrative of a nation progressing, even if unsteadily, toward the modernity that nationalism demanded. The novel, then, as a form new to the post-1895 canon, could show how the cultural tradition was “developing” and not moribund— even if it could also be shown as evidence of that culture’s need for radical revitalization. In other words, the advent of fiction as a valorized category was arguably what enabled Liu Dajie to write a “history of the development” of Chinese literature rather than a history of its decline. The novel can also not be discounted as one of the reasons that literature was able to establish itself as an academic field even if courses on the novel were late in coming to most Chinese departments. The example of Liang Qichao ṕଳ䍙 (1873–1929) is instructive here: the general scholarly consensus is that Liang was one of the key figures in the first official curriculum of 1898—and one of those who did not see fit to include literature within it. In some of his later writings, however—most notably, his 1902 essay “Xiaoshuo yu qunzhi zhi guanxi” ᇣ䁾 㟛㕸⊏П䮰֖ (“On the Relationship between Fiction and the Government of the People”)24—as well as through his sponsorship of the publication of fiction, he played a key part in making the novel, and hence the “literature” of which it was a part, a central component of modern national discourse. Wang Yao’s (1914–89) ⥟⨸ Zhongguo xinwenxue shigao Ё೟ᮄ᭛ᅌ৆〓 (Draft history of China’s new literature), the first of its two volumes published soon after the establishment of the People’s Republic, offers a particularly sharp illustration of the tight links among written literary history, the classroom, and the government in ultimate charge of that pedagogical space. In his preface, Wang relates that he had been teaching the literary history of the Han, Wei, and Six Dynasties at Tsinghua when the Red Army entered Beijing in late 1948. In response to student demand, however, the university added a course on modern Chinese literature, which Wang Yao ended up teaching. Wang goes on to write: In May of 1950 a conference of national institutions of higher learning convened by the Ministry of Education passed a “Draft plan of the curriculum for the schools of Law and Humanities in institutes of higher learning,” which mandated “The History of the New Chinese Literature” as one of the core courses in the Chinese departments of all universities, furthering stipulating its content as follows: “Use new viewpoints and new methods to recount the history of the development of the new Chinese literature from the May Fourth period to the present, emphasizing the struggles over literary thinking in each period and the conditions of their development, along with accounts of the prominent authors and works of the essay, poetry, drama, and the novel.” This, then, was the basis and the direction I followed when I compiled my teaching materials. Because bookstores don’t have any books of this sort just now, people teaching this course have all felt a bit stressed, and since Tsinghua added

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it rather early on, after the “Higher Education Conference” I continuously received letters from friends at other universities seeking such things as lecture notes and teaching outlines.25

It is sign of the contingent nature of the information contained in modern Chinese literary histories that Wang Yao’s foundational work never was labeled anything other than a “draft.” This sense of contingency becomes more acute when one considers the numerous politically based critiques to which Wang was subjected after the publication of the work and the often downright abject responses he felt obliged to give to, if not exculpate, at least justify himself.26 More than anything else, the tentativeness with which the discrete information in literary histories was offered and received was a product of the constantly changing Communist Party line after 1949, creating situations in which an earlier judgment of a literary work and its ideological significance could be dramatically overturned by the sudden advent of new policy that rendered previous literary works dealing with a specific topic, as well as any positive commentary on them, not just obsolete but also politically suspect. Beyond the immediate concern of bolstering the ruling ideology of the day, which can be seen in all its kinetic splendor in Wang Yao’s case, there were larger cultural issues involved in creating literary history that lay beyond the immediate moment. In creating narratives of cultural splendor and continuity, literary history throughout the twentieth century worked in the service of the augmented sense of nationalism that was a key part of the Chinese entry into modernity. A prominent part of this national narrative was a constant emphasis on historical progress and how each work discussed represented an advance on works of the same type that had come before, with all such advances leading up to and contributing to the apotheosis of literature in its modern incarnation after about 1920. Even as this process was being established, however, it was also incumbent on literary history to establish the contradictory case of the evils of the old system, where the literary tradition served as the means by which these evils were made palpable even if the works themselves were limited in their expressive capacity. This created a tension that was virtually impossible to resolve between praising how the “progressive” components of a given work made it part of a glorious heritage and necessarily pointing out the ways in which the work was hamstrung by the flawed social and intellectual milieu from which it arose. This political coloration worked on both sides of the Cold War divide: for instance, Liu Dajie’s History was regarded as being so important that it was widely used in Taiwan, although no author was listed and the title was changed to Zhongguo wenxue fadashi Ё೟᭛ᅌⱐ䘨৆ (A history of the flourishing of Chinese literature).27 In addition, anticommunist rhetoric was inserted at various points to replace some of the more politically charged language of the original.

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If literary history per se was liable to get lost in its accumulations of dates, information on social and intellectual background, relationships among authors, and much too brief collections of ad hoc comments on the works themselves, a subgenre of the form, history of literary criticism (wenxue pipingshi ᭛ᅌᡍ䀩৆), which actually lies in a middle ground between intellectual and literary history, has been able to bring to bear much greater intellectual focus. The best works within this rubric, such as Guo Shaoyu’s Zhongguo wenxue pipingshi Ё೟᭛ ᅌᡍ䀩৆ (History of Chinese literary criticism) and Huang Lin’s 咗䳪 Jindai wenxue pipingshi 䖥ҷ᭛ᅌᡍ䀩৆ (History of modern literary criticism), have been able to focus on literary thinking, something that even the best literary histories have not been able to do.28 The provenance of the form is also a good deal more venerable than that of literary history, as the argument can be made that there have been works of Chinese literary criticism for many hundreds of years. From the iconoclastic modern perspective, however, these older works do not qualify as proper histories, for as Mao Dun 㣙Ⳓ (1896–1981) wrote in 1922: “There are a number of old books, like the Shipin 䀽ક [Gradations of poetry] and Wenxin diaolong ᭛ᖗ䲩啡 [The Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons], but they in fact are not theoretical works of literary criticism, but rather merely nothing more than subjective definitions of various literary forms such as poetry, the rhapsody and the song-lyric.”29 With all this traditional work thus preemptively ruled out, the first modern work of the history of literary criticism is generally thought to be that of Chen Zhongfan 䱇Ё޵ (1888–1982), Zhongguo wenxue pipingshi Ё೟᭛ᅌᡍ䀩৆ (History of Chinese literary criticism), published in 1927.30 That Guo Shaoyu’s magisterial work was first published as early as 1934 perhaps does illustrate how a robust tradition of the discussion of literary thought—pace Mao Dun—facilitated the rapid growth of a modern avatar of the genre, a grounding that modern literary history did not enjoy. Chen Pingyuan maintains that “moving writing and teaching from ‘critiques of poetry and prose’ to ‘literary history’ was a self-conscious choice of Chinese from the late Qing period on.”31 While it would be ill-advised to ignore the degree of autonomous volition involved in the creation and evolution of this new academic genre, it would be equally unwise to diminish the extent to which larger discursive forces more powerful than individual choice were pushing in this direction (all of which, by the way, Chen goes into in great detail): the overwhelming sense of the need to create a new order of learning, the impulse to reconcile this new thought with intellectual trends in the West, the pressing need to create a national history that was dismissive of the flaws of the past even as it insisted on it as providing core building blocks, and the needs of a burgeoning and ultimately government-controlled educational establishment. All this made the information contained in literary histories indispensable even while making it highly contingent and much less sure of itself than it otherwise might have been.

Literary Histories 405

Notes 1. While the initial set of formal curricular recommendations was not promulgated until 1898, an important memorial by the official in charge, Sun Jia’nai ᄿᆊ哤 (1827–1909), should be regarded as the beginning of the discussion. See Chen Guoqiu 䰜೑⧗, Wenxueshi shuxie xingtai yu wenhua zhengzhi ᭛ᄺ৆к‫ݭ‬ᔶᗕϢ᭛࣪ᬓ⊏ (Beijing: Beijing daxue chubanshe, 2004), 4. 2. Chen Pingyuan, Zuowei xueke de wenxueshi ԰Ўᄺ⾥ⱘ᭛ᄺ৆ (Beijing: Beijing daxue chubanshe, 2011), 1. Much of the information in this and the three paragraphs that follow is from the first chapter of Chen’s book. 3. Christopher A. Reed, Gutenberg in Shanghai: Chinese Print Capitalism, 1876–1937 (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2004). 4. Chen Pingyuan, Zuowei xueke de wenxueshi, 2. 5. Chen Guoqiu, Wenxueshi shuxie xingtai, 3. 6. Chen Pingyuan, Zuowei xueke de wenxueshi, 6. 7. Quoted in Chen Guoqiu, “Wenxue piping zuowei Zhongguo wenxue yanjiu fangfa” ᭛ᅌᡍ䀩԰⚎Ё೟᭛ᅌⷨおᮍ⊩, in 2012 Wang Meng’ou jiaoshou xueshu jiangzuo yanjiang ji 2012 ⥟໶厫ᬭᥜᅌ㸧䃯ᑻⓨ䃯䲚 (Taipei: Guoli zhengzhi daxue Zhongwenxi, 2014), 57. 8. Chen Pingyuan, Zuowei xueke de wenxueshi, 6. 9. Quoted in Chen Pingyuan, Wenxueshi de xingcheng yu jiangou ᭛ᄺ৆ⱘᔶ៤Ϣᓎᵘ (Nanning: Guangxi jiaoyu chubanshe, 1999), 5. 10. Mori Arinori, Wenxue xingguo ce ᭛ᅌ㟜೟ㄪ, trans. Young J. Allen and Ren Tingxu (Shanghai: Shanghai shudian, 2002). The question of whether the translation was made from the English original or the Japanese translation is moot: while the Chinese translation uses the title and some of the terms from the Japanese, it is questionable whether either Allen or Ren Tingxu (who held the highest degree in the imperial examination system, the jinshi 䘆຿) knew enough Japanese to have used that rendition exclusively. 11. Arinori Mori, Education in Japan: A Series of Letters Addressed by Prominent Americans to Arinori Mori (New York: D. Appleton, 1873); Mori Arinori, Wenxue xingguo ce, 1. 12. Lin Lezhi, “Shang yishu yiqing chuangshe zongxuetang yi” Ϟ䅃㕆ᫀ䂟ࡉ䀁㐑ᅌූ䅄, quoted in Chen Pingyuan, Zuowei xueke de wenxueshi, 4. 13. Chen Pingyuan, Zuowei xueke de wenxueshi, 7. 14. Cheng Guangwei ⿟‫ ♰ܝ‬et al., eds., Zhongguo xiandai wenxue Ё೑⦄ҷ᭛ᄺ৆ (Beijing: Renmin daxue chubanshe, 2000). 15. Chen Pingyuan, Wenxueshi de xingcheng yu jiangou, 5. 16. Qian Jibo, Xiandai Zhongguo wenxueshi (1936; repr., Hong Kong: Longmen shuju, 1965). 17. The most accessible version of Lu Xun’s history can be found in Lu Xun quanji 元䖙ܼ 䲚 (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 2005), 9:1–307. 18. See Chen Pingyuan, Zuowei xueke de wenxueshi, 411. Chen claims here that 1920 should be considered the year that the systematic history of Chinese fiction began, thanks to Lu Xun’s lectures that summer and the virtually simultaneous publication of Hu Shi’s “Shuihu zhuan kaozheng” ∈Ⓦ‫ڇ‬㗗䄝 (Textual criticism of the Outlaws of the Marsh). 19. This is also the form used by Ah Ying 䰓㣅 (Qian Xingcun 䣶ᴣ䙼, 1900–1977) in his Wan Qing xiaoshuo shi ᰮ⏙ᇣ䁾৆ (1937; repr., Beijing: Dongfang chubanshe, 1996). 20. Liu Dajie, Zhongguo wenxue fazhanshi (Shanghai: Gudian wenxue chubanshe, 1958), 3:890.

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21. The lone exception to this rule seems to be a quote from Wu Jingzi’s ਇᭀṧ (1701–54) Qing dynasty Rulin waishi ‫ۦ‬ᵫ໪৆ (The Scholars), although the quoted section has nothing to do with the novel’s plot or characters but rather jabs at the examination system. See Liu Dajie, Zhongguo wenxue fazhanshi, 1242. 22. On the theme of “development” as it plays out in modern Chinese literature, see Andrew F. Jones, Developmental Fairy Tales: Evolutionary Thinking and Modern Chinese Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011). 23. Liu Dajie, Zhongguo wenxue fazhanshi, 1025–26. 24. Liang Qichao, “On the Relationship Between Fiction and the Government of the People,” trans. Gel Nai Cheng, in Modern Chinese Literary Thought: Writings on Literature, 1893–1945, ed. Kirk A. Denton (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), 74–81. 25. Wang Yao, Zhongguo xinwenxue shigao: 1919–1950 (Hong Kong: Po Wen Book Co., 1972), 1. 26. The 1972 Po Wen edition of the work helpfully includes some 140 pages of this documentation, including Wang Yao’s “Zhongguo xinwenxue shigao de ziwo pipan” ljЁ ೟ᮄ᭛ᅌ৆〓NJⱘ㞾៥ᡍ߸ (A self-criticism of the Draft history of China’s new literature). 27. [Liu Dajie], Zhongguo wenxue fada shi (Taipei: Zhonghua shuju, 1957). 28. Guo Shaoyu, Zhongguo wenxue pipingshi (Taipei: Minglun chubanshe, 1975); Huang Lin, Jindai wenxue pipingshi (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1993). 29. Quoted in Chen Guoqiu, “Wenxue piping zuowei Zhongguo wenxue yanjiu fangfa,” 59. 30. Chen Guoqiu, “Wenxue piping zuowei Zhongguo wenxue yanjiu fangfa,” 61. 31. Chen Pingyuan, Zuowei xueke de wenxue shi, 10.

SECTION A

LIBRARIES, MUSEUMS, AND ARCHIVES E D I T E D B Y X I AO L I U

W

hile the terms for “library” and “archive” are distinct in the modern Chinese context—tushu guan ೪᳌仼 and dang’an ⁨Ḝ, respectively—one might well ask what the difference is between these as institutions for information collection, storage, and management. One answer, offered by Marlene Manoff, is as follows: “Libraries are defined as repositories of published materials such as books, journals and other media while archives are defined as repositories of unpublished and unique materials such as manuscripts, letters and official documents.”1 However, it is difficult to draw a hard line between many premodern libraries and those collections of documents that one might now consider to be archives. For example, excavations of Mesopotamian sites, such as the one at Ebla, Syria, have uncovered repositories of written documents on clay tablets that show a mixture of archival records and pieces of a more literary nature, including bilingual texts and incantations.2 Similarly, textual repositories in imperial China included literary writings, historical works, and philosophical and religious treatises, along with household registers, maps, and other important documents for the purpose of facilitating the governing of the state. The entanglement of the state power, the bureaucratic needs of information collecting and management, and the role of writing and literacy in state governing and ritual traditions all became important factors in understanding early library-archives. It is worth asking when and how libraries and archives became separate institutions for information gathering and transmission and how their mechanisms of information organization and access were gradually

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differentiated from each other. The birth of museums in modern times has further complicated the institutional structures and mechanisms of managing literary information. Claims that they “combine the services and functions of museums, libraries, and archives” made by, for example, the National Museum of Modern Chinese Literature (Zhongguo xiandai wenxueguan Ё೑⦄ҷ᭛ᄺ佚), which was established in 1985 in Beijing, indicate the overlapping roles and functions of these institutions. Although scholars of Chinese library history have debated the question of whether book collections in premodern China should be counted as prototypical libraries, there is no reason to insist that the modern instantiation is the only possible form of library.3 In particular, one question that scholars have focused on is the issue of access. Premodern book collections and archives—such as imperial libraries, private libraries, and monastery libraries—are sometimes seen as not “public” enough, being accessible only to a limited circle of readers and users. Yet such an invocation of the public is anachronistic. The degree of openness of these book collections should be examined in their own historical contexts. Moreover, modern public libraries are seldom as public as they claim to be. Various choices and regulations—from the construction of the information infrastructure, to the adoption of library membership systems (based on residence, citizenship, affiliation, or fees), to the disciplining of users through rules and etiquettes—determine who is eventually eligible to be a library user. The control and regulation of accessibility to information is never separate from the construction and management of libraries and archives. Of course, libraries and archives are not only collections of books and documents but also spaces for the storage and display of materials. The physical form of books to a large degree determines the method of storage and display. Books may be kept in a chest or rolled up in the case of bamboo slats or silk rolls. Each media form required specific sets of technics and technology for the preservation and transmission of information. For example, many medieval libraries in Europe placed books on reading desks with benches, giving readers a chance to better examine details of a manuscript. The spatial layout of modern libraries, with rows of stacks and volumes of books vertically placed in those stacks, is a quite recent arrangement for the purpose of storing a large number of books in a relatively small space. With the drastic processes of digitization, there are worries that such spatial affordances of libraries might be disappearing. It is feared that the libraries where people pull books out from shelves and sit down to enjoy reading might be replaced by virtual spaces of personal computers and monitors. Nonetheless, it is worth asking how digital publications remediate the forms and conventions of paper-based books. After all, should e-libraries not be considered just another recent development in the long history of the library, one that builds upon and reimagines existing technologies?

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Notes 1. Marlene Manoff, “Archive and Library,” in The Oxford Encyclopedia of Literary Theory, ed. John Frow (June 2019), http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.013.1017. 2. James W. P. Campbell with Will Pryce, The Library: A World History (London: Thames & Hudson, 2013), 37–38. 3. Han Yongjin 䶽∌䖯, ed., Zhongguo tushuguanshi Ё೑೒к佚৆, vol. 1, Gudai cangshu juan সҷ㮣кो (Beijing: Guojia tushuguan chubanshe, 2017).

CHAPTER 41

LIBRARIES FROM THE EARLY PERIOD TO THE TANG M ICH A E L N Y L A N

S

ome apocryphal tales describe pre-Qin wandering persuaders traveling with cartloads of writings, the better to advertise their vast funds of knowledge for hire.1 More credible is this: rulers and advisers from the fourth through the second centuries BCE valued documents, maps, and registers of land and population—the charts and registers (tuji ೪㈡) or charts and writings (tushu ೪᳌) stored in the palace archives of the time— according to a single standard: each document’s utility to the centralizing projects of the various powerful states contending for supreme power. However, a momentous transition from archives to libraries, completed during the years 26–6 BCE, ushered in and accelerated a series of changes in the social practices and attitudes associated with manuscript learning. (While archives house records of immediate use, which may be pitched once they are outdated, libraries include manuscripts whose value rests on their age, fragility, relative rarity, and place within the entire library collection and on the number and range of ritual activities entailed in their textual production and transmission.) Ultimately, these changes raised the bar for high cultural literacy for members of the governing elite, emphasizing the value of intertextual roaming among writings valued in roughly inverse proportion to their immediate practical use.2 And once broad learning (boxue मᅌ) in multiple Classics and masterworks came to be admired more than expertise in a single transmission or field of knowledge, as it was indubitably by late Western Han, the claim to love antiquity (hao gu དস) as a spur to moral action invested some men and women with greater authority than their relatively low status in court circles warranted.3

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The First Imperial Library Collections, Han Through Tang During the first 150 years of the first stable empire, that of Western Han, the courts had encouraged experts and commoners alike to “gather, as in a net,” extant versions of useful writings for the throne’s perusal.4 In 26 BCE, as part of a series of initiatives designed to centralize all knowledge at the capital, Han emperor Cheng ⓶៤Ᏹ (r. 33–7 BCE) named the members of a commission to identify lacunae in the imperial collection, locate copies of the missing texts, produce better recensions through collation and editing, and classify all the versions produced for the official imperial collections. An imperial envoy, Chen Nong 䱇䖆, was dispatched from the capital to scour the suburbs and countryside for lost books. Palace superintendent Liu Xiang ࡝৥ (77–6 BCE), as the senior head of the imperial clan, was duly appointed to oversee the all-important task of revising the Classics and their commentaries as well as the philosophical and the poetic works. Infantry colonel Ren Hong ӏᅣ was to superintend the acquisition and editing of military texts for the imperial collections; senior archivist Yin Xian ልઌ, the technical manuals (shushu ᭌ㸧 “quantitative arts”; shu 㸧 refers to “regular changes” that can be predicted and enumerated); and court physician Li Zhuguo ᴢ᷅೟, the medical texts. Meanwhile, Liu Xiang, as head of the entire commission, set out to compile an annotated catalog of the imperial collections that would serve as a reference guide for the emperor and his staff. This library catalog, so far as is known, was the first of its kind (see Nylan, chapter 48). Supervising the collation, editing, and cataloging of the imperial collections, including illustrated books, charts, and maps, occupied Liu Xiang for nearly twenty years. Shortly after Chengdi and Liu Xiang both died in 7 BCE, Xiang’s son Liu Xin ࡝ℚ (53 BCE–23 CE) presented to the new boy emperor Aidi ઔᏱ (r. 7–1 BCE) a catalog entitled Qilüe ϗ⬹ (Seven epitomes).5 Based on his father’s work, Qilüe in turn became the basis of the “Yiwen zhi” 㮱᭛ᖫ (Treatise on bibliography) compiled by Ban Gu ⧁೎ (32–92) and included in Hanshu ⓶᳌ (History of the Han).6 The Hanshu bibliographical treatise groups a total of 13,296 scrolls in the imperial library collections under six main subject headings, preceded by introductory remarks (see Nylan, chapter 48) and followed by miscellaneous works: (1) the Six Arts or Classics; (2) philosophical masterworks; (3) verse; (4) military works; (5) treatises on the technical and quantitative arts, including divination; and (6) medicine. For the first time, so far as is known, texts—not just masters—were treated as experts in their own right.7 Given the tendency on the part of the leading Han classical masters to borrow freely from multiple works (a distinctive feature of early manuscript culture generally, not just in China, which presumed the best compositions would be written in this way),8 it cannot always have been easy to assign a single set of writings to a particular

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category. Notably, the classicist or Ru ‫ ۦ‬experts’ writings are put in a separate bibliographical classification—that of the masters (zhuzi 䃌ᄤ)—from the Six Arts (i.e., the Classics proper), which are treated as the “common cultural coin” of the realm.9 It is easy to overlook the sheer magnitude of the editorial changes wrought by the activist editors working under Liu Xiang’s direction, changes that ended in the compilation of new texts (their term). Legend had Kongzi ᄨᄤ/Confucius culling 300 odes for his Shi 䀽 (Odes) classic, out of a total of either 3,000 or 6,000 odes known to him, and selecting for his Shu ᳌ (Documents) classic a mere 100 or 120 chapters out of 3,240 (see Hunter, chapter 20). Closer to Liu Xiang’s time, the Western Han Liji ⾂㿬 (Book of Rites) expert Dai De ᠈ᖋ excised all but 85 pian out of an original 214 pian for his Da Dai Liji ໻᠈⾂㿬 (Elder Dai’s Book of Rites); Dai Sheng ᠈㘪, his relative, expunged another 46 pian. In Liu Xin’s case, for example, the new edition of the pre-Qin masterwork Liezi ߫ᄤ (Master Lie) in 8 juan ो (scrolls or chapters) was produced after comparing and collating short works, only one of them a shorter Liezi, that once circulated under five separate titles in 20 juan. By Liu Xiang’s own account, he found many incorrect characters and some duplication among the various recensions. Assuming the old palace editions to be more reliable than those circulating “among the people,” Liu made a new edition, which he hoped showed more internal consistency within chapters (though Liu doubted whether the original chapters “were by the same hand”).10 Similarly, Liu Xiang made up a “revised and reduced” Zhanguoce ᠄೟ㄪ (Strategies of the Warring States) in 33 bamboo bundles from six different manuscripts whose texts he described as a total mishmash.11 More astonishing still, Liu Xiang rejected as “duplicates” all but 32 of 320 pian ㆛ (bamboo bundles) of the Confucian masterwork Xunzi 㤔ᄤ (Master Xun), or one-tenth of the originals he had at his disposal, when making his new edition of that masterwork; that tenth he had transcribed in a fair hand on strips of properly seasoned bamboo in order to minimize future damage. Like father, like son. Liu Xin’s laboring in the imperial library reduced a Shanhai jing ቅ⍋㍧ (Classic of Mountains and Seas) in 32 pian to a mere 18.12 Accordingly, many of the so-called pre-Qin masterworks must rightly be considered compilations of late Western Han. Such massive efforts directed toward remedying (zhi ⊏) the flaws in hand-copied manuscripts led editors in the late Western Han imperial libraries to try to devise more reliable methods for evaluating competing variants and editions, with the result that those same editors became more self-conscious authors who showed ever greater selectivity in choosing among models for their own compositions. The most immediate result of the new methods in text criticism was the production of several of the first reference works in Classical Chinese devoted to deciphering early scripts, including the etymological

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and conceptual list known as the Shuowen jiezi 䁾᭛㾷ᄫ (Explaining simple graphs and analyzing complex graphs; see Handel, chapter 5). It is best to be clear about one thing: every dynastic collapse and civil war meant catastrophic losses to the capital libraries, as Jean-Pierre Drège has discussed, not to mention the destruction of private libraries. For this reason, the Hanshu’s “Yiwen zhi” almost certainly lists the holdings of the Eastern Han palaces in Luoyang ⋯䱑; thus, it must differ, to an unknown degree, from the catalogs compiled earlier by Liu Xiang and Liu Xin, which described the contents of late Western Han palace libraries.13 Drège mentions four major disasters after the Qin-Han wars of transition and before Tang: (1) (2) (3) (4)

under Wang Mang ⥟㦑 (45 BCE–23 CE), in 23 CE; near the end of Eastern Han, in 193; during the years 311–16, attending the fall of Western Jin; and during the “voluntary destruction” by Emperor Yuan of Liang ṕ‫ܗ‬Ᏹ (r. 552–55) in 554, shortly before the dynasty’s end.14

With each of these, there was likely near-total destruction in the metropolitan areas due to raging fires. Nevertheless, in early manuscript culture, where texts were often known by heart and hand copying often led to storage of multiple copies in outlying areas, at least parts of library collections could be quickly “restored,” if need be, so long as the resources were close to hand. Judging from the extant sources, among the rulers of states controlling the North China Plain, Emperor Xiaowen ᄱ᭛ (r. 471–99) of Northern Wei was the first to really be interested in collecting Chinese books. His decree of 495 ordered his subjects to scour the countryside for books throughout the north of the Central States, as did a later decree in 510 by Xuanwu ᅷ℺ (r. 499–515). Once the Sui had reunified the country, scholar Niu Hong ⠯ᓬ (545–610), newly appointed director of the Imperial Library, forthrightly detailed the disorder and deficiencies of the palace holdings in 583.15 But thanks to the aggressive “book conquests” by Sui Wendi 䱟᭛Ᏹ (r. 581–604) and Sui Yangdi 䱟❀Ᏹ (r. 604–618), nearly the entire Northern Zhou and Northern Chen palace holdings were acquired, plus many manuscripts from major libraries of Yangzhou ᦮Ꮂ, Sui Yangdi’s base. While some texts were on such poor paper that they required recopying, new works of excellent quality included seventeen thousand scrolls under thirty-one titles, many of them Buddhist and Daoist. In 622 and 641, the reigning Tang emperors commissioned groups of scholars to undertake two mammoth projects: (1) the redaction of dynasty histories of the pre-Tang period, begun in 622 but soon abandoned, and (2) the production of Wujing zhengyi Ѩ㍧ℷ㕽 (Correct readings of the Five Classics), compiled by Yan Shigu 丣᏿স (581–645) and Kong Yingda ᄨ〢䘨 (574–648), in 180 juan or scrolls (completed in 653). How widely the latter circulated outside the court

Libraries from the Early Period to the Tang

417

has been called into question, and it is likely that both projects were intended for the benefit of court-sponsored schools and examination officials.16 That said, the Tang library holdings greatly surpassed those of Han—in part because of better paper and printing technology and in part because of additional categories of texts deemed authoritative. By 715, during the reign of Xuanzong ⥘ᅫ (r. 713–56), the cultural impresario, the palace holdings had once again become massive and disorganized; the emperor complained that the literary works and explications of texts were rendered nearly incomprehensible by inappropriate “corrections” made to them. The Zizhi tongjian 䊛⊏䗮䨥 (Comprehensive mirror in aid of governance; 1084) mentions twenty people assigned to “correct and rectify” the texts, while the Jiu Tangshu 㟞૤᳌ (Old history of the Tang; 945) gives the number as twenty-six. One learns that by 731 the emperor had an inventory of his library that, some claimed, counted eighty thousand scrolls.17 But with the An Lushan Rebellion in 755, Luoyang and Chang’an 䭋ᅝ, the capitals housing the main palace libraries, were sacked, and the exigencies of the post-An Lushan order resulted in little new money being allocated to restore this source of Tang cultural capital. In 849, the Censorate calculated that the copyists employed in the Imperial Library could transcribe, on average, 417 scrolls per year. In that year, 365 works were copied on 11,707 pieces of hemp paper. Two years later 452 scrolls were revised and collated in the Imperial Library. The late ninth-century rebellion of Huang Chao 咗Ꮆ (835–884), however, put a stop to all such activity. Once again, a rebellion ravaged the two capitals and completely destroyed palaces. Not surprisingly, the “works inherited from the old days entirely disappeared, no matter what medium, wooden board or bamboo slip, was used.”18

Private Libraries Han Through Tang As Drège remarks, “Private libraries up to the Tang are particularly ill-known.”19 But once reading itself became a virtue—an evaluation spurred on by Yang Xiong’s ᦮䲘 (53 BCE–18 CE) Fayan ⊩㿔 (Exemplary Figures) and by multiple estate-management manuals such as Yan Zhitui’s 丣П᥼ (531–591) Yanshi jiaxun 丣⇣ᆊ㿧 (Family Instructions for the Yen Clan)—private collecting of books was bound to take off, if only as a form of cultural competition; as Yan said, personal cultivation and beneficial deeds are the fruits of reading.20 A few figures will give some idea of the exponential growth of private book collecting before Song. In early Eastern Han, it is known that the Ban family enjoyed a particularly fine library, some of it copies of the late Western Han palace holdings.21 By the late second century CE, Cai Yong 㫵䙩 (132–192) was happily ensconced

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in a very large library that supposedly eventually came down to Wang Bi ⥟ᔐ (226–249), who inherited the library from his great-uncle, the bibliophile Wang Can ⥟㊆ (177–217); the private library, with some ten thousand rolls/ scrolls, rivaled the imperial holdings.22 Although a steady improvement in the quality of paper during the first through fourth centuries, particularly in Sichuan, lowered the costs of paper manuscripts, as compared with silk and bamboo, a major reduction in the cost of textual reproduction had to await improvements in woodblock printing (known in the Tang but exploited more widely in Song and Ming), new papermaking techniques, and improved market distribution.23 Scholars today tend to believe that a fully developed “culture” of the written word cannot exist absent three preconditions: the circulation of multiple copies of key works, the expansion of access to books via the growth of private libraries, and the development of public repositories for books. By those measures, a sophisticated culture of the written word could not emerge before the Song, which witnessed the phenomenal growth of private academies and libraries as well as state-sponsored and private printings of the Classics, commentaries, and technical manuals.24 Generally speaking, Song witnesses the spread of commercial printing within the larger context that includes government printing and family/household imprints, but the dominance of commercial imprints in the libraries of the literati did not begin until mid-Ming, despite the hefty price of manuscript copies.25 By late Ming, the price of producing imprints had fallen precipitously (to one-tenth the prices of the sixteenth century), largely because of new production techniques (especially the design of a new, standardized font) and cheaper labor, creating the first mass market for imprints.26

Public Versus Private, East Versus West The substantial evidence concerning the history of libraries in China has been largely discounted along with so many other achievements in Chinese history.27 Popular history highlights closed palace libraries and censorship in China, while celebrating the purported openness to all comers of the Great Library in Ptolemaic Alexandria (305 to 30 BCE) and the later so-called public libraries of Rome.28 This is to cherry-pick the evidence to build the sharpest contrast between East and West.29 In the case of the Great Library, to take one example, current scholarly estimates speak of a small group of clients, roughly thirty to fifty of the “king’s men,” enjoying privileged access through royal patronage and wandering into the “farthest recesses of labyrinthine erudition.”30 That is more or less the same picture that exists for the palace library under Han Chengdi.31

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Notes 1. This is said, for example, of Zhuangzi’s sparring partner Hui Shi ᚴᮑ, in Zhuangzi jishi 㥞ᄤ䲚䞟, annot. Guo Xiang 䛁䈵 (Taipei: Shijie shuju, 1967), 33.1102. 2. Ban Gu ⧁೎ et al., comps., Hanshu, 8 vols. (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1962), 100A.4205–6 (for the story of Huan Tan’s ḧ䄮 [43 BCE–28 CE] thwarted attempt to see the Ban family library). 3. Ban Gu et al., Hanshu, 100A.4222, 4225. For an overview, see Michael Nylan, Yang Xiong and the Pleasures of Reading and Classical Learning in Han China (New Haven, CT: American Oriental Society, 2011), and “On Libraries and Manuscript Culture in Western Han Chang’an and Alexandria,” in Ancient Greece and China Compared, ed. G. E. R. Lloyd and Jenny Zhao (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 373–408. 4. Ban Gu et al., Hanshu, 88.3621; cf. 30.1701. 5. Ban Gu et al., Hanshu, 30.1701, 10.310. 6. Chen Guoqing 䱇೟ᝊ, Hanshu Yiwen zhi zhu shi huibian ⓶᳌㮱᭛ᖫ⊼䞟ᔭ㎼ (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 2015), chap. 1 (acknowledges “radical abridgments”). 7. See Sarah A. Queen, “Inventories of the Past: Rethinking the ‘School’ Affiliation of the Huainanzi,” Asia Major, 3rd ser., 14 (2001): 51–72, esp. 62. 8. For Han compositional styles, see Michael Nylan, “Manuscript Culture in Late Western Han and Authors’ Authority,” Journal of Chinese Literature 1, no. 3 (2014–15): 155–85. 9. Moreover, as late as 703, it was acknowledged that the Classics and histories all contained abundant materials relating to military science. See Liu Xu ࡝᯿, ed., Jiu Tangshu 㟞૤᳌, 16 vols. (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1975), 196A.5232–33; Ouyang Xiu ℤ䱑ׂ et al., comps., Xin Tangshu ᮄ૤᳌, 20 vols. (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1975), 104.4007; and Wang Pu ⥟⑹, Tang huiyao ૤᳗㽕, 3 vols. (Taipei: Shijie shuju, 1968), 36.667. 10. Liu Xiang, cited in Quan Hanwen ܼ⓶᭛, in Quan Shanggu Sandai Qin Han Sanguo Liuchao wen ܼϞসϝҷ⾺⓶ϝ೟݁ᳱ᭛, comp. Yan Kejun ಈৃഛ (Taipei: Shijie shuju, 1961), 37.6a–b. 11. One of the titles was Guoce ೟ㄪ, but none of the six titles matches the title Zhanguoce. Liu Xiang, cited in Yan Kejun, Quan Hanwen, in Quan Shanggu Sandai Qin Han Sanguo Liuchao wen, 37.1a–2b, compares the texts to taros mashed together. 12. Liu Rulin ࡝∱䳪, Han Jin xueshu biannian ⓶ᰝᅌ㸧㎼ᑈ (Shanghai: Shangwu yinshuguan, 1935), 2:109. 13. Wang Guowei’s ⥟೟㎁ (1877–1927) “Hanshu Yiwen zhi juli ba” ⓶᳌㮱᭛ᖫ㟝՟ 䎟 notes this; see a summary in Zeng Shengyi ᳒㘪Ⲟ, Hanshu Yiwen zhi yu shumu wenxian lunji ⓶᳌㮱᭛ᖫ㟛᳌Ⳃ᭛⥏䂪䲚 (Taipei: Wenshizhe chubanshe, 2013), 13–14. 14. Jean-Pierre Drège, Les bibliothèques en Chine au temps des manuscrits (jusqu’au Xe siècle) (Paris: École Française d’Extrême-Orient, 1991), 19–37. 15. For Niu’s biography, see Wei Zheng 儣ᖉ, ed., Suishu 䱟᳌, 6 vols. (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1973), 49.1297–1310. 16. Noma Fumachika 䞢䭧᭛৆, Gokyō seigi no kenkyū: sono seiritsu to tenkai Ѩ㍧ℷ㕽ȃ ⷨお˖Dzȃ៤ゟǽሩ䭟 (Tokyo: Kenbun, 1988), 7–38. 17. At its height, the Tang palace collection apparently boasted some 89,000 scrolls. See Joseph P. McDermott, A Social History of the Chinese Book: Books and Literati Culture in Late Imperial China (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2006), 214n16. 18. Liu Xu, Jiu Tangshu, 46.1962. 19. Drège, Les bibliothèques, 145.

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20. Yan Zhitui, Yanshi jiaxun jijie 丣⇣ᆊ㿧䲚㾷, ed. Wang Liqi ⥟఼߽, rev. ed. (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1993), 3.171; Teng Ssu-yü, trans., Family Instructions for the Yen Clan (Leiden: Brill, 1968), 61. 21. Ban Gu et al., Hanshu, 100A.4205–6. 22. Drège, Les bibliothèques, 172–73. Drège supplies a useful list of private libraries up through the tenth century. 23. In Printing for Profit: The Commercial Publishers of Jianyang, Fujian (11th–17th Centuries) (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), Lucille Chia differs with McDermott, arguing that ephemeral printings (almanacs, calendars, etc.) changed the lives of elites and commoners alike in Fujian, her area of research. But the industry died there in the seventeenth century, and evidence about ephemera is, by definition, scarce. 24. Access to it presumably accounted for Wang Su’s ⥟㙙 (d. 256) remarkable authority as well. The oldest surviving dated Tang imprint is a Dunhuang copy of the Diamond Sūtra, published in 868, but there are other ninth-century examples. See McDermott, Social History; and Cynthia J. Brokaw, “Book History in Premodern China: The State of the Discipline I,” Book History 10, no. 1 (2007): 253–90. McDermott emphasizes (1) how few bookstores existed in Ming outside the major metropolitan centers, (2) how often books were acquired through gift exchange, and (3) how many titles were extremely hard to get, even sometimes the “basic” books. By contrast, Glen Dudbridge, Lost Books of Medieval China, The Panizzi Lectures 1999 (London: British Library, 2000), is inclined to overemphasize the similarities. Using any standard of evidence, public access was too limited to warrant his rosy account. 25. Peter J. Golas, in Picturing Technology in China: From Earliest Times to the Nineteenth Century (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2015), xix–xx, explains why the situation in China was not at all comparable to that described by Wolfgang Lefèvre for northern Europe in Picturing Machines, 1400–1700 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004). 26. Golas, Picturing Technology, chap. 5. 27. The first library conceived of as truly open to all classes is Angelo Rocca’s Bibliotheca Angelica, established in the 1600s and even then an exception. In the Roman era, there were several so-called public libraries: the Atrium Libertatis library (founded in the 30s BCE), the Palatine Apollo library (founded 28 BCE), and the Porticus Octaviae library (founded in the 20s BCE). The degree to which these libraries were open to anybody outside the senatorial and equestrian classes is subject to debate. Public libraries were unknown in China as late as the 1920s (see McDermott, Social History), although imperial China was much like Jane Austen’s England in that “men and women of breeding” could visit private libraries upon timely application to the owner. 28. Robert Darnton discusses Western censorship extensively in The Forbidden Best-Sellers of Pre-revolutionary France (New York: W. W. Norton, 1996). 29. Ian F. McNeely and Lisa Wolverton, Reinventing Knowledge: From Alexandria to the Internet (New York: W. W. Norton, 2008), is such an example of Orientalist discourse. 30. Gaëlle Coqueugniot, Archives et bibliothèques dans le monde grec: edifices et organisation, Ve siècle avant notre ère—IIe siècle de notre ère (Oxford: BAR International Series, 2013), 49. 31. Nylan, “On Libraries and Manuscript Culture.”

CHAPTER 42

LIBRARIES FROM SONG TO QING RO N A L D C . E G A N

T

he foregoing chapters have already pointed out that library, as applied to collections of written material in premodern China, is a problematic term and conceptual category. Whatever archives of manuscripts or collections of books (in any form) existed—whether amassed by the government at different levels, private academies, temples, or private book collectors—bore little resemblance to the entities called libraries in the modern world. To a certain extent, this distinction is applicable to book collections in most cultures in the premodern world and is not unique to China. But there were also special circumstances operative in late imperial China, owing to technological, institutional, political, and social factors there. Libraries were just one part of a larger topic or system: that encompassing the production, editing, classification, distribution, preservation, and transmission of written materials generally. Libraries of any period in premodern China were part of this larger production and circulation system. They took their place alongside publishers (government and private), book peddlers, bookshops, and temple markets. Today one tends to think of libraries as the end point in the distribution of books, a place where a particular copy of a book, having already achieved its final form, winds up and will end its days. But deposit in a library was often not the end of the story of a particular book in premodern China for two reasons. First, the great majority of book collections were themselves only temporary and not permanent. Quantitatively, the largest number of collections were those put together by private collectors. Such collections rarely lasted as long as a hundred years before they were split up because books were a form

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of property and wealth and Chinese society practiced partible inheritance, in which property was divided among the sons. Otherwise, the collections were sold or destroyed (by fire, worms, theft, rebellions, etc.). It was a common saying by Ming times, if not before, that even the largest private book collections seldom lasted more than two generations. The second reason the library was often not a final resting place for a given title is that libraries were also production centers: collectors had their books recopied, often altering them in the process, or they edited them, collated them against rival editions, or prepared new editions that they then printed. Book printing was often a household operation in premodern China, practiced on a small scale, with small print runs. So books, once they became the property of a private collector, were often recast or repackaged before being sent out into circulation again as a new imprint. Two key technological and institutional factors became apparent from the Song dynasty onward or at least were far more consequential than they had been before the eleventh century: book printing and the civil service examination system. In China, these two went hand in hand, and their impact on the history of the book cannot be overstated. Woodblock printing became widespread during the eleventh century mostly due to the expanded examination system under the Northern Song and the resulting emergence of a greatly expanded class of educated men whose ambition was to pass the exams and enter into officialdom. Printing had existed for at least two hundred years before that, but it was the new demand for the essential classics and histories on which the exams were based, together with many types of exam preparation aids (sample essays, encyclopedias, literary anthologies, phrase thesauruses, etc.) that now made printing profitable and hence economically viable. A flood of imprints transformed the book market within a few generations (the first century of the Northern Song, from 960 to 1060) into something that would have been unimaginable in the Tang dynasty. The Ming dynasty is often thought of as the period in which woodblock printing became truly commercial and dominant in China. That claim tends to overlook the fact that hundreds, if not thousands, of titles were already being printed during the eleventh through the thirteenth centuries. That is not to say that the older tradition of manuscripts fell into neglect. Manuscripts were still produced and transmitted and coexisted alongside the newly abundant woodblock imprints. At first, the more elite and conservative members of the educated class looked down on imprints, which were often low-quality commercial products, rife with misprints, and brought out in a hurry with an eye only for profit. But in time, elite disapproval of the imprints softened as higher-quality editions began to appear more regularly. This change can be seen in the holdings of private collectors. While many private libraries in the Northern Song took pride in admitting only manuscripts into their holdings, libraries in the Southern Song had manuscripts and imprints side by side. The veneration of manuscripts—and indeed the production of them through

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recopying earlier manuscripts—would continue through later imperial times and down into the twentieth century. But by then, early (i.e., Song or Yuan) high-quality imprints likewise became collectors’ items, as prized for the quality of their paper, ink, and design as the finest manuscripts might be. Another important development in the Song that far surpassed what had existed earlier and that would last throughout the later dynasties was the private academy movement. This was closely tied to neo-Confucianism, which is often treated purely as an important event in the history of thought, which no doubt it was. But it was also a social and educational movement. The reestablishment of historic academies, such as the White Deer Grotto Academy (Bailudong shuyuan ⱑ呓⋲᳌䰶), revived by Zhu Xi ᴅ➍ (1130–1200), and the Yuelu Academy (Yuelu shuyuan ኇ呧᳌䰶), the site of famous debates between Zhu Xi and Zhang Shi ᔉḏ (1133–80), allowed such scholar-teachers to build up their own libraries. Beyond that, these figures also established new curricula for Confucian studies, supported new commentaries and editions of the classics, and underwrote the printing of these new works, to be disseminated both inside the walls of the academies and beyond. Such scholarly academies became an indispensable part of intellectual life and book production and dissemination and would remain so. No doubt isolated examples of private academies existed before Song times, but they had none of the scale or impact that academies came to have as the Confucian revival took hold and grew through the following centuries. As for private collections, in the Song dynasty alone there are some 700 private libraries of considerable size (measured by tens of thousands of juan or “chapters” of writings); in the Ming, this number increases to 897 and in the Qing, to 2,082.1 These private libraries constituted the most numerous and important type of book collection through the later imperial period, far outdistancing the number of other kinds of collections (those maintained by imperial and provincial governments, temples, academies, etc.). Considered here briefly are the types of activities that are well documented among Ming dynasty private collectors, knowing that they had already begun in the Song and were continued through the Qing. Hand copying: Collectors were often diligent copyists, adding to their collection by creating their own fresh copies written out in their own calligraphy (when they did not rely on hired scribes to make the fresh copies). Copying showed self-discipline and devotion to learning; it was also the hallowed method of book reproduction, practiced by the ancients. Consequently, having a collection that consisted mostly or entirely of one’s own recopied books was a claim to fame and inspired far more admiration from friends and family than simply having a collection of imprints purchased from the market. There were collectors who prided themselves on devoting a certain amount of time every day to this practice, never stopping, so they claimed, for years on end.

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Collation and editing: Collectors often compared multiple editions of a particular work (perhaps examining early manuscripts side by side with later imprints) prior to recopying. They exercised their philological skill by choosing among the variant characters, or even entire passages, that multiple editions inevitably presented when laid out for close comparison. Scholarly studies: Simply amassing a large library but not using it to make a contribution to learning was said to be wasteful, if not disgraceful. Many collectors approached their holdings with a sense of scholarly responsibility: some were specialists in a particular field or classic and produced new commentaries or studies on it; others rifled through the tens of thousands of juan in their holdings to produce anthologies that, once printed, would bring seldom-seen texts to the readers’ attention; and still others produced annotated catalogs of their own books and rare editions as a record for posterity. Book lending: Book lending was certainly exceptional among bibliophiles, who were more likely to be fiercely possessive of their books (discussed later), but it did happen. There are records of collectors who generously lent books to others for reading or copying, actions that were credited with being crucial in the lives of more than a few aspiring young scholars. Printing: Several collectors brought out their own imprints, often of older books in their collection that they themselves had edited and “improved.” Book printing know-how was widespread, the necessary materials easy to come by, and woodblock carvers cheap labor. So printing on a small scale was relatively easy to arrange. Many of these scholar-collectors turned printers probably never intended to make money off the titles they published. The imprints’ value was in their cultural capital. As gifts to family and friends, they would be hard evidence of the collector’s scholarly pursuits. But, of course, the line between printing for prestige and printing for profit was not absolute and could easily be crossed. The most famous late Ming scholar-collector was also among the most prolific publishers. Mao Jin ↯ᰝ (1599–1659) had been a student of the renowned scholar Qian Qianyi 䣶䃭Ⲟ (1582–1664) but was unsuccessful in his attempts to pass the civil service exams. He turned to printing, drawing on his learning and his large library of eighty-four thousand volumes (ce ‫ )ݞ‬and naming his publishing house Jiguge ≆স䭷 (Wellspring of Antiquity Pavilion). He would bring out some six hundred titles, specializing in Tang and Song works that were then largely unavailable, many of which he printed for the very first time. He is thought to have employed some two hundred workers, carvers and printers mostly, whom he boarded in various workrooms and storehouses in his own home. No doubt Mao Jin made a living from his publishing business. But even so, he clung to the mantle of scholar, as suggested by the name he gave to his operation. A contrast has emerged in recent scholarship on book collectors and book circulation during the late imperial period. Concerning the accessibility of books to those who sought to obtain and read them—for whatever reason (e.g.,

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for general interest or for exam preparation)—recent accounts leave distinctly different impressions depending on which account one reads. Large, comprehensive Chinese-language studies of the subject, such as Fan Fengshu’s 㣗޸к Zhongguo sijia cangshushi Ё೑⾕ᆊ㮣к৆ (A history of private book collecting in China) and the premodern library volume of Wang Yuguang’s ⥟ ԭ‫ ܝ‬Zhongguo tushuguanshi: Gudai cangshu juan Ё೑೒к佚৆ (A history of Chinese libraries),2 emphasize the abundance of books, the growing number of ever-larger private libraries in each dynastic period, the promotion of book production by collector-printers, and even the frequency of book lending between the haves and have-nots of the reading public. One comes away from these studies with a strong impression that by the mid-Ming, if not before, the urban areas of China were flooded with books and that they were available for anyone who sought them. A very different picture emerges in Joseph P. McDermott’s A Social History of the Chinese Book. McDermott gives his study of book history a distinctive conceptual frame. He is interested in investigating not just the production, collection, and transmission of books but also the connection between books and the establishment of what he calls a “community of learning” (his reformulation of Erasmus’s “republic of letters”).3 McDermott finds that despite all the reverence for books and learning that unquestionably permeated upper-class society during the Song through the Ming, actual access to books remained very limited. He documents the frustrations often expressed at the time by aspiring scholars who found it difficult to obtain the range of books they wanted to have unless they were lucky enough to have been born into families of book collectors. McDermott points out that even well into the Qing, there was no systematic establishment of government-sponsored public libraries where people could go to read books, much less to borrow them. And he also lays a good deal of the blame for the book access problem at the feet of the private book collectors, whom he characterizes more as book hoarders who avoided sharing their precious volumes with anyone but a select few, most of them other collectors. This criticism was voiced by Chinese scholars at the time, some of whom went so far as to say that to the extent that collectors regularly hid away the books they collected, their passion for books had the ironic effect of impeding the spread of knowledge.4 As for the great private libraries of the affluent lower Yangzi region, McDermott argues that to aspiring scholars who came to the region from poorer inland areas, the large private libraries must have seemed more like locked vaults of knowledge than monuments to the Chinese love of books and learning. He goes on to acknowledge that some progress toward the idea of a “community of learning” was realized in the latter half of the Qing dynasty, when the imperial government began to institutionalize and otherwise promote open libraries and publication projects. One major step in this direction was the Siku quanshu ಯᑿܼ᳌ (Complete writings of the four

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repositories) project; what made this important in the context of access was not the compilation of the writings itself but rather the later decision, after the selected texts were copied and installed in several cities around the empire, to afford scholars with the right credentials access to the Four Repositories Libraries in Yangzhou, Zhenjiang, and Hangzhou, along with copying privileges. This step meant that, in one stroke, thousands of texts in all the traditional branches of learning now became widely accessible for the first time—at least to those who lived in those cities or could visit them. During the Qianlong and post-Qianlong reigns, the Qing government further promoted general learning by permitting high officials to use their status, wealth, and prestige to patronize editorial projects that employed hundreds of scholars and resulted in the publication of new editions of old scholarly books in classical studies, history, philosophy, and literature. Although the Four Repositories and later Qing government initiatives were not without their own restrictive and censorial purposes and private collectors’ old practices of book hoarding and clandestine preservation persisted, progress had been made toward a more liberal practice of sharing books and knowledge. In this connection, the 1794 Four Repositories catalog, the Siku quanshu zongmu tiyao ಯᑿܼ᳌㐑Ⳃᦤ㽕 (Catalog with critical abstracts of the Complete writings of the four repositories; see Gandolfo, chapter 50), warrants special mention. A long tradition of annotated book catalogs, prepared for both imperial libraries and private libraries, stretched back at least to the Song dynasty. The more perfunctory of these were minimally annotated, simply noting the title of each work, the author, and the date (if known) and perhaps including a brief generalization about its contents. The more ambitious library catalogs contained more extensive entries for each title, delving into, for example, questions there might be concerning a work’s provenance, authenticity, authorship, or missing or interpolated passages. Sometimes the cataloger would also give a general assessment of the work and its contribution to the field of knowledge to which it belonged. Among early catalogs, the ones compiled of their personal libraries by Chao Gongwu ᰕ݀℺ (1105–1180) and Chen Zhensun 䱇ᤃᄿ (1179–1262), containing 1,492 and 3,096 titles, respectively, became the models for many that followed. Although not strictly speaking a library catalog, “Jingji kao” ㍧㈡㗗 (Study of books), with seventy-five juan of critical entries on books, in Ma Duanlin’s 侀ッ㞼 (1254–1323) encyclopedia, Wenxian tongkao ᭛⥏㍅㗗 (Comprehensive examination of authoritative sources), brought this type of writing to a new level because Ma’s entries scrupulously take account of much that had been written about a particular title by earlier scholars. But no earlier book catalog begins to compare with the Zongmu tiyao. It is not the sheer size or the number of titles treated that makes this catalog so important, although the numbers are impressive (3,471 titles of works selected

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into the Four Repositories, with another 6,793 notices on titles not selected). What sets the Zongmu tiyao apart is the high quality of the critical abstracts themselves. This is High Qing bibliographical scholarship at its best, obviously influenced by the kaozhengxue 㗗䄝ᅌ (evidential learning) tradition of learning. The entries zero in on whatever problematic issues there are for each work. The discussions are learned, drawing on relevant cognate sources; the argumentation is persuasive, supported by quotations of particular passages; and the assessments are fair and balanced. There is indeed a commendable large-mindedness evident in the ultimate judgment typically given of a work’s value: minor blemishes or eccentricities were tolerated, and allowances were made for period styles and intellectual proclivities of the day. What is also clear is that specialists among the hundreds of editors working under the Four Repositories editor-in-chief, Ji Yun ㋔ᯔ (1724–1805), must have been involved in writing the entries. Thus, the notices on classical commentaries display the learning of classicists, those on historiography the influence of historians, and those on poetry and literary collections the influence of literary scholars. The other crucial virtue of this enormous critical catalog, which runs to 4,490 pages in a modern typeset edition, is that it was immediately published upon its completion in 1794, twenty years after it was begun. To have such a work not just completed but also circulating in printed form was an unprecedented accomplishment. It would be difficult to overstate the significance of its appearance or the contribution it made to knowledge of China’s written past. Perhaps the most famous private library from imperial times that still exists today is Tianyi Library (Tianyige ໽ϔ䭷) in the city of Ningbo, which now consists of several buildings spread out over a compound abutting Moon Lake (Yuehu ᳜␪) in central Ningbo. A close examination of that library reveals several features that help to account for its longevity and status as one of the premier private book collections of Ming and Qing times. In recent years, the library has been converted into Tianyi Library Museum, and several buildings have been added to fill out the needs of the museum. Yet in imperial times, Tianyi Library already consisted of multiple buildings because as the collection grew, the original two-story library building could no longer contain it. Tianyi Library was established by Fan Qin 㣗ℑ (1506–85), a native of Ningbo who passed the jinshi exam and rose in his official career to the high post of vice minister of war. After he retired from official service in his midfifties, he returned to Ningbo and established the library, filling it with the books he had acquired over several decades in various provincial assignments. The library’s holdings grew considerably during the Fan family’s curatorship of the library, which lasted through the Qing period, even as portions of the original collection were lost. Fan Qin’s descendants continued to be active in the management of the library through the Republican period, when the Ningbo

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government also became involved. In 1949, the library became the property of the Ningbo municipal government. At that time, and on into the 1950s and 1960s, the size of the collection grew manyfold as the holdings of other previously private collections in the Ningbo area were combined into the Tianyi Library collection. Today the holdings are digitalized, including numerous titles and editions that are found only in the Tianyi database, which researchers can access only at the site. Fan Qin’s original collection consisted of some seventy thousand juan of books, with particular strengths in local gazetteers and family genealogies. Visiting the library today and searching out vestiges of its past, one is struck by all the precautions the early Fan family patriarchs took to safeguard their collection. The library shows that its keepers clearly had a keen appreciation of the precariousness of their collection and the many dangers that threatened it. The primary ones apparently were fire, insects, and either greed or apathy about maintaining the collection within the Fan clan itself. Worry about the threat of fire is readily understood: the wooden buildings that typically housed libraries were easy prey for flames, and, in fact, several large private libraries in Ningbo were lost to fire. One finds evidence of Fan Qin’s worries about fire in the name he chose for his library: Tianyi derives from a statement in Zheng Xuan’s 䜁⥘ (127–200) commentary on the Yijing ᯧ㍧ (Classic of Changes): “Heaven (tian) is one (yi) and produces water; Earth is six and receives it.” The library’s name thus promotes the association of the building with water, the phase in the Five Phases scheme that conquers the phase of fire. More pragmatic measures were also taken. Fire-prevention corridors have been constructed within buildings to inhibit the spread of fire, and the doorways leading in and out of such corridors are staggered, preventing straight-line passage. Pools of water are scattered throughout the grounds so that flames could be handily doused if necessary. The apprehensiveness over fire continues into the present. To this day, there is no electrical wiring inside the library building, and one ascends the stairway to the second floor holding a flashlight. It is on the second floor that the original collection of Fan Qin’s books were stored. The first floor was reserved for reading rather than storage in an effort to protect the books from dampness and insects. The books were kept in fully enclosed camphor book cabinets (camphor being used for its fumigant properties against insects) with solid doors that were locked shut. These cabinets were labeled with a single character in conventional five-character sequences (e.g., the five musical notes of the pentatonic scale and the five human virtues). Yet the early Fan patriarchs understood that it was carelessness, apathy, or avarice within the clan that constituted perhaps the greatest threat to the preservation of their collection. Inside the library building, they posted two large inscriptions at the foot of the stairway leading to the second floor with its books. The first reads: “Tobacco and Liquor Are Strictly Forbidden in the Upper Story”

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✭䜦ߛᖠⱏῧ. The second announces a series of graduated punishments for clan members who violate the rules for safeguarding the collection: Sons or grandsons who, without reason, open the door and enter the library will be punished by exclusion from the ancestral sacrifices on three occasions. Those who secretly bring friends or relatives into the library and presume, on their own, to open the book cases will be punished by exclusion from the ancestral sacrifices for one year. Those who presume, on their own, to lend books to in-laws or other persons with different surnames will be punished by exclusion from ancestral sacrifices for two years. When such lending results in the mortgaging or pawning of books, aside from a retroactive punishment to be assessed, the descendant will be permanently expelled from the clan and forever prohibited from participating in ancestral sacrifices.5

Clearly, the clan elders knew there was no guarantee that the younger generations would share their own veneration for books and learning. Thanks probably in part to such precautions, the Ningbo Fan clan was successful in preserving much of its private library through four centuries (although it lost a sizable number of them in “donations” to the Four Repositories project). But that preservation was not without a cost. From the preceding notice, for example, one may see that younger male members of the clan were prohibited even from entering the library building on their own, much less from opening the book cases. One is reminded of the close relationship between book collecting and book hoarding, mentioned earlier, that seems to have bedeviled much of library building in premodern times.

Notes 1. Figures from Fan Fengshu 㣗޸к, Zhongguo sijia cangshu shi Ё೑⾕ᆊ㮣к৆ (Zhengzhou: Daxiang chubanshe, 2001), extracted in Joseph P. McDermott, A Social History of the Chinese Book: Books and Literati Culture in Late Imperial China (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2006), 134. 2. In Han Yongjin 䶽∌䖯, ed., Zhongguo tushuguanshi Ё೑೒к佚৆, 4 vols. (Beijing: Guojia tushuguan chubanshe, 2017). 3. McDermott, Social History, 117. 4. McDermott, Social History, 145, quoting Gui Zhuang ⅌㥞 (1613–73), Gui Zhuang ji ⅌ 㥞䲚 (Shanghai: Zhonghua shuju, 1962), 2:494. 5. This notice, like the previous one, is still posted inside the library building today. The text is reproduced in Luo Zhaoping 做‫ܚ‬ᑇ, Tianyi ge congtan ໽ϔ䯕ϯ䇜 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1993), 34–35; and McDermott, Social History, 244n106.

CHAPTER 43

LATE IMPERIAL LITERARY ARCHIVES KAIJUN CHEN

U

nlike the archives of modern Chinese literature, there was no explicitly named literary archive in premodern China, but this volume’s etic perspective allows diverse terms not available to historical actors to shed light on the equivalent management of literary production by means of an archive. By 87 CE, the newly built Eastern Tower (Dongguan ᵅ㾔) housed “books” not generated immediately from the administrative operation, while the Orchid Terrace (Lantai 㰁㟎), which had been built in the Western Han, specialized in storing administrative documents such as edicts, memorials, and legal codes.1 Based on their different temporal relations with contemporary administrations, this divided specialization of depositories continued in the dynasties to follow.2 This chapter examines the archival management of literary and theatrical production in late imperial China, when the cultural production at court was an integral part of its governing technology. To do this, it will investigate the literary archive, whose structure overlapped with various administrative and fiscal archives in the second millennium. The chapter focuses on the imperial theatrical archive, the Shengpingshu ᯛᑇ㕆 (Bureau of Ascending Peace), which existed from the 1820s to 1911, during the Qing dynasty.3 The archive consisted in part of documents directly related to literary production, such as play scripts, stage directions, and prop catalogs, but a large amount of its documents concerned administrative operations. Differing from libraries, which housed selected works permanently, this archive served more like a time capsule, recording specific moments of literary production. Once a reported project had finished, the value or significance

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of such documents changed from functional to historiographical. Moreover, the heterogeneity of the media, as well as the genres, in the archive raises a thorny issue in studying literature together with historical written data: What is the literariness of documents? This question may be posed of the most recent scholarship on Chinese archives, which has made discoveries about the registration system, construction of storage, and personnel. The question this chapter addresses is, How can an understanding of the structural and processual practice of archiving shed new light on the political and material management of literary work?

Genre The archival documents in the theatrical Shengpingshu were certainly called dang ⁨, which is probably derived from a Manchu term, dangse.4 This archive of literature and theater was a late and small part of the gigantic archival system of statecraft, which primarily dealt with military campaigns, revenue, and public construction projects under the central government’s control. Archival practice in the Shengpingshu exemplifies both the general managerial principles and the specific approach applied to literature and art-related information—in other words, cultural management in statecraft. The Jiaofangsi ᬭഞৌ (Office of Music Instruction) from the Tang to the Qing dynasty was a comparable bureau that managed theatrical production and probably stored drama scripts, but there is too little documentation to examine it.5 In terms of general archives of the late imperial period, the Ming government had already established a system of administrative paper trails. The term wendang ᭛⁨ (textual document) appears in a memorial dated February 11, 1392, in a draft version of the Ming shilu ᯢᆺ䣘 (Ming veritable records).6 However, dang was not widely used as the name of archival documents during the Ming dynasty. A few Ming rulers attempted to control the writing style of administrative communications, which would eventually become archival documents once the official missions referred to had been accomplished. For example, the Ming founder, Zhu Yuanzhang ᴅ‫( ⩟ܗ‬1328–1398), pledged to criminalize unnecessarily complex writing (fanwen 㐕᭛).7 Given the fact that many memorials and formal statements were still anthologized into individual writers’ literary œuvres, this attempted restriction on style implied rich alternative embellishments that should call our attention to the historical entanglement of information management and the stylistic development of functional genres.8 The managerial principles were embedded in a hierarchical decorum of writing style and material format. The ceaseless stream of documents between the central and regional bureaus can be classified into three flows: those dispatched from superior institutions,

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those submitted from subordinate departments, and lateral correspondence.9 The genre of administrative documents depended on the positions of sender and receiver in the bureaucracy as well as the issue under discussion. For instance, the “Xingyi wanglai shili” 㸠⿏ᕔ՚џ՟ (Precedents for official correspondence), issued in 1382, regulated the movement of information by specifying which bureaus were allowed to directly correspond with each other. Moreover, the formulaic templates in “Xingyi shuya tishi” 㸠⿏㕆ᢐ储 ᓣ (Templates for official correspondence), decreed in the same year, further prescribed the format, such as the number of characters on each line and the number of lines per page, and specified the correct way to write official titles, honorifics, lipograms, and so on.10 In a sense, the templates standardized the documents on the material level by stipulating the appropriate size of paper to be used for different ranks of correspondence.11 By the Song dynasty, the government was using seventeen types of paper in different colors and materials to differentiate among genres.12 These formal and material regulations over the documents served as technical markers for classifying them, thus narrowing the kinds of information they were expected to transmit.

Medium The Shengpingshu archive brought together a peculiar heterogeneity of materials. In addition to the fifteen kinds of textual genres, it housed costumes and stage props in its Qianliangchu 䣶㊻㰩 (Office of Supplies). Two-thirds of the extant textual archives of the Shengpingshu in the National Library today consist of drama scripts.13 The scripts preserve not only the plays’ texts but also production details of specific performances. Thus, one play title could generate as many as six kinds of texts employed in performances. The zongben 㐑ᴀ is a complete play script, as opposed to the dantou ben ஂ丁ᴀ, which transcribes only a single character’s arias and speech. The qupu ᳆䄰 provides the musical score between the lines of lyrics, and the tigang ᦤ㎅ lists the cast of a specific production. The chuantou paichang І丁ᥦจ lays out the stage design and choreographic arrangement. Finally, the most polished and refined andian ben ᅝ↓ᴀ (palace repository copies) were prepared for the royal audience to consult during a performance.14 These multiple genres of records in the archive reflect the multidimensional documentation of theatrical performances. This somewhat redundant proliferation of scripts added to the volume amassed since the beginning of script collection and censorship, which was a crucial part of archiving practice. One telling example is the Qianlong emperor’s ђ䱚ⱛᏱ (r. 1735–96) rebuke of the censors’ excessive efforts to collect allegedly seditious play scripts during 1780–81. A few bannerman officials, who were the emperor’s personal intelligence agents in regional societies,

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including Ilingga (Yiling’a Ӟ唵䰓; d. 1795), were ordered to scrutinize potentially seditious scripts.15 They set up an office near the Lianghuai ܽ⏂ custom house and ended up submitting 434 titles of plays to be censored. The campaign quickly escalated, and governors of most provinces joined in inspecting local plays until Qianlong blamed the censors for the resulting cost and social disturbance. These scripts collected across the empire are still buried in the imperial theater archive in the Shengpingshu. The heterogeneity of documents in the Shengpingshu archive is marked by the multiple orders that the information crisscrosses. Apart from drama scripts, one third of the records in the National Library are various types of administrative documents: zhiyi dang ᮼᛣ⁨ (imperial orders), riji dang ᮹㿬⁨ (performers’ daily training), huaming dang 㢅ৡ⁨ (roll lists), sanjiao dang ᬷ㾦⁨ (recruitment and assessment), enshang dang ᘽ䊲⁨ (payments and gifts), and qianliang dang 䣶㊻⁨ (miscellaneous expenditures). Thus, the Shengpingshu archive stores both the play scripts and the information about their commission, circulation, and use. Moreover, Shengpingshu’s Office of Supplies complemented the textual archive, as it stored not only silver, elaborate costumes, and stage props but also the lengthy qingce ⏙‫( ݠ‬inventories) that listed all of these. The inventories in the Office of Supplies and the documentation in the Office of Archives jointly tracked the coordination of manufacture with other bureaus. Such information could be verified by records about the same commissions stored in the corresponding offices—for instance, the Zaobanchu 䗴䕺㰩 (Imperial Handicraft Workshops), which often manufactured the requested costumes or props.16 This redundant documentation served as a system of proof that monitored the collaborative procedures across offices. The physical documents of the Shengpingshu archive were scattered across several offices, forming an interconnected physical depository. The transmission of such documents between palaces was clearly noted as physical labor. In 1821, the court used five wagons to carry the archival documents and six wagons to take the zongben (full scripts) and kandan ⳟஂ (call lists) from the Forbidden City to the Summer Palace (Yuanmingyuan ೧ᯢ೦) as part of a routine tour around five palaces.17 The Qing emperors, together with their large entourage, routinely toured among a few residential and hunting sites every year.

Space An archive is as much about the structure of storage space as the physical documents kept there. Monumental archives in history are often remembered for their distinct architectural characteristics. Between 1534 and 1536, the Jiajing emperor approved the building of a fireproof stone structure, the Huangshicheng ⱛ৆ᆀ (Imperial Archive of History) to store shilu ᆺ䣘

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(veritable records), vital edicts, and imperial genealogy. Alternatively, water surrounding an archive could protect it from fire or unsanctioned access. Zhu Yuanzhang began building a depository on islets in Houhu ᕠ␪, a lake near Nanjing, to store huangce 咗‫( ݞ‬yellow registers), census and taxation records compiled every ten years.18 The number of rooms filled with ordered stacks of paper (jiage ᶊ䭷) kept expanding to various other islets and by 1562 amounted to 2,078 stacks housed in 525 rooms.19 Officials in charge of archiving documents considered damaged, incomplete, or improperly collated documents unacceptable. According to the administrative procedures in these premodern archival systems, a functioning administrative document could achieve the status of an archival document only after verification, duplication, and classification within an established sorting system.

Sorting System In the Shengpingshu theatrical archive, once a commissioned performance had ended, the running orders, lists, and design drafts were turned into archival documents for future reference. Some sample artifacts were marked with an inventory number, which was a character from the Qianzi wen गᄫ᭛ (Thousand character classic). The sorting system using the Qianzi wen was invented during the Song dynasty to manage ordered stacks (jiageku ᶊ䭷ᑿ). To combat disorder and theft, a fiscal commissioner (zhuanyun shi 䔝䘟Փ), Zhou Zhan ਼␯ (fl. ca. eleventh cent.), first used the characters in the Qianzi wen to serialize the archival records and match them with similarly marked shelves.20 An imperial edict then ordered archivists throughout the country to quickly adopt this method. The sorting system based on the Qianzi wen was still in use in Republican China.21 In short, the sorting system was an integrating technique key for archival information management. This sorting technique and strict standardization make the archive a pivotal reference point for governmental action—for instance, to hold officials accountable, to deliberate on policy, or simply to strengthen its authority. Documents in the archive were far from raw data but rather were organized according to state agendas. Looking back at the theatrical archive in Shengpingshu, it is clear that the highly regulated inventories and well-scrutinized play scripts exerted political control over cultural production. This chapter contextualizes a theater archive of the Qing court in the overarching imperial apparatus of information management in the longue durée. The structural development of archival practice reveals how political control permeated the regulation of material infrastructure as well as the process of archiving. The examples about paper formats in the Tang and Song, as well as the stylistic regulation of writing style in the Ming, show that templates were imposed to

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standardize the paper, format, and writing style of documents, thereby creating genres that specialized in transmitting different kinds of information. Such classification of media in a theater archive entailed the management of heterogeneous information—both documents and artifacts. The sorting system functioned as the protocol for integrating physical documents into an ordered physical space from which information could be efficiently retrieved. The precise and comprehensive collections of documents in the imperial archive of theater conserved a narrative of literary and artistic activities. In retrospect, the entirety of archives related to culture—more than those that are focused on fiscal and legal matters—reveals the uneasy relation between the volatile creation of culture and an imposing political power that aimed to establish an appropriate orderliness.

Notes 1. Li Xiaoju ᴢᰧ㦞, Tang-Song dang’an wenxian bianzuan yanjiu ૤ᅟḷḜ᭛⤂㓪㑖ⷨ お (Beijing: Shehui kexue wenxian chubanshe, 2014), 6–7. For a detailed discussion of the difference in the Han dynasty and inquiry on local archives, see Max Jakob Fölster, “Libraries and Archives in the Former Han Dynasty: Arguing for a Distinction,” in Manuscripts and Archives: Comparative Views on Record-Keeping, ed. Alessandro Bausi et al. (Boston: De Gruyter, 2018), 201–30. 2. Niu Runzhen ⠯⍺⦡, Han zhi Tangchu shiguan zhidu de yanbian ∝㟇૤߱৆ᅬࠊᑺ ⱘⓨব (Shijiazhuang: Hebei jiaoyu chubanshe, 1999). 3. Wang Zhizhang ⥟㢋ゴ, Qing Shengpingshu zhilüe ⏙ᯛᑇ㕆ᖫ⬹ (Beijing: Beiping yanjiuyuan shixue yanjiuhui, 1937). 4. Some scholars argue that the systematic archival practice named dang ⁨ began as Manchu statecraft. See Wang Jinyu ⥟䞥⥝, Wang Jinyu dang’an xue lunzhu ⥟䞥⥝⁨ Ḝᅌ䂪㨫 (Beijing: Zhongguo dang’an chubanshe, 2004), 38–57. See also Devin Fitzgerald, “Between Paper and Wood, or the Manchu Invention of the Dang’an,” Saksaha: A Journal of Manchu Studies 13 (2015): 75–80. 5. Zhang Ying ᓴᕅ, Lidai jiaofang yu yanju ग़ҷᬭഞϢⓨ࠻ (Jinan: Qi Lu shushe, 2007), 66–67, 172–73. 6. Liaoning sheng dang’anguan, ed., Mingdai Liaodong dang’an huibian ᯢҷ䖑ϰḷḜ∛ 㓪, 2 vols. (Shenyang: Liaosheng shushe, 1985), 1211. 7. Huang Zhangjian 咗ᕄ‫ع‬, comp., Taizu shilu ໾⼪ᆺ䣘, in Ming shilu (Nangang: Zhongyang yanjiuyuan lishi yuyan yanjiusuo, 1966), 149.2354 (Hongwu 15/10/27). 8. For a discussion of the literary quality of administrative genres such as memorials and statements, see K’o Ch’ing-ming [Ke Qingming] ᷃ᝊᯢ, Gudian Zhongguo shiyong wenlei meixue স‫݌‬Ё೟ᆺ⫼᭛串㕢ᅌ (Taipei: Guoli Taiwan daxue chuban zhongxin, 2016), 151–203. 9. For a brief summary of arguably the earliest system of various kinds of governmental correspondence in the Han dynasty, see Zhou Xueheng ਼䲾ᘚ, ed., Zhongguo dang’an shiyeshi Ё೑ḷḜџϮ৆ (Beijing: Renmin daxue chubanshe, 1994), 114–18. 10. Li Dongyang ᴢᵅ䱑 et al., comps., Da Ming huidian ໻ᯢ᳗‫݌‬, 5 vols. (Taipei: Dongnan shubao, 1963), 76.1201–2.

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11. Li Dongyang et al., Da Ming huidian, 76.1201–2. The “Precedents for Official Correspondence” specifies: “The officials in service who can use papers for official business following the models will be evaluated as the best. Criminalize those who do not follow the models.” 12. Toqto’a (Tuotuo 㛿㛿), comp., Songshi ᅟ৆, 40 vols. (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1977), 163.3842–46. 13. The National Library houses 1,239 volumes of scripts and other documents in 564 volumes. Other extant archival documents from the Shengpingshu are scattered in the First Archive, Palace Museum (11,491 play scripts), and Art Institute in Beijing. Only the documents in the National Library have been published in Shengpingshu dang’an jicheng ᯛᑇ㕆⁨Ḝ䲚៤. Wang Zhizhang maps out the institutional structure and analytically categorizes the archival documents in his Qing shengping shu zhilüe. 14. Zhang Hongwei ゴᅣӳ, “Gugong bowuyuan Qingchao gongting xiju wenxian shoucang xianzhuang” ᬙᅿम⠽䰶⏙ᳱᅿᓋ៣࠻᭛⤂ᬊ㮣⦄⢊, Zhongguo xiqu xueyuan xuebao 32, no. 8 (2011): 23–31. 15. Zhu Jiajin ᴅᆊ② and Ding Ruqin ϕ∱㢍, Qingdai neiting yanju shimo kao ⏙ҷ‫ݙ‬ᓋ ⓨ࠻ྟ᳿㗗 (Beijing: Zhongguo shudian, 2007), 55–67. 16. For example, see Wang Zhizhang, Qing Shengpingshu zhilüe, 222. 17. Wang Zhizhang, Qing Shengpingshu zhilüe, 586–88. 18. Li Hairong ᴢ⍋㤷, ed., Houhu zhi ৢ␪ᖫ (Nanjing: Nanjing chubanshe, 2011), 55. 19. Zhang Wenxian, “The Yellow Register Archive of Imperial Ming China,” Libraries and the Cultural Record 43, no. 2 (2008): 163. See also Li Hairong, Houhu zhi, 6, 19–20. 20. See Toqto’a (Tuotuo), Songshi, 300.9967. 21. Zhongguo dier lishi dang’anguan Ё೑㄀Ѡग़৆ḷḜ佚, ed., Minguo shiqi wenshu gongzuo he dang’an gongzuo ziliao xuanbian ⇥೑ᯊᳳ᭛кᎹ԰੠ḷḜᎹ԰䌘᭭䗝㓪 (Beijing: Dang’an chubanshe, 1987), 114.

CHAPTER 44

MODERN LIBRARIES J I D O N G YA N G

Early Development Modern libraries—circulating book collections that are professionally managed to serve the information needs of certain communities—first appeared in China in the nineteenth century. Like many other cultural and educational institutions emerging during the same period, they were products of the modernization movement in the late Qing dynasty. The earliest efforts to introduce modern Western libraries to the Chinese public were made in the mid-nineteenth century. Even before the First Opium War (1839–42), Lin Zexu ᵫࠛᕤ (1785–1850) had ordered the translation of the Encyclopaedia of Geography, comprising a Complete Description of the Earth, Physical, Statistical, Civil, and Political by Hugh Murray, published in London in 1834. Lin later gave the unpublished manuscript to Wei Yuan 儣⑤ (1794– 1857), who edited it by incorporating translations from some other Western works and published it under the title of Haiguo tuzhi ⍋೟೪ᖫ (Illustrated treatise on the maritime kingdoms) in 1843. Both Lin’s and Wei’s translations included detailed accounts of public libraries (gongzhong shuguan ݀㸚᳌仼) in some European countries and the United States.1 During the decades that followed the Opium War, a number of Qing officials and intellectuals visited Europe and America, including Guo Songtao 䛁ጽ⟒ (1818–91), Zeng Jize ᳒㋔╸ (1839–90), Li Gui ᴢഁ (1842–1903), and Wang Tao ⥟䶰 (1828–97), and brought back more reports about libraries in the Western world. They used a variety of Chinese compounds to render the Western

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concept of library, such as shuguan ᳌仼, shuku ᳌ᑿ, shuyuan ᳌䰶, dianji yuan ‫݌‬㈡䰶, and cangshu zhi suo 㮣᳌П᠔.2 In his Shengshi weiyan ⲯϪॅ㿔 (Words of warning to a prosperous age),3 Zheng Guanying 䜁㾔ឝ (1842–1922) made a clear distinction between traditional Chinese book repositories and Western libraries. As he pointed out, Chinese book collectors rarely shared their private holdings with people outside the family, while a great number of libraries in modern Britain, France, Germany, and other Western countries opened their collections to the general public. Near the end of the nineteenth century, leading reformists appealed to the Qing government to build modern libraries throughout the country. The leaders of the Hundred Days’ Reform of 1898, such as Kang Youwei ᒋ᳝⠆ (1858–1927) and Liang Qichao ṕଧ䍙 (1873–1929), all considered building libraries one of the top priorities on their political agenda.4 The first modern libraries modeled on Western public libraries appeared during the middle of the nineteenth century in China, within the communities of foreign immigrants and missionaries. Among them, the Shanghai Library, Bibliotheca Zi-Ka-Wei (Xujiahui cangshulou ᕤᆊः㮣᳌ῧ), and Library of the North China Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society were the most influential.5 Driven by the need to acquire Western science and technology, some of the new educational institutions founded by the Qing government also included a library. The Academy of United Cultures (Tongwenguan ৠ᭛仼), a college established in Beijing in 1862 to teach foreign languages, had a circulating collection (shuge ᳌䭷) of more than three thousand volumes to support the teaching and learning of the faculty and students.6 The library quickly became a standard feature of all newly established institutions of higher education, including the Imperial University of Beijing (Jingshi daxuetang Ҁ᏿໻ᅌූ; predecessor of Peking University). The original plan for building the university presented by the Qing cabinet to the emperor in 1898 placed the library (cangshulou 㮣᳌ῧ) at the very center of the institution, allocating more than one-third of the start-up budget (twelve thousand out of thirty-five thousand liang of silver) to the library’s construction and book acquisition.7 Entering the first decade of the twentieth century, the development of libraries gained momentum. In addition to educational institutions, local elites and authorities in Anhui, Zhejiang, Hunan, and Hubei established the country’s first libraries aiming to serve the general public.8 Meanwhile, tushuguan ೪᳌仼 became the widely accepted name for the modern type of library. Like many other words in the modern Chinese vocabulary, it was adopted from a Japanese term, toshokan ೇ᳌仼, attesting to the important role of Japan in the development of modern libraries in China.9 The founding of the Republic of China in 1912 ushered in an era of rapid growth for modern libraries. Within a few years, the Department of Education in the central government in Beijing issued the Tushuguan guicheng ೪᳌仼㽣⿟

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(Regulations on libraries) and Tongsu tushuguan guicheng 䗮֫೪᳌仼㽣⿟ (Regulations on public libraries), which defined the social, cultural, and educational roles of the library, encouraged contribution from the private sector, and required all public libraries to offer free access to the citizens.10 From the 1910s to the 1930s, the United States played a crucial role in the development of libraries and library science in China.11 Mary Elizabeth Wood (1861–1931), an American librarian, arrived in China as a missionary for the Protestant Episcopal Church in 1899. She would spend the rest of her life in China and help launch the so-called New Library movement that culminated in the founding of the Library Association of China in 1927.12 A number of Chinese students also went to the United States to study library science and became involved in the New Library movement after returning. Many leading intellectuals of the time, although holding very different positions on the country’s political spectrum, were united in calling for the development of modern libraries after the U.S. model.13 Li Dazhao ᴢ໻䞫 (1889–1927), head of the Peking University Library and one of the founders of the Chinese Communist Party, introduced the library science programs in seventeen U.S. universities in a newspaper article published in 1921.14 Thanks to all these efforts of both the government and the elite, new libraries emerged all across the country at a rapid rate. According to one statistical study,15 the total number of Chinese libraries in all categories increased from 293 in 1916 to 5,196 in 1936 (the year before full-scale fighting began in the Second Sino-Japanese War).

Modern Library Classifications and the New Definition and Status of Literature The modern libraries emerging in the late Qing period faced a dilemma in choosing an appropriate methodology for organizing their holdings. The traditional system of classifying all written works into the fourfold classification (sibu ಯ䚼 or siku ಯᑿ)—namely, jing ㍧ (Classics), shi ৆ (Histories), zi ᄤ (Masters), and ji 䲚 (Collections)—was still the method most familiar to and preferred by educated Chinese men of the time for sorting and seeking information. However, imported and translated Western works, especially those on science, technology, geography, medicine, law, and social sciences, could hardly be incorporated into this old taxonomy of knowledge.16 As a result, most newly founded Chinese libraries applied a hybrid approach, using the four-class system to catalog and shelve traditional books, while developing new methodologies for organizing modern publications.17 In the early decades of the twentieth century, as the majority of primary schools and colleges adopted the “new learning” (xinxue ᮄᅌ),18 the fourclass system quickly became obsolete for the young generation of students.

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Meanwhile, on the shelves of most educational and public libraries, books written in modern Chinese (baihua ⱑ䁅) and introducing new knowledge gradually outnumbered those published in Literary Chinese and covering traditional subjects. Thus, there emerged an urgent need to design a new and unified classification that was more suitable for contemporary libraries and their readers. A number of scholars devoted themselves to this cause, publishing a variety of cataloging schemes after U.S. and European models. The Dewey Decimal System of library classification created by U.S. librarian Melvil Dewey (1851–1931) in 1876 was of special interest to Chinese librarians of the time. Two of the most influential classifications for Chinese books—namely, those designed by Shen Zurong ≜⼪ᾂ (1883–1977) and Liu Guojun ࡝೟䟲 (1899–1980)—were based on Dewey’s system.19 The adoption of these new methodologies of cataloging marked the completion of the Chinese elite’s effort to redefine and restructure knowledge that had begun in the mid-nineteenth century. The modern Chinese concept of literature, like the terms for many other modern disciplines of the humanities and sciences, was also solidified under these new cataloging schemes. During the late Qing period, Chinese writers and readers gradually accepted the Western perception and classification of creative writings. Following the Japanese, they started to use the repurposed two-character compound wenxue ᭛ᅌ to render the modern Western meaning of “literature.”20 This new concept was dramatically different from wenzhang ᭛ゴ (belles lettres composed by members of the elite class in Literary Chinese) in premodern terminology. For example, literary works in the vernacular language, such as dramas of the Yuan dynasty and fiction of the Ming dynasty, were mostly excluded from the Siku quanshu ಯᑿܼ᳌ (Complete writings of the four repositories), compiled by the Qing court in the late eighteenth century.21 But they began to be considered true literature in nineteenth-century China. In the early Republican period, both Shen Zurong and Liu Guojun treated literature, along with linguistics, as one of the major classes in their newly designed cataloging schemes. In his Zhongguo tushu fenleifa Ё೟೪᳌ߚ串⊩ (Classification of Chinese books), first published in 1929 and revised in 1936, Liu proposed the following hierarchy of subject headings to represent Chinese literature of all times:22 Class of literature and linguistics 䁲᭛䚼       Languages and linguistics 䁲㿔᭛ᄫᅌ             . . . . . .       Chinese literature Ё೟᭛ᅌ             General theory 㐑䂪

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            Criticism on prose and poetry 䀽᭛䀩             Comprehensive anthologies 㐑䲚             Works of individual authors ߹䲚             Special genres of literature ⡍。᭛㮱                   Shi poetry 䀽                   Ci poetry 䀲                   Qu poetry ᳆                   Drama ࡛ᴀ                   Letters and miscellaneous writings ߑ⠬ঞ䲰㨫                   Fiction ᇣ䁾                   Folk literature ⇥䭧᭛ᅌ                   Children’s literature ‫ܦ‬ス᭛ᅌ       Literature of Oriental countries ᵅᮍ৘೟᭛ᅌ             . . . . . .       Literature of the West 㽓⋟᭛ᅌ             . . . . . .

Liu’s classification of Chinese literature was to a large extent an outline of what had already become common sense among Chinese writers, critics, and scholars by the end of the 1920s. Compared with the old four-class scheme, it amounted to an overhaul of the organization of China’s literary information, both historical and contemporary. Liu made a great effort to match literary genres of traditional China with those of the modern West as defined by the Dewey Decimal System. Under the heading of fiction (xiaoshuo ᇣ䂀), for example, he listed in parallel several fictional genres of both Chinese and Western origins, including biji ㄚ㿬 (casual prose notes), pinghua 䀩䁅 (premodern short stories), zhanghui ゴಲ (premodern novels in chapters), bianwen 䅞᭛ (Buddhist transformation texts), tanci ᔜ䀲 (narrative songs), duanpian ⷁ㆛ (modern short stories), and changpian 䭋㆛ (modern novels). His methodology would constitute the foundation of numerous later Chinese library classifications, including those still used by libraries in Taiwan and Hong Kong. The spread of modern libraries all over China during the Republican period fundamentally changed the way literary information was stored, organized, and accessed. Although private collections still played an important role in the distribution of writings, libraries increasingly became a major source of information for many readers, including those with sizable personal book repositories. Lu Xun 元䖙 (1881–1936), for example, recorded frequent visits to various libraries in his diaries.23 Literature books and magazines were oftentimes the most circulated materials in library collections, therefore consuming a significant part of the institution’s acquisition budget.

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Library and Literary Information in the People’s Republic of China The first twenty-five years of the Republican era were a golden age in the development of modern libraries in China. As the number of libraries increased dramatically in both urban and rural areas, library science as a new field of study had been firmly established in the country’s academia. But the outbreak of a full-scale war between China and Japan in 1937 brought the development to an abrupt stop. The founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949 marked the beginning of a new era in the history of Chinese libraries. Within a few years, the Communist Party and the new regime took over the management of all libraries across the country with the goal to “make them an important tool of educating the masses.” This mission was stated more clearly in the “Instruction for Strengthening and Improving the Work of Public Libraries,” issued by the Ministry of Culture in July 1955: “Public libraries are the cultural institutions that carry out education in patriotism and socialism to the people by means of books and magazines. They are very helpful for the party and government in conducting propaganda and education work.”24 In 1975, the first edition of the Zhongguo tushuguan fenleifa Ё೑೒к佚 ߚ㉏⊩ (Chinese library classification; hereafter CLC) was published. After several revisions, its fifth edition is now applied by most mainland Chinese libraries in cataloging. One of the most striking features of the CLC is that it separates the works by Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, and Deng Xiaoping from all other texts and places them at the very top of the taxonomy (class A).25 This practice not only reflects strong influence by the library classification of the former Soviet Union26 but also reminds people of the four-class scheme of premodern China, which put Confucian classics above everything else. However, the CLC’s treatment of literature basically followed the path started by librarians of the Republican period, as one can see from the following hierarchy of subject headings presented in class I:27 Literature ᭛ᄺ       Literary theory ᭛ᄺ⧚䆎             . . . . . .       World literature Ϫ⬠᭛ᄺ             . . . . . .       Chinese literature Ё೑᭛ᄺ             Guidelines, policies, and their interpretations ᮍ䩜ᬓㄪঞ݊䯤䗄             Literary criticism and studies ᭛ᄺ䆘䆎੠ⷨお             Criticism and studies on various genres ৘ԧ᭛ᄺ䆘䆎੠ⷨお

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            History of literature and literary thoughts ᭛ᄺ৆ǃ᭛ᄺᗱᛇ৆             Anthologies ԰ક䲚             Poetry, verse 䆫℠ǃ䷉᭛             Theatrical literature ៣࠻᭛ᄺ             Folk literature in oral forms ᳆㡎             Fictions ᇣ䇈             Reportage ᡹ਞ᭛ᄺ             Essays ᬷ᭛             Miscellaneous writings ᴖ㨫             Folk literature ⇥䯈᭛ᄺ             Children’s literature ‫ܓ‬ス᭛䗝             Literature of ethnic minorities ᇥ᭄⇥ᮣ᭛ᄺ       Literature of various countries ৘೑᭛ᄺ             . . . . . .

Apparently, the overall organization of literary information in the CLC is a continuation from the 1920s and the 1930s with some modifications. It is built on a consensus about the understanding of literature among the country’s intellectuals developed over the course of more than a century. Unlike the libraries of the Republican period that received funding from a variety of sources, including the government, local communities, entrepreneurs, and religious groups, almost all libraries in the People’s Republic had to rely on the government for fiscal support, at least until the early 1980s.28 Although monetary donations from the private sector have been allowed and encouraged since then, the government has remained the dominant player in library development up to the present day. As a result, while most provincial and municipal libraries have moved into brand-new and much larger buildings over the past two to three decades, small-size and community-oriented public libraries are still scarce even in major Chinese cities.29 This fact at least partially explains why the arrival of the internet age in the 1990s brought revolutionary changes to the landscape of Chinese literature. As literary writers and readers have rushed to online platforms to produce and seek information,30 mainstream literary magazines from the predigital age find it hard to survive today.31

Chinese Libraries and Literary Information in the Digital Age Advances in information technology have brought about a massive digitization of Chinese written works. Since the late 1980s, many cultural and educational institutions, as well as commercial companies in mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the United States, have invested heavily in digitizing historical and contemporary Chinese texts, producing a large number of

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searchable databases that have transformed the landscape of Chinese studies. There are two basic methods of digitizing Chinese works: scanning (often combined with optical character recognition [OCR] technology) and manual input. While the best-quality Chinese databases currently available have been created mostly through manual input of characters (see Mullaney, chapter 4, and Sturgeon, chapter 47), the accuracy of Chinese OCR technology has improved significantly over the past few decades, and the application of artificial intelligence may make it even better in the near future.32 As of now, the majority of premodern and modern Chinese literary works have been digitized at least once, and the rest are being made available electronically at a rapid rate. This has resulted in fundamental changes in reading, teaching, and researching Chinese literature. Chinese libraries both inside and outside the Chinese-speaking world have embraced the transition from print to digital. Although the physical book is still preferred by many as the format most suitable for daily reading and libraries, especially public libraries, continue to acquire printed publications in large quantities, electronic databases and serials are increasingly becoming the most heavily used resources in academic and research libraries. Many institutions with an extensive collection of Chinese-language materials, such as the National Library of China in Beijing, Shanghai Library, National Central Library (Guojia tushuguan ೟ᆊ೪᳌仼) in Taipei, and Harvard-Yenching Library in Cambridge, Massachusetts, have digitized their unique holdings in addition to purchasing commercial databases and e-books. Thanks to the open-access movement, which has gained momentum since the turn of the century, a large and ever-increasing number of primary-source texts, images, and maps are now shared freely online by communities of China scholars around the world, as exemplified by the Chinese Text Project (http://ctext.org; see Sturgeon, chapter 47). The availability of massive textual and other data has also spurred the rapid development of computational scholarship that uses sophisticated algorithms and specifically designed software to perform research tasks that are difficult for the human brain to do. While most scholars and librarians have welcomed the arrival of the digital age, some have cautioned against its potential negative side effects and risks. Digital information is convenient to store, access, and search, but its longterm preservation is always a big challenge to the library. The standardization process required for dealing with electronic data may oversimplify the cultural complexity and diversity that are represented very well by traditional print media. In the case of the literary information of China, for example, the nuances between different print editions of the same text are sometimes important clues for studying linguistic, cultural, and political changes over time, but they may be lost as more and more scholars are only using one standardized digital version. The copyright of many Chinese texts is of particular concern and may

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bring legal risks for online users in the future. Despite all these issues, the transition to digital is unstoppable and will continue to reshape the readership and scholarship of Chinese literature in the years to come.

Notes 1. Cheng Huanwen ⿟⛩᭛, “Xifang tushuguan guannian de chuanru” 㽓ᮍ೒к佚㾖ᗉ ⱘӴܹ, in Zhongguo tushuguanshi Ё೑೒к佚৆, ed. Han Yongjin 䶽∌䖯 (Beijing: Guojia tushuguan chubanshe, 2017), 2:9–12. 2. Cheng, “Xifang tushuguan,” 2:20–29. 3. Zheng Guanying, Shengshi weiyan, 2 vols. (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 2008), 1:403–14. Cf. Jing Liao, “The Genesis of the Modern Academic Library in China: Western Influences and the Chinese Response,” Libraries and Culture 39, no. 2 (2004): 165–66. 4. Li Xibi ᴢᏠ⊠ and Zhang Jiaohua ᓴỦढ, eds., Zhongguo gudai cangshu yu jindai tushuguan shiliao (Chunqiu zhi Wusi qianhou) Ё೑সҷ㮣кϢ䖥ҷ೒к佚৆᭭ ˄᯹⾟㟇Ѩಯࠡৢ˅ (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1982), 88–95. 5. Hu Daojing 㚵䘧䴭, “Shanghai tushuguanshi” Ϟ⍋೒к佚৆, in Shanghai lishi yanjiu Ϟ⍋ग़৆ⷨお (1935; repr., Shanghai: Shanghai renmin chubanshe, 2011), 9–17, 34–36, 42–44; Harold M. Otness, “ ‘The One Bright Spot in Shanghai’: A History of the Library of the North China Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society,” Journal of the Hong Kong Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society 28 (1988): 185–97. 6. Li and Zhang, Zhongguo gudai, 85. 7. Chen Yuanhui 䰜‫ܗ‬ᰪ et al., eds., Zhongguo jindai jiaoyu shi ziliao huibian Ё೑䖥ҷᬭ 㚆৆䌘᭭∛㓪, 10 vols. (Shanghai: Shanghai jiaoyu chubanshe, 2007), 4:228–39. 8. Cheng Huanwen, “Qingmo xinzheng shiqi de gonggong tushuguan yundong” ⏙᳿ᮄ ᬓᯊᳳⱘ݀݅೒к佚䖤ࡼ, in Han, Zhongguo tushuguanshi, 2:48–58. 9. Zhang Lihua ᔉ呫㧃, “Kindai shin Kango ‘toshokan’ no Chūgokugo e no inyū to teichaku ni tsuite” 䖥ҷᮄ⓶䁲Njೇ᳌仼njȃЁ೑䁲ȍȃ⿏ܹǽᅮⴔȀǹǙǻ, Kansai daigaku Chūgoku bungakukai kiyō 䭶㽓໻ᄺЁ೑᭛ᄺӮ㋔㽕 30 (2009): 47–69; Tōjō Fuminori ᵅᴵ᭛㽣, Toshokan no kindai: shiron toshokan wa kōshite ōkiku natta ೇ᳌仼ȃ䖥ҷ: ⾕䂪ίೇ᳌仼ȄǨǛǬǻ໻ǢǤǿǸǴ (Tokyo: Potto shuppan, 1999), 12–27. 10. Wang Lei ⥟㭒 and Li Pengyuan ᴢᕁ‫ܗ‬, “Minguo chuqi de xin tushuguan yundong” ⇥೑߱ᳳⱘᮄ೒к佚䖤ࡼ, in Han, Zhongguo tushuguanshi, 2:87–90. 11. See Nagazawa Kikuya 䭋≶㽣ⶽг, “Kindai Shina no tosho kyū toshokan” 䖥ҷᬃ䙷ȃ ೇ᳌ঞೇ᳌仼, Ajia mondai kōza ȪɀȪଣ丠䃯ᑻ 10 (1939): 437–38; and Ming-yueh Tsay, “The Influence of the American Library Association on Modern Chinese Librarianship, 1924–1949,” Asian Libraries 8, no. 8 (1999): 275–88. 12. George W. Huang, “Miss Mary Elizabeth Wood: Pioneer of the Library Movement in China,” Tushuguan xue yu zixun kexue ೪᳌仼ᅌ㟛䊛㿞⾥ᅌ 1, no. 1 (1975): 67–78. 13. Wang and Li, “Minguo chuqi,” 2:96–115. 14. See Li Dazhao, “Meiguo tushuguanyuan zhi xunlian” 㕢೑೒к佚ਬП䆁㒗, in Li Dazhao quanji ᴢ໻䩞ܼ䲚, ed. Zhongguo Li Dazhao yanjiuhui Ё೑ᴢ໻䩞ⷨおӮ (Beijing: Renmin chubanshe, 2006), 3:336–44. 15. Zhixian Yi, “History of Library Development in China” (paper presented at IFLA WLIC 2013, July 1, 2013), http://library.ifla.org/143/, 4. Cf. Yan Wenyu ಈ᭛䚕, Zhongguo tushuguan fazhanshi Ё೟೪᳌仼ⱐሩ৆ (Taipei: Zhongguo tushuguan xiehui, 1983), 110–14.

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16. Zou Zhenhuan 䚍ᤃ⦃, “Zhongguo tushu fenleifa de yange yu zhishi jiegou de bianhua” Ё೑೒к佚ߚ㉏⊩ⱘ⊓䴽੠ⶹ䆚㒧ᵘⱘব࣪, Fudan daxue xuebao (shehui kexue ban) 3 (1987): 88–89. 17. Zuo Yuhe Ꮊ⥝⊇, “Dianji fenlei yu jindai Zhongguo zhishi xitong zhi yanhua” ‫݌‬㈡ߚ ㉏Ϣ䖥ҷЁ೑ⶹ䆚㋏㒳Пⓨ࣪, Huadong shifan daxue xuebao: Zhexue shehui kexue ban 36, no. 6 (November 2004): 48–51. 18. Chen Jingpan 䰜᱃⺤, Zhongguo jindai jiaoyushi Ё೑䖥ҷᬭ㚆৆, 3rd ed. (Beijing: Renmin jiaoyu chubanshe, 2004), 208–33, 261–69. 19. Yu Junli ֲ৯ゟ et al., Zhongguo wenxian fenleifa bainian fazhan yu zhanwang Ё೑᭛ ⤂ߚ㉏⊩ⱒᑈথሩϢሩᳯ (Wuhan: Wuhan daxue chubanshe, 2002), 10–14. 20. Chen Guanghong 䰜ᑓᓬ, “Jindai Zhongguo wenxue gainian zhuanhuan de lishi yujing he lujing” 䖥ҷЁ೑᭛ᄺὖᗉ䕀ᤶⱘग़৆䇁๗੠䏃ᕘ, Wenxue pinglun 5 (2016): 84–98. 21. He Zongmei ԩᅫ㕢, “Siku tixi zhong de quxue sixiang bianzheng” ಯᑧԧ㋏Ёⱘ᳆ ᄺᗱᛇ䕽䆕, Wenxue yichan 2 (2018): 154–63; Wen Qingxin ⏽ᑚᮄ, “Cong muluxue jiaodu tan Siku quanshu zongmu bu shou tongsu xiaoshuo de yuanyou” ҢⳂᔩᄺ㾦ᑺ 䇜ljಯᑧܼкᘏⳂNJϡᬊ䗮֫ᇣ䇈ⱘ㓬⬅, Tushuguan gongzuo yu yanjiu 261 (2017): 77–82. 22. Liu Guojun ࡝೟䟲, Zhongguo tushu fenleifa Ё೟೪᳌ߚ串⊩, 2nd rev. ed. (Nanjing: Jinling daxue tushuguan, 1936), 104–10. 23. Li and Zhang, Zhongguo gudai, 173–77. 24. Xiao Ximing 㙪Ꮰ⇥ and Tang Yi ૤Н, “Xin Zhongguo chengli chuqi de tushuguan” ᮄЁ೑៤ゟ߱ᳳⱘ೒к佚, in Han, Zhongguo tushuguanshi, 3:15. 25. Guojia tushuguan Zhongguo tushuguan fenleifa bianji weiyuanhui ೑ᆊ೒к佚ljЁ೑ ೒к佚ߚ㉏⊩NJ㓪䕥ྨਬӮ, ed., Zhongguo tushuguan fenleifa Ё೑೒к佚ߚ㉏⊩, 5th ed. (Beijing: Guojia tushuguan chubanshe, 2010), 1–5. 26. Wenxian Zhang, “Classification for Chinese Libraries (CCL): Histories, Accomplishments, Problems, and Its Comparisons,” Journal of Educational Media and Library Sciences 41, no. 1 (2003): 9–12. 27. Guojia tushuguan Zhongguo tushuguan fenleifa bianji weiyuanhui, Zhongguo tushuguan fenleifa, 167–75. 28. Wang You-mei and A. R. Rogers, “Thirty Years of Library Development in the People’s Republic of China,” International Library Review 14 (1984): 399. 29. Zhang Jun ᓴ֞, “Zhengxie ti’an jianyi fazhan shequ tushuguan” ᬓणᦤḜᓎ䆂থሩ⼒ ऎ೒к佚, Zhonghua dushubao Ёढ䇏к᡹, March 8, 2006, 1. 30. Ji Wei ጛӳ, “Hulianwang shidai de qiji: Zhongguo wangluo wenxue” Ѧ㘨㔥ᯊҷⱘ ༛䗍˖Ё೑㔥㒰᭛ᄺ, BBC News Chinese, March 5, 2010, https://www.bbc.com/zhongwen /trad/indepth/2010/03/100302_internetliterature1. 31. Yan Jiaqi Ϲ㩁⎛, “Chun wenxue zazhi shengcun kunjing” 㒃᭛ᄺᴖᖫ⫳ᄬೄ๗, Huaxia shibao ढ໣ᯊ᡹, July 19, 2012, 19. 32. Donald Sturgeon, “Large-Scale Optical Character Recognition of Pre-modern Chinese Texts,” International Journal of Buddhist Thought and Culture 28, no. 2 (2018): 11–44.

CHAPTER 45

MODERN LITERATURE MUSEUMS AND ARCHIVES K IR K A . DE N TON

L

iterature and literary information do not exist without (1) the media through which they are disseminated (e.g., literary journals, newspaper supplements, books, compendia, and encyclopedias), (2) the agents behind them (e.g., writers, literary societies, editors, scholars, critics, and teachers), and (3) the readers who consume them and give them lived meaning. Modern literature museums and archives, the focus of this chapter, also contribute to the shaping of literature and literary information; like other media discussed in this volume, they collect, categorize, filter, and sometimes narrativize information and human knowledge. But museums are unique in terms of giving a three-dimensional and multimedia presence to a two-dimensional form grounded in language and print. The museum and the archive are architectural structures (though not always, of course, in this digital age) that people enter and walk through, observing and perusing the materials inside. Unlike reading a literary text—a process of entering an imagined world stirred by words on a page—or reading about literature in an encyclopedia, visiting a literature museum is an embodied and sensorial experience. The building surrounds the visitor and—with its entrances, front desks, display rooms, multimedia exhibits, hallways, and stacks—controls, or attempts to control, the visitor’s movement through its space. Some literature museums also include dioramas that three-dimensionalize the writer and the world they inhabited in history or created in fiction, thus bringing the literary past into our embodied world in a way text or a photograph, for instance, cannot.

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With their architectural presence and use of visual and multimedia exhibitionary technology, literature museums and archives constitute an intermedial leap from the literary and the textual, and as with the adaptation of a literary text into film, for example, much is lost or transformed in the process. By their very nature, exhibits in a museum present a simplified narrative that emphasizes the writer, the writer’s life, and physical artifacts (e.g., books, journals, and photographs) or that situates writers in a larger context of literary history. Literary information is reduced to a digestible narrative for easy consumption. This chapter explores museums and archives devoted to modern literature in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and Taiwan and their roles in shaping and narrativizing the literary past and offering a public face for literature. The focus is on two national literature museums, the National Museum of Modern Chinese Literature (Zhongguo xiandai wenxueguan Ё೑⦄ҷ᭛ᄺ佚) in Beijing and the National Museum of Taiwan Literature (Guoli Taiwan wenxueguan ೟ゟৄ☷᭛ᅌ仼) in Tainan, Taiwan, as well as their respective archives. Like many of the forms and media discussed in this volume, they are social and political institutions that make sense out of and order a vast array of information and knowledge and that contribute to the shaping of national historical memory and cultural identity. As such, they tend to serve politically driven narratives and reinforce social hierarchies. Although the number of literature museums in the PRC/Taiwan (approximately 150) is significantly smaller than the numbers in countries with smaller populations, such as France, Russia, and Italy, the pace at which they have been growing in the past three decades is astounding.1 In the Republican era, there were no dedicated literary museums/archives in China, and the Mao era saw the construction of just a handful of such museums—most famously, those dedicated to Lu Xun 元䖙 (1881–1936).2 Since the 1980s, however, they have proliferated. The reasons are manifold: to contribute to the rewriting of literary history in the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution’s erasure of that history, to restore writers previously purged in the repressive literary politics of the Maoist past, to address the rise of domestic tourism and the emergence of a leisure economy, and to provide municipal branding in the market economy. It may not be coincidental that the rise of these museums corresponds to a decline in readership in China and Taiwan;3 though ideally the museum should stir the visitor to read works of literature, the reality may be that if people visit them at all, it is as a substitute for reading and as a badge of cultural capital. Literature museums in Taiwan developed at roughly the same time as on the mainland, partly as a response to the end of martial law in 1987, the emergence of Taiwanese political consciousness, and the rise of a leisure economy. Although there is not space to discuss them here, the vast majority of literature museums/ archives in the PRC and Taiwan are dedicated to the memory of individual writers, most often in the form of a former residence (guju ᬙሙ) or memorial

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hall (jinianguan ㋔ᗉ仼). In some respects, they constitute a local counterpoint to the national museums that are the main concern of this chapter.

National Literature Museums Literature museums in the PRC and Taiwan can be divided into six main types: (1) national museums, (2) provincial museums, (3) municipal museums, (4) individual author museums, (5) museums centered around a literary text,4 and (6) literary theme parks.5 At present, at least seven provinces have museums dedicated to literature produced by their natives, but such museums are also in preparation elsewhere, and it seems inevitable that more will follow.6 Interestingly, they generally combine premodern and modern literary traditions, suggesting that the promotion of literary greatness overrides the conventional story of the fundamental discontinuity between classical and modern literatures. A more recent phenomenon is the municipal literature museum. In May 2018, Shanghai announced that it would build the Shanghai Literature Museum (Shanghai wenxueguan Ϟ⍋᭛ᄺ佚) in the Hongkou district—one of first city-focused literature museums in China. Now that Shanghai has committed to building a literature museum, Beijing will not be far behind, given the intense competition between these two metropolises. The first three categories of literature museums are organized around politically driven territorial divisions, an arbitrary, if predictable, way of looking at literature. Literary texts may be produced in particular nations, provinces, or cities, but they are inherently fluid things that move across political borders. Writers may be from certain places, but more often than not, they travel, relocate, and sometimes never return to their natal homes. Shen Congwen ≜ᕲ᭛ (1902–88), for example, is labeled a Hunan nativist writer, and a memorial hall is dedicated to him near his hometown of Fenghuang. No doubt the culture and landscape of his natal home inform his work, but his nativist texts were written mostly in Beijing and under the influence of Freud and other Western thinkers. So national, provincial, and municipal literatures are problematic constructs in the borderless arena of literary production and consumption. The national literature museums of the PRC and Taiwan project a view of literature as part of nation-building projects that are interwoven with party politics—in particular, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), the Kuomintang (KMT), and the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP). Inherently political, these museums help establish a literary foundation for the assertion of nationalism and national identity. They are thus important agents in the public construction of a national literature for a broad citizenry, comprised of people who are not necessarily well educated and who often do not read works from the literary canon. Nationhood is a particularly thorny issue with regard to Taiwan,

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whose status as a “nation” is, at least in the global arena, ambiguous—all the more reason for its museum to project a “soft” form of national identification through literature.

Museum of Modern Chinese Literature At the instigation of Ba Jin Ꮘ䞥 (1904–2005), who in 1981 raised the idea of preserving the memory of China’s modern literary heritage, Beijing established the Museum of Modern Chinese Literature (MMCL) as an archive in 1985.7 The archive was centered around a collection of donated books, letters, photographs, and manuscripts, many from well-known writers with whom Ba Jin had personal friendships, and was housed in Wanshou Temple in the Haidian district. But Ba Jin had something grander and more permanent in mind, so he petitioned the government to allocate funds for the construction of a dedicated building, one that would house the collection but that would also have a public exhibitionary component. In the 1990s, under former president Jiang Zemin ∳⋑⇥ (b. 1926), funding was approved, and the resulting structure opened to the public in 2001 in Chaoyang district. Ba Jin’s vision for the archive/museum was a reaction to the Cultural Revolution, during which “only the model dramas were literature, all else was garbage.”8 It was part of the post-Cultural Revolution effort to restore and uphold the tradition of realism, as well as the ethical value system on which it was based, in the face of the avant-garde and experimental literature that had emerged on the literary scene since the late 1980s. Which writers get memorialized in museums and how they get memorialized is, of course, a politicized process. The MMCL presents a conventional early post-Mao view of the history of modern Chinese literature that emphasizes its May Fourth origins and the critical realist tradition.9 With the important exception of Lu Xun, who had been praised on multiple occasions by Chairman Mao Zedong ↯⋑ϰ (1893–1976) himself, and Guo Moruo 䛁≿ 㢹 (1892–1978), many of the writers glorified in the museum had been targets during the Cultural Revolution. The main exhibit on the first floor is dedicated to a “constellation” of seven great literary “stars”—Mao Dun 㣙Ⳓ (1896–1981), Guo Moruo, Lao She 㗕㟡 (1899–1966), Bing Xin ‫ބ‬ᖗ (1900–1999), Cao Yu ᳍ ⾎ (1910–96), and Ba Jin are found around the perimeter of its circular space, and Lu Xun, its most brilliant star, is located in the center—all solidly in the May Fourth tradition. As with any representation, it is built on exclusions. Absent from this pantheon are Shen Congwen, Zhang Ailing ᔉᛯ⦆ (1920– 95), Zhang Henshui ᔉᘼ∈ (1895–1967), and Jin Yong 䞥ᒌ (1924–2008), each of whom had defied the norms of May Fourth New Literature in their own way. The displays themselves capture only one facet of each writer’s life and work.

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The Ba Jin display, for example, shows an aging writer: the Ba Jin who reflected on the horrors of the Cultural Revolution and his own guilt in perpetrating political oppression, not the younger Ba Jin who wrote the novel Jia ᆊ (Family; 1933). Of the seven writers commemorated in this space, only Lu Xun and Lao She, both of whom died rather young, are depicted in the prime of their careers; the rest are shown in their later years, perhaps to better consecrate them as venerable great masters of modern Chinese literature. The third- and fourth-floor exhibits are slightly more inclusive, although still strongly in the social realist tradition. The third floor presents mock-ups of the studios of a variety of writers—Ding Ling ϕ⦆ (1904–86), Yang Hansheng 䰇㗄ロ (1902–93), Yao Xueyin ྮ䲾൴ (1910–99), Xiao Jun 㧻‫( ݯ‬1907–88), Yang Mo ᴼ≿ (1914–95), Chen Baichen 䰜ⱑᇬ (1904–98), Xiao Qian 㧻ђ (1910–99), and Hu Feng 㚵亢 (1902–85), among others—but from their relatively marginal place in the museum and the size of the space devoted to them, it is clear that the museum sees them as second-tier writers. Hu Feng had long been a thorn in the side of the CCP cultural bureaucracy until he was arrested and tried as a counterrevolutionary in 1955, but he was still a committed Marxist who held fervently to the realist ideals of the May Fourth movement. The others, also solidly in the May Fourth-leftist mold, had been subject to attacks during the Anti-Rightist campaign or the Cultural Revolution. A third tier of writers is given even smaller displays. On the perimeter wall of the third and fourth floors is the Writers Libraries (Zuojia wenku ԰ᆊ᭛ᑧ) display. Behind glass cases are stored books donated to the museum by well-known writers and scholars. Here is an instance of the archive, normally hidden away from public view, becoming a visible part of the museum exhibits. But the books on display cannot be touched or perused, as one might in library stacks; they are locked behind glass doors to be admired from a respectful distance. These exhibits, which highlight hierarchies of literary stars in the realist tradition, are the filter for appreciating the second-floor overview, which tells the story of the history of modern Chinese literature. Even as it draws cursory attention to writers of alternative schools and styles—modernists, popular commercial writers, nativists, aesthetics, and liberal humanists—the exhibit highlights the realist and leftist literary traditions, creating in the process a story that is both derived from and supports CCP historical narratives. The titles given to the various sections provide a sense of the narrative structure of the exhibit as a whole: (1) The May Fourth Literary Revolution (1917–1927); (2) The Rise of the Left League and Progressive Literature (1927–1937); (3) Literature Goes to the Masses (1937–1949); (4) The Socialist Period: The First Seventeen Years (1949– 1966); and (5) The Glorious New Period Literature (1976–1999). Perhaps not surprising, the years of the Cultural Revolution are blank—not one placard marks the existence of literature or other forms of cultural production from that period.

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The exhibit was revamped in 2012 on the seventieth anniversary of the “Yan’an Talks,” Mao Zedong’s 1942 speeches outlining party policy toward literature and the arts. Opened after Xi Jinping’s д䖥ᑇ (b. 1953) ascension to power, it seems, if anything, even more retrograde than the original. Although the late Qing was more formally recognized as an important prelude, the connection with the Anti-Japanese War was strengthened, and a new section for twenty-firstcentury developments was added, the broad structure of the narrative remains centered on the May Fourth and leftist literary traditions. After Xi Jinping gave a speech to writers in 2014,10 a whole host of cultural institutions praised and celebrated it,11 including the MMCL, which developed a special exhibit entitled Encourage Moving Forward: Achievements in Chinese Literature Since the 18th Party Congress (Dili fenjin: dang de shibada yilai Zhongguo wenxue chengjiu zhan ⷹ⸎༟䖯˖‫ⱘܮ‬कܿ໻ҹᴹЁ೑᭛ᄺ៤ህሩ). If the permanent exhibits were not already framed with a CCP-derived narrative, here the museum explicitly becomes a mouthpiece for the cultural policy of the party in general and that of Xi Jinping in particular.

National Museum of Taiwan Literature The National Museum of Taiwan Literature (NMTL) opened in 2003 in the southern city of Tainan, responding, it would seem, to the opening of the Beijing museum a couple of years earlier in an attempt to define Taiwan literature on its own terms and to contribute to the shaping of a Taiwan identity. Although the inception of the museum may have been driven by a Taiwan nativist political agenda, the resulting museum and its exhibits project an inclusive and multicultural framework. In that sense, it reflects the more mature and less narrowly Hoklo-centric vision of Taiwan cultural identity that characterized some early strains of Taiwanese nativism. The museum presents a national view of Taiwan literature that embraces diversity of styles, themes, politics, and ethnicities and contributes to the ongoing imagining of Taiwan as a modern, pluralistic, democratic, and multiethnic nation state. Although the vision of literature here is, in comparison, less exclusionary than that of its Beijing counterpart, it is no less political: politics—one might say particularly DPP politics—is built into the very fabric of this national literature museum.12 Symphonies of Languages, Blossoms of Multiethnic Literature, one section of the museum’s initial permanent exhibit, draws attention to the strongly multicultural and pluralistic nature of Taiwan literature. The exhibit has displays on literature written in aboriginal languages, Dutch, Hoklo, Hakka, Mandarin, and Japanese. Around the wall of the room are displays of sample texts written in these languages, along with audio of them being read aloud. In the center of the room, a display labeled Voices of Mothers presents nine wooden busts

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representing nine official aboriginal groups of Taiwan;13 at each bust, the visitor can listen to a lullaby sung in the language of that particular aboriginal group. The powerful trope of the mother-child bond is here used to convey a feeling of intimacy with Taiwan’s “first nations,” which in turn become integral to a national imaginary. In the Sharing Memories, Developing Themes section of the exhibit, a placard informs the visitor that Taiwan is an “immigrant society” characterized by “diaspora” and “settlement.” A placard reads: “The history of Taiwan is like a symphony of fate, weaving historical incidents that involve immigration, settlement, colonialism, and anti-colonialism. The experiences created common memories for the people of Taiwan.” What emerges from the various “memories” is the idea that Taiwan’s literature formed through multiple experiences of colonialism and that its history of political repression in turn engendered a desire for political freedoms, aboriginal rights, gender equality, and tolerance for multiple sexual orientations. The Taiwan presented here is one that has earned, through struggle and suffering, its present open democracy and political and cultural freedom—a radically different narrative than that presented in the MMCL. Other sections of the permanent exhibit emphasize Taiwan literature’s close interrelationship with world literature. One display has an impressive wall of foreign books that is meant to suggest not only the outside influences on Taiwan literature but also Taiwan literature’s place in world literature. Another section shows efforts to make Taiwan literature known to the world through translation. This emphasis on the two-way cultural interaction of Taiwan and the world is not something that gets stressed in the museum’s Beijing counterpart, at least in its initial exhibit. The NMTL emphasizes Taiwan’s cosmopolitan character as a key marker of Taiwan identity, a compensation, perhaps, for Taiwan’s actual political and diplomatic isolation from the world. The NMTL also has its literary stars, but they seem to shine less brightly than those in the MMCL. One room in the permanent exhibition is devoted to Lai He 䋈੠ (1894–1943) and is dominated by a reconstruction of the studio of this colonial-era writer, who is often said to be the Lu Xun of Taiwan literature.14 But whereas Lu Xun is the center of a literary constellation in the MMCL, Lai He occupies a much less prominent and overarching position in the NMTL. The curatorial approach at the NMTL is impressionistic and scholarly and is influenced by current trends in academia—most noticeably, postcolonial and feminist theories and ecocriticism. Its exhibit on Discovering Taiwan Literary History also shows an implicit recognition that literary history is not a given but rather something constructed over time, shaped by various forces, and therefore open to contestation. This politics behind literary history is not, perhaps unsurprisingly, something the Beijing museum acknowledges in its displays.

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The Archives Both national museums are also literary archives. Although these two kinds of institutions—the museum and the archive—are different, they work hand in hand. The stored-away materials in the archive and the public exhibitions of the museum have a complementary relationship: the archive is the wellspring for the exhibitions, and the exhibitions are the public face of the archive; the archive gives scholarly authority to the museum, which in term legitimizes the archive through its outreach to the public. Although the third and fourth floors of the MMCL are dedicated to displays of donated books and manuscripts, the bulk of the archive is stored away from public view. On the first floor is a reading room where scholars can request to view items in the collection. It is not an open lending library, but the museum has digitally cataloged its collection, which is searchable online, though one can’t actually access the materials themselves.15 The NMTL also has a library, located in its basement, with many materials laid out on open stacks that any visitor can peruse but that do not circulate. The bulk of its archive, however, is not open to the public. The museum also maintains several online databases: a compilation of literature written in Taiwanese, a bibliography of traditional-style Chinese-language literature from Taiwan, a dictionary of Taiwan literature, and a catalog of Taiwan literary journals. It also maintains a search engine that allows the user to search multiple databases related to Taiwan literature.16 In both museums, the archives, both physical and digital, feed into and inform the exhibits. Even if invisible or inaccessible to the visitor, the archive lends scholarly seriousness to the public displays in the museum proper, legitimizing their narratives and thematic choices. Both museums also serve as active cultural centers, holding lectures, workshops, temporary exhibitions, and readings and engaging in other forms of public outreach. The outreach and digital archives make the two museums active sites of remembering, thus belying the notion, upheld by moderns like Theodor Adorno, that the museum is a mausoleum where dead artifacts are buried and forgotten.17

Notes 1. Anne Trubek calculates that the United States, by comparison, has fifty-seven writers’ houses open to the public. See Trubek, A Skeptic’s Guide to Writers’ Houses (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 4. According to Olga Voronina, there are 256 literature museums in Russia. See Voronina, “From the Altar to the Forum: The Post-Soviet Transformation of Russian Literary Museums,” Australian Slavonic and East European Studies 31, no. 1–2 (2017): 84. 2. Five Lu Xun museums were established in the 1950s: in Xiamen (1952), Guangzhou (1959), Beijing (1956), Shaoxing (1953–56), and Shanghai (1956).

Modern Literature Museums and Archives 455 3. See William Blythe, “Why Doesn’t Anyone in Taiwan Read Anymore?,” The Atlantic, April 5, 2013, https://www.theatlantic.com/china/archive/2013/04/why-doesnt-anyone -in-taiwan-read-anymore/274714/; and Helen Gao, “Why Aren’t Chinese People Reading Books Anymore?,” The Atlantic, August 15, 2013, https://www.theatlantic.com /china/archive/2013/08/why-arent-chinese-people-reading-books-anymore/278729/. 4. For example, the Camel Xiangzi Museum (Luotou Xiangzi bowuguan 做偐⼹ᄤम⠽ 佚) in Qingdao, which focuses on Lao She’s famous novel Camel Xiangzi, written while the writer lived there. 5. For example, Lu Village (Luzhen 剕䬛) outside of Shaoxing, is centered around the settings and characters from Lu Xun’s fiction, and the Prospect Garden (Daguan yuan ໻㾖ು) theme parks, one in Beijing and one in Shanghai, recreate the fictional setting of the late imperial novel Honglou meng ㋙ῧ໶ (The Dream of the Red Chamber). 6. Provincial literature museums exist in Anhui, Hainan, Hebei, Heilongjiang, Hunan, Jiangsu, and Shandong. They are in preparation in Guangdong, Liaoning, and Zhejiang. 7. Ba Jin, “Xiandai wenxue ziliao guan” ⦄ҷ᭛ᄺ䌘᭭佚, Xinhua wenzhai ᮄढ᭛ᨬ (1981.12): 148–50. 8. Ba Jin, “Xiandai wenxue ziliao guan.” 9. See Kirk A. Denton, Exhibiting the Past: Historical Memory and the Politics of Museums in Postsocialist China (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2014), 177–98. 10. The speech was given on October 15, 2014, but not published until October 15 of the following year, no doubt with emendations. See Xi Jinping, “Zai wenyi gongzuo zuotanhui shang de jianghua” ೼᭛㡎Ꮉ԰ᑻ䇜ӮϞⱘ䆆䆱, Chinawriter.com, October 15, 2015, http://www.chinawriter.com.cn/2015/2015-10-16/255684.html. 11. The Chinese Writer’s Association website has a dedicated page entitled “Shenru shenghuo, zhagen renmin” ⏅ܹ⫳⌏ˈᠢḍҎ⇥ (“Enter deeply into life, grasp the people”)—a line from Xi’s speech—to highlight model writers who fulfill that literary mission. See http://www.chinawriter.com.cn/z/shenrshzhagrm/index.shtml. 12. Emily Mae Graf has shown that actual users of the NMTL do not necessarily interact with or use the museum in prescribed or intended ways and has concluded that it “is not a place which inculcates a Taiwanese national identity into its visitors, but a space in which visitors live out their personal identity by choosing to come to the museum.” Graf, “Visiting Experience and Communication in Literature Museums: A Case Study of the National Museum of Taiwan Literature” (MA thesis, Heidelberg University, 2012), 5. I do not dispute Graf ’s findings or the sincerity of her interlocutors, but I would suggest that the messages I find in the museum may have subtle ways of entering the minds and experience of visitors, even those who are at the museum for fun and relaxation. 13. The official number of aboriginal groups in Taiwan has changed over the years, with new groups being recognized frequently; there are now sixteen. 14. Parallels between the writers include the facts that both studied medicine (though Lai would go on to practice it) and both supported the work of younger writers. 15. See the MMCL website: http://www.wxg.org.cn/gctd/index.jhtml. 16. For the Taiwanese literature database, see http://tgbhsuliau.nmtl.gov.tw/opencms/; for the bibliography of traditional literature, see http://tctb.nmtl.gov.tw/opencms/index. html; for the online dictionary, see http://tld.nmtl.gov.tw/opencms/introduction.html; for the catalog of literary journals, see http://dhtlj.nmtl.gov.tw/opencms/index.html; for the general search engine, see http://isrh.nmtl.gov.tw/FSE/. 17. Theodor Adorno, and other moderns, have accused the museum of being a mausoleum or a cemetery. See Adorno, “Valéry Proust Museum,” in Prisms, trans. Samuel Weber and Shierry Weber (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1967), 175–85.

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he Fuyin baokan ziliao ໡ॄ᡹ߞ䌘᭭ (Periodical and newspaper materials reprint series), published by the Zhongguo Renmin daxue shubao ziliao zhongxin Ё೑Ҏ⇥໻ᄺк᡹䌘᭭Ёᖗ (formerly known in English as the Information Center for Social Sciences of Renmin University of China; hereafter, “Information Center”), was a vital resource for any research in the humanities and social sciences in China until the recent rise of the CNKI Ё೑ⶹ㔥 (China National Knowledge Infrastructure) databases. The series editors collected and selected recent publications from newspapers, general journals, and academic journals in specialized fields and reproduced and recompiled them into volumes on, for example, ancient and early modern Chinese literature studies and literature theory. The series volumes were published periodically, usually one volume each month under each title. In the 1980s and early 1990s, it was the most eclectic source for scholarly and publication information in the People’s Republic of China (PRC). In 1981, the Information Center also started an overseas subscription business. Although it was interrupted temporarily between 1983 and 1984, the reprinted materials became an important channel for Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan, and other parts of the world to follow new developments in the PRC. Institutionally, the Information Center can be traced back to 1958, when three entities associated with the university—the Jianbao gongsi ࠾᡹݀ৌ (hereafter, “Newspaper Clipping Company”), Tushu tiyao kapian lianhe bianjizu ೒ кᦤ㽕व⠛㘨ড়㓪䕥㒘 (hereafter, “Book Digest and Indexing Group”), and Xinwenxi yinshuachang ᮄ䯏㋏ॄࠋॖ (Printing house of the department

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of journalism)—appeared almost at the same time. In 1962, the Newspaper Clipping Company started to formally offer its subscribers newspaper clippings on seven themes: Works and Biographical Studies of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Mao; Philosophy; Social Science and Political Science; Political Economy, Economy, and Finances; Communist Movement, Communist Party and Labor Party; and History, Literature, and Arts. The three units worked closely with each other in collecting, compiling, and reproducing items from newspapers and academic journals, and by 1963, they were combined as the Jianbao ziliao tushu kapianshe ࠾᡹䌘᭭೒кव⠛⼒ (hereafter, “Newspaper Clipping and Book Indexing Office”), which specialized in information services for the government and academic research. This is the predecessor of the present Information Center. The practices of the office had close connections and often overlaps with library services, and, in fact, several principals of the office were also the heads of the Library of Renmin University— for example, Zhang Zhao ᓴᰁ (1905–69), one of the founders of the Chinese Book Digest and Indexing Group. Besides working on index cards and newspaper clipping, the office published reference books such as catalogs and compiled volumes on special topics such as foreign politics (waiguo zhengzhi ໪೑ᬓ⊏), education studies (jiaoyu xue ᬭ㚆ᄺ), and diplomacy and international relations (waijiao guoji guanxi ໪Ѹ೑䰙݇㋏), each including selected published articles from academic journals and other periodicals. These reprinted materials initially came from six major Communist Party newspapers, but the office’s sources were soon expanded to include sixty-five newspapers and journals, and the themes of its reprinted series increased from the seven in 1962 to forty-two in just one year. Significantly, the technology of production had also evolved from pure cut-and-paste handwork to photomechanical processes. During the Cultural Revolution (1966–76), the regular publication of many newspapers and periodicals was interrupted, and the work of the Newspaper Clipping and Book Indexing Office was also suspended. After the end of the Cultural Revolution, the office resumed its business in 1978 under a new name: Zhongguo Renmin daxue shubao ziliaoshe Ё೑Ҏ⇥໻ᄺк᡹䌘᭭⼒ (literally, Office of books, newspapers, and publications of Renmin University in China). In 1985, the office was renamed Shubao ziliao zhongxin к᡹䌘᭭Ёᖗ (Center for books, newspapers, and publications). Previously, it had taken the name Information Center for Social Sciences, RUC, in English, which, on the one hand, indicates its self-conscious association with the booming information industry and the popular discourse of “information society” and, on the other, shows an understanding of publication collection, selection, and compilation as essential parts of information-management practices. The new website, however, omits the English subtitle.1 With the arrival of digital media, the status of the Information Center was challenged by new players, such as the China Academic Journals Full-Text

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Database (Zhongguo xueshu qikan quanwen shujuku Ё೑ᄺᴃᳳߞܼ᭛᭄ ᥂ᑧ) developed by Tsinghua Tongfang Co., Ltd. ⏙ढৠᮍ, which has since grown to become the well-known CNKI. The network version of its database was launched in 1999. With support from the Ministry of Education, Ministry of Science, General Administration of Press and Publication, and other government institutions, CNKI quickly developed into a system comprising not only journals but also doctoral dissertations, statistical yearbooks, patents, standards, and other types of material. Although the Information Center developed floppy disk and CD products as early as in 1994, its full-text database with search functions appeared only in 2007. By this time, CNKI had become the major knowledge database, widely subscribed to by universities in China and abroad. Indeed, with the full-text database of CNKI, the reprinted materials provided by the Information Center appeared limited and redundant to internet users. Once one of most active and powerful agents in collecting and organizing publication information, it has now been eclipsed by the more inclusive full-text databases of CNKI and others. Its new website shows that it has redefined its core business beyond the realm of publication into the areas of academic evaluation, think-tank consultation, advertising, and professional training. Despite the reduced role of the Information Center in information collection in the era of networks and digital media, its practices are of particular interest in that they provide a unique glimpse into ways of managing publication information—and especially scholarly publication information—during the information explosion before the digital revolution. As Ann M. Blair has pointed out, the experience of “information overload” is hardly unique to those inundated with incessant flows of information from digital devices.2 Such information abundance was also experienced by Chinese researchers and scholars. The number of periodicals more than doubled, from 542 to 1,470, between 1976 and 1979, and book publications and translations similarly boomed in the same period. Therefore, the golden era of the Information Center in the 1980s and early 1990s coincided with these increasing information flows, and its guidelines for selecting and compiling information became critical for providing comprehensive overviews of new publications and updated developments in various disciplines. Its methods of information management, rather than appearing as archaic and dated in the digital era, are crucial to later developments of digital databases. In other words, instead of seeing the relationship between the information practices of the print and digital media as disconnected with the former superseded by the latter, this chapter argues for continuities between the two. To a degree, the practices of the Information Center provide a prehistory of the digital media and internet-hosted databases that are familiar today. The practices of the reprinted materials series were deeply rooted in the socialist traditions of information collection and management. The term ziliao

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䌘᭭ suggests that these compiled materials were to provide information for administrative, research, and business activities. Since the 1950s, almost all work units from government departments to factories and cultural units had set up their own ziliaoshi 䌘᭭ᅸ (reference rooms). Different from public libraries, reference rooms were mostly open only to affiliates of these work units. The materials collected might be a combination of general publications and special collections of archives, statistics, and other data with more specific focus. In terms of their function, reference rooms may be considered a combination of libraries and archives. The term ziliao is also used for the compilation of special-topic materials. Scholars of modern Chinese literature might be familiar with the ziliao-type collections on individual authors or literary movements, such as Ding Ling yanjiu ziliao ϕ⦆ⷨお䌘᭭ (Research materials on Ding Ling). The title Fuyin baokan ziliao indicates the continuity of these publications with the institutional practices of reference rooms. As is shown by the history of the Information Center, newspaper clipping preceded the reprinted materials. Besides such centralized services of newspaper clipping, many work units had their own clipping department for information on specific topics. This historical and institutional aspect of ziliao resonates with Ronald E. Day’s argument about the role of user need and searchability in the process of informationization.3 The products of the Information Center took several forms. One of the most important was the digest and index cards (wenzhai kapian ᭛ᨬव⠛). These cards, obviously developed from library index cards, succinctly listed the argument and reasoning of an article as well as key evidence it employed. The Information Center adopted the international standard library catalog card size of 75 mm x 125 mm, the so-called postal size, which was first recommended by the Cooperation Committee of the American Library Association in 1877 as the one of the two standard sizes for catalog cards and which later became the predominant choice for American library catalog cards. This card form has the advantages of easy organization and easy access, as the cards could be slid backward and forward without affecting their order. The digest and index cards created by the Information Center were in effect highly condensed information records. On the one hand, their compact size met the requirement for fast information consumption; on the other, their card format provided flexibility in organization and expansion. These simple catalog and digest cards provided an effective way of organizing large amounts of information. Electronic databases of academic journals that developed later, including those of CNKI, almost replicated this format with a link separate from the full text to a webpage that provides the title and author information, the abstract, and keywords for each article. This is an instance of how computer-based databases remediate and renew the paper-based form of information organization. The core product of the Information Center was a series of full-text journal articles reproduced and compiled under different topics and disciplines.

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Initially, the series volumes were published as loose-leaf editions, but in 1978, they were changed to bound books. The business also expanded into foreign-language publications, including major newspapers in English, Russian, Japanese, German, and French, but this foreign-language business was soon terminated in 1981. For the reprinted materials from Chinese-language journals, the themes increased to 102 by 1986; that is, the Information Center regularly published more than one hundred titles with reprinted materials under different topics, making the series a most important source of information. For library users who could not go over a variety of publications—and especially for those in more remote areas who might not have access to a variety of newspapers and journals— the reprinted materials offered an expeditious and focused way to keep up with recent publications. In terms of the practical work of producing the series, the editors selected published articles that they deemed important and influential from periodicals and newspapers. Whereas the full-text database of academic journals later developed by Tsinghua Tongfang Co., Ltd. indiscriminately published all articles from a wide range of journals, the Information Center emphasized the importance of selection, which usually was performed by experts in each field. Whether a journal article was selected became an important criterion for judging the quality of publications in academia. Since 2008, the Information Center has issued a yearly “ranked list of the index of academic essays reprinted by Renmin University Reprinted materials,” which ranks journals based on the amount and impact of published essays selected and reprinted by the series, and a yearly list of “important source journals for Reprinted materials,” which lists periodicals deemed to be key sources of selected articles for the Reprinted series. The Information Center thus has self-consciously reinvented itself as a setter of standards and a keeper of academic criteria. The series is divided into about twenty disciplines, from Marxism studies, religion studies, and philosophy to arts, archeology, political science, law studies, sociology, journalism and communication, management studies, and more. Under the category of literature, there are four titles that cover literary theory; ancient and early modern Chinese literature studies, which includes scholarly work on Chinese literature of any period before the twentieth century; modern and contemporary Chinese literature studies; and foreign literature studies. This arrangement corresponds to the disciplines and subdisciplines (erji xueke Ѡ㑻ᄺ⾥) set up by the Ministry of Education in Chinese universities and colleges. Each title is issued monthly, its publishing cycle similar to those of regular academic journals, and yet all of its materials are recently published journal articles that have already appeared somewhere else. Whereas academic journals operate according to the “first-time appearance” rule in accepting and reviewing articles, the Information Center does not deal directly with author

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submissions but relies on existing repertoire for its series. It therefore acts more like an archiving agency in charge of filtering and organizing scholarly and publication information. The word fuyin ໡ॄ (photocopying or xerographic copying) is pivotal to understanding the information operations of the Information Center. As previously mentioned, it was initially developed from a newspaper-clipping company, and “newpaper clipping” was part of its name until the late 1970s. If newspaper clipping indicates the process of cutting and pasting with a heavy reliance on human hands, xerographic copying suggests new advantages of mechanical reproducibility brought about by using of xeroxing machines, both easy to operate and affordable, in archiving and preserving print materials. Yet just like newspaper clippings, which are taken directly from many original sources, photocopied materials preserve the formats and even the errors of the originals. Therefore, each issue of the series published by the Information Center resembles a news-clipping book, with pieces in the disparate fonts and formats of the originals. The oddity of the appearance of the series compared with regular publications drives home the particularity of the photocopying method. Besides the reproduced full-text articles, each issue offers an appendix listing articles that were not selected for reproduction but that were published recently in journals. While the main body of each issue resembles a full-text database, the appendix serves the function of a catalog. As for the reprints of journal articles, each article is interestingly treated as a discrete unit, an independent document separable from the journal in which it was originally published, even though it retains its original format; its duplication simultaneously testifies to and records its existence. This autonomy of each individual article can be traced to the practices of newspaper clipping, with each clipping treated as an independent document. The idea was that organizing these documents should both serve the purpose of searchability and preserve the space for the increasing size of accumulation. The method was to make the clipped articles into individual cards and place them in different folders for further categorization in the future if needed. It is easy to see how full-text databases today continue with this practice by preserving each journal article as an independent document, often in PDF format, with its own original typesetting but alienated from the context of the journal in which it was originally published. While the method of photocopying made reproducing selected journal articles convenient, it also became controversial as the cultural production in China was drastically transformed from a state-subsidized and state-operated socialist system to an increasingly commercialized market system. In particular, pressure increased to establish a legal system to protect intellectual property rights, and the first copyright law of the PRC was eventually passed in

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1990. The Information Center from its day of establishment was defined as a public institution (shiye danwei џϮऩԡ) as opposed to an enterprise (qiye danwei ӕϮऩԡ), which was expected to be responsible for its own financial situation. Having the privileges of a state-backed institution, the Information Center maintained a publication system that did not operate according to the rules of the market and the copyright legal system that treats intellectual products as protected private property; because its reproducing and reprinting activities were regarded more as a public service, it initially encountered little difficulty. But this started to change in the late 1970s. As China became more deeply involved in trade relations with Western countries, the issue of intellectual property rights emerged in the negotiations. According to Shen Rengan ≜ҕᑆ, who was appointed as the head of the National Copyright Administration (Guojia banquanju ೑ᆊ⠜ᴗሔ) in 1984, Deng Xiaoping’s 䙧ᇣᑇ (1904–97) official visit to the United States in 1979 pushed the issue to the foreground. Under the pressure of technological and trade restrictions enforced in the name of intellectual property rights, the Chinese government quickly set up the Patent Bureau (Guojia zhuanliju ೑ᆊϧ߽ሔ) in 1980 and passed a patent law in 1984. Work had also begun on the copyright law; however, it wasn’t officially approved and enforced until 1990. Under these circumstances, the protection of copyrights became an increasingly common concern, and authors’ economic rights over the reprints of their work were no longer an alien concept. With copyright legislation under way, the Information Center faced a dilemma: How could it continue with its duplication and publication business without violating the new spirit of copyrights? In 1985, the Bureau of Culture and Publication (Guojia chuban ju ೑ᆊߎ⠜ሔ) and the newly-established National Bureau of Copyrights (Guojia banquan ju ೑ᆊ⠜ ᴗሔ) came to the rescue: they gave the Information Center special permission to reproduce any newspaper and journal publications without asking for agreements from the copyright holders, and it was not obligated to pay the authors any remuneration for the reprints. This special permission was given on three conditions: (1) in addition to serving its subscribers, the Information Center had to provide free information services to researchers in the social sciences and humanities; (2) it had to keep its charges for photocopying services at a level equivalent to the basic costs of photocopying so that it could continue to be defined as a nonprofit organization; and (3) in lieu of remuneration, it had to send each author a sample copy of the volume in which the reprint of their article appeared. These measures ensured the Information Center could continue its business without any major changes. At the same time, the conditions that came along with the special permission defined it as a nonprofit, public organization, its operations continuous with the remaining socialist system of publication. Yet major changes ensued after the first copyright law became effective in June 1991. In compliance with the new copyright legislation, the National

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Bureau of Copyrights revoked the Information Center’s special permission. In the same year, its financial situation raised concerns, and an auditing group advised it to alter its financial management to an accrual accounting system, which was used by enterprises. This suggested that the Information Center was no longer considered a nonprofit organization. Now, in accordance with the new copyright law, it was expected not only to pay authors for its reprints but also to earn revenues from its business. In 1992, the year of Deng’s southern tour that accelerated economic reforms and marketization, the Information Center was registered at the Bureau of Commerce and Industry and given a business license, which signified its transformation from a state institute to a business agency. On the one hand, the Information Center had to adapt its information collection and reprinting operations to new conditions presented by the copyright law, and on the other, it soon had to face fierce competition from other periodical databases. Its self-reinvention as a setter of standards and a keeper of academic criteria was a key step in adjusting its status. However, this process has not been without controversy. In 1991, the Information Center began to pay authors for reprints at the rate of 10 RMB per thousand words. Over more than two decades, this rate has hardly changed, except that authors would receive an invitation to join the Author’s Club (Zuozhe julebu ԰㗙 ‫ׅ‬Ф䚼), a membership that allows authors to subscribe to several of the Information Center’s journals at a discounted rate, which is supposed to be compensation for the low rate of remuneration. This practice was criticized by some authors and observers, for they saw it as a confusion of the Information Center’s business model and its academic function.4 Authors might be unhappy with the low rate, but because the appearance of their essays in the reprinted series is commonly regarded by universities and research institutes as evidence of academic quality, an “honor” bestowed on authors, they often end up accepting the terms. The evolution of the Information Center shows that information collection, sorting, and organization has always been crucial not only for serving the government but also for facilitating scholarly research and sharing scholarly discourses and standards among academic communities. Although digital technology is always presented as a breakthrough moment for information management, the practices of the Information Center have long served the functions of information databases and search engines. Its methods of information organization, from catalog and index cards to full-text reprints under different themes and disciplines, show interesting parallels with the organization of digital databases. Information management is a practice that intersects with state administration and the cultural production system as well as with legal discourse and the systems that regulate the flow and reproduction of information. The Information Center’s reprinted materials series serves as a case study

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showcasing the transformation of information management from a socialist cultural system to a postsocialist cultural industry.

Notes 1. See the Shubao ziliao zhongxin’s previous website at http://old.zlzx.ruc.edu.cn/ and its new version at http://zlzx.ruc.edu.cn/. 2. Ann M. Blair, Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information Before the Modern Age (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010). 3. Ronald E. Day, Indexing It All: The Subject in the Age of Documentation, Information, and Data (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014). 4. Wang Xiaohui ∾ᰧ᜻, “Renda fuyin ziliao: qinquan haishi rongyu” Ҏ໻໡ॄ䌘᭭˖ ։ᴗ䖬ᰃ㤷䁝, December 1, 2015, http://cul.qq.com/a/20151201/011161.htm.

CHAPTER 47

THEMATIC RESEARCH COLLECTIONS D O N A L D S T U RG E O N

T

hematic research collections—collections of primary source content, modeled electronically, with contents structured and selected according to a coherent scholarly theme—have flourished in the internet era and have become widely used scholarly resources in many fields of inquiry. Since the 1980s, digital collections of premodern Chinese written materials have been a part of this trend and have become indispensable tools in many scholarly workflows.

Overview of Digitization Projects One of the earliest large-scale digital collections of Chinese premodern text, one that is still in development today, is the Hanji dianzi wenxian ziliaoku ⓶㈡ 䳏ᄤ᭛⥏䊛᭭ᑿ or Scripta Sinica database (hereafter Scripta Sinica). Initiated by Academia Sinica in 1984 as part of its Automation of Historical Works Project (Shiji zidonghua jihua ৆㈡㞾ࢩ࣪㿜⬿), the effort that ultimately evolved into Scripta Sinica began with the digital transcription of key parts of the standard histories, a process that continued until 1990, when a complete database of the twenty-five standard histories (the official twenty-four histories plus the draft history of the Qing) was established.1 Subsequently, the Shisanjing कϝ㍧ (Thirteen Confucian classics) were selected as the next target for digitization, to be followed by a range of other works to be digitized by the project itself or in collaboration with other groups. The first web-based iteration of the system

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went online in 1995 and was made available to institutional and individual subscribers in 1997, making it one of the earliest systematic collections of premodern Chinese texts available through the internet. By 1997, this system contained over one hundred million characters of premodern Chinese source material.2 While the user interface was initially developed in-house at Academia Sinica, by 2007 difficulties in satisfactorily completing a planned software upgrade led to the decision to replace it entirely with a commercially developed system.3 A second early digitization project with a quite distinct emphasis is the Chinese Ancient Texts project (Handa wenku ⓶䘨᭛ᑿ; hereafter CHANT), created by the Institute of Chinese Studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong in 1988.4 Like Scripta Sinica, this project focused on a particular group of texts—in this case, the transmitted classical Chinese corpus, with an initial focus on the earliest texts up to and including the Han dynasty. Unlike with Scripta Sinica, however, a substantial portion of the work involved the creation of entirely new critical editions of the early (i.e., pre-Han) texts involved. Detailed comparison of multiple editions and traditional commentaries led to the creation of extensively annotated editions in which numerous corrections to the received text, as well as variant readings present in other editions, were explicitly recorded. This work proceeded in parallel with the publication of printed editions with identical contents and annotations, together with computer-generated printed character-level concordances of the contents. The latter of necessity included internal referencing systems to specify pages and lines on which specific characters occur; though not their originally intended purpose, in some scholarly domains these references have come to be used as a standard means of citing primary source material, as the page and line numbers within the printed concordance unambiguously refer to specific occurrences of particular words or phrases. These page and line numbers are not present in the digital editions—they are unnecessary for their original concordancing purpose due to the availability of full-text search—with the effect that the digital system cannot be used as a substitute for the printed volumes for referencing despite the fact that their textual contents are identical. Subsequent stages of CHANT expanded the contents to include later texts as well as excavated texts, which involve additional complexity in digitization due to the extensive use of characters varying significantly from modern Chinese script. In addition to the traditional classical corpus, Buddhist works have been a focus for inclusion in thematic collections. Coalescing around a sizable predigital corpus—the Dazangjing ໻㮣㍧ (Great Chinese Tripit.aka)—two digitization projects emerged independently around 1998 that were committed to the large-scale digitization of Buddhist Chinese works: the SAT Daizōkyō group in Japan (hereafter SAT) and the Chinese Buddhist Electronic Text Association (Zhonghua dianzi fodian xiehui Ё㧃䳏ᄤԯ‫݌‬न᳗; hereafter CBETA)

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in Taiwan.5 Both projects ultimately resulted in online, freely accessible, and full-text searchable databases. While SAT worked together with the publisher of the Taishō shinshū Daizōkyō ໻ℷᮄ㛽໻㮣㍧ (Taishō revised Tripit.aka), CBETA worked independently, with the result that the CBETA texts were released under an open license, allowing their reuse outside of the project’s search platform. In parallel with the advances of scholarly groups and institutions, commercial publishers have developed numerous research collections and associated digitization projects. Particularly since the 1990s, a wide variety of commercial thematic databases have been created by vendors,6 many of which are important resources for research in particular domains—such as the extensive collections of difangzhi ഄᮍᖫ (local gazetteers) digitized by Erudition (http:// server.wenzibase.com/) and Proquest’s collections of premodern Chinese newspapers (https://www.proquest.com/products-services/hnp_cnc.html). Many of these projects involved the investment of significant resources not easily available to noncommercial projects—for example, creating the database for the Siku quanshu ಯᑿܼ᳌ (Complete writings of the four repositories) involved a team of around four hundred scholars and technicians, resulting in a corpus of 2.3 million pages of scanned material and 800 million words.7 A natural consequence of the cost of development is the need to recoup these costs through commercialization; as a result, like Scripta Sinica and CHANT, most, if not all, such databases are accessible only through academic institutions that have subscribed to or purchased their contents or have purchased an individual license. Partly due to such restrictions on the use of many commercial and academic databases, open-access collections have also been created and are widely used. First released publicly in 2005, the Chinese Text Project (https://ctext.org/) is a collection of premodern Chinese materials that uses an open-ended selection policy: rather than selectively including materials according to specific themes or time periods, it attempts to collect all available premodern Chinese transmitted works from pre-Han through Qing. This system takes a crowdsourced approach to transcription, in which scanned primary-source texts are ingested together with transcriptions generated automatically through optical character recognition, and then the results are corrected by individual users of the system.8 In contrast to general-purpose transcription projects like Wikisource and Distributed Proofreaders, more typical full-text database functionality such as hierarchical full-text search is provided alongside crowdsourced editing functionality.9 As a result, it has become one of the largest noncommercial databases, containing five billion characters of transcribed text spread across over thirty thousand individual works.10 In contrast to Scripta Sinica, CHANT, and the majority of commercial products, all Chinese Text Project materials have been freely available since their initial release.

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Challenges of Digitization Digitizing Chinese premodern materials presents a variety of technical challenges. While Academia Sinica’s digitized version of the twenty-five standard histories was completed in 1990, it was another two years before the two thousand “missing” character types (i.e., those not expressible using contemporary versions of mainstream encoding schemes such as Big5) were added, and work on adding the tables was completed only in 1997.11 Aside from the difficulty of adequately representing rare and variant characters used in premodern works, accurate digitization entails exhaustive processing of texts that may typically not be read cover to cover as single narratives, and this often brings to light errors in print publications on which digitized materials are based. Examples include missing pages and incorrectly “restored” characters in photographic reproductions of historical editions, which can result in renderings of the text that seem plausible but are erroneous—and historically inaccurate.12 A widely used approach to address some of these issues—though one that again requires additional investment—is to provide digitized images of a primary-source text alongside its transcription into digital characters, allowing the user to confirm the accuracy of transcription visually and examine any variant characters that may have been normalized. Some systems, like CBETA, additionally record machine-readable data on individual normalizations and variant characters present in the source. Due to the complexity of the task, errors are almost inevitable, and many databases include some facility for reporting errors; crowdsourced systems like the Chinese Text Project additionally allow individual users to directly correct mistakes through a provided user interface. A further challenge presented by digitization is the issue of long-term preservation of collections in the face of rapidly changing technologies and practices.13 As operating systems and standards change, software that once could be expected to be usable without issue on any mainstream system quickly becomes inaccessible without a significant degree of effort. Early full-text databases of the preinternet era typically relied on data being packaged together with its own set of custom software that would provide the viewing, navigating, and search functions necessary to access these data; this software was in almost all cases specific to a single operating system platform as well as to the particular collection of materials. Without significant ongoing investment in software maintenance, these databases quickly become obsolete and eventually incompatible with subsequent iterations of mainstream consumer operating systems (typically Microsoft Windows), and access to the data and the functionality of the collections correspondingly become difficult, if not impossible, to maintain. The widespread adoption of the internet as a common method of access has brought additional challenges and opportunities in this regard and has led to substantial changes in how research collections are typically presented

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in practice. On the one hand, the adoption of open standards has brought a greater degree of interoperability. Open web standards and browsers adhering to them have been widely adopted, meaning that users of most web-based collections are no longer reliant on the continued long-term development of a single piece of consumer software. At the same time, the change to the client-server model that has accompanied this move—in which the full contents of collections are often no longer distributed as complete copies to end users but are instead stored in a central location from which queries are served—has implications for long-term preservation. Whereas widely used digital collections once existed as thousands of copies in the hands of users or libraries around the world, in the case of most contemporary web-based collections no such copies are distributed. While the use of web standards has reduced the rate of obsolescence of client-side software needed to access collections, central maintenance is nevertheless still required to continue service provision and carries its own risk of obsolescence. Without multiple copies, the risk of data disappearing entirely also increases. Additional technical challenges specific to premodern Chinese materials relate in large part to aspects of the writing system itself. Particularly since the 1990s, improvements in general-purpose computing environments and their handling of non-Latin writing systems have brought significant practical benefits for Chinese full-text database systems and resolved many early practical difficulties. Writing in 2001 on the first digital Siku quanshu database, Ronald C. Egan commented on the relative inconvenience of using the built-in input method provided as part of that system, as compared with Microsoft’s Global IME (input method editor), which offered the freedom to input Chinese using a variety of alternative systems such as pinyin, Cangjie, and Zhuyin (see Mullaney, chapter 4). At that time, this functionality was a relatively new feature that required the user to download and install additional software and, in many cases, further so-called internationalization support from individual programs able to make use of the IME; in most modern operating systems and software packages in use today, this functionality has been integrated and widely deployed (see Love, chapter 10). Similarly, while various nationally sponsored character encodings for Chinese were created in the 1980s and became widely used—most notably, GB 2312 (guobiao ೟῭ “national standard [encoding]”) and Big5 (dawuma ໻Ѩ⺐), developed in the People’s Republic of China and Taiwan, respectively—these initially contained partially overlapping sets of characters and hence were in a sense mutually incommensurable, creating practical difficulties for constructing as well as deploying and using digital libraries. While the key feature initially differentiating these standards was that GB supported only simplified characters, whereas Big5 supported only traditional characters, both standards were subsequently augmented to encode both types of characters. The creation of the Unicode standard in the early 1990s and

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its subsequent widespread adoption provided a sustainable mechanism for reliable conversion between the two—a nontrivial task, given the large numbers of characters involved as well as the multiple revisions to each standard, which often added many new characters. Similarly, ongoing additions to the Unicode standard, as well as its near-universal adoption in software with multilingual support, have greatly reduced (though not eliminated) the issue of historically attested characters having no digital textual representation.14

Beyond Full-Text Search Alongside the most basic functionality of representing text and presenting it to the user for reading on a computer screen, full-text search has been available in some form since digital representation of Chinese became widely available with early encoding systems. As increasing numbers of individual works were added to digital systems, organization of the metadata of these works— such as information about authors, editions, dates of creation, and thematic categorizations—became necessary in order to facilitate their discovery. Many systems also made use of hierarchical information—such as fascicle, chapter, and section divisions—within texts in order to provide more efficient navigation.15 Several approaches have been deployed to provide further computer assistance to the user beyond simple full-text search. The simplest of these are extensions of character- or keyword-based summary analyses, such as statistics of character usage across ranges of materials. At its most basic, this can be a simple listing of the number of matching occurrences of a search term in different texts, parts of texts, or groups of texts—an approach that is widely used in contemporary digital collections and that increases in value where hierarchies and textual metadata are available as facets. It can also be extended in a variety of ways—including pattern-based searches, normalization to allow meaningful comparisons of the usage of terms and phrases across materials by comparing relative rates of occurrence rather than absolute occurrence counts, and automatically generated visualizations of various kinds. Examples of these include the Chinese Text Project’s Text Tools16 and the functionality provided by CBETA Online (http://cbetaonline.dila.edu.tw/). Other, more task-specific functionality includes the identification of text reuse—identical and near-identical passages or fragments of writing17—as well as purpose-designed environments aimed to leverage the structural organization and other systematic aspects of works such as leishu 串᳌ (encyclopedias; see Nugent, chapter 30) and local gazetteers.18 For many languages, word-based search is a common approach in full-text search that can be implemented without any complex processing due to the presence of explicitly recorded word boundaries—searching an English-language

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corpus for ear matches occurrences of that word only (possibly, with some additional processing, also matching ears) and not, say, earth. As Chinese is written without explicit word delimiters, word-based searches cannot be done using such straightforward approaches; hence, the vast majority of premodern Chinese full-text database systems implement some form of keyword or “string” search, in which a search for ᄨ (kong) matches both ᄨᄤ䘽Ἦ (Confucius went to Chu) and ߽ߎϔᄨ (Gain comes through a single outlet). Improving on this requires some degree of digital analysis of the language—a relatively simple matter for some limited cases, such as some proper names, but very challenging in the general case. However, incorporating data recording these distinctions into a digital system can significantly enhance results. Typically, this is implemented using a markup language, most often XML (and previously its closely-related precursor SGML), that offers technical facilities for storing precise machine-readable annotations alongside textual content—for instance, information indicating ᄨᄤ (Kongzi) is a single word, referring to the same person as the ᄨ in ᄨ๼П䖃 (Disputes between Confucius and Mozi), whereas ᄨ in ߽ߎϔᄨ is not. These annotations are costly to accurately produce, but once created they can be used as the basis for an array of more sophisticated analyses of materials based on the annotations and the distinctions of usage they make available for computer processing. While automated approaches to generating such annotations using machine learning are an ongoing research topic in the field of natural language processing (NLP), these techniques currently produce results with a nontrivial rate of error even for well-resourced and -researched languages such as modern Chinese; as a result, annotations for historical research collections are generally created manually. Annotations of this kind have been used in a variety of systems, including Scripta Sinica and CBETA—both early adopters of markup—as well as the Chinese Text Project.

Beyond Information Silos While early full-text database systems primarily offered relatively basic functionality such as viewing and full-text search, over time many additional methods of locating specific content in texts as well as summarizing their contents have been developed, both within and outside of research collections. As the sophistication of the processing involved has increased, many of these methods have been first implemented as projects independent from the research collections themselves. These include a wide variety of tools for corpus analysis, NLP for premodern Chinese text, and manual and semiautomatic annotation. The high degree of specialism in multiple distinct domains necessary to perform the tasks involved—detailed knowledge of specific periods of Chinese history, machine learning and associated NLP skills, and software development and

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platform maintenance—has meant that advances are often not immediately and widely deployed directly within research collections. Partly as a way to manage the complexity involved, particularly since the 2010s the potential utility of building concrete connections between textual collections and research databases with overlapping thematic content has attracted a significant amount of attention. Tools such as MARKUS (https:// dh.chinese-empires.eu/markus/beta/),19 Docusky (https://docusky.org.tw /DocuSky/ds-01.home.html), and the Text Tools plug-in for the Chinese Text Project (http://ctext.org/plugins/texttools/#help) provide a variety of means of searching, summarizing, and visualizing information in texts, regardless of the digital origin of the text itself, and allow annotation and analysis to take place externally from a central repository. To better facilitate the transfer of materials, a small number of collections provide application programming interfaces (APIs) that allow textual materials to be read directly into these tools on demand.20 These tools directly access not only textual collections but also materials from other types of databases, either by providing complete machine-readable downloads of their content or by using APIs provided by the collections themselves. This allows tools like MARKUS to leverage machine-readable data such as that created by the China Biographical Database Project (https://projects .iq.harvard.edu/cbdb/home) to provide computer assistance in identifying and annotating proper names and office titles and by digital gazetteers like the China Historical GIS (Geographic Information System) (http://chgis.fas. harvard.edu/)21 to identify and locate historical place names on a map. Similarly, databases such as the Dharma Drum Time Authority Database (https:// authority.dila.edu.tw/docs/open_content/)22 can be used to convert between dates specified in historical Chinese formats—typically indexed to a particular era—and dates in the Gregorian calendar, making date references available for further digital analysis. Connecting specialized data sources together in these ways allows for scalable collaboration between projects, avoids unnecessary duplication of effort, and enables the development of more sophisticated analytic tools in vastly shorter timescales.

Notes 1. Liu Cheng-yun ࡝䣮䳆, “Shiyusuo hanji dianziwenxian ziliaoku: huigu yu zhanwang” ৆䁲᠔⓶㈡䳏ᄤ᭛⥏䊛᭭ᑿ˖ಲ主㟛ሩᳯ, Gujin lunheng সҞ䂪㸵 31 (2018): 4–5. 2. Hsieh Ching-Chun 䃱⏙֞ and Lin Shih ᵫ᱄, “Zhongyang yanjiuyuan guji quanwen ziliaoku de fazhan gaiyao” Ё༂ⷨお䰶স㈡ܼ᭛䊛᭭ᑿⱘⱐሩὖ㽕, Computational Linguistics and Chinese Language Processing 2, no. 1 (1997): 108. 3. Liu Cheng-yun, “Shiyusuo hanji dianziwenxian ziliaoku,” 7. 4. Ho Che Wah, “CHANT (CHinese ANcient Texts): A Comprehensive Database of All Ancient Chinese Texts up to 600 AD,” Journal of Digital Information 3, no. 2 (2002), https://journals.tdl.org/jodi/index.php/jodi/article/view/81/80.

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5. Christian Wittern, “Chinese Buddhist Texts for the New Millennium—The Chinese Buddhist Electronic Text Association (CBETA) and Its Digital Tripitaka,” Journal of Digital Information 3, no. 2 (2002), https://journals.tdl.org/jodi/index.php/jodi/article /view/84/83. 6. Wen-ling Liu, “Commercial Databases in East Asian Studies,” Journal of East Asian Libraries 151 (2010): 13. 7. Egan, “Reflections on Uses of the Electronic Siku quanshu,” Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews 23 (2001): 103. 8. Donald Sturgeon, “Large-Scale Optical Character Recognition of Pre-modern Chinese Texts,” International Journal of Buddhist Thought and Culture 28, no. 2 (2018): 11–44. 9. Donald Sturgeon, “Chinese Text Project: A Dynamic Digital Library of Premodern Chinese,” Digital Scholarship in the Humanities 35, no. 3 (2020), https://doi.org/10.1093 /llc/fqz046. 10. See Chinese Text Project, https://ctext.org/system-statistics. 11. Liu Cheng-yun, “Shiyusuo hanji dianziwenxian ziliaoku,” 5. 12. Liu Cheng-yun, “Shiyusuo hanji dianziwenxian ziliaoku,” 10. 13. Oya Y. Rieger, Preservation in the Age of Large-Scale Digitization: A White Paper (Washington, DC: Council on Library and Information Resources, 2008). 14. Note that this is distinct from the issue of multiple encodings being used, such as Big5 versus GB; the Unicode standard defines the complete set of characters that can be represented digitally, whereas each of these various encoding schemes defines a concrete representation of some or all of the characters in this set. 15. Hsieh and Lin, “Zhongyang yanjiuyuan guji quanwen ziliaoku de fazhan gaiyao,” 107. 16. See Chinese Text Project, http://ctext.org/plugins/texttools/#help; and Donald Sturgeon, “Digital Approaches to Text Reuse in the Early Chinese Corpus,” Journal of Chinese Literature and Culture 5, no. 2 (2018): 186–213. 17. Donald Sturgeon, “Unsupervised Identification of Text Reuse in Early Chinese Literature,” Digital Scholarship in the Humanities 33, no. 3 (2018): 670–84. 18. Hsiang Jieh ䷙┨ et al., “Shuwei renwen shiyexiae de zhishi fenlei guancha: liangbu guanxiu leishu de bijiao fenxi” ᭌԡҎ᭛㽪䞢ϟⱘⶹ䄬ߚ串㾔ᆳ˖ܽ䚼ᅬׂ串᳌ⱘ ↨䓗ߚᵤ, Dongya guannianshi jikan 9 (2015): 229–86. 19. Also see Hilde De Weerdt, Chu Ming-kin, and Ho Hou-Ieong, “Chinese Empires in Comparative Perspective: A Digital Approach,” Verge: Studies in Global Asias 2, no. 2 (2016): 58–69. 20. An example of this is the Chinese Text Project API, https://ctext.org/tools/api. 21. Also see Peter K. Bol, “GIS, Prosopography and History,” Annals of GIS 18, no. 1 (2011): 3–15. 22. See Marcus Bingenheimer et al., “Modeling East Asian Calendars in an Open Source Authority Database,” International Journal of Humanities and Arts Computing 10, no. 2 (2016): 127–44.

SECTION B

BIBLIOGRAPHIES AND INDICES E D I T E D B Y B RU C E RU S K A N D X I AO L I U

B

ibliographies and indices are special cases of inventory: listings of objects that themselves are documents.1 That is, as “the knowledge of all published or copied texts,” bibliography names both the techniques of managing literary information according to some organizing principle and the inventories that result from such work.2 Bibliographies become necessary once a corpus of documents becomes too large for easy management by human memory. Where that tipping point lies depends on the nature of the documents and of the interaction with them. A chronological series of records may not need inventorying if readers retrieve them only by date, but to make them findable by topic, author, or title, a separate list is needed, and an inventory of a collection also helps prevent and detect losses. These same principles must have applied to collections of documents in early China, though direct evidence of cataloging practices before the Western Han is scant. Thereafter, imperial libraries, at least, were inventoried during major projects in which scholars developed standards and ordering schemes that shaped subsequent bibliographical practice. In this way, bibliography can be considered as a class of higher-order information about information. Some bibliographies seek to exhaust their target subject, while others sort and evaluate, winnowing a mass of information into a curated list. However, no bibliography is disinterested. Regardless of whether it aims at maximal preservation or selectivity, any bibliography constitutes a form of authority, determining representation and access through its decisions about inclusion and exclusion while staking out for itself credibility and mastery of

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a knowledge domain. In the case of literary information, a bibliography can resemble an anthology in its canonization effect. And as a form of metaknowledge, its classifying scheme, like any ordered list or taxonomy, rests upon a historically and culturally specific episteme. The index recognizes both the autonomy of the book and its place in a system, though it can be reordered for retrieval by other criteria: author, title, date, etc. Indexing orders information from within one or multiple documents according to a new, external organizing principle. For example, medieval classicists studying the Chunqiu ᯹⾟ (Annals) produced categorized lists of events—all the instances of meteorological phenomena, omens, wars, etc.—in the chronicle. This allowed scholars to identify comparable events and analyze the language describing them. Other indices were based on linguistic rather than conceptual features. For example, by the mid-Qing a reader encountering an unfamiliar place name could consult an index, sorted in rhyme order, to locate it among the thousands of administrative units across the empire. Indices and concordances to individual works break documents into their constituent words and reorder those words, typically on a graphic or phonetic basis. This task was facilitated, and eventually obviated, by digitization, which makes it possible to search for strings within and across documents. Online indices permit searching on one or multiple criteria, sometimes including the contents of the documents themselves. Such indices, like other electronic documents, become dynamic objects that contain multiple levels of information (contents and metadata) and can be reordered instantly, increasingly blurring the distinction between bibliography and index.

Notes 1. It is not always clear how to differentiate bibliography from index or either term from catalog. See Archie G. Rugh, “Catalog, Bibliography, or Index?,” Reference Quarterly 13, no. 1 (Fall 1973): 27–30. 2. Suzanne Briet, What Is Documentation?, trans. and ed. Ronald E. Day and Laurent Martinet with Hermina G. B. Anghelescu (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2006), 11.

CHAPTER 48

EARLY BIBLIOGRAPHIES M ICH A E L N Y L A N

B

ibliographies in Qin and early Western Han almost certainly began as expansions of the rhymed postfaces that circulated for single compilations either as separate works or as final chapters; such postfaces functioned as easy-to-memorize tables of contents for authoritative manuscripts. While much remains unclear, within the last decade or so scholars have laid to rest a long-standing narrative that claimed, first, that the “Yiwen zhi” 㮱᭛ᖫ (Treatise on bibliography; hereafter “Yiwen”) in the Hanshu ⓶᳌ (History of the Han) listed nearly all, if not all, of the palace library holdings1 and, second, that only minor changes were introduced during the lengthy process by which Liu Xiang’s ࡝৥ (77–6 BCE) Bielu ߹䣘 (Separate record; ca. 20 BCE?) was used by Liu Xin’s ࡝ℚ (53 BCE–23 CE) Qilüe ϗ⬹ (Seven epitomes; ca. 6 BCE),2 a work that in turn informed the “Yiwen.” Propelling the revisionist thinking is a new appreciation of the differences between manuscript and print cultures. Whereas students of early China once imagined faithful transmission of urtexts (some composed of many bamboo bundles or silk scrolls and transmitted over many centuries and great distances), experts now recognize the dominant role of oral teaching within discrete textual communities. The distinctive features of the preprinting world raise questions about the presumed dating of many works once deemed—as early as the two Han dynasties—to be faithful copies of works from Zhou and even earlier. The new default position—held for all but a very narrow range of administrative records and legal documents—presumes that each lengthy text is a composite work and looks for evidence of sutures. The two Han dynasties afford

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numerous cases where essays once circulating separately came together to form new compendia, quite possibly including the Shangshu ᇮ᳌ (Esteemed documents). One can identify Han and later revisions, reorganizations, and additions in and to writings once imagined going back to antiquity.3 And it is hardly surprising that political and cultural agendas shaped official rhetoric and the reorganization of texts, as did literary fashions. A finer appreciation of the precise historical contexts that generated the bibliographical lists of Liu Xiang, Liu Xin, and Ban Gu ⧁೎ (32–92), coupled with a curiosity about technological, conceptual, and material changes, has fostered interest in early bibliographies, even though modern historians often find it hard to imagine a world without quick and cheap access to widely shared funds of knowledge—where only a privileged few were granted access to the palace storehouses to consult texts laboriously copied on silk and bamboo. By Han emperor Wu’s ⓶℺Ᏹ reign (141–87 BCE), the palace holdings had “heaped up like hills and mountains,”4 since the throne’s explicit goal was to gather writings from the pre-Qin period “as in a net” to guide governing5 and to lend rhetorical flourishes to court proclamations. By then, the palace texts were in real danger of being neglected, with no one charged with overseeing their conservation. Even so fundamental a text as the Shangshu had three strips missing, for instance, and over seven hundred variant graphs in competing copies. So by Han emperor Cheng’s ⓶៤Ᏹ reign (33–7 BCE), the court decided to impose order on the perceived chaos. Hence, a commission headed by Liu Xiang, a senior member of the imperial clan, was established to produce collated and “corrected” versions of all important texts, which would be given fixed titles and descriptive postfaces specifying the length measured by the number of silk scrolls or bamboo bundles, for the edification of those privileged to access the palace libraries. Judging from the surviving fragments, Liu Xiang generated a “separate record” for each “new” work his team edited and transcribed. It included some or all of the following pieces of information: (1) the name of the work and order of the chapters (expressed as pian ㆛ or juan ो), (2) a description of the main principles underlying Liu Xiang’s method of collating and editing the work, (3) a capsule history of the (presumed) author and his life, (4) a brief explication of the title’s significance, (5) a discussion regarding the authenticity or unreliability of the traditions attached to the name of the author or compiler, (6) a consideration of the motivations prompting the initial textual production, (7) a characterization of the type of thinking found in the text, and (8) an assessment of the title’s value in relation to comparable writings.6 (As one Chinese scholar quips, in antiquity the mulu Ⳃ䣘 [catalog-record] must contain both a mu [manuscript title] and a lu [an attached record].)7 Liu Xiang’s combined annotations totaled at least twenty scrolls (juan ो), Liu Xin’s catalog seven juan, and Ban Gu’s bibliographical treatise a single juan.8

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In this process of radical abridgment, Ban Gu drew heavily on the records of Liu Xiang and Liu Xin, as he did in other treatises in the Hanshu.9 To arrive at his digest of a digest, however, Ban excised all but the bare essentials of the earlier bibliographies10 while adding entries for more recent compositions.11 Thus, in Ban’s treatise each entry consists of a manuscript title and pian count, to which, in rare cases, is appended the briefest of notations about the manuscript’s compiler or author, date of composition, choice of title, or reception history.12 As the two earlier bibliographies doubtless remained in circulation, Ban’s radical simplification subordinated their contents to the status of proof for his declarations. Ban Gu, like his father, was intent on demonstrating the legitimacy of the two Han dynasties, crowned by the emperors of Ban’s own era; after all, it was their devotion to classical learning that had spurred the revival of so many antique institutions and elicited clear signs of heaven’s favor. Hence, Ban made the crucial decision to embed the slightly revised bibliographical lists in a powerful and multilayered narrative celebrating Han rule as the epitome of classical ideals. Needless to say, such a narrative would gratify his Eastern Han emperors, whose reduced power made them all the more eager to advertise their patronage of the Classics and polite arts. Ban’s primary aim, then, was less to provide a catalogue raisonné of the manuscripts in the palace libraries than to sketch pleasing symmetries in the scholastic lineages that Ban traced back as far as possible, the better to attest to the particular glories of the “revived” Eastern Han ruling house.13 To that end, Ban added three explanatory layers to his basic catalog: the introductory remarks for the entire treatise; the framing narratives attached to each of the six major bibliographical divisions and thirty-eight subdivisions, nearly all of which forge close connections between the contributions of the primeval sage-kings and activities at the Han courts (especially at the xueguan ᅌᅬ, whose officers supervise classical learning); and the brief notations identifying a few individual works, as mentioned previously. The relentless historicizing framework that Ban Gu imposed on a total of 13,296 scrolls cast all types of edifying writing as products developed first by the king’s officers, with the cooperation of the early sage-kings.14 And while the preliminary remarks tarry over a portrait of moral and political decline wherein even Kongzi’s (Confucius’s) own disciples and their disciples unwittingly promote ideological fragmentation during the “dark ages” of Eastern Zhou, the unified, beneficent Han promises several paths out of these degraded practices. Given his preoccupation with origins, Ban arranged the manuscripts within each division and subdivision according to the age he attributed to them. For this reason, the Zuoshi chunqiu Ꮊ⇣᯹⾟ (Mr. Zuo’s annals; the precursor to today’s Zuozhuan) appears before the other, court-sponsored Chunqiu ᯹⾟ (Annals) traditions (zhuan ‫)ڇ‬. (Possibly Ban believes the Zuoshi chunqiu adherents who argued that of all three Chunqiu traditions, the Zuo most supports

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strong hierarchy.) Imputed age presumably justified placing the Yi ᯧ (Changes) classic first among the Five Classics, before the Shi 䀽 (Odes) and Shu ᳌ (Documents) given pride of place in Western Han. Some of Ban’s decisions modern scholars have come to expect, sometimes for the wrong reasons. For example, Ban predictably assigned the classicists or Ru ‫ ۦ‬first place among the Nine Streams of learning,15 seeing those men like himself who were well versed in precedents and protocols as the most versatile servants to the ruling house.16 Some omissions nonetheless surprise. For example, Ban’s treatise catalogs neither the courtsponsored Da Dai Liji ໻᠈⾂㿬 (Elder Dai’s Book of Rites) nor the Liji ⾂㿬 (Book of Rites), although it does not shy away from including other controversial works on the Classics.17 Curiously for a historian, Ban devised no separate category for historical works. Instead, histories were consigned to a supporting role in the Annals or the chronicles subdivision within the Classics section, making all historians potential Kongzis, able to predict the future based on their knowledge of historical patterns and skilled, like Kongzi, in the subtle wording (weiyan ᖂ㿔) of protest.18 But what end was Ban Gu serving when he twice noted that writings once in existence had “a record, but no text” ᳝䣘⛵᳌?19 Perhaps he pronounced his intent to preserve lacunae, lest he distort the past. Key to delving into the relation between Ban’s bibliography and its two predecessors are five vocabulary items that are often overlooked. Four types of notations signal Ban’s emendations: (1) ru ܹ (inserted) indicates additions by Ban, mainly the works of Liu Xiang and Yang Xiong; (2) chu ߎ (removed) shows the entries that Ban moved elsewhere, such as the Sima fa ৌ侀⊩ (Regulations of the colonel), which he moved from the section devoted to military classics to the section on ritual; and (3) sheng ⳕ (excised) and (4) chong 䞡 (repeated) remedy duplication, where the same text might conceivably fall under two or more categories. “Someone says” (huo yue ៪᳄), used three times,20 introduces alternative views on authorship and dating. While Ban’s notations are maddeningly short, they often illumine important aspects of text history. For instance, he lists Neiye ܻὁ (Inward Training) in fifteen pian,21 which he calls a “Classicist” text of unknown authorship, while later scholars tend to label Neiye a Daoist work. The Classicist subdivision is in fact a diverse assemblage of authors, led by Kongzi’s opponent Yanzi ᰣᄤ, the administrator Li Ke ᴢ‫ܟ‬ (later portrayed as a Legalist), the wily strategist Ning Yue ⬃䍞, and such decidedly un-Confucian types as Lord Pingyuan ᑇॳ৯ and Ni Kuan ‫ܦ‬ᇀ. As Qing evidential scholar Wang Mingsheng ⥟勈ⲯ (1722–98) famously opined, “If you do not thoroughly comprehend the Hanshu ‘Yiwen zhi,’ then you will not be capable of reading the texts of the realm.”22 While the next major bibliographical treatise, that in the Suishu, adopted the four-field classification system over the six divisions (see Nicoll-Johnson, chapter 49), the “Yiwen” remained a model for subsequent bibliographies even after the bibliographies of Liu Xiang and Liu Xin were lost (see Gandolfo, chapter 50).

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481

Notes 1. For an overview of omissions in the “Yiwen,” see Fu Rongxian ٙ㤷䋸, “Lidai bu Hanshu Yiwen zhi queshou wenxian yanjiu” ग़ҷ㸹∝к㡎᭛ᖫ䯭ᬊ᭛⤂ⷨお, Tushuguan ೒к佚 3 (2013): 30–33. 2. The Qilüe describes six catalog divisions plus the overall framing device. Chen Guoqing 䰜೑ᑚ, Hanshu Yiwen zhi zhu shi huibian∝к㡎᭛ᖫ∛㓪 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 2015); Zeng Shengyi ᳒㘪Ⲟ, Hanshu Yiwen zhi yu shumu wenxian lunji ⓶᳌㮱᭛ᖫ㟛 ᳌Ⳃ᭛⥏䂪䲚 (Taipei: Wenshizhe chubanshe, 2013); Wang Yong ⥟࢛, “Hanshu Yiwen zhi santi” ∝к㡎᭛ᖫϝ乬, Shaanxi shifan daxue xuebao (zhexue shehui kexue ban) 29, no. 1 (March 2000): esp. 92. 3. On Han activist editing, see Michael Nylan, Yang Xiong and the Pleasures of Reading and Classical Learning in Han China (New Haven, CT: American Oriental Society, 2011), and “Manuscript Culture in Late Western Han and Authors’ Authority,” Journal of Chinese Literature 1, no. 3 (2014–15): 155–85; and Ruyue He and Michael Nylan, “On a Han-Era Postface (Xu ᑣ) to the Documents,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 75, no. 2 (2015): 377–426. On Song activist editing, see Susan Cherniack, “Book Culture and Textual Transmission in Sung China,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 54, no. 1 (1994): 5–125. 4. Apparently this is Liu Xin’s statement from Qilüe; see Ouyang Xun ℤ䱑䀶, comp., Yiwen leiju 㮱᭛串㘮, 4 vols. (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1982), 12.231. 5. For the Han courts’ announced intention to “weave a tight net [to capture] omissions and lacunae,” see Ban Gu et al., comps., Hanshu, 8 vols. (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1962), 88.3621; and Fan Ye 㣗Ი, comp., Hou Han shu ᕠ⓶᳌, 12 vols (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1965), 79A.2546. 6. Ruan Xiaoxu 䰂ᄱ㎦ (479–536) says, in the preface to his Qilu ϗ䣘, that Liu Xiang in every case of collation made a lu (record), discussing the text’s general meaning and possible errors, which he sent to the emperor before storing the collated and corrected version. See Wei Zheng 儣ᖉ, ed., Suishu 䱟᳌, 6 vols. (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1973), 32.991–92. 7. Wang Yong, “Hanshu Yiwen zhi santi,” 92. 8. These figures are from the Suishu bibliographical treatise, which lists a Qilüe bielu in twenty juan (ascribed to Liu Xiang) and a Qilüe in seven juan (ascribed to Liu Xin). In Wei Zheng, Suishu, 32.991. 9. Even with only fragments, the contrast between Liu’s Qilüe and Ban’s “Yiwen,” in format and content, is startling. Liu Xiang’s editorial labors must be separated from Liu Xin’s efforts to provide a general organizational statement about his father’s work. Ban Gu tended to emphasize the differences, but later scholars have tended to conflate them, as in Yao Zhenzong ྮᤃᅫ, Suishu jingji zhi kaozheng 䱟᳌㍧㈡ᖫ㗗䄝, in Ershiwu shi bubian ѠकѨ৆㸹㓪, ed. Ershiwu shi kanxing weiyuanhui ѠकѨ৆ߞ㸠ྨવ᳗ (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1955), 2:385–86. See Li Ling ᴢ䳊, Lantai wanjuan: du Hanshu Yiwen zhi ݄ৄϛो; 䇏∝к㡎᭛ᖫ (Beijing: Sanlian shudian, 2013), chap. 1. Yu Jiaxi ԭ௝䣿 thought Ban rather hit or miss in his excisions; see Yu Jiaxi, “Mulu shu zhi tizi xulu,” Ⳃᔩ᳌П丠ᄫˈᑣ䣘, in Muluxue fawei Ⳃᔩᄺথᖂ (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 2007), 5. 10. Both Wei Zheng’s Suishu and the Jiu Tangshu say the Qilüe listed more than thirty thousand juan. In Wei Zheng, Suishu, 32.906; and Liu Xu ࡝᯿, ed., Jiu Tangshu 㟞૤᳌, 16 vols. (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1975), 47.2081 11. Ban Gu et al., Hanshu, 30.1701. Yan Shigu took the phrase to mean that Ban “excised all the superfluities, in order to bring out the most essential.” But what did Ban deem

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12.

13. 14.

15.

16. 17.

18. 19. 20. 21.

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INFORMATION MANAGEMENT AT THE LEVEL OF THE COLLECTION

superfluous and why? The magnitude of the losses to the palace holdings occasioned by the civil wars preceding Eastern Han necessitated multiple changes to the catalogs. Ruan Xiaoxu’s Guang Hongming ji talks of Ban Gu “writing new records” ᪄ᮄ㿬. See Zeng Shengyi, Hanshu Yiwen zhi, 10n21, 11n23. See Wang Yong, Hanshu Yiwen zhi santi, 92–93, for details. Examples include his notes for Guwuzi সѨᄤ (p. 1703), Mingtang yinyang ᯢූ䱄䱑 (p. 1709), Zhou zheng ਼ᬓ (p. 1725), and Qinlingling lingxin ⾺䳊䱉Ҹֵ (p. 1739). Li Ling, Lantai wanjuan, passim. In today’s terms, these scrolls represent some 596 titles. See Zeng Shengyi, Hanshu Yiwen zhi, on discrepant juan counts. Possibly, Ban Gu took the total over from an earlier count; this problem occurs with his geographic treatise, apparently based on tax registers of 2 CE. Ban Gu specifies ten types of mastery, but he prefers his numerology to be correct, so he does not include in his count the “Xiaoshuo jia” ᇣ䁾ᆊ (the class in which anecdotal works and other minor writings were included). Note that Ru works are not slotted under the Five Classics. See, e.g., Ban Gu et al., Hanshu, 30.1710, 1714. Also missing are the much-respected Laozi zhigui 㗕ᄤᣛ⅌ (Guide to Laozi) and the Guiguzi 儐䈋ᄤ (Ghost Valley Master). Ma Nan 侀ἴ, in “Jinwen Shangshu ‘Da shi’ zongli” 䞥᭛ᇮк໻䁧ᘏ⧚, Zhongguo dianji yu wenhua 92 (2015.1): 49–59, esp. 56, explains why there is no mention of a “Shuo gua” 䁾ऺ (Explication of the hexagrams) in Ban Gu et al., Hanshu 30. Ban Gu et al., Hanshu, 30.1714. Ban Gu et al., Hanshu, 30.1713, 1714. These are presumably Ban Gu’s own notations. Ban Gu et al., Hanshu, 30.1725 (twice), 1740. This scrupulous attention to other views is typical of Han scholarly works. Ban Gu et al., Hanshu, 30.1725. Wang Yinglin ⥟ឝ味 (1223–96), in Hanzhi kao, Han Yiwen zhi kaozheng ⓶ࠊ㗗ˈ⓶㮱᭛ᖫ㗗䄝 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 2011), identified the text as part of the Guanzi ㅵᄤ (Master Guan), but the pian length precludes any easy identification between the two works. Jin Bang 䞥ὰ (1735–1801), cited in Wang Mingsheng, Shiqi shi shangque कϗ৆ଚᾋ (Taipei: Guangwen shuju, 1980), 18.

CHAPTER 49

MEDIEVAL BIBLIOGRAPHIES E VA N N I C O L L -J O H N S O N

I

n the medieval period (the third through the tenth centuries), scholars continued to create bibliographical treatises in the tradition of the “Yiwen zhi” 㮱᭛ᖫ (Treatise on bibliography; see Nylan, chapter 48) in Hanshu ⓶᳌ (History of the Han), compiling catalogs that organized bibliographical information into hierarchies of categories. Some of these were produced with imperial sponsorship to catalog the contents of palace archives; others were compiled independently of the state and described personal collections. The most prominent example of early medieval bibliography, the “Jingji zhi” ㍧㈡ᖫ (Treatise on bibliography; hereafter JJZ) of the Suishu 䱟᳌ (History of the Sui) drew influence from both private and imperial catalogs.1 The works that influenced and were influenced by JJZ constitute the early bibliographical mainstream and have received the most attention from contemporary scholars of Chinese bibliography. Scholars operating outside of this bibliographical mainstream developed their own systems of classification for specialized corpora of Buddhist and Daoist texts. The bibliographies they produced offer a variety of perspectives on which aspects of the textual production cycle are worth noting, which features of books best capture such information, and how all of this should inform textual classifications. These divergent bibliographical traditions share an interest in using information about books to examine textual production in social and historical context. Medieval Chinese bibliographers across textual traditions examined how books came into existence, circulated among readers, and inspired the creation of new books.

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Because of this shared interest in the social and historical context of textual production and circulation, medieval bibliographical classification systems are not exclusively concerned with the formal and aesthetic features of texts. As such, while bibliographies from all three of these scholastic traditions record information about texts that contemporary readers would certainly consider literary works, there are no medieval bibliographies devoted exclusively to literary works, and there are always other factors at stake in what appear to be bibliographical distinctions between literary and nonliterary writings. Medieval bibliographers address formal and aesthetic details of texts alongside a host of other aspects of textual production, including broader patterns in how the contents of books were arranged, the social contexts in which texts were created, and even the material components of physical books. These criteria for bibliographical description and classification varied widely from bibliography to bibliography, both within and among Buddhist, Daoist, and mainstream textual traditions. JJZ is undoubtedly the bibliography contemporary scholars of medieval Chinese literature consult most frequently. But this text’s position at the center of the mainstream bibliographical tradition makes it difficult to recognize that JJZ, too, offers a distinctive perspective on medieval manuscript culture. On the one hand, JJZ draws much from the Hanshu “Yiwen zhi,” featuring many of the same subcategories and occasionally even incorporating lengthy passages of that text through unannounced citations. On the other, JJZ’s major innovation, its four-part classification system of Classics, Histories, Masters, and Collections (jing shi zi ji ㍧৆ᄤ䲚), which replaced the overarching six-part system of the “Yiwen zhi,” was reused by many later bibliographers and remains in use today. Because of these entanglements with earlier and later bibliographical scholarship, its categories now seem like abstractly defined genres that can describe the contents of texts regardless of their time and place of origin. Nonetheless, JJZ articulates a perspective of its own through its particular interest in the connection between cycles of textual production and cycles of dynastic rise and fall, which it uses to advance an argument about the nature of textual and bibliographical order. This politicized perspective on the production, circulation, and classification of texts is one of the many elements of JJZ with a clear antecedent in the Han “Yiwen zhi.”2 But as a product of the Zhenguan 䉲㾔 period (627–49) of the Tang dynasty, it must account for several more centuries of history. “Yiwen zhi” positions the institutions of the Han as the legitimate successors to an idealized Zhou bureaucracy. JJZ expands this rhetorical stance into a more broadly applicable theory of the relationship between the rise and fall of states and the cycles of textual production and loss. Moreover, in the period between the Han and Tang virtually every major dynastic power attempted to enlarge and reorganize

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its archives.3 The JJZ preface applies its theories of textual order and disorder not only to the books it organizes but also to earlier bibliographical scholarship that attempted to do the same. This perspective is articulated most clearly in its preface, which offers a narrative account of the history of government record keeping and archival practices from the invention of writing until the beginning of the Tang. A major turning point in this narrative is the collapse of the Zhou dynasty. The preface treats this event both as the instigator of an unrestrained proliferation of texts, in the form of the “many schools” of the Warring States period, and as the precursor to textual destruction—the Qin dynasty “burning of the books and burying of the scholars.”4 The preface maintains this emphasis on the consequences of political order and disorder for the textual record in its description of later periods. As the preface moves on to the Han and Northern and Southern dynasties, it describes other occasions in which dynastic collapse destroyed archives and created an unwieldy proliferation of textual types, and it praises new dynasties for replenishing decimated archives and bringing the disorderly record back under control through bibliography. The preface does not have much to say about what these well-ordered archives actually looked like, at least in its account of the pre-Han era. For the Han dynasty onward, the preface provides information about the organizational systems of bibliographical catalogs. It describes the work of Liu Xiang ࡝৥ (77–6 BCE) that laid the foundation for “Yiwen zhi” and then narrates the development of several other pre-Tang bibliographies, describing their classification systems in detail. Because none of these bibliographies has been transmitted to the present, the preface is a useful source for the history of medieval bibliography. But the preface does not offer neutral descriptions of these texts. Rather, it evaluates and even criticizes them. In its conclusion to this section of the preface, JJZ presents itself as a solution to the disorderliness of earlier attempts to catalog and classify books: Scanning far in the past to Sima Qian’s Shiji and Ban Gu’s Hanshu, and reading in more recent times the Seven Treatises of Wang Jian and Seven Records of Ruan Xiaoxu, we have adapted their style and format and excised their disorganized excesses and vulgarities; we have discarded their vagaries and gathered together their details, making concise their writings and coherent their meanings.5

The unrestrained proliferation of texts that the preface associates with periods of disorder is here transferred to the very act of bibliography. The JJZ preface clarifies that its classification system was intended to solve not just the problem of too many books but also the problems resulting from scholars creating too much information about books. In JJZ, responsibility for the management of textual excess is extended to the management of bibliographical excess.

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This correlation between political order and the orderliness of imperial archives extends to the classification system of JJZ, in which anxiety about the legitimacy of the communities from which texts emerge and concern for the internal orderliness of individual books inform bibliographical categories and subcategories. Such matters often take precedence over attention to aesthetic and formal details. For example, the “Collections” (ji) section contains poetry and literary prose, making it JJZ’s closest equivalent to a bibliographical category for literature. Although modern scholars often gesture toward equivalence by translating ji as “belles lettres,” the word ji does not have exclusively aesthetic connotations. Nevertheless, the contents of “Collections” are not exclusively determined by the method of compilation, as titles throughout all sections of JJZ are the result of textual gathering. The aesthetic and formal criteria for recognition as a collection are clarified in the section’s postface, which provides a brief account of the rise and fall of literary styles and communities of authors throughout the ages. As in the general preface to JJZ, this discussion ties literary history to political history by evaluating styles and genres based on their emergence in periods of political order or disorder. Moreover, none of these aesthetic criteria informs the three subcategories into which collections are classified. Instead, two of the three subcategories are based on compilation methods—one for single-author individual collections (bieji ߹䲚) and another for multiauthor comprehensive collections (zongji 㐑䲚) regardless of literary form. The third is reserved for works of scholarship associated with the canonical anthology Chuci Ἦ䖁 (Verses of Chu). From a present-day perspective, this combination is certainly idiosyncratic, but as suggested in the general preface, JJZ presents the “Collections” category as a refinement of past bibliographical practices. The “Collections” postface concludes with a direct reference to “Yiwen zhi,” which states that “[Hanshu compiler] Ban Gu ⧁೎ (32–92) had a ‘Survey of Poetry and Fu’ with a total of five types. At present we have drawn from these and extended them, combining them into three types and calling these the ‘Collections’ section.”6 Evaluations of textual form and content also play a role in the classification of Buddhist texts. In the Buddhist context, these evaluations reflect uniquely Buddhist doctrinal concerns, such as the overarching three-part classification of texts into the Sūtra (jing ㍧, “Sermons of the Buddha”), Vinaya (lü ᕟ, “Monastic codes”), and Abhidharma (lun 䂪, “Systematic treatises”)—the categories that give the Buddhist canon its Sanskrit name Tripi‫ܒ‬aka (sanzang ϝ㮣, “Three baskets”)—and the many approaches to separating Mahāyāna (dasheng ໻Ь) texts from other scriptures. But some Buddhist bibliographies also document other forms of bibliographical information. The earliest completely extant Chinese bibliography of Buddhist texts, Chusanzang jiji ߎϝ㮣 㿬䲚 (Collected records of the production of the Tripi‫ܒ‬aka; henceforth CSJJ), compiled by Sengyou ‫( ⼤ڻ‬445–518), is not organized according to doctrinal

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categories. Instead, it focuses on translation, another distinctive feature of texts in the Buddhist tradition. It treats the attributions to individual translators as crucial bibliographical information that informs its organizational structure.7 The first section of the bibliographical portion of CSJJ is ordered chronologically according to translator. It thus has entries for two translations of the Saddharma Pu۬‫ڲ‬arīka Sūtra (Scripture of the Lotus Blossom of the Fine Dharma; known in China as the Fahua jing ⊩㧃㍧ or The Lotus Sutra). The first, entitled Zheng fahua jing ℷ⊩㧃㍧ (The standard dharma flower sūtra), is recorded as consisting of ten scrolls (juan ो) and classified as one of ninety extant texts translated by the monk Dharmarakৢa (Zhu Fahu ノ⊩䅋; 265–313 or 239–316).8 This is followed by another list of sixty-four titles also translated by Dharmarakৢa but no longer extant at the time of the catalog’s compilation. The second version of the text in this catalog, entitled Xin fahua jing ᮄ⊩㧃㍧ (The new dharma flower sūtra), is not located in close proximity to Dharmarakৢa’s version but rather appears in a list of thirty-five titles translated by Kumārajīva (Jiumoluoshi 劽ᨽ㕙Ҕ; 344–413).9 The next section of the bibliography records “different Chinese versions of the same foreign text” 㚵ᴀৠ 㗠⓶᭛⭄. This list contains three Lotus Sutra translations: in addition to the Dharmarakৢa and Kumārajīva translations, the text mentions a third version, although the name of the translator has been lost.10 The CSJJ bibliographical system uses information about translators as an organizational framework not just because doing so was convenient but also because the life and work of translators were of central importance to Sengyou’s scholarly project.11 Although other bibliographies are also interested in the individuals responsible for mediating the production of texts—they attribute texts to authors and occasionally even editors—this information does not shape their overarching structures. The contrast can be most clearly seen in the fourth division of the CSJJ, which is devoted to summaries and abridged editions of texts. Unlike translation, abridgment is not uniquely prominent among Buddhist texts and was in fact common throughout early medieval manuscript culture.12 The section listing these texts is titled chaojing ᡘ㍧. The term chao, whose root meaning is “to copy or transcribe,” also appears in the titles of abbreviated versions of many non-Buddhist texts, especially condensed works of historiography.13 Although many abbreviated texts are also listed in mainstream bibliographies such as JJZ, such catalogs do not confine them to their own section. CSJJ is unique in sequestering the abridged texts, a feature that fits naturally within that catalog’s schema of categories developed in response to other editorial interventions in the form of translation. As with Buddhist bibliography, Daoist scriptural catalogs feature organizational systems that address doctrinal concerns unique to the corpus they catalog. These issues are particularly complex for early medieval Daoist scriptures. The early medieval period saw the emergence of numerous interrelated

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Daoist scriptural traditions, and scholarly proponents of each used classification systems informed by their own priorities.14 Daoist works of bibliographical scholarship also occasionally discussed features that were not unique to Daoist scripture but that were virtually ignored by bibliographers working with other corpora. One example of this is Zhengao ⳳ䁹 (Declarations of the perfected; henceforth ZG), a carefully curated anthology of core texts in the Shangqing Ϟ⏙ (Highest clarity) Daoist tradition (also see Heller, chapter 24). ZG gathers writings attributed to perfected beings (zhenren ⳳҎ) said to have transmitted their writings through the medium Yang Xi ἞㖆 (330–86?).15 To compile the text, Tao Hongjing 䱊ᓬ᱃ (456–536) gathered documents that he believed were either autograph manuscripts or faithful hand-copied facsimiles. ZG concludes with series of notes on this corpus and a lengthy account of its dissemination (and corruption) throughout a network of collectors, copyists, and fraudsters.16 Thus, while not typically treated as an example of bibliography, ZG’s final chapters are rich in bibliographical detail. They document material qualities of texts and details of their transmission processes overlooked in bibliographies of other corpora.17 For instance, Tao points out that certain documents were written on “white Jingzhou paper” 㤞Ꮂⱑ⠟. He also reports that some texts had been completely rearranged, while others had deteriorated with age, resulting in many lacunae.18 Elsewhere, he even evaluates the quality of a text’s calligraphy, comparing it favorably to that of famed father-son calligraphers Wang Xizhi ⥟㖆П (303–61) and Wang Xianzhi ⥟⥏П (344–86).19 The contents of ZG are unlike anything else in the early medieval corpus, but their material features—paper quality, calligraphy, and varying states of preservation and decay—were features of all early medieval texts. Yet these were typically ignored by Tao Hongjing’s contemporaries. As a result, where other bibliographies create the illusion that books are abstract, perfectly reproducible texts, ZG demonstrates that every manuscript is a unique object, produced through the fallible process of transcription and made from material subject to deterioration and disfigurement. As the lively narratives of The Lotus Sutra and the ornate poetry of ZG attest, bibliographical information about texts of literary interest to contemporary readers can be found across the spectrum of early medieval bibliographies. But because each bibliography is interested in different textual features and aspects of textual production, the type of information that has been recorded about a given text can vary widely depending on the bibliography in which the text appears. JJZ is fixated on how the rise and fall of political institutions affects the management of bibliographical information, CSJJ is organized according to the efforts of individual textual mediators, and ZG documents how material qualities either are preserved or decay during the dissemination of a corpus. These selective interests may limit what can now be known about each specific work, but combining their

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insights can create a deeper perspective of early medieval manuscript culture in general. They allow glimpses of what the early medieval landscape of texts looked like—and why it mattered—to those who lived inside it.

Notes 1. On the JJZ and its antecedents, see Glen Dudbridge, “Libraries, Book Catalogs, Lost Writings,” in The Oxford Handbook of Classical Chinese Literature (1000 BCE–900 CE), ed. Wiebke Denecke, Wai-yee Li, and Xiaofei Tian (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 148–52; and Lai Xinxia ՚ᮄ໣, Gudian muluxue স‫Ⳃ݌‬ᔩᄺ, rev. ed. (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 2013), 143–56. 2. For the ideology of the Hanshu bibliography, see Michael Hunter, “The ‘Yiwen zhi’ 㮱᭛ᖫ (Treatise on Arts and Letters) Bibliography in Its Own Context,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 138, no. 4 (2018): 763–80. 3. For a survey of government-sponsored archival activities in the third to seventh centuries, see Zhou Shaochuan ਼ᇥᎱ et al., Zhongguo chuban tongshi Ё೑ߎ⠜䗮৆, vol. 2, Wei Jin Nanbeichao juan 儣ᰟफ࣫ᳱो (Beijing: Zhongguo shuji chubanshe, 2008), 118–51. 4. Wei Zheng 儣ᖉ, ed., Suishu, 6 vols. (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1973), 32.904–5. 5. Wei Zheng, Suishu 32.908. 6. Wei Zheng, Suishu 35.1091. 7. Sengyou’s catalog incorporates information from a lost predecessor by Dao’an 䘧ᅝ (312–85), after whose structure it is likely modeled. See Tanya Storch, The History of Chinese Buddhist Bibliography: Censorship and Transformation of the Tripitaka (Amherst, NY: Cambria Press, 2014), 21–22, 30–36. 8. Sengyou, Chu sanzang jiji, in Taishō shinshū daizōkyō ໻ℷᮄ㛽໻㮣㍧, ed. Takakusu Junjirō 催ἴ䷚⃵䚢 and Watanabe Kaigyoku ⏵䙞⍋ᯁ (Tokyo: Taishō issaikyō kankōkai, 1924–35), T55n2145: 7b14, 9b25. 9. Sengyou, Chu sanzang jiji, T55.2145: 10c19, 11a26. 10. Sengyou, Chu sanzang jiji, T55.2145: 13c22–29. The entry mentions only that three versions of The Lotus Sutra exist; annotations provide the titles and translators of the two known translations and briefly describe the anonymous lost translation. 11. Other sections of CSJJ provide biographies of important translators that informed early collections of monks’ biographies. Storch, History of Chinese Buddhist Bibliography, 147; Daniel Boucher, “Dharmarakৢa and the Transmission of Buddhism to China,” Asia Major, 3rd ser., 19, no. 1–2 (2006): 14. 12. On these abbreviated texts, see Zhao Xing 䍉᯳, “Chaocuo wenxian de yuanqi yu liubian” ᡘ䫭᭛⤂ⱘ㓬䍋Ϣ⌕ব, Huazhong shifan daxue yanjiusheng xuebao 23 (2016.1): 141–46. See also Hu Baoguo 㚵ᅱ೑, Han Tang jian shixue de fazhan ∝૤ 䯈৆ᄺⱘথሩ (Beijing: Beijing daxue chubanshe, 2014), 85; and Xiaofei Tian, Beacon Fire and Shooting Star: The Literary Culture of the Liang (502–557) (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2007), 82–83. 13. Zhao Xing, “Chaocuo wenxian de yuanqi yu liubian,” 144–45. JJZ lists several such works and describes them alongside other examples of “Miscellaneous History” (za shi 䲰৆). See Wei Zheng, Suishu 33.959–62. 14. See, for example, Wang Chengwen, “The Revelation and Classification of Daoist Scriptures,” trans. Gil Raz, in Early Chinese Religion: Part Two: The Period of Division (220– 589 AD), ed. John Lagerwey and Pengzhi Lü (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 2:827–45.

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15. Stephen R. Bokenkamp, “Declarations of the Perfected,” in Religions of China in Practice, ed. Donald S. Lopez (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 166–67; Paul W. Kroll, “Daoist Verse and the Quest of the Divine,” in Lagerwey and Lü, Early Chinese Religion: Part Two, 2:963–64. 16. Tao Hongjing, Zhengao ⳳ䁹, in Zhengtong daozang ℷ㍅䘧㮣, comp. and ed. Zhang Yuchu ᔉᅛ߱ (1361–1410), Shao Yizheng 䚉ҹℷ (1368–1463), and Zhang Guoxiang ᔉ೟⼹ (d. 1611), vol. 35 (Taipei: Xinwenfeng, 1985), 19.171b–78b. The narrative portion of this chapter of Zhengao is translated and analyzed in Michel Strickmann, “The Mao Shan Revelations: Taoism and the Aristocracy,” T’oung Pao 63, no. 1 (1977): 41–62. 17. The material and calligraphic details documented by Tao are explained in Kōzen Hiroshi ݈㞇ᅣ, “Shufa lishi zhong de Tao Hongjing yu Zhengao” к⊩ग़৆Ёⱘ䱊ᓬ᱃ Ϣⳳ䇄, in Yiyu zhi yan: Xingshan Hong Zhongguo gudian lunji ᓖඳПⴐ˖݈㞇ᅣЁ ೑স‫݌‬䆎䲚, trans. and ed. Dai Yan ᠈➩ (Shanghai: Fudan daxue chubanshe, 2006), 96–99. 18. Tao Hongjing, Zhengao, 19.174b. For other cases in which Tao Hongjing discusses paper quality and color, see Kōzen, “Shufa lishi,” 98–99. See also Strickmann, “Mao Shan Revelations,” 3, 41–42. 19. Tao Hongjing, Zhengao, 19.174a; Zhengao refers to these figures with the epithet “the two Wangs” Ѡ⥟; see Kōzen, “Shufa lishi,” 92–93.

CHAPTER 50

LATER IMPERIAL BIBLIOGRAPHIES S T E FA N O G A N D O L F O

T

he historiography of late imperial bibliographies is driven by two assumptions. The first holds that the fourfold classification (sibu ಯ䚼) was the dominant organizing system for imperial projects from the Tang dynasty onward and that it constituted, in the words of Yao Mingda ྮৡ䘨 (1905–42), the “orthodox” (zhengtong ℷ㍅) system.1 The fact that the last major imperial bibliographical collection of texts, the Siku quanshu ಯᑿܼ᳌ (Complete writings of the four repositories), compiled in the late eighteenth century, adopted the fourfold classification greatly contributed to the formation of this assumption. The second assumption views the development of bibliography in China through a teleological lens, taking the fourfold classification as the apex of bibliographical practices. The sibu is seen as the climax of a thousand-year process of gestation and experimentation, finding its highest expression in the Siku quanshu.2 One outcome of these two assumptions has been that Ming imperial bibliographies, which used systems different from the fourfold classification, have been overlooked and undervalued. Few and far apart, modern scholarly works on late imperial bibliographies tend to downplay the significance the model adopted in the Ming had—and could have had—in the development of bibliographical practices in China. This chapter provides a closer look at the practices and products of late imperial scholars in the Song, Ming, and Qing dynasties. It will suggest that the conceptualization of the purposes and structures of late imperial bibliographies can be understood as fitting two distinct models for organizing textual knowledge: that of a descriptive map and that of an advising guide. How scholars

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at different times understood the goals of bibliographical projects influenced the ways in which the order of knowledge was conceived. The richness and diversity of bibliographical praxis are not accessible only with the privilege of modern hindsight. Rather, the makers of the Siku quanshu were well aware of and intentionally responded to this state of affairs. How these two models were conceived within the context of the Siku quanshu is at the heart of this chapter.

Zheng Qiao and His Legacy From the Song dynasty onward, many private bibliographies did not employ the fourfold classification.3 Rather, systems with far more numerous divisions and subdivisions were adopted. Zheng Qiao 䜁  (1104–62) was instrumental in this development. One of the most influential scholars of his time, he presented the first systematic and comprehensive account of bibliographical principles and practices in Chinese history. His conception of a bibliographical project—of what it is supposed to achieve and how—exerted a tremendous influence on subsequent bibliographical undertakings, both private and imperial. Zheng Qiao offered a vision of the bibliographical universe that was unparalleled in detail and granularity. In the “Jiaochou lüe” ᷵䅢⬹ (Bibliographical summary) chapter of his celebrated Tongzhi 䗮ᖫ (Universal treatise), he provided an organization with 12 main sections (lei 串), 100 subsections (jia ᆊ), and 422 subsubsections (zhong 。), making it the most granular and thorough organization of knowledge in imperial China.4 The innovation of a three-tiered structure granted unprecedented precision, since broader bibliographical units were now subdivided with unmatched granularity. The use of three levels to organize the bibliographical universe was intended to confer a systematic order to the entire structure with the intention to make it easier to understand and use. By dividing all fields of knowledge in three levels of increasing precision, the organization had a systematicity that was designed to facilitate the search and retrieval of texts. The three-tiered structure was so effective that even the Siku quanshu compilers—who otherwise criticized Zheng Qiao’s organization—adopted it in their project. Yet Zheng Qiao’s use of multiple main sections—and not just four—was perhaps more significant, as it afforded a different conception of the intellectual landscape. He elevated many of the subgroups of the fourfold classification to independent and self-contained main sections. By affording different fields of scholarship a distinct bibliographical position, he was recognizing the diversity and level of specialization that defined academic practices at the time. For example, he took philological works and primers (xiaoxue ᇣᅌ) out of the classics section (jingbu ㍧䚼) where they were typically found in the fourfold classification and where they would eventually reappear in the Siku quanshu.

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His further subdivision of the xiaoxue section into eight subsections—including phonology (yinyun ䷇䷏), paleography (guwen স᭛), the study of characters (wenzi ᭛ᄫ), and calligraphy (fashu ⊩᳌)—reflects and exemplifies the degree of specialization of scholarship during the Song dynasty. Zheng Qiao’s innovations were not limited to xiaoxue. He elevated astronomical and calendrical studies (tianwen ໽᭛) from their position in the masters section (zibu ᄤ䚼) of the fourfold classification, granting them conceptual independence as one of the twelve stand-alone main sections. He then further divided the section into three groups—astronomy (tianwen), calendrical studies (lishu ⅋ᭌ), and calculations (suanshu ㅫ㸧)—each of which he in turn subdivided into more than fifteen subsections. He similarly transformed the sections on the five phases (wuxing Ѩ㸠), the arts (yishu 㮱㸧), literature (wen ᭛), and medicine (yifang 䝿ᮍ) into separate main sections with multiple subdivisions.5 Several of the headings Zheng Qiao employed for his twelve main sections had precedents in earlier fourfold classifications. Nonetheless, making subgroups of the fourfold classification into conceptually independent wholes came with an additional layer of granularity unseen in any fourfold organization. In Zheng Qiao’s case, conceptual independence and precision went hand in hand. The introduction of multiple independent sections and their division into fine and precise subsections reflected a qualitatively different way of conceptualizing the knowledge universe. Zheng Qiao’s division was the product of a meticulous consideration of bibliography and its purposes. His starting premise was that without scholarly specialization, texts could not be understood, which led to unclear bibliographical divisions. A precise system was not merely intellectually necessary but also existentially vital, as it guaranteed the survival of texts: proper conduct in scholarship meant proper handling of texts, and correct organization of bibliographies led to the perpetuation of scholarship and the preservation of texts.6 Zheng Qiao was extremely critical of the Han dynasty Qilüe ϗ⬹ (Seven epitomes) and fourfold organization systems, which did not have the level of precision that defined his organization (see Nylan, chapter 48). He described the two as incapable of making texts clear and ultimately found them unintelligible and disorderly.7 With these considerations in mind, he held that the main objective of bibliographical arrangements is to distinguish as much as possible in order for scholarship to become self-evidently clear.8 The quest for a clear and precise bibliographical division translated into a critique of the practice of including introductory critical notes to sections (xiaoxu ᇣᑣ) and to individual texts (jieti 㾷丠), which provided key information along with evaluative judgments. Zheng Qiao argued that bibliographical divisions ought to be so clearly demarcated as to make it possible to know the contents of different bibliographical units simply by looking at their names: With such clarity, of what use would critical notes be? he asked rhetorically.9

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Thus, he criticized the Song dynasty imperial project Chongwen zongmu ዛ᭛ 㐑Ⳃ (Comprehensive catalog of the Academy of Venerating Literature), which used the fourfold classification, for including a bibliographical note for every book entry.10 Connecting to his critique of the fourfold order, he claimed that clear and precise divisions (unlike those in the fourfold order) do not need to explain themselves with prefaces. Zheng Qiao’s criticism of introductory critical notes went even further. Early Tang dynasty scholars had commented on the first fourfold classifications as being capable of “separating the crimson from the vermilion.”11 This phrase was taken from the Lunyu 䂪䁲 (Analects), where Confucius lamented: “I despise the fact that crimson robs the luster of vermilion. I despise that the songs of Zheng dishevel elegant music. I despise those who with sharp mouths overthrow kingdoms and families.”12 Distinguishing the crimson from the vermillion was a way of stating that differences in value existed among seemingly similar objects. In the Lunyu, the phrase refers to ethical and political distinctions among rulers and their behaviors. Following the spirit of the Analects, the Tang scholars’ evaluation was an approval of the fourfold classification for its capacity to establish differences in value in its bibliographical order. This was not a nod to its precision or detail but rather a recognition that it established clear hierarchical distinctions separating the worthy from the unworthy and the true from the false. Zheng Qiao used the same phrase—but in a deliberately different manner. He stated that with the use of “twelve main sections and hundreds of sub- and sub-subsections, the crimson and the vermillion were separated.”13 By appropriating the phrase to underline the necessity for clarity and detail, Zheng Qiao was critiquing the notion that bibliographical divisions ought to establish hierarchical divisions of value. Granularity and precision, and not value judgments and hierarchies, were the essential objectives of bibliographical projects for Zheng Qiao. Critical prefaces were not needed not only because a clear division had no use for them but also because evaluative judgments had little room in his conception of bibliography. Zheng Qiao’s understanding of bibliographical projects influenced many future imperial collections—most notably, in the Ming dynasty. In 1441, the Wenyuange shumu ᭛⏉䭷᳌Ⳃ (Catalog of the Literary Depths Library) was compiled using an organizational structure quite distinct from the fourfold classification. Since this was a catalog of a preexisting collection at a specific point in time, one cannot ignore the possibility that some aspects of its organization reflect the physical layout of the library. Nonetheless, the catalog had twenty main sections, ten of which were divided into further subsections. The twenty main groups were labeled with the first twenty characters of the Qianzi wen गᄫ᭛ (Thousand character classic), which effectively functioned as a notation system, since the characters were unrelated to the content enclosed in the same way that a numerical codifying system is. Compiled in 1605, the

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Xinding neige cangshu mulu ᮄᅮ‫ݙ‬䭷㮣᳌Ⳃ䣘 (New catalog of the Library of the Grand Secretariat) was organized along similar lines, with a total of eighteen main groups. The fact that the fourfold division was not followed undermines the first assumption of the historiography of bibliographical catalogs that the fourfold order was the dominant, orthodox system. While neither of these compilations matched Zheng Qiao’s organization in precision and detail, they both echoed its fundamental idea that the textual universe is composed of more than four primary divisions. The breakup of the four main sections of the sibu in both the Song and the Ming shows that it was far from being the prevailing organizing order. The use of a notation system cohered with one other major development in Ming knowledge-organization practices: the rhyming structure of the massive fifteenth-century encyclopedia (leishu 串᳌) Yongle dadian ∌ῖ໻‫( ݌‬Great compendium of the Yongle reign). In the past, encyclopedias had been topically organized (see Allen, chapter 31). The order of topics followed a specific understanding of the knowledge universe whereby the movement from one topic to the next was dictated by a concrete conception of the world. The rhyming organization of the Yongle dadian broke this conception and instead followed the phonetic order of the Hongwu zhengyun ⋾℺ℷ䷏ (Correct rimes of the Hongwu reign) dictionary, thus operating as the functional equivalent of an alphabetic arrangement. The use of notation and a phonetic structure highlights a tendency during the Ming toward a conceptualization of the order of knowledge that broke away from traditionally conceived “inherent” connections across domains. In this sense, despite its lack of detail, the Wenyuange shumu resembles the Yongle dadian in that both stand as examples of imperial projects where the organization of the knowledge universe was becoming increasingly abstract.

The Response of the Siku quanshu The editors of the Siku quanshu were, to say the least, unimpressed by the innovations of their Ming counterparts. Compared to the order established by Liu Xiang ࡝৥ (77–6 BCE) and Xun Xu 㤔ࢪ (d. 289), the founders of the Qilüe and sibu divisions, respectively, the order of the Wenyuange shumu was, in their eyes, an embarrassment. The editors held that the makers of the Wenyuange shumu had done a poor, sloppy job. There is no reference in the editorial preface that indicates the failures of the Wenyuange shumu were conceived in terms of a break with an orthodox practice of organizing knowledge. Rather, the editors were concerned that the Wenyuange shumu did not list such basic information as number of chapters and author’s name and, more seriously, that it was so poorly organized it did not allow one to examine the order of texts and

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gain a grasp of their development.14 It was the failure to accomplish both simple and complex tasks, and not the failure to uphold orthodoxy, that precipitated a disparaging critique. The choice to compare the Wenyuange shumu to the first manifestations of the two historically most important organizing systems is telling. A comparison with the founding bibliographical schemes highlighted the novelty of the organization of the Wenyuange shumu. In the editors’ eyes, it was a poor system no doubt, but, nonetheless, they perceived it to signal a different approach to bibliography, as distinct as the Qilüe and sibu organizations had been. The negative evaluation of the organization should not conceal the fact that implicit in the editors’ statement is a recognition of the innovative spirit of the Wenyuange shumu. In fact, the organization was seen as an embarrassment exactly because it was a novel approach that, however, failed to perform the basic bibliographical tasks set out by the Siku quanshu editors. A major charge by the editors against Zheng Qiao and the bibliographical schemes that followed him was that of failing to appreciate the significance of critical introductory prefaces. Labeling them useless literary embellishments, Zheng Qiao, in the editors’ eyes, had excised them and put forth petty schemes “that did not exhibit a mind [directed to] the public good.” Critical introductions, the editors asserted, could not be dismissed as mere literary embellishments.15 In their view, the purpose behind reviews was not only to provide background information on a text, its history, its number of volumes and so forth but also to summarize its contents and provide a critical evaluation of its strengths and weaknesses.16 With their critique of Zheng Qiao’s rejection of critical evaluations, the Siku quanshu editors were supporting the notion that evaluative distinctions were a fundamental goal of a bibliographical project. A hierarchical structure that brought out distinctions in value was necessary to guide one’s understanding of the origins and development of knowledge. How to understand the totality of knowledge from its origins all the way down to its most minute manifestations had become one of the primary scholarly concerns during the Qing dynasty. Providing an order to this seemingly infinite outpouring of learning had become essential. The editors of the Siku quanshu argued that this did not entail drawing as many and as fine distinctions as possible but rather called for a structure that indicated how different fields of knowledge where connected to each other relative to their (perceived) merits. It is exactly for this reason that they criticized the Ming dynasty scholar Jiao Hong ⛺ゥ (1540–1620) whose “Jingji zhi” ㍧㈡ᖫ (Treatise on bibliography) chapter in Guoshi ೟৆ (History of the state) closely resembled Zheng Qiao’s in its level of detail. The editors argued that having so many subdivisions made it impractical and that their choice to use the fourfold classification with fewer subsections offered a proper and orderly arrangement, making it easier for readers to search through the catalog. The editors concluded that deleting

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and merging different sections would dispense with excessive trivialities.17 It was possible, in the Siku quanshu editors’ view, to have an organization that simply had too many divisions. Detail and precision were not the be-all and end-all of bibliography.

The Two Models The Siku quanshu, on the one hand, and Zheng Qiao’s organization and its successors, on the other, represent two different models of bibliography in late imperial China. Different practices emerged as a result of different conceptualizations of the fundamental objectives that a bibliographical project, and the organization of knowledge more generally, was supposed to achieve. The model proposed by Zheng Qiao and put into practice, however incompletely, in Ming imperial bibliographies can be understood as embodying the logic of a descriptive map. Bibliographical divisions in this conception ought to be as detailed and precise as possible, giving plenty of information about the intellectual landscape. For this reason, having multiple main sections and numerous subsections and subsubsections was desirable. The drive toward clarity and precision contributed to the formation of a three-tiered division for Zheng Qiao and to the use of numerous main sections in Ming imperial projects. With precision as the main intellectual purpose, value-laden hierarchical judgments became less important. This concern with objectivity was manifested in the choice not to include critical prefaces and, to some extent, in the larger changes during the Ming toward abstract knowledge and away from specific inherent relations, as seen in the introduction of notation and phonetic systems. These transformations should be understood not as markers of an Enlightenment-like fascination with reason and objectivity but rather as seedlings that leaned in a different direction in the practice of Chinese bibliography but did not fully bloom. This was not China’s “lost chance” to develop bibliographical schemes that would resemble those of its European counterparts but rather an internal development designed as an alternative conception of bibliography to that of the Qilüe and the sibu. The lack of an imperially sponsored bibliography that would embody Zheng Qiao’s level of sophistication contributed to the assumption that the fourfold classification was its teleological end point, ignoring the possibility of a different trajectory offered in the Song and Ming dynasties. The makers of the Siku quanshu, motivated by a set of concerns paradigmatic of their era, responded to Zheng Qiao’s conception of bibliography with their own view. For them, bibliography ought to function as an advising guide that can assist emperor and scholars alike in their quest to understand the development of the textual universe. This was not an exercise in simply laying out how

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things are but rather a tool that would contribute to the proper understanding of how the myriads of texts encountered by Qing scholars grew out from and were connected to scholarship of the past. Of course, scholars in the Ming and Song dynasties were also faced with an overwhelming textual outpouring, but these questions acquired a distinctive salience during the Qing. The fourfold classification was thus perceived as a structure that could provide hierarchical distinctions to help scholars understand what was valuable and what was not. The inclusion of critical prefaces highlights the overwhelming concern with an evaluative rather than a descriptive conception of bibliography. The textual record reveals significant differences in the conceptions of bibliographical purposes and practices in late imperial China. Nonetheless, one should be cautious not to overemphasize these differences. For example, while hierarchical judgments played a smaller role in Song and Ming bibliographies, Zheng Qiao and Ming imperial bibliographical projects certainly did not eschew the notion of hierarchy. The placement of Ming emperors’ writings as the first bibliographical section certainly indicates otherwise. However, compared to the Siku quanshu, it is hard to detect a hierarchical logic unfolding throughout the entire structure. On the other hand, there is reason to argue that detail and precision were instrumental goals for Qing bibliographers, since the inclusion of the three-tiered division in the Siku quanshu made it by far the most detailed imperial bibliography. Nonetheless, the added level of granularity was subordinated to the logic of evaluative distinctions, whereby finer subgroupings were deployed primarily to the extent that they contributed to a hierarchical order of knowledge. Significant similarities existed between the two divergent models of conceptualizing bibliographies and their objectives. Yet the logic of a descriptive map and that of an advising guide were substantially different, and this accounts for the polemical language that each side employed in its description of the other. What emerges from late imperial bibliographical discourse and practice is a deliberate and robust debate on the conceptualizations of bibliography, a debate where genuine intellectual positions and not ideological doctrines of an entrenched orthodoxy fueled a highly sophisticated and self-reflexive discourse.

Notes 1. Yao Mingda, Zhongguo muluxue shi Ё೑Ⳃᔩᄺ৆ (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 2011), 77. A classic book on bibliography, Yu Jiaxi ԭ௝䫵, Muluxue fawei Ⳃᔩᄺথ ᖂ (1963; repr., Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 2007), does not even mention Ming imperial bibliographies in the chapter on the development of bibliographies from the Tang to the Qing. For one of the few works that includes a discussion of Ming bibliographies, albeit rather short, see Lai Xinxia ᴹᮄ໣, Gudian muluxue স‫Ⳃ݌‬ᔩᄺ, rev. ed. (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 2013).

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2. One of the few works of contemporary scholarship that explicitly presents the idea of Ming imperial bibliographies as constituting a new system is Chen Yaosheng 䰜㗔ⲯ, “Xueshu wenhua xinxi jiaoliu jilei yu Zhong-Xi muluxue zhi bijiao yanjiu” ᄺᴃ᭛ֵ࣪ ᙃѸ⌕⿃㌃ϢЁ㽓ⳂᔩᄺП↨䕗ⷨお, Sichuan tushuguan bao 96 (1997): 11–30, esp. 20. 3. For more on Song bibliographies, see Bai Jin ⱑ䞥, Bei Song muluxue yanjiu ࣫ᅟⳂᔩ ᄺⷨお (Beijing: Renmin chubanshe, 2014). 4. Zheng Qiao, “Jiaochou lüe”, in Tongzhi ershi lüe 䗮ᖫѠक⬹, ed. Wang Shumin ⥟‍⇥ (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1995), 2:1805 (hereafter Tongzhi). 5. For an easy-to-use reference on Zheng Qiao’s organization, see Yuan Xueliang 㹕ᄺ㡃, Gudai shumu fenleifa yu wenxue dianji yalüe সҷкⳂߚ㉏⊩Ϣ᭛ᄺ‫݌‬㈡ዪ⬹ (Chengdu: Ba Shu shushe, 2002), 100–103. 6. Zheng Qiao, Tongzhi, 2.1804. 7. Zheng Qiao, Tongzhi, 2.1805. 8. Zheng Qiao, Tongzhi, 2.1806. 9. Zheng Qiao, Tongzhi, 2.1818. 10. Zheng Qiao, Tongzhi, 2.1818. 11. Zheng Qiao, Tongzhi, 2.1805. 12. Lunyu, 17.18 / Cheng Shude ⿟‍ᖋ, ed., Lunyu jishi 䂪䁲䲚䞟, vol. 4 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1990), 35.1225 13. Zheng Qiao, Tongzhi, 2.1805. 14. Ji Yun ㋔ᯔ et al., comps., Siku quanshu zongmu tiyao ಯᑿܼ᳌㐑Ⳃᦤ㽕, 4 vols. (Shanghai: Shangwu yinshuguan, 1933), 1781–82. 15. Ji Yun et al., Siku quanshu zongmu tiyao, 1775–77. 16. Zhongguo diyi lishi dang’anguan Ё೑㄀ϔग़৆ḷḜ佚, ed., Zuanxiu Siku quanshu dang’an 㑖ׂಯᑧܼкḷḜ (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1997), 1:21. 17. “Siku quanshu fanli” ಯᑿܼ᳌޵՟, in Ji Yun et al., Siku quanshu zongmu tiyao, 2.

CHAPTER 51

TWENTIETH-CENTURY BIBLIOGRAPHIES A N AT O LY D E T W Y L E R

O

ver the course of the twentieth century, the practices of classifying and cataloging texts in China reflected larger, architectonic shifts in epistemology, cultural authority, and institutional power. The modernization of theories and practices of bibliography began with the reorganization of knowledge in the second half of the nineteenth century and the accelerated proliferation of systems of knowledge through encounters with imperialism and capitalism. This included sporadic attempts to fit an expanding list of translated texts into the traditional sibu ಯ䚼 (fourfold classification) scheme. Zhang Zhidong ᔉП⋲ (1837–1909), the reformist Qing official and prominent advocate of “Chinese learning as substance, western learning for application” Ё储㽓⫼, used the Masters (zi ᄤ) category to accommodate works by Western authors or on Western subjects such as mathematics and armaments in the Shumu dawen ᳌Ⳃㄨଣ (Questions and answers on catalogs; 1876), his widely influential bibliography of essential learning. He further added a separate section for congshu শ᳌ (collectanea) as a convenient way of including reprinted collections of miscellaneous old texts that were otherwise difficult to categorize.1 The accommodation of Western knowledge and the inclusion of its disciplines using the sibu system continued beyond the fall of the Qing dynasty in 1911 into the early years of the Republic. This was particularly true for scholarship focusing on the Chinese tradition such as the extensive bibliographical work by National Studies (Guoxue ೟ᅌ) advocates like Liang Qichao ṕଧ䍙

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(1873–1929) and Hu Shi 㚵䘽 (1891–1962), who had inherited the concerns regarding text sources and authorship from Qing evidentiary scholarship. By the 1920s, the meaning and premise of bibliography—including its impact on literary knowledge—were radically transforming as part of broader reconfigurations of institutions, disciplines, and fields of knowledge. By a process of translational coupling, mulu Ⳃ䣘 was conjoined with the English word bibliography and accorded new status as a modern and descriptive science (mulu can also be translated as “catalog” and “index”). China’s earlier traditions of cataloging and indexing, including the appearance of the term mulu itself in Zheng Xuan’s 䜁⥘ (127–200) San Li mulu ϝ⾂Ⳃ䣘 (Catalog of the Three Rites classics), retroactively became a prehistory to modern bibliography studies (muluxue Ⳃ䣘ᅌ), which was itself installed within the modern discipline of library science (see Nylan, chapter 48). Muluxue was conceived as a way of overcoming nation-based epistemic silos and unifying knowledge across the world. Characteristic of this was the subject-oriented Dewey Decimal System, which could be used to define modern bibliography itself. Even the system’s use of Hindu-Arabic numerals was appealing for its seeming rationality.2 Accordingly, the Dewey Decimal System and card cataloging were adopted by the Tsinghua University Library and other institutions beginning in the early 1920s. New metadata protocols (metadata in the sense that they provide information about other data—in this case, publication data) settled on identifying a work’s author or editor, publisher, and place and date of publication along with a subject heading. This newly integrated version of mulu and related practices both accompanied and intersected with developments in the management of literary information. Modern bibliography was attractive to scholars as a way of consolidating China’s cultural heritage by making the whole tradition accessible through systematic categories. Proper hierarchization could make information more retrievable, allowing one to easily “find the fine steed using only a drawing” ᣝ೪㋶倹.3 Underlying this motivation were anxieties about amplitude: rationalized bibliographies and catalogs were a coping mechanism for dealing with a corpus that was now perceived as too large to reasonably master. More centrally, bibliography was instrumental to the concurrent translingual redefinition of wenxue ᭛ᅌ as “literature,” which, following Western generic conventions, regarded all writing outside of fiction, poetry, drama, and free prose (sanwen ᬷ᭛) as nonliterary.4 Beginning in the 1930s, bibliography joined anthologies in contributing to this retrenchment by mapping out the new literary field, solidifying generic boundaries, and helping to preserve and elevate works associated with the New Culture and May Fourth movements from two decades prior. The remaining part of this chapter examines this history using two important case studies. The first delves into the bibliographical study of the most

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iconic modern Chinese author, Lu Xun 元䖙 (1881–1936; pen name of Zhou Shuren ਼‍Ҏ), and the cataloging of his personal book collection and manuscripts. The second surveys large-scale enumerations of the field of literary culture during the modern period (coterminous with the political history of the Republican era), with a focus on the medium of the journal. In both cases, bibliography occupies a central place in the management of literary information, mediating between a number of other practices and forms covered in this volume, particularly collection and librarianship along with anthologization and indexing. Within this network of practices, it is not always easy to clearly delineate between bibliography and these other forms, ultimately positioning bibliography as a critical interface between higher and lower levels of literary information management.

Individual Collections: The Catalog of Lu Xun’s Articles of Handwriting and Book Collection Lu Xun was not simply the most famous writer and arbiter of the literary field in his day; he was also an avid bibliophile, collector, and devoted visitor of traditional book markets and foreign bookstores in Beijing and Shanghai. If bibliography is to be understood as both a process and its subsequent product, then the catalog of Lu Xun’s personal collection must be examined as a historical phenomenon involving the author’s practices and as an autonomous work completed after his death in 1936. The two phases represent distinct ways of managing literary information. During his lifetime, Lu Xun kept a diary in which he meticulously recorded and collated information about his book acquisitions, noting all transactions alongside other details such as the day’s weather, letters received and sent, travel, and so on. Indeed, the diary’s first entry, dated May 5, 1912, already records the acquisition of a book, Yuezhong xianxian cimu 䍞Ё‫ܜ‬䊶⼴Ⳃ (Catalog of shrines devoted to past sages in Shaoxing); the subsequent week, on a visit to the antique bookstores at Liulichang ⧝⩗ᒴ in Beijing, he purchased a seven-volume set of Zuanxilu congshu 㑖୰ᓀশ᳌ (Collectanea from the Hut of Compiled Delights) for five yuan and eight jiao.5 At the end of each calendar year, he recorded a detailed inventory of acquired titles, including prices (or, in the case of gifts, the giver), as well as a calculation of the average monthly expenditure. Volume seventeen of the authoritative 2005 edition of the Lu Xun quanji 剕䖙ܼ䲚 (Lu Xun’s collected works; hereafter Collected Works—see also Laughlin, chapter 27) includes an index of all publication titles appearing in the diary. These inventories were indispensable when Lu Xun’s widow, Xu Guangping 䀅ᒷᑇ (1898–1968), led the effort to compile a list of his collection in the 1950s. Xu collaborated with the Beijing Lu Xun Museum to produce the Lu Xun shouji

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he cangshu mulu 剕䖙᠟䐳੠㮣кⳂᔩ (Catalog of Lu Xun’s articles of handwriting and collected books; hereafter Catalog). As she explains in the preface, compiling a list of the collection involved a lengthy process of recovering Lu Xun’s books held by various institutions in Shanghai and Beijing.6 This included mobilizing a network of friends and colleagues to track down and preserve artifacts from the collection, some of which had been maliciously released by Lu Xun’s brother, Zhou Zuoren ਼԰Ҏ (1885–1967), who was vilified for his wartime collaboration with the Japanese occupational government. The difficulty of putting together the list also reflects the more general challenges posed by the vagaries of twentieth-century Chinese history: war, sociopolitical upheaval, and geographic instability. Even in its incomplete state, the collection presented challenges for categorization within a unified system. Leaving aside the first volume of the Catalog, which is archival and exclusively focused on artifacts bearing Lu Xun’s handwriting and their holding sites,7 the following description gives a sense of the varied schemes employed by volumes two and three, respectively devoted to Lu Xun’s Chinese and foreign-language collections. Volume two organizes its contents by medium, with sections for traditional string-bound (xianzhuang ㎮㺱) volumes, Western-style (both cloth-bound and paperback) books, and periodicals. Though string-bound books were by no means out of production in the Republican period, their classification follows the older sibu scheme. Modeled after Zhang Zhidong’s bibliographical innovation, this catalog also includes a section on collectanea, which is further subdivided into miscellaneous, autobiographical, and regional collections. The organization of volume three represents a balance between linguistic groupings based on the number of items in a given language and ordering according to the geopolitical priorities of Maoist China (thereby painting Lu Xun’s political sympathies in the Cold War colors of the mid-1950s). Thus, Lu Xun’s massive collection of Japanese-language materials constitutes its own section, but Russian-language materials, numbering only seventy-seven items, are separated out from the section on Western-language materials. In each of the three major sections, the organization and scope of subject fields is idiosyncratic. For example, the Russian section is divided into “Philosophy,” “Social Sciences,” “Fine Arts,” “Philology,” “Literature,” “History & Geography,” “Natural Sciences,” “Medical Sciences,” and “Generalities.” In Japanese, the subject of “Literature” is listed as a subfield under “Social Science,” while the Russian- and Western-language sections each categorize it as its own major field. Within the Western-language section, moreover, works are grouped by nationality, with present-day socialist countries typically listed first, followed by nonaligned countries and then capitalist bloc members such as the United States and France. Finally, Lu Xun’s extensive collection of foreign art books and criticism—primarily from Germany—receives its own subsection.

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The accommodations and hybridity of the Catalog offer a window into changing practices of cataloging as well as the ways in which politics shaped bibliographical categorization and ordering. Like Lu Xun’s Collected Works, the veritable industry of Lu Xun studies since the Cultural Revolution has made the Catalog an invaluable research tool. Bibliographically, this research has produced a number of annotative projects aimed at further describing parts of his collection, including the contents of individual works, their sociohistorical contexts, and the intellectual or artistic influence that they may have had on the author.8 While it would be an overstatement to credit the Catalog and subsequent bibliographies with a level of impact commensurate to that of the Collected Works on twentieth-century anthologies, the fact that a supplementary or updated list has not been published indicates the relative thoroughness and stability of the original enumerative bibliography.

Virtual Collections: Surveying the Modern Literary Field Bibliographies of an individuals’ collections can offer important insights into their reading and annotation habits, translation pathways, and book markets. However, in terms of producing literary authority, such works tend to reflect prevailing hierarchies of the canon or the boundaries of a genre rather than actively participate in their making. Instead, authoritative knowledge is a function of bibliographies aimed at sorting literary information of a certain period, literary genre, or cultural movement. This was the case with the mid-1930s compilation of the Zhongguo xinwenxue daxi Ё೟ᮄ᭛ᅌ໻㋏ (Compendium of New Literature in China; hereafter Compendium), the first major anthology of vernacular May Fourth literature, which more than any other work helped cement the legacy of modern Chinese literature (again, see also Laughlin, chapter 27).9 The tenth and final volume of this series, devoted to “Historical Materials and Indices” (shiliao, suoyin ৆᭭ǃ㋶ᓩ), includes bibliographies for creative works and translations and for journals and newspaper supplements (nearly three hundred titles) dating from 1917 to 1927. Compiled from his personal collection by Marxist critic Ah Ying 䰓㣅 (Qian Xingcun 䪅ᴣ䙼; 1900–1977), it constructs a macroview, allowing “one to read through the titles linearly and see the ways in which the literary movement of those days developed, as if reading a systematic literary history.”10 Sequentially ordered, these lists offer a form of chronicle that is expedient for recognizing patterns and describing—albeit normatively—print culture and field as objects of literary sociology. The categorization of Ah Ying’s bibliography rests on the materiality of texts: “Creative Works” and “Translations” represent stand-alone books, while the third section, “Periodicals,” is further subdivided between a general catalog of

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titles and detailed indices of several of the period’s most central outlets. The preservation of older literary information no longer easily accessible in the 1930s was an important priority of the Compendium. The ephemeral nature of journals made them especially critical while also posing the challenge of lifting out relevant literary information buried within the pages of individual journal issues. However, because the bulk of the Compendium’s reprinted pieces—if not modern Chinese literary output as a whole—originally appeared in journals rather than in books, the former has received more attention in subsequent bibliographies of modern literature. Shortly after publication of the Compendium, the Chinese literary establishment became preoccupied with the pressing matter of war. It was not until the relatively stable years of the early People’s Republic that another major enumeration of modern literary journals took place. A collective effort that received institutional support from the Shanghai Library, the Shanghai branch of the China Writers Association (Zhongguo zuojia xiehui Shanghai fenhui Ё೑԰ ᆊणӮϞ⍋ߚӮ), and the Shanghai editorial office of Zhonghua shuju Ёढ кሔ (China Books), the project was an initial examination of institutionally available resources rather than individuals’ collections. The result, Zhongguo xiandai wenxue qikan mulu (chugao) Ё೑⦄ҷ᭛ᄺᳳߞⳂᔩ˄߱〓˅ (Catalog of Chinese modern literature periodicals, first draft), was published in 1961.11 This thin volume covers titles from 1919 to 1949 while also including a smattering of periodicals published between 1902 and 1919. It is organized first by period and then by politically defined territories of origin. Such distinctions, much like the ordering of the Lu Xun Catalog, reflect the politics of its day by not only giving separate sections to the Shanghai “isolated island” (gudao ᄸቯ) period (1937–41) and the broader territories under Japanese occupation (1937–45) but also elevating a section covering the revolutionary base area (geming genjudi 䴽ੑḍ᥂ഄ)—in fact a shifting series of territories under Communist administration, dating from 1927 to 1949. Within each of these sections, titles are chronologically organized by founding date. The bibliography also quarantines information about “reactionary” journals as a supplement. Entries include title, frequency of publication, known volumes and issue numbers, dates, editors, publisher name and location, known holdings, and miscellaneous notes. Altogether it totals over fifteen hundred entries. However, as the work’s title suggests, this bibliography was considered a preliminary version of the project, with an invitation to readers from the compilers to submit additional information by mail. Like Ah Ying’s work at the end of the 1930s, further development was again interrupted by social upheaval, this time in the form of the Cultural Revolution and suspended operations of academic institutions. The 1980s saw the resumption of academic research and state support for large-scale projects, leading to the expansion of general bibliographical work

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that continues today. The most systematic attempt to identify and comprehensively catalog the literary output of the Republican era was the Zhongguo wenxueshi ziliao huibian Ё೑᭛ᄺ৆䌘᭭∛㓪 (Compilation of Chinese literary history materials), an umbrella for three separate initiatives undertaken in 1981 to index books, journals, and newspaper supplements, respectively. All three were conducted under the direction of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences’ Institute of Literature and produced separate reference volumes. One of the results of the umbrella project was the 1988 publication of the landmark bibliography Zhongguo xiandai wenxue qikan mulu huibian Ё೑⦄ҷ᭛ᄺᳳߞ Ⳃᔩ∛㓪 (Compilation of modern Chinese literary journal indices; hereafter Index), edited by Tang Yuan ૤≙ and a large team of specialists from Peking and Shandong Normal Universities. Like its predecessors, the Index aims to comprehensively catalog and index every literary journal published in modern China.12 In the spirit of the Reform period in which it was undertaken, the project claimed the mantle of scientific and objective research. In practice, this meant including information about nonleftist publications such as the popular satirical journal Lunyu 䂪䁲 (Analects; published 1932–37, 1946–49), edited by politically liberal Lin Yutang ᵫ䁲ූ (1895–1976), and the fascist Qianfeng yuekan ࠡ䢦᳜ߞ (Avant-garde monthly; published 1930–31)—both of which were targets of political criticism in their own day and during the Maoist era. Problematically, however, such claims of scientism and objectivity were belied by the subjective determination of whether or not a journal was literary—a reifying category that remained uninterrogated by the editors. Coupled with a recent supplement, the Zhongguo xiandai wenxue qikan mulu xinbian Ё೑⦄ҷ᭛ᄺᳳߞⳂᔩᮄ㓪 (Modern Chinese literary journal indices, newly compiled), which adds 657 titles to the original 276 by casting a much wider net,13 the 1988 Index remains the standard reference volume today. The myth of plentitude is undercut by an ever-receding horizon in the cataloging of print culture. No collection can ever be entirely exhaustive, a point perfectly illustrated by the preface to the supplement, which notes that at the time of publication, another sixty titles had been discovered but not included. Nonetheless, the two bibliographies add up to a virtual collection that significantly surpasses the individual holdings of even the largest institutions. The entries in both bibliographies are lightly annotated, with some analytical description of each journal, such as its dimensions, the printing format (e.g., vertical versus horizontal character layout), and a description of its contents and significance in literary history. Entries for individual issues include the original index, with added notes indicating discrepancies between a piece’s title in the index and its title as published (a situation that occurred regularly and made it difficult to locate a particular text). Still, within this pool of metadata, text titles are the reliable unit, far more coherent than author names, which can be impossible to resolve into stable author-entities.

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Attempts to systematically decipher pen names arose around the same time as modern bibliography in response to the liberal adoption of pen names as a way to skirt censorship or, less opaquely, as a stylistic embellishment. In 1936, Yuan Yongjin 㹕␻䘆, a librarian at the Beiping Library, published an index of pen names that he had circulated for several years in manuscript form; it identified 58 pen names as belonging to Lu Xun, while a more recent, expanded study lists more than 237.14 In essence, the Index and its predecessors are databases, suitable for locating detailed publication information for specific journals, akin to looking up a telephone number in a directory. The relatively nonhierarchical structuring of this literary metadata further resembles the directory’s list of names insofar as browsing does not produce coherent meaning outside of serendipitous encounter. Just as directories contain certain sociological data, so, too, are such bibliographies aimed at capturing the historical ecology (lishi yuanshengtai ग़৆ॳ ⫳ᗕ) of modern literature,15 the formation and activities of author groups, and the discovery of lost or forgotten documents. Getting beyond the conventional capacities of a simple reference tool and analyzing the collection in a holistic or ecological manner requires viewing its metadata at a distance, identifying patterns and anomalies that otherwise remain latent at a more human level of reading or search and retrieval. To this end, the twentieth-century project of collecting bibliographical metadata has shifted in our current century to digitizing and exploring using computational methods—a transition, in other words, to new ways of manipulating old information.

Notes 1. Zhang Zhidong, Shumu dawen (Shanghai: Shangwu yinshuguan, 1935). 2. Li Jinxi 咢䣺❭, “Xinmuluxue ji ‘leimafa’ zhi kuoda yingyong” ᮄⳂ䣘ᅌঞ “串⺐⊩” П᫈໻ឝ⫼, Dongfang zazhi 41, no. 17 (1945): 55–59. 3. Rong Zhaozu ᆍ㙛⼪, “Zhongguo muluxue yinlun” Ё೟Ⳃ䣘ᅌᓩ䂪, Zhongshan daxue tushuguan zhoukan Ёቅ໻ᅌ೪᳌仼䘅ߞ 5, no. 4 (1928): 3. 4. Lydia H. Liu, Translingual Practice: Literature, National Culture, and Translated Modernity; China, 1900–1937 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), 235–36. 5. Lu Xun, Lu Xun quanji 剕䖙ܼ䲚, 18 vols. (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 2005), 15:1. 6. Beijing Lu Xun bowuguan ࣫Ҁ剕䖙म⠽佚, ed., Lu Xun shouji he cangshu mulu, 3 vols. (Beijing: Lu Xun bowuguan, 1959), 1:3–5. 7. On the challenges and limitations of cataloging instances of Lu Xun’s handwriting, see Huang Qiaosheng 咘Ш⫳, “Lu Xun shougao de shoucang, zhengli he chuban” 元䖙᠟ 〓ⱘᬊ㮣ǃᭈ⧚੠ߎ⠜, Lu Xun yanjiu yuekan (2014.6): 50–55. 8. The annotation of his traditional Chinese collection is Wei Li 䶺࡯, comp., Lu Xun cangshu zhi (guji zhi bu) 剕䖙㮣кᖫ (স㈡П䚼), ed. Beijing Lu Xun bowuguan, 3 vols. (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 2016); articles describing individual works within his foreign collection have been published under the series title of “Lu Xun waiwen cangshu

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9. 10. 11.

12.

13. 14.

15.

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tiyao” 剕䖙໪᭛㮣кᦤ㽕 [Summaries of Lu Xun’s foreign-language collection] in the Lu Xun yanjiu yuekan beginning in 2010. Liu, Translingual Practice, 214–38. Zhao Jiabi 䍭ᆊ⩻, ed., Zhongguo xinwenxue daxi, 10 vols. (Shanghai: Shanghai wenyi chubanshe, 2003), 10:4–5. Xiandai wenxue qikan lianhe diaocha xiaozu ⦄ҷ᭛ᄺᳳߞ㘨ড়䇗ᶹᇣ㒘, ed., Zhongguo xiandai wenxue qikan mulu (chugao) (Shanghai: Shanghai wenyi chubanshe, 1961). Tang Yuan et al., eds., Zhongguo xiandai wenxue qikan mulu huibian, 2 vols. (Tianjin: Tianjin renmin chubanshe, 1988). This collection has been reprinted in seven volumes as part of the Zhongguo wenxueshi ziliao quanbian Ё೑᭛ᄺ৆䌘ܼ᭭㓪 (Beijing: Zhishi chanquan chubanshe, 2010). Wu Jun ਈ֞ et al., “Qianyan” ࠡ㿔, in Zhongguo xiandai wenxue qikan mulu xinbian, ed. Wu Jun et al., 3 vols. (Shanghai: Renmin chubanshe, 2008), 1:1. Given his central position within the field, Lu Xun is a slight outlier, but the percentage increase is similar for many of the less prolific authors. Yuan Yongjin, Xiandai Zhongguo zuojia biminglu ⧒ҷЁ೟԰ᆊㄚৡ䣘 (Beiping: Zhonghua tushuguan xiehui, 1936); Zhu Baoliang ᴅᅱῥ, ed., Ershi shiji Zhongwen zhuzuozhe biminglu ѠकϪ㑾Ё ᭛㨫԰㗙ヨৡᔩ = Twentieth-Century Chinese Authors and Their Pen Names, rev. ed. (Guilin: Guangxi shifan daxue chubanshe, 2002). Wu Jun et al., Zhongguo xiandai wenxue qikan mulu xinbian, 1.

CHAPTER 52

INDICES AND CONCORDANCES D O N A L D S T U RG E O N

I

ndices—lists of headwords or brief descriptions of material in larger works, together with the means of locating the material—were a long-lasting innovation in the history of print publication, providing rapid access to information contained in large literary works. Together with concordances—a particular type of index in which all terms appearing in a work are indexed—this innovation revolutionized efficient retrieval of information from written works, remaining, alongside contents pages and hierarchical divisions of content, the primary nonlinear way of locating material within a work until the advent of modern digital systems. The creation of systematic reference works in China has a long tradition, with early encyclopedic works such the lost Huanglan ⱛ㾑 (For imperial perusal) dating back to the third century CE and systematic lexicographic works dating back as early as the Erya ⠒䲙 (Approaching the elegant), compiled around the third century BCE (see Nugent, chapter 30, and Handel, chapter 5). A significant innovation of early Chinese lexicography was the development of the “radical” system used in the second-century Shuowen jiezi 䁾᭛㾷ᄫ (Explaining simple graphs and analyzing complex graphs) dictionary; used with character stroke counts, it remains a widely used ordering and retrieval system for Chinese characters to the present day. Countless later reference works were produced for a variety of purposes, including consultation by rulers and ministers, composition of literary works, and preparation for imperial exams. Some works aimed to achieve unparalleled comprehensiveness, like the Yongle dadian ∌ῖ໻‫( ݌‬Great compendium of the Yongle reign), completed in 1408, which

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remained the world’s largest encyclopedia until finally surpassed by Wikipedia in the twenty-first century (see Allen, chapter 31, and Guo, chapter 35). Works such as the Shixing yunbian ৆ྦྷ䷏㎼ (Rime dictionary of historical family names), compiled in the Qing dynasty, indexed particular types of information—in this case, biographical records. Such indexing in large works like the standard histories eliminated the need to estimate where in such a work a person might be described and to laboriously scan potentially relevant sections to find their occurrence. Despite this long tradition of creating secondary reference works, by the twentieth century Chinese reference materials continued to be compiled largely along traditional lines, and very few works had adopted the indexing and concordancing approaches commonly used in nineteenth-century English-language works, which traced their history back as far as biblical scholarship in the Middle Ages. In its treatise What Is an Index? published in London in 1878, the newly formed Index Society cited hundreds of examples of indices and concordances published for English-language works;1 by contrast, in his 1930 paper “Indexing Chinese Books,” William Hung (Hong Ye ⋾ὁ; 1893–1980), chief editor of the first systematic, large-scale indexing project for Chinese works, lamented that only a small number of indices and concordances to Chinese works had been compiled and that “practically none” of those were available.2 Prior to the modern era, Chinese books typically came with, at most, tables of contents listing the title of each section, normally without references to page numbers or other finding aids. While many factors played a role in this, a stark contrast can be seen between the enthusiasm toward indexing shown by Western scholars such as the 160 or so members of the Index Society listed in the 1878 treatise and the prevailing negative attitude toward the use of such works in the Chinese tradition. As Endymion Wilkinson puts it, good scholars “did not need time-saving devices,” since an ability to recall and recite textual sources, and particularly lines from literary classics, was highly prized, and a stigma existed against those who relied on reference works rather than memory to produce quotations.3 By the early twentieth century, indices to Chinese works were being created and used by sinologists outside of China, and the importance of their creation and use domestically came to be seen as crucial to the development of national learning as a field of study as well as to the continuation of classical culture generally in a rapidly changing world. As works, collectanea, and collections generally increase in size, indices providing efficient location of materials within their contents become increasingly important to effective use of the materials. Many leishu 串᳌ (categorized writings) facilitated the location of material in classical sources, provided that an appropriate headword could be inferred from the information sought. A challenge for a reader attempting to navigate a leishu in this way was that the

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selection of headwords and their hierarchical classification would naturally differ, requiring familiarity with the classification system of a particular leishu.4 The table of contents of a leishu might run to several hundred pages, and in general, no alternative means was provided for locating a headword, such as a separate index of headwords from which one could identify the categories in which it might appear. And it was common for such works to include an excerpt of the relevant passage and cite only the title of the work or chapter without providing a more granular location.

Indices and Concordances to Chinese Works While traditional Chinese scholarship had created numerous secondary scholarly reference works—including commentaries, encyclopedias, and dictionaries—by the late nineteenth century relatively little attempt had been made within China to create indices for these works. As large works became available to Western sinologists, these scholars began applying established indexing techniques borrowed from other disciplines. An early example of this is the 1911 index to the Gujin tushu jicheng সҞ೪᳌䲚៤ (Collected writings and illustrations, past and present), prepared by Lionel Giles at the request of the British Museum, which had obtained a copy of this encyclopedic work of over eight hundred thousand pages in 1877.5 In this case, the index—itself running to almost one hundred pages in length—does not attempt to reproduce the content of the work and indexes only the topic headwords contained in the encyclopedia. Organized alphabetically by romanization and English translation, each entry includes either a location specified by thematic section number and fascicle (juan ो) number within that section identifying the location of the entry or a cross-reference pointing the reader to another entry in the index. In addition to the convenience of the translations and transliterations for Western sinologists, a key contribution of the index to the original work is that it enables finding a heading anywhere in the work without having to first identify in which of the thirty-two thematic sections that heading should be filed. In this respect, the index functions much like the indices typical of modern reference works. Around the same time, numerous indices to Chinese works began to be published in Japan.6 As a result, even Chinese scholars might find it more effective to locate information in a Chinese work through the use of a foreign-language translation, many of which included indices as a matter of course.7 The political and cultural crises of early twentieth-century China and the New Culture movement (xinwenhua yundong ᮄ᭛࣪䘟ࢩ) brought attention to the potential utility of improved secondary reference works. Much of the motivation came from scholars such as Hu Shi 㚵䘽 (1891–1962), who argued that the creation of indices would be a key step in securing the future of guoxue ೟ᅌ

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(national learning) in a 1923 manifesto forming part of the first issue of Guoxue jikan ೟ᅌᄷߞ (National learning quarterly). Hu Shi identified the reluctance of traditional scholars to make use of secondary works organizing and collecting earlier scholarship—such as the Qing dictionary Jingji cuangu ㍧㈡㈥䀕 (Exegetic interpretations of classic texts) with its citations from classical literature—as being in part a consequence of their association with scholars cheating on imperial examinations, leading to their view that the use of such works in other contexts was likewise a source of embarrassment. Instead, he argued that organization and indexing would be a fundamental and essential step in making guoxue accessible to a wider audience and thus in securing its future.8

Harvard-Yenching Index Series The first systematic attempt to create a series of indices to major Chinese literary works was undertaken by the Harvard-Yenching Institute, which published a series of sixty-four indices to selected premodern Chinese works from 1931 through 1950. The stated initial focus was on works that had no translation or other index, that were considered to be authentic, and that were short enough that completion could be expected within a period of two months.9 The first of these indices, Index to Shuo Yuan, published in 1931, set the general format used for many subsequent works in the series.10 It is strictly an index rather than a concordance, as the items indexed are a selection of important terms chosen by the compilers rather than an exhaustive list of all vocabulary used in the text. As the editors themselves noted, compiling such an index was by no means a mechanical task or even a straightforward one for a competent scholar.11 For example, the terms zhenren ⳳҎ (true man, perfected being) and Zhending ⳳᅮ (a place name) are listed, but zhen ⳳ (true) itself is not, though it appears several times in the text. This allowed the authors to unify under a single heading references to the same person using different expressions; for instance, Zhou Wenwang ਼᭛⥟ (King Wen of Zhou) was also referred to as Wenwang ᭛⥟ (King Wen) and in some cases simply as Wen ᭛. In order to facilitate locating a headword in the index, the book introduced its own system of ordering, propounded by William Hung, which he called the Zhongguozi guixie Ё೟ᄫᑟੜ (Chinese character placing and taking) method. This method, somewhat similar to Wang Yunwu’s ⥟䳆Ѩ (1888–1979) Four-Corner method, although explicitly presented as a superior alternative to it, maps each character into a string of digits based on aspects of its shape and composition; the numbers produced are then used to order characters and words in the index (see Kuzuoğlu, chapter 3). A reader familiar with the

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system can then rapidly locate any term in the index by constructing its number in the same fashion, avoiding the need to scan through many lines of the index looking for a headword. For added convenience, a further index lists all characters appearing at the start of a headword in the main index according to their romanized form together with their corresponding number (see Zhong, chapter 2). As the Shuo Yuan index did not itself include a copy of the text it indexed, it relied on a standard print edition, that in the Sibu congkan ಯ䚼শߞ (Collectanea of the four categories). Each headword had associated with it a list of occurrences in terms of pages within this edition. Other time-saving devices were also incorporated; a novel addition to some volumes of the index series, including the Shuo Yuan index, was a table comparing the number of characters in each column and row of a page in a variety of editions, including the one selected for the concordance; the table also included for each edition the ratio of the number of characters per page of that edition to the number per page of the concordance edition, which could be used by the reader to calculate the approximate location of a piece of text in another edition. Many subsequent indices were produced in the same series, largely following this initial format. Further types were also added to deal with other kinds of information, such as book titles referenced within a work (and/or its commentaries), making use of the same general indexing method, resulting in volumes such as the Index to Yi Li and to the Titles Quoted in the Commentaries (1932). Several volumes in the set of supplements (tekan ⡍ߞ) published for the index series made two important changes to the original index format: they included a complete copy of the indexed text, and they switched to a concordance format rather than an index format.12 In these works, in cases where passage numbers were largely standard and passages of text reasonably short (as was the case with the Analects, for example), these numbers were printed beside each passage of text and used in place of the page numbers used in the earlier indices. In other works where this was not the case, like the Mozi ๼ᄤ and Zhuangzi 㥞ᄤ, line numbers were used instead, and textual references were made using a sequence of chapter, page, and line numbers—providing a much higher level of specificity in textual reference than had been possible previously. This aspect of these concordances caused the numbering system to subsequently take on a life beyond the concordances themselves, as the numbers could now be used to make precise textual references in scholarly works that could be located quickly and precisely by anyone in possession of the concordance. This had the additional convenience of not requiring inclusion of Chinese characters when making textual references, which could be problematic for typesetting in non-Chinese publications—making this referencing system particularly popular outside of the Chinese-speaking world.

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Chinese University of Hong Kong Concordances The compilation of the Harvard-Yenching index series was interrupted by the chaos of the Second World War and Chinese Civil War, with the last volume in the series of forty-one indices and twenty-three supplements, A Concordance to Hsiao Ching (Xiaojing yinde ᄱ㍧ᓩᕫ), published in 1950.13 While many indices were subsequently compiled by individual editors, this left many works, including mainstream classical texts, with no index or concordance widely available. A second systematic attempt to expand on the concordancing efforts of Harvard-Yenching was made by the Chinese University of Hong Kong Institute of Chinese Studies (ICS), which produced a series of concordances to early Chinese works. With the first of these, A Concordance to the Zhanguoce (Zhanguoce zhuzi suoyin ᠄೟ㄪ䗤ᄫ㋶ᓩ) being published in 1992,14 these books benefited greatly from the use of digital technology. In this case, the concordances were part of a larger project to create entirely new annotated and corrected editions of all transmitted texts from the pre-Qin through Han periods as well as a significant number of later works. These new editions formed the basis of a digital search and reading platform called CHANT (CHinese ANcient Texts, http:// www.chant.org) and at the same time were used to produce printed reference works, including concordances and compendia of similar passages repeated throughout various texts. Unlike with the Harvard-Yenching volumes, the ICS editors did not generally use a single prior published work as the basis for their editions but instead began with a transcription of one early edition—frequently from the Sibu congkan—and proceeded to methodically annotate their proposed emendations to the text of that edition, citing detailed textual evidence for each. This made these editions and the reference works derived from them usable by those who wanted to work directly with the base edition itself, those who were interested in the textual criticism, and those who were looking for a more readable edition of the text than the Sibu congkan text, which in many cases contained significant corruption. The concordance series produced by the ICS differed substantially from the Harvard-Yenching series in a number of ways; many of the differences were influenced by the availability and use of digital technology, and unlike the Harvard-Yenching series, the ICS concordances follow identical conventions. The items indexed in the ICS are not words or phrases but characters, and as a result, the ICS concordances can in principle be mechanically produced from the underlying annotated text: there is virtually no scope for editorial decision-making in any part of the process after the text and the accompanying emendations and comments have been settled. By using characters rather than words, the difficult task of correctly identifying word breaks in the classical texts was sidestepped entirely. This meant that automated software could be

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used to generate the contents of the concordance with little subsequent manual intervention, leaving to human editors only the complex task of producing the annotated texts and the trivial one of typesetting the resulting concordances. As well as significantly reducing the labor required to produce the concordances, this process significantly reduced the potential for introducing errors during the repetitive index-building step. Textual references were constructed in a way that was broadly similar to the Harvard-Yenching references, using a combination of section, page, and line numbers to uniquely identify a line; character lookup was provided using pinyin romanization, which by this time had become a widely accepted standard. As the digital CHANT system used the same annotated texts, the full-text search function of that system could be expected to produce results similar to those obtained by consulting the corresponding printed concordance. As a result, in principle the printed concordances would be at risk of immediate obsolescence, as it would ordinarily be much faster to consult the online system than to locate the same information manually in the printed concordance. However, the online platform lacked the print version’s numerical references to lines of text. While the numerical references were essential in the printed medium to fulfill the basic function of locating occurrences of the same character by specifying page and line, the equivalent lookup in the digital editions could be done directly and automatically, producing search results showing the desired keyword in each context in which it appears, with no need for human-readable reference numbers. As a result, the digital system cannot replace the printed work as a basis for textual references.

Indices in the Digital Era From the late 1990s onward, thanks to full-text search in textual databases, digital texts rapidly supplanted concordances as efficient locators of content. These initially took the form of software run on individual or institutional computers, using large distributable media such as CD-ROMs capable of storing in a tiny amount of physical space information that would previously have taken up multiple shelves of a library. The spread of the internet quickly resulted in the introduction of online subscription databases, such as Academia Sinica’s Scripta Sinica (http://hanji.sinica.edu.tw/),15 Chinese University of Hong Kong’s CHANT,16 and many commercial products as well as open-access systems like the Chinese Text Project (https://ctext.org).17 While the speed and efficiency of full-text search and its immediate availability through online systems have caused it to largely supplant index and concordance lookups in scholarly workflows, printed indices remain relevant in the present digital era. Journals continue to use the concordance numbering

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conventions firmly rooted in the printed medium, and concordance lines—the finest-grained units citable by the conventions used in both Harvard-Yenching and ICS concordances—remain a standard method of citation, particularly in English-language publications; the Chinese Text Project database, for example, includes concordance line information as searchable metadata for this reason.18 No purely digital equivalent has replaced these referencing schemes. Some features of manually compiled indices like the Harvard-Yenching series have, by contrast, been less fully integrated into modern full-text databases. Unification of closely related terms referencing the same objects or individuals (as in the King Wen example referenced earlier) is not generally handled well in contemporary full-text systems, and basic units of search functionality still tend to be characters rather than words, even in cases where the latter would appear more logical from a user perspective. At the same time, the digital medium provides opportunities for a more structured organization of material. Scholarly databases like the China Biographical Database project19 and Buddhist Studies Authority Database Project20 form born-digital successors to the type of information once recorded in printed works such as the Songren zhuanji ziliao suoyin ᅟҎ‫ڇ‬㿬䊛᭭㋶ᓩ (Index to Song biographical materials),21 systematizing the encoding of similar pieces of information and allowing vastly more powerful indexing, querying, and summarization than achievable in the print medium. Together with the prospect of digital infrastructure linking information across and between databases, including full-text databases, a vast range of opportunities for born-digital indexing of data is now tantalizingly close and has the potential to revolutionize access to information in historical texts just as much as the printed index boom did in the twentieth century.

Notes 1. Henry B. Wheatley, What Is an Index? (London: Index Society, 1878). 2. William Hung, “Indexing Chinese Books,” paper originally read at a Chinese Political and Social Association meeting, December 12, 1930. Later published in Chinese Social and Political Science Review 15, no. 1 (1931): 48–61. 3. Endymion Wilkinson, Chinese History: A New Manual, 5th ed. (self-pub., 2018), 1092. 4. William Hung, ᓩᕫ䁾 Yinde shuo = On Indexing (Peiping: Hafo yanjing daxue yinde bianzuanchu, 1932), 2. 5. Lionel Giles, An Alphabetical Index to the Chinese Encyclopaedia Ch’in Ting Ku Chin Tu Shu Chi Ch’êng (London: Trustees of the British Museum, 1911). 6. David L. McMullen, Concordances and Indexes to Chinese Texts (San Francisco: Chinese Materials Center, 1975). 7. Hung, “Indexing Chinese Books,” 5. 8. Hu Shi, “Fakan xuanyan” ⱐߞᅷ㿔, Guoxue jikan 1, no. 1 (1923): 1–16. 9. Hung, “Indexing Chinese Books,” 6.

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10. William Hung et al., comps., 䁾㢥ᓩᕫ Shuoyuan yinde = Index to Shuo Yuan (Peiping: Hafo Yanjing daxue yinde bianzunchu, 1931). 11. Hung, “Indexing Chinese Books,” 12. 12. Note that while the English titles of these volumes of the series use the word concordance instead of index to distinguish them, the Chinese titles continue to use yinde ᓩᕫ for both indices and concordances. 13. William Hung et al., comps., Xiaojing yinde ᄱ㍧ᓩᕫ (Peiping: Hafo yanjing daxue yinde bianzuanchu, 1950). 14. Chen Fangzheng and D. C. Lau, comps., A Concordance to the Zhanguoce ᠄೟ㄪ䗤ᄫ ㋶ᓩ (Taipei: Commercial Press, 1992). 15. Liu Cheng-yun ࡝䣮䳆, “Shiyusuo hanji dianzi wenxian ziliaoku: huigu yu zhanwang” ৆䁲᠔⓶㈡䳏ᄤ᭛⥏䊛᭭ᑿ: ಲ主㟛ሩᳯ, Gujin lunheng সҞ䂪㸵 31 (2018): 3–18. 16. Ho Che Wah, “CHANT (CHinese ANcient Texts): A Comprehensive Database of All Ancient Chinese Texts up to 600 AD,” Journal of Digital Information 3, no. 2 (2002), https://journals.tdl.org/jodi/index.php/jodi/article/view/81/80. 17. Donald Sturgeon, “Chinese Text Project: A Dynamic Digital Library of Premodern Chinese,” Digital Scholarship in the Humanities 35, no. 3 (2020), https://doi.org/10.1093/llc /fqz046. 18. Donald Sturgeon, Chinese Text Project, https://ctext.org/tools/concordance. 19. Harvard University, Academia Sinica, and Peking University, “Chinese Biographical Database Project (CBDB),” https://projects.iq.harvard.edu/cbdb/. 20. Huimin Bhiks.u ᚴᬣ䞟 et al., Buddhist Studies Authority Database Project ԯᅌ㽣㆘ 䊛᭭ᑿ, https://authority.dila.edu.tw/. 21. Chang Bide ᯠᕐᕫ et al., eds., Songren zhuanji ziliao suoyin ᅟҎ‫ڇ‬㿬䊛᭭㋶ᓩ (Taipei: Dingwen shuju, 1974).

SECTION C

SERIAL PUBLICATIONS E D I T E D B Y A N AT O LY D E T W Y L E R A N D X I AO L I U

A

serial is a work published at intervals as part of a larger set. This set might be well defined from the beginning, as in collectanea (congshu শ᳌) of the late imperial period that republished limited batches of classical texts. In other cases, the set is open-ended, like the monthly and weekly periodicals that have become popular since the end of the nineteenth century. Either way, seriality gestures toward more to come, a future-facing orientation that imparts serials with a paradoxical relationship to the information they carry, stoking readers’ desire for more while also devaluing such information as impermanent and disposable. This quality distinguishes serials from other kinds of literary information management featured in this volume: in response to the feeling of “too much to know” in the face of the literary tradition’s growing enormity, serials pile on, proffering more to come. The sequential nature of serials is closely connected to the ways they circulate, which are in turn shaped by forces like market demand and political exigency. Of course, the evolution of any cultural practice is beholden to circuits of consumption and production to a degree. However, such feedback mechanisms play a deciding factor for serials, closely shaping what information they contain and how such information is managed. Compared with other kinds of collections such as bibliographies or libraries and archives, serials rely more on the factor of communication. Differentiating communication from the concept of medium, Bruce Clarke notes the importance of their respective temporal logics: whereas media typically emphasize a kind of suspended “virtual time,”

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in which information is inscribed, stored, and retrieved as needed, communication underscores a sense of “real time,” binding together the source of a message and its receiver.1 Though a serial publication is also a medium, its properties of inscription and storage are subsumed by this communicational quality: like a telegram or letter, serials are meant to flow rather than capture. Ultimately, the innovation and proliferation of serials cannot be understood outside the history of communication. Within China, serial publication arguably first appeared during the Song (960–1276) in the form of collectanea that emerged alongside a rapidly expanding—and increasingly competitive—book market. Conceived at the outset as series of multiple works, congshu collated and reprinted works with the aim of preventing the loss of older texts by making them accessible to a wider readership. While this conservative function makes congshu an integral source of information for scholars today, in its own era it was the congshu’s economic advantages that made it attractive to commercial publishers. Bringing out a collection of works sequentially allowed a publisher to react to and anticipate the demands of its readership, thus reducing the risk posed by the costs of a large project. By the nineteenth century, China’s encounter with Western missionaries and companies resulted in the introduction and adaptation of new print technologies, including photolithography and linotype. The apparatus of industrial printing necessitated ever-larger capital outlays, leading to the rise of the modern joint-stock corporation in Shanghai, which fundamentally transformed the political economy of publishing in China.2 A spectrum of new kinds of periodicals emerged both in response to and in search of mass readerships, including newspapers and literary supplements, political and cultural journals, and pictorial magazines. The extended scale and social reach of these serials, per Benedict Anderson’s famous argument, greatly contributed to the effect of a “homogeneous, empty time,” binding readers through imagination of themselves as part of a (more or less) unified, national community.3 The political effects and use value of periodicals have remained salient, as serials have served as a vital arena for state or institutional information management in the forms of propaganda and censorship throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. During the modern period, the communicative nature of the serial has further impacted its relationship with information in several significant ways. First is the increasingly ephemeral nature of such publications. Regardless of whether a periodical is highbrow or pulp, its operation in real time typically elevates the most recent over older issues. Take, for instance, last Tuesday’s weather forecast and stock news or an announcement published in 1932: much of the serial’s informational value is not very durable. As a result, like other forms of print ephemera such as old postcards or movie handbills, out-of-date

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serials are infrequently saved and, even then, rarely in a systematic fashion. Such ephemerality aligns more generally with the values of development as unlimited progress under modern capitalism. Equally importantly, the ephemerality of serials parallels information as it is colloquially understood as a piece of knowledge with little value beyond its original context of exchange. This similarity is not coincidental and instead reveals the centrality of periodicals in modern experiences and accounts of information—as well as information’s impact on conceptions and practices of literature itself.4 This is not to say that all information contained within serials is ephemeral, for even if the container is seen as transient and discardable, the texts within have in many cases outlasted their original context of publication, thanks to anthologizing and republishing. Such winnowing retrospectively calls attention to the unevenness of information stored in original publications, particularly their multiplicity of genres, forms, and sources. Denise Gimpel’s observation of one of the most influential journals of the Republican period, Xiaoshuo yuebao ᇣ䁾᳜ฅ (Fiction Monthly), applies to periodicals more generally: “Despite being published in bound form, something like booklets, literary magazines were not a single work of literature and were never produced with the intention of constituting one. They are a complex web of various strands of information, and the forms in which the information is presented vary greatly.”5 The serial’s capacity to amalgamate and remediate genres was already evident in earlier congshu, which grouped various texts within an overarching framework. Overall, serial publications are rarely coherent genres themselves. Rather, they provide the grounds for coincidences and encounters among a wide variety of textual forms. Moreover, the work/text distinction is important for understanding the afterlife of literary information originally published in serials. Many of the other cultural forms featured in this volume, including anthologies, compendia, and digital databases, have partly developed in order to collate and republish texts out of serials. Convenient as such tools may be, they obscure the fact that in their earliest instance, many of these texts were published and consumed in a more limited or disjointed way, unfurling through time and across separate issues of the publication, not unlike the ways in which one experiences a series of posts on Twitter or weekly episodes of a TV drama today. In the original context, “valuable” texts appear alongside a medley of even more ephemeral information, such as ads for soap or medicine (or, to again offer a contemporary example, online pop-ups selling cellphone games). Given that much of the literature and criticism from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries first appeared within serials, scholars have recently begun to question whether the creative wheat can so easily be separated from the contextual chaff. Michel Hockx, for example, has suggested a practice of “horizontal” reading that treats a serial publication as a comprehensive, unified work, requiring that a literary

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text be accessed alongside its original frame, including components like the journal cover, colophons, and other texts.6 Finally, as a communication circuit, serials modulate reading practices and expectations about information’s continuity and discontinuity. The anticipation of new information structures not only the serial’s modality but also much of its conventional formatting, whether in the page arrangements of newspapers, the establishment of topical columns, or the typesetting of individual articles. A newspaper prioritizes national and international items on its front pages, while headlines in bold characters invite skimming rather than detailed reading. Such conventions provide a habitat that frames the new with the familiar. The ratio between the two, between the novel and the expected, ultimately closes the loop with information science and its attempts to optimize the effects and efficiency of communication. Whether intentionally or not, serials have developed in the direction of maximizing the rate at which information— literary, commercial, and political—can be transmitted through a channel without overwhelming the human receptor.

Notes 1. Bruce Clarke, “Communication,” in Critical Terms for Media Studies, ed. W. J. T. Mitchell and Mark B. N. Hansen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 135. 2. Christopher A. Reed, Gutenberg in Shanghai: Chinese Print Capitalism, 1876–1937 (Vancouver: University of British Columbia, 2004). 3. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1998), 33. 4. See, for example, Walter Benjamin’s well-known essay, “The Death of the Storyteller,” and its condemnation of mitteilung, or information (reproduced in newspapers), as the primary factor in the modern disappearance of the aura of literary art. In Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1968), 83–109. 5. Denise Gimpel, Lost Voices of Modernity: Chinese Popular Fiction Magazine in Context (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2001), 15. 6. Michel Hockx, Questions of Style: Literary Societies and Literary Journals in Modern China, 1911–1937 (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 118–57.

CHAPTER 53

PREMODERN LITERARY COLLECTANEA S U YOU N G S O N

T

he development of literary collectanea in serial publication came about when the use of print technology became widespread and the commercial book market reached a critical mass in terms of volume. Since their emergence in the Song dynasty, literary collectanea— typically called congshu শ᳌—have been a well-established form of literary production and circulation.1 Congshu are large-volume compendia of a broad range of documents, arranged according to loosely defined schemes such as genre, period, locality, or a combination thereof. These compendia were comprised predominantly of shorter texts or excerpts of texts that would not necessarily constitute a stand-alone, independently circulating publication. Compendia were thus a vehicle for presenting works that were miscellaneous in nature—that is, various small pieces of works by different authors. By cobbling together as many as a few hundred such works ranging in length from a couple of pages to several chapters (juan ो), this format served to preserve and make available old and ephemeral texts that were otherwise prone to being lost through dispersal and destruction.2 The advance of print culture, which resulted in an increasing variety and plenitude of documents, in tandem with the thriving book market in the late Ming and early Qing periods, drove literary collectanea toward serial publication. Although serially published works had sporadically appeared before then,3 this era witnessed widespread interest in serial publication of various genres.4 The most common were volumes published in consecutive installments. Typically numbered or dated, each installment was published as a continuous and

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self-contained fascicle under the same title. Whether these texts circulated individually or were combined with previous installments, this format resulted in large, multivolume sets of a single compendium. For example, the Baoyantang miji ᇊ丣ූ⾬ボ (Secret satchel from the Hall of Treasuring Yan [Zhenqing 丣ⳳ॓; 709–85]) was a huge corpus of the works published by the studio of one of the most famous literary celebrities of the late Ming, Chen Jiru 䱇㑐‫ۦ‬ (1558–1639). Gathering together 234 unofficial histories, random jottings, and art treatises from the Six Dynasties to the Ming dynasty, it was not published as a whole but as a series of six installments from 1606 to the 1620s. Similarly, when the renowned late Ming bibliophile Mao Jin ↯ᰝ (1599–1659) printed the Jindai mishu ⋹䘂⾬᳌ (Rare texts reached through waterways), he put out 141 titles in a series of fifteen installments. The installment format was preferred particularly because it reduced the financial risks associated with publishing such large works. Budget-conscious compilers and booksellers found it more feasible to incrementally issue sequential volumes of a given collection than to expend up front the huge amount of capital required for the carving, printing, and storage of the woodblocks that a large compendium would necessitate.5 Readers, too, were also more attracted to affordably priced books of manageable size than to immense, expensive works. If demand was high enough, the serialized compendium could betoken sustained popularity and guarantee a steady financial return.6 It was thus often the case that the cover page of each volume of a collection advertised upcoming installments with phrases such as “the second installment will follow” (erbian xuchu Ѡ㎼㑠ߎ or erji sichu Ѡ䲚ஷߎ) or “an extra installment will follow” (yuji sichu 们䲚ஷߎ) to sustain the attention of potential buyers. The emergence of the serial form does not merely reflect an awareness of economic realities on the part of late Ming and early Qing book producers and consumers. It also indicates a shift from the preservation and presentation of old texts to the timely management of ever-growing amounts of information and numbers of documents, a response to the increasing demand for the synchronic exchange between contemporaries. For example, literary collectanea issued in the seventeenth century not only included rare and canonical texts but also contemporary works of an informal and miscellaneous nature, less esteemed yet widely popular with readers. Compilers frequently touted the novelty as well as the variety of their volumes’ contents,7 and they also called on readers to submit their own recent works.8 One of the most successful commercial bookshops in Hangzhou in the late Ming and early Qing period, Cuiyuge 㖴࿯䭷 (Jade Pavilion of Pleasure), inserted into its publications a full-page solicitation for upcoming compilations it planned to publish, including the poetry and prose compendium Mingwen gui ᯢ᭛⅌ (Return to Ming writings; first printed in 1635) and the compilation of imperial edicts and orders, memorials, letters, poetry, prose, and songs known as Cuiyuge pingxuan xingji bixie

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㖴࿯䭷䀩䙌㸠ボᖙ᫰ (Must-carry-along readings, selected and attached with commentary by the Jade Pavilion of Pleasure; first printed in 1631).9 The early Qing literatus Wang Zhuo ⥟᰿ (1636–ca. 1707) requested readers to send him their manuscripts to be included in the next installment of his compilation of 124 writings in diverse genres by eighty contemporary authors, entitled Wenjin ᭛⋹ (Ford of writing): Recently, numerous works that esteem the old prose have been compiled into each specialized anthology. This current compilation has ended up being a few volumes, and I regret that the whole picture [of contemporary prose] is not presented. If I have a little bit more time, I will try to compile another installment. Do not spare your eminent works and please be sure to mail them to me.10

This preoccupation with newly created documents is evident across the expansive and decentralized medleys of work on diverse topics in the literary collectanea that sought reader submissions. The collected documents usually reflected contemporary topics and interests central to the official, intellectual, and cultural activities of literati. For example, the 307 short prose pieces selected for the early Qing serialized compendia Tanji congshu ⁔޴শ᳌ (Collectanea of a sandalwood desk; published in three installments: 1695, 1697, and 1697) and Zhaodai congshu ᰁҷশ᳌ (Collectanea of a glorious age; also published three installments: 1697, 1700, and 1703)—published in almost identical formats by the same editors, who had in both cases solicited readers’ manuscripts— demonstrate that their value is related not so much to their aesthetic or stylistic significance as to the currency of the topics they addressed. Following is a list of the general categories of the documents in both collectanea:11 • News and reports related to imperial activities during the reign of the Kangxi ᒋ❭ emperor (r. 1654–1722), including a list of books received from the emperor, travel accounts of those accompanying the emperor, records of court audiences, and accounts of the imperial examination, such as Yinci yushu ji ᘽ䊰ᕵ᳌㋔ (Record of books granted by the emperor), Hucong xixun rilu ᠜ᕲ㽓Ꮅ᮹䣘 (A retainer’s daily record of the emperor’s western tour), Feng Changbaishan ji ᇕ䭋ⱑቅ㿬 (Account of the bestowal at Changbai Mountain), Ji’en lu ㋔ᘽ䣘 (Record of the emperor’s grace), Songting xingji ᵒҁ㸠 ㋔ (An account of travel to Songting Pass), Ganqing men zoudui ji ђ⏙䭔༣ ᇡ㿬 (Record of an audience with the emperor at Ganqing Gate [in the imperial palace]), and Changchun yuan yushi gongji ᱶ᯹㢥ᕵ䀺ᙁ㋔ (Account of the imperial examination at Changchun Garden). • Scholarly findings and treatises that reflect new research, including records of rubbings, chronologies, Western missionary knowledge, evidential research on Confucian classics, and astronomical observations, such as Jiaoshan guding

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kao ⛺ቅস哢㗗 (Investigation of the inscription on the ancient Jiaoshan Tripod), Yiheming bian ⯲厈䡬䕼 (Analysis of the “Inscription on the Burial of a Crane”), Zhaoling liujuntu bian ᰁ䱉݁俓೪䕼 (Analysis of the six images of horses at the Zhao mausoleum), Han Ganquan gongwa kao ⓶⫬⊝ᆂ⪺ 㗗 (Investigation of a Han Ganquan Palace roof tile), Mengzi kao ᄳᄤ㗗 (Investigation of [the chronology of] Mencius), Xie Gaoyu nianpu 䃱ⱟ㖑 ᑈ䄰 (Chronological biography of Xie Gaoyu [1249–95]), Shiliuguo nianbiao क݁೟ᑈ㸼 (Chronological tables of the Sixteen Kingdoms [304–439]), Xifang yaoji 㽓ᮍ㽕㋔ (Essential notes on the West), Chunqiu sanzhuan yitong kao ᯹⾟ϝ‫⭄ڇ‬ৠ㗗 (Comparative investigation of the three commentaries to the Annals), Sanbaipian niaoshou caomu ji ϝⱒ㆛効⥌㤝᳼㿬 (Account of birds, beasts, plants, and trees in Classic of Odes), Chunqiu rishi zhiyi ᯹⾟᮹亳䊾⭥ (Inquiry into solar eclipses in the Annals), Tan gong dingwu ⁔ᓧ㿖䁸 (Correction of mistakes in “Tan Gong” [a chapter in the Record of Rites]), and Jiangnan xingye kao ∳फ᯳䞢㗗 (Analysis of constellations [visible in] the Jiangnan region). • Everyday knowledge, such as Furen xiewa kao ်Ҏ䵟㼾㗗 (Investigation of women’s shoes and stockings), Daishi 咯৆ (History of eyebrow cosmetics), Shepu 㲛䄰 (Register of snakes), Zhupu ネ䄰 (Register of bamboo), Yuzu tongpu 㖑ᮣ䗮䄰 (Comprehensive register of birds), and Gejing 匓㍧ (Classic of pigeons). • Prose about the cultural pursuits of the literati, including rock collecting, inkstone collecting, painting, garden making, traveling, and reading, such as Xuanshi ji 䙌⷇㿬 (Account of selecting rocks), Guanshi lu 㾔⷇䣘 (Record of observing rocks), Guanshi houlu 㾔⷇ᕠ䣘 (Sequel to Record of observing rocks), Guaishi zan ᗾ⷇䋞 (Encomium to strange rocks), Shipu ⷇䄰 (Register of rocks), Xuetang mopin 䲾ූ๼ક (Xuetang’s [Zhang Renxi ᔉҕ❭ (b. 1647)] ranking of inks), Mantang mopin ⓿ූ๼ક (Mantang’s [Song Luo ᅟ⡪ (1634–1714)] ranking of inks), Yanlin ⹃ᵫ (Forest of inkstones), Huajue ⬿㿷 (Painting formulas), Jiang Jiuyuan ji ᇛህ೦㿬 (Record of Jiang and Jiu Gardens), Guangzhou youlan xiaozhi ᒷᎲ䘞㾑ᇣᖫ (Short record of a Guangzhou tour), Liuqiu ru taixue shimo ⧝⧗ܹ໾ᅌྟ᳿ (Story of entering the Imperial College of Ryukyu Kingdom), Long Shu yuwen 䲈㳔们㘲 (More stories of the Long and Shu regions), Miaosu jiwen 㢫֫㋔㘲 (Record of customs of the Miao people), and Dushi guanjian 䅔৆ㅵ㽟 (Humble opinions on reading the histories). • Descriptions of literati games and manuals of games popular at the time, including drinking, board, word, and card games as well as riddles, such as Yinzhong baxian ling 仆ЁܿҭҸ (Drinking game of the eight immortals), Jiulü 䜦ᕟ (Rules for drinking), Shangzheng 㿈ᬓ (Regulations of the goblet), Lansheng tu ᬀࢱ೪ (Board game of visiting scenic spots), Lianwen shiyi 䗷᭛ 䞟㕽 (Connected sentence riddles), Qiezi shiyi ߛᄫ䞟㕽 (Dividing character

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riddles), Tongjie fumo Ḥ䱢ࡃ๼ (Supplementary jottings on the tung tree leaves from stairs), and Sishizhang zhipai shuo ಯकᔉ㋭⠠䁾 (Explanation of forty paper cards). • Accounts of minor social affairs, such as Zhiwo lu ⶹ៥䣘 (Record of my friends), Renrui lu Ҏ⨲䣘 (Record of people of venerable age), and Wenyuan yicheng ᭛ᅯ⭄々 (Pen names of members of literary circles); rules for elite society gatherings, such as Doufu jie 䈚㜤៦ (Abstinence of Tofu Eaters), Jushe yue 㦞⼒㋘ Code of Chrysanthemum Society, and Fangshenghui yue ᬒ⫳᳗㋘ Code of Society of Freeing Captive Animals; instructions for young men, Youxun ᑐ㿧, and married daughters, Xinfu pu ᮄ်䄰; and a manual on how to treat concubines, Xiaoxing pu ᇣ᯳䄰. • Parodies of and sequels to earlier works, such as Kuaishuo xuji ᖿ䁾㑠㿬 (Sequel to On pleasure [by Jin Shengtan 䞥㘪௚ (1608–61)]), Shu Bencao ᳌ᴀ㤝 (Materia medica [by Li Shizhen ᴢᰖ⦡ (ca. 1518–93) with reading treatments]), “Qiliao” ϗⰖ (Seven remedies [in imitation of Mei Sheng’s ᵮЬ (d. 145 BCE) “Qifa” ϗⱐ (Seven stimuli)]), Xinfu pubu ᮄ်䄰㺰 (Supplement to Manual for brides by Lu Qi 䱌ഏ [ca. 1614–88]), and Renpu butu Ҏ䄰㺰೪ (Supplementary illustrations to Register of the human body [by Liu Niantai ࡝ᗉ㟎 (1578–1645)]).

These topics cover the recent trends in examination culture, current political affairs, research on the mundane as well as scholarly matters, literati hobbies and leisure activities in vogue, and records of literati sociality. Reflecting the abiding need to keep abreast of current affairs and the voyeuristic appetite for news of the latest trends,12 these literary collectanea present the literary information and other knowledge vital to the maintenance of social status and cultural taste that determined literati identity during this period. It appears that literary collectanea in serial form were perceived as a suitable place for literati to share recent news, information, and discussions about their interests. Compared to the earlier conventions of publishing sequels—which could come out as long as a few hundred years after the original and were intended to add updated or new content to the older work and its subjects13— installments of literary collectanea appeared at much shorter intervals, usually ranging from a few months to around three years. Although no match for the more regular and faster-paced periodicity of modern serial publications, particular literary collectanea did serve as a stable platform, at least for a certain period of time, for interactions among contemporary literati. They not only informed readers of recent intellectual, cultural, and political developments but also elicited responses and provided a venue for sharing ensuing works. The renowned early Qing poet Wang Shizhen ⥟຿⽢ (1634–1711) expressed great joy upon finding the records of rubbings selected in the Zhaodai congshu because they broadened his knowledge of the subject.14 Another figure from

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the period, the scholar Wang Yan ⥟㿔 (1641–1711), did not stop at reading Zhang Zhengmao’s ᔉℷ㣖 (d. 1616) record of seventy-two female immortals, Guitai wanyan 啰㟎⨀⨄ (Beautiful jades of Tortoise Terrace), printed in the first installment of the Tanji congshu in 1695; instead, he added thirty-six more immortals and submitted his supplement, Xihua xianlu 㽓㧃ҭ㈭ (Immortal talismans from the Western Florescence Palace), to the first installment of the Zhaodai congshu, which came out two years later, in 1697.15 Rather than conserving and delimiting texts, the literary collectanea in serial form thus welcomed a continuous flow of new documents as part of the ongoing dialogues and discussions of contemporary literati. Not surprisingly, the aggregate nature of the literary collectanea in serial form—in particular, those that included reader submissions—resulted in a lack of consistent organizing principles or argumentative structure. In comparison to anthologies, which filtered and arranged documents according to a set editorial agenda, or to encyclopedias, which purported to present knowledge in terms of specific categories, the organizational scheme in literary collectanea was usually versatile due to the accumulation of heterogeneous works that retained their own distinct identities.16 Ming scholar Shen Jiefu ≜㆔⫿ (1532–1601) states that his compilation of official and unofficial records of contemporary political affairs, Jilu huibian ㋔䣘ᔭ㎼ (Collection of records; posthumously published in 1617), spanning 123 mixed genres, presents its contents indiscriminately because they cannot be arranged into coherent categories.17 Although some literary collectanea attempted to impose a unity on the varied documents they contained through uniform physical features such as pagination, chapter divisions and headings printed on the centerfold of the folded pages (banxin ⠜ᖗ), and headlines printed in the upper margins of the pages, the arrangement of documents often did not reflect any hierarchy of importance. As late Ming compiler Cheng Yinzhao ⿟㚸‫( ܚ‬fl. 1627) mentions in his compilation Tianduge cangshu ໽䛑䭷㮣᳌ (Collected books in the Pavilion of the Heavenly Capital; 1627), the documents were often “printed in the order in which they are acquired” (suiyou xuke 䱼᳝㑠ࠏ).18 Beneath this apparently haphazard organization, however, lies the latent structuring principle of the literary collectanea in installment form—namely, the sociality of the compiler. The authors or contributors selected for each literary compendium were likely to belong to a specific network centered around the main compiler, and their works often allude to partisan or private contexts that are based on their familial and social relationships. Despite their open solicitation of manuscripts, it was very common for the literary collectanea to consist mainly of documents provided by the compiler himself and members of his coterie. For instance, a large proportion of the pieces in the Tanji congshu and Zhaodai congshu come from the compilers of these collections, Zhang Chao ᔉ╂ (1650–ca. 1707) and Wang Zhuo, as well as their respective coteries,

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composed of family members, friends, and friends of friends. In other words, the documents were selected not only on the basis of their currency but also according to the reputation and status of those who submitted them. Accordingly, the value of the documents was determined largely, if not exclusively, by the social and cultural privileges attached to the cohesive and exclusive sociality of the coterie rather than by their contents per se. This is partly the reason why the compilers of the vast eighteenth-century imperial compendium Siku quanshu ಯᑿܼ᳌ (Complete writings of the four repositories; see Gandolfo, chapter 33) denigrated the late Ming and early Qing literary collectanea as shameful products of vanity publishing.19 Ironically, however, the serial format of literary collectanea inevitably militated against the textual uses promoted by the compilers and their groups. Each installment bound together several abridged as well as unabridged texts from various books and contexts.20 By decoupling such texts from their original intentions and rearranging them within randomly determined physical divisions, the literary collectanea encouraged readers to endow the original texts with new meanings and significance attuned to their specific needs. For instance, Zhang Chao proudly asserts that his collectanea is superior to previous ones, stating that “not only [do] the viewers find it easy to browse the selected works at a glance but also the officials and secretaries find it convenient to organize and store the materials for the affairs to which they attend” ϡ⤼㾔㗙ˈ⛵䲷ϔⳂњ✊ˈे‫݌‬㈸㿬ᅸˈᭈ⧚㮣ᓚˈѺᯧѢᕲџг.21 This conventional rhetoric of the ease of document search and retrieval in fact discloses Zhang Chao’s acknowledgment that his collectanea is geared to selective and sporadic reading rather than to the intensive and exhaustive reading from cover to cover that had been traditionally valued.22 By offering some extratextual tools to help with navigation of the diverse documents in the installments, such as a table of contents, a statement of editorial principles, pagination, and category indexes,23 the literary collectanea frees readers to make use of the documents in whatever ways are most valuable to them. In other words, the compiler or author does not prescribe the significance of each document in the literary collectanea; rather, they codetermine it with the reader. The production of a serialized literary collectanea providing contemporary information and knowledge was labor intensive and difficult to sustain. It usually took years to gather documents, secure the substantial funds needed for publication, and generate a level of popularity that would ensure steady demand. More importantly, the impetus for publishing collectanea in serial form changed after the seventeenth century. Though the production of multivolume literary collectanea in installments did continue until the end of the Qing—particularly in the lower Yangzi region and Guangdong province, centers of the dynasty’s booming economy and flourishing culture—these works primarily resumed their initial function as a depository of valuable scholarly materials. The late

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Ming and early Qing collectanea had expanded to include miscellaneous contemporary writings, whereas compilers of later works carefully selected and meticulously collated rare canonical and formal writings on the basis of their bibliographical expertise.24 Combined with the predominant intellectual orientation toward kaozheng 㗗䄝 (evidential research), most of these later collectanea focused on reliable editions of older scholarly texts or newly recovered ancient texts, reprinting rather than featuring newly created materials.25 By foregrounding the compiler’s studio name in their titles—such as Zhibuzuzhai congshu ⶹϡ䎇唟শ᳌ (Collectanea from the Studio of Insufficient Knowledge), named after compiler Bao Tingbo’s 入ᓋम (1728–1814) study, and Huayulou congchao 㢅䲼ῧশ䟨 (Collected transcriptions from the Flower Rain Tower), following the name of compiler Zhang Shourong’s ᔉ໑ᾂ (b. 1827) library— mid- and late Qing literary collectanea discontinued the practice of soliciting manuscripts and emphasized the erudition of the individual compiler more than that of his surrounding coterie. In a turn away from meeting the demand for synchronic exchange of information and knowledge, installments of literary collectanea after the seventeenth century adjusted to prioritize authenticity and rigorous reexamination of canonical texts in accord with the shifting intellectual and social trends of the late years of the imperial era.

Notes 1. While Ruxue jingwu ‫ۦ‬ᅌ䄺ᙳ, compiled by Yu Dingsun ֲ哢ᄿ and Yu Jing ֲ㍧ in 1204, is arguably considered the first of the literary collectanea, the term congshu itself was first used by Hu Wenhuan 㚵᭛✹ (fl. 1590s), whose Gezhi congshu Ḑ㟈শ᳌ came out in the Wanli period (1572–1620) of the Ming dynasty. On the genealogies of the term and the genre, see Xie Guozhen 䃱೟⽢, “Congshu kanke yuanliu kao” শ᳌ߞࠏ ⑤⌕㗗, in Ming Qing biji tancong ᯢ⏙ㄚ㿬䂛শ (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1981), 202–3. 2. Xie Guozhen, “Congshu,” 209; Wai-yee Li, “Textual Transmission of Earlier Literature During the Yuan, Ming, and Qing Dynasties,” in The Oxford Handbook of Classical Chinese Literature (1000 BCE–900 CE), ed. Wiebke Denecke, Wai-yee Li, and Xiaofei Tian (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 329. 3. Hilde De Weerdt, “The Encyclopedia as Textbook: Selling Private Chinese Encyclopedias in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries,” Qu’était-ce qu’écrire une encyclopédie en Chine? Extrême-Orient, Extrême-Occident, hors série (2007): 85–86, and “Continuities between Scribal and Print Publishing in Twelfth-Century Song China: The Case of Wang Mingqing’s Serialized Notebooks,” East Asian Publishing and Society 6 (2016): 54–83; Alister D. Inglis, “A Textual History of Hong Mai’s Yijian zhi,” T’oung Pao, 2nd ser., 93, no. 4–5 (2007): 288–89. 4. Suyoung Son, Writing for Print: Publishing and the Making of Textual Authority in Late Imperial China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2018), esp. 133–39. 5. Song Weibi ᅟᖂ⩻, “Fanli” ޵՟, in Chen Zilong’s 䱇ᄤ啡 Huang Ming jingshi wenbian ⱛᯢ㍧Ϫ᭛㎼, in Xuxiu Siku quanshu 㑠ׂಯᑿܼ᳌, ed. Xuxiu Siku quanshu bianzuan weiyuanhui, vol. 1655 (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1995), 18b.

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6. Wang Zhuo’s letter to Zhang Chao, in Chidu yousheng ሎ⠬ট㙆, comp. Zhang Chao, 1780 ed., (Peking University Library, Beijing), 8.16b–17a. This text is translated in Son, Writing for Print, 135. 7. For example, see Zheng Yuanxun 䜁‫ࣇܗ‬, “Wenyu zixu” ᭛࿯㞾ᑣ, in Meiyouge wenyu ၮᑑ䭷᭛࿯, 1633 ed. (Harvard-Yenching Library, Cambridge, MA). 8. Zhang Xiumin ᓴ⾔⇥ argues that the earliest printed solicitation for manuscripts was found in an anthology of poetry in 1336. See Zhongguo yinshua shi Ё೑ॄࠋ৆, 2 vols. (Hangzhou: Zhejiang guji chubanshe, 2006), 1:372. In the seventeenth century, requests for readers’ manuscripts were common across different genres of anthologies, including those of letters, poetry, prose, stories, and examination essays. Kai-wing Chow, Publishing, Culture, and Power in Early Modern China (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), 75–77; Tobie Meyer-Fong, “Packaging the Men of Our Times: Literary Anthologies, Friendship Networks, and Political Accommodation in the Early Qing,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 64, no. 1 (June 2004): 33–35. 9. The solicitation page in Huang Ming shiliu mingjia xiaopin ⱛᯢक݁ৡᆊᇣક, 1633 ed. (Harvard-Yenching Library, Cambridge, MA). 10. Wang Zhuo, “Liyan” ՟㿔, in Wenjin, Early Qing ed. (National Library of China, Beijing), 2a. 11. Revised and expanded from Son, Writing for Print, 122nn112–116. 12. This indulgence in accounts of contemporary life was also a feature of other popular genres that emerged in the late Ming and early Qing period, such as news-based vernacular novels (shishi xiaoshuo ᰖџᇣ䁾) and dramas (shishi xi ᰖџ᠆). See Si-yen Fei, Negotiating Urban Space: Urbanization and Late Ming Nanjing (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2009), 196–200; and Wu Jen-shu Ꮏҕᘩ, “Ming Qing zhi ji Jiangnan shishi ju de fazhan ji qi suo fanying de shehui xintai” ᯢ⏙П䱯∳फᰖ џ࡛ⱘⱐሩঞ݊᠔ড᯴ⱘ⼒᳗ᖗᜟ, Zhongyang yanjiuyuan jindaishi yanjiusuo jikan 31 (1999): 1–48. 13. For example, the sequels to Zuo Gui’s Ꮊഁ Baichuan xuehai ⱒᎱᅌ⍋ (1273), such as Wu Yong’s ਇ∌ Xu Baichuan xuehai 㑠ⱒᎱᅌ⍋ and Feng Kebin’s 侂ৃ䊧 Guang Baichuan xuehai ᒷⱒᎱᅌ⍋, both published in the 1620s. 14. Wang Shizhen’s letters to Zhang Chao, in Zhang Chao, Chidu yousheng, 9.23b, 11.23a–b. 15. Wang Yan, “Xihua xianlu” 㽓㧃ҭ㈭, in Zhaodai congshu, 4 vols. (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1990), 42–43. 16. Liu Shangheng ߬ᇮᘚ, Guji congshu gaishuo স㈡ϯкὖ䇈 (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1989), 7–8. 17. Shen Jiefu, “Fanli” ޵՟, in Jilu huibian, 1617 ed. (Harvard-Yenching Library, Cambridge, MA). 18. Cheng Yinzhao, preface to Tianduge cangshu, 1627 ed. (Harvard-Yenching Library, Cambridge, MA). Further examples are found in Liu Shangheng, Guji congshu gaishuo, 97; and Meyer-Fong, “Packaging the Men of Our Times,” 26–27. 19. See, for example, the criticism of collectanea such as the Yimen guangdu ་䭔ᒷ⠬ and Zhangshi cangshu ᔉ⇣㮣᳌ in Ji Yun ㋔ᯔ, et al., comps., Siku quanshu zongmu tiyao ಯᑿܼ᳌㐑Ⳃᦤ㽕, 4 vols. (Shanghai: Shangwu yinshuguan, 1933), 2771–72. 20. Because collectanea frequently change a text’s title or abridge it, the compilers of Siku quanshu considered the compiling practices of collectanea to be a distortion of the original meaning of texts. See Ji Yun et al., Siku quanshu zongmu tiyao, 2779–80, 4385. 21. Zhang Chao, “Fanli” ޵՟, in the second installment (yiji Э䲚) of Zhaodai congshu, 183. 22. Barbara M. Benedict, “The Paradox of the Anthology: Collecting and Différence in Eighteenth-Century Britain,” New Literary History 34, no. 2 (2003): 249.

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23. See the examples in Ye Dehui 㨝ᖋ䓱, Shulin qinghua; Shulin yuhua ᳌ᵫ⏙䁅 ᳌ᵫ 们䁅 (Changsha: Yuelu shushe, 2000), 184; De Weerdt, “Encyclopedia as Textbook,” 86–87; and Ellen Widmer, “The Huanduzhai of Hangzhou and Suzhou: A Study in Seventeenth-Century Publishing,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 56, no. 1 (1996): 105. 24. Xie Guozhen, “Congshu,” 209–17; Liu Shangheng, Guji congshu gaishuo, 21–22. 25. The intimate relationship between literary collectanea and the development of evidential research is discussed by Benjamin A. Elman in From Philosophy to Philology: Intellectual and Social Aspects of Change in Late Imperial China, rev. ed. (Los Angeles: UCLA Asia-Pacific Institute, 2001), 178–91, 215–17, and by Cynthia J. Brokaw in “Book History in Premodern China: The State of the Discipline I,” Book History 10, no. 1 (2007): 272.

CHAPTER 54

MODERN LITERARY COLLECTANEA ROBERT J. CU L P

T

he production of Republican-era literary series took shape as one aspect of Chinese publishers’ broader agenda of serial publication. Editors at the Shangwu yinshuguan ଚࢭॄ᳌仼 (Commercial Press), Shijie shuju Ϫ⬠᳌ሔ (World Book Company), and Zhonghua shuju Ё㧃᳌ሔ (Zhonghua Book Company) viewed series publications as a mechanism to represent the vast array of modern and traditional Chinese knowledge in a form that would proliferate titles and thereby increase profits. By taking this comprehensive approach to publishing, they categorized knowledge in new ways according to modern academic disciplines. In these constellations of disciplines, the “literary” crystallized as a distinct field in ways it had not in previous collections that had been organized according to the fourfold classification (sibu ಯ䚼). Moreover, literature (wenxue ᭛ᅌ, wenyi ᭛㮱) as it took shape in comprehensive series publications included not just literary works but also literary criticism and history. The incorporated literature and criticism were further subdivided into “Chinese” and “world” literature, which in turn was demarcated by nation. These subdivisions served to map out a world of “national literatures.” In these ways, the Republican period’s comprehensive series assimilated literature into a modern system of newly defined categories of knowledge. Within each series, critical and historical texts organized literary information by period and genre, presenting genealogies of literary traditions’ development. Comprehensive series not only collected and presented literary information to readers but also organized that information in very specific ways.

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Publication of book series to introduce Western learning to China had started during the late nineteenth century. Coordinated publication of groups of books served as a way for Chinese intellectuals and publishers to manage new forms of knowledge and categories of text while also packaging them for consumption by Chinese readers. As Benjamin A. Elman’s path-breaking research on the history of science has shown, first missionary translators and then government translation bureaus produced several series of translations of seminal works and introductory textbooks focused on natural science, mathematics, and social science starting in the 1870s and continuing through the turn of the century.1 Parallel to these translations of scientific and social scientific texts, translators working with Lin Shu ᵫ㋧ (1852–1924) published more than 180 translations of foreign literary works, a number of which were incorporated into Commercial Press’s Shuobu congshu 䁾䚼শ᳌ (Collectanea of fiction).2 As modern academic institutions and cultural reform movements took shape and gained momentum during the Republican period, series publications became an outlet for circulating new knowledge and culture. For instance, with Beijing University’s emergence as a central academic and cultural center during the May Fourth period, the young scholars there self-published monographs in a Beijing daxue congshu ࣫Ҁ໻ᅌশ᳌ (Beijing University series) until Commercial Press contracted to publish the series in 1919.3 During the height of the New Culture movement in 1919 and 1920, Zhonghua Book Company hired Zuo Shunsheng Ꮊ㟰㘪 to lead a New Books Division. Zuo immediately reached out to the network of young intellectuals who were active in the Young China Association and the New Culture movement more broadly to secure manuscripts on new research topics that became the basis for Zhonghua’s Xinwenhua congshu ᮄ᭛࣪শ᳌ (New culture series).4 The series was dominated by social science, history, science, and philosophy, with just a handful of texts about literature. Into the early 1920s, however, most series remained relatively small, informal, and eclectic in their coverage. The scale and comprehensiveness of Chinese series publications changed dramatically when Wang Yunwu ⥟䳆Ѩ (1888–1979), one of modern China’s great cultural entrepreneurs, became director of the Commercial Press Editing Department in 1922.5 Wang identified the new students and graduates of the Chinese school system as a potential market for more specialized books, and he viewed the positive reaction to late Qing publications on science and technology as one confirmation of that market.6 In response, Wang developed a comprehensive plan for publishing multiple series of books, with a target of one hundred titles for each, that would greatly expand Commercial Press’s overall list of publications.7 Each major field of learning provided an opportunity to publish dozens of books on more specific topics. Fields and subjects became placeholders for potential print commodities that Wang hoped Commercial Press could supply to a Chinese market of readers eager for exposure

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to modern, Western thought. With this step, Wang Yunwu effectively redefined modern series as thematically organized collections of books meant to represent delineated categories of knowledge. By 1929, the titles in Wang’s series had mounted to a level where he felt confident rolling out the Wanyou wenku 㨀᳝᭛ᑿ (Complete Library; literally, Literary repository that contains all things). This set repackaged all the discrete series published during the previous decade into a single, unified product. Working from a base of roughly four hundred volumes that had already been produced by 1929, Wang sought to fill in and expand these series to a complete set with one thousand titles printed in two thousand volumes.8 For Wang, the primary goal of the series’ broad survey of world knowledge was to “instill the learning necessary for human life in the general reading public,” which served the civic function of providing China’s populace with the modern knowledge necessary to become active citizens while also dramatically expanding the range of titles sold by Commercial Press.9 Although the massive size of the series made it too expensive for most individual consumers, Wang envisioned the series serving as a foundational collection for libraries and institutions like schools, companies, or government offices.10 The Complete Library set the pace for series publishing during the Republican period. Commercial Press’s main competitor, Zhonghua Book Company, responded with more than a dozen comprehensive series along with multiple series in more specialized topics, including twenty-four series focused on literature of various kinds.11 More directly comparable to the Complete Library, if somewhat smaller in scale, was World Book Company’s ABC Series, which company founder Shen Zhifang ≜ⶹᮍ (1883–1939) launched in 1928 with the help of Xu Weinan ᕤᝄफ. The World Book Company planned a comprehensive series on the model of an encyclopedia, similar to Commercial Press’s Baike xiaocongshu ⱒ⾥ᇣশ᳌ (Universal Library; literally, One hundred branches of learning, small series; see Judge, chapter 34). Although the ABC Series would be comparable in scale to the Baike xiaocongshu, the World Book Company aspired to make it more accessible to common readers. Ultimately, the ABC Series included several hundred titles.12 As the foregoing references to Wang Yunwu, Shen Zhifang, Xu Weinan, and Zuo Shunsheng suggest, editors and publishers played a major role in configuring modern series publications and through them categories of knowledge, including the category of the literary. Collectanea of the past had primarily been organized according to the four categories of learning. The collected works (jibu 䲚䚼) category incorporated existing publications of literary works and authors’ oeuvres. Modern publishers continued that long-standing mode of organization through their large-scale republication of collections of texts like Sibu congkan ಯ䚼শߞ (Collectanea of the four categories) and Sibu beiyao ಯ䚼‫٭‬㽕 (Essential writings from the four categories), which included

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dozens of reprints of rare literary collections that were organized according to the classical method of the four categories of learning.13 By contrast, publishers planned modern congshu by first configuring major categories of publication as coherent fields of knowledge, which included literature or the literary. Then they solicited many of the works that would “fill in” that field, either by assigning projects to their own staff members or by reaching out to scholars who were experts in a particular subject, genre, or tradition to write an encapsulating monograph or translate a relevant work into Chinese. This process is captured clearly in the series catalogs where a prospective title is listed alongside existing publications as a placeholder for a text that had yet to be drafted.14 Of course, where published works or translations of foreign works already existed, publishers were happy to use them. Commercial Press, for example, never hesitated to republish earlier translations by famous intellectual Yan Fu ಈᕽ (1854–1921) or by Lin Shu if they met the company’s needs.15 But publishers first established the categories of knowledge as a road map and then sought texts to fill those categories. In this way, publishers were active agents in the organization and dissemination of literary information during the Republican period. As mechanisms to configure such systems of knowledge, large-scale series juxtaposed literature with other fields of learning. The ABC Series, for example, lined up “Literature and the Arts” (“Wenyi” ᭛㮱) with the general categories of “Politics and Economics” (“Zhengzhi jingji” ᬓ⊏㍧△), “Philosophy” (“Zhexue” ૆ᅌ), “Education-History-Geography” (“Jiaoyu shi di” ᬭ㚆৆ഄ), and “Science” (“Kexue” ⾥ᅌ).16 The component series in Commercial Press’s Complete Library similarly juxtaposed literature and the literary with other disciplinary categories. For starters, Commercial Press had no component series dedicated to literature as such. Rather, literature, literary history, and literary criticism were primarily incorporated into two major comprehensive series: the Universal Library and Hanyi shijie mingzhu ⓶䅃Ϫ⬠ৡ㨫 (Chinese translations of the world’s famous works). Some classical Chinese literary works were also incorporated into the Guoxue jiben congshu ೟ᅌ෎ᴀশ᳌ (National learning basic series).17 The Universal Library was organized into major categories for philosophy, religion, social science, linguistics, natural science, applied science, the arts, literature, and history and geography. When one delves further into how the category of “Literature” (“Wenxue”) was configured in the Universal Library, one finds that it was composed exclusively of texts of literary history and criticism that were subdivided into three main areas.18 The “General Discussion” (“Zonglun” 㐑䂪) category was dominated by studies of literary form or genre: “Literary Style” (“Wenti” ᭛储), “Rhetoric” (“Xiuci” ׂ䖁), “Poetry and Song” (“Shige” 䀽℠), “Mythology” (“Shenhua” ⼲䁅), “Oratory” (“Yanshuoxue” ⓨ䁾ᅌ), and “Journalism” (“Xinwenxue” ᮄ㘲ᅌ). “Literature” was then further divided into “Chinese Literature” (“Zhongguo wenxue” Ё೟᭛ᅌ) and

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“World Literature” (“Shijie wenxue” Ϫ⬠᭛ᅌ). The category of “Chinese Literature” was dominated by monographs on the literature of each dynastic period—pre-Qin, Han/Wei/Six Dynasties, Tang, Song, Liao/Jin/Yuan, Ming, and Qing—culminating in “Modern Literature” (“Xiandai wenxue” ⧒ҷ᭛ᅌ).19 This organizational system configured a Chinese national literary tradition that unfolded in linear historical time in neatly organized dynastic units, starting from ancient roots and developing to a modern present parallel to other national literatures.20 In turn, “World Literature” was largely organized according to corresponding national literatures for a range of European countries in addition to the United States, India, and Japan. Literature, in short, meant national literatures that developed through linear, progressive time. The Hanyi shijie mingzhu ⓶䅃Ϫ⬠ৡ㨫 (Chinese translations of the world’s famous works) in the Complete Library was similarly divided by disciplinary categories.21 In the area of literature, the primary mode of categorization in Hanyi shijie mingzhu’s two collections was by national literature. Hanyi shijie mingzhu’s second collection included translations of two general studies of comparative literature by Fu Donghua ٙᵅ㧃 (1893–1971). But it further divided the field of literature into representative collections of translated short fiction from each country and then separate works of each country’s literature. The series already had collections of short fiction for Japan, France, Italy, Spain, Russia, Poland, Denmark, Hungary, Norway, and Romania and projected further collections for India, the United States, England, Germany, and Sweden. The remaining eclectic examples of novels, short fiction, and memoirs were similarly presented as examples of national literatures. In general, the emphasis on literary history and criticism, along with the juxtaposition with other academic disciplines, configured literature as a field of knowledge subject to systematic analysis according to form, genre, and development over time, parallel to other fields. This macroscopic organization of literature alongside other disciplines and categories of learning was made visible in part through the catalogs of the series that publishers distributed as promotional materials. At the same time, publishers’ repeated organization of literary and critical texts by national culture, whether Chinese or foreign, cast literature as an index of the national community, a cultural marker of a spatial distinction. In series publications, publishers like Commercial Press presented literary information as information about national cultures. Book series like the Complete Library thus fostered a sense of literary space and time quite different from that produced by installment fiction published in newspapers, which were a common medium of literary publishing in the late Qing and early Republic. Serialized fiction created a sense of immediacy by unfolding in contemporary social time and perhaps referencing contexts and events with which the reader was familiar.22 Literary book series, by contrast, created a sense of global simultaneity of commensurate national cultures that extended back into the past.

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Within individual volumes of the Complete Library, authors organized literary information according to period, genre, and/or style. For example, brothers Hu Pu’an 㚵‌ᅝ and Hu Huaichen 㚵់⧯ organized their study of Tang literature by textual genre: poetry, fiction, drama, lyric prose, and miscellany.23 Chen Zhongfan’s 䱇䧬޵ study of the literature of the Han, Wei, and Six Dynasties periods first differentiated by era and then made distinctions by genre.24 Authors presented capsule biographies of or anecdotes about key figures, critical summaries of authors’ writings, and occasional short excerpts of exemplary works. In the volumes focused on China, the compilers occasionally grappled with the very definition and boundaries of the category of literature as it related to past forms of Chinese writing. For instance, the Hu brothers dismissed whole categories of text—for example, prefaces and postscripts, biographies, memorials, and poetry written for the examinations—that might previously have been included in scholars’ collected works as not being “literary,” suggesting how scholars in the early twentieth century were independently recategorizing literary information at the micro level in individual volumes of series publications.25 Studies of foreign literature were organized by genre and period26 as well as by style, as in Zheng Cichuan’s 䜁⃵Ꮁ study of Euro-American fiction, which described a progressive development from romanticism to realism to naturalism.27 In these texts, capsule biographies of individual authors and canned summaries of key works provide encyclopedic knowledge of foreign literary traditions for Chinese readers. The series’ translations of foreign literature also provide readers with key examples of many of the foreign works mentioned in the summaries, offering opportunities for in-depth reading. In this way, the Complete Library provided scaffolded tiers of literary information, ranging from general overviews of national literary traditions, biographies of individual authors, and summaries of iconic works to translations and examples of specific works, allowing readers to move from greater generality to greater specificity in their engagement with the literary.

Notes 1. Benjamin A. Elman, On Their Own Terms: Science in China, 1550–1900 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 321–32, 359–68, 413. These were coordinated collections of texts, but they were not always labeled congshu. 2. Michael Gibbs Hill, Lin Shu, Inc.: Translation and the Making of Modern Chinese Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 2, 93. 3. Timothy B. Weston, The Power of Position: Beijing University, Intellectuals, and Chinese Political Culture, 1898–1929 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 207–8. 4. Zhou Qihou ਼݊८, Zhonghua shuju yu jindai wenhua Ё㧃᳌ሔ㟛䖥ҷ᭛࣪ (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 2007), 170–73; Zou Zhenhuan 䚍ᤃ⦃, “‘Xinwenhua congshu’:

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5.

6. 7. 8.

9.

10. 11. 12.

13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

18. 19. 20.

21. 22.

23.

539

Xinzhi chuanshu yu xinxue yinling” ᮄ᭛࣪ϯк˖ᮄⶹӴ䕧Ϣᮄᄺᓩ乚, in Zhonghua shuju yu Zhongguo jin xiandai wenhua ЁढкሔϢЁ೑䖥⦄ҷ᭛࣪, ed. Fudan daxue lishixi, Chuban bowuguan, Zhonghua shuju, and Shanghai cishu chubanshe (Shanghai: Shanghai renmin chubanshe, 2013), 168–76; Zuo Shunsheng Ꮊ㟰㘪, Jin sanshinian jianwen zaji 䖥ϝकᑈ㽟㘲䲰㿬 (Jiulong: Ziyou chubanshe, 1952), 22. Christopher Rea and Nicolai Volland define the cultural entrepreneur as someone who takes risks and invests cultural and economic capital in cultural ventures for profit and/ or accumulation of symbolic capital. Rea and Volland, eds., The Business of Culture: Cultural Entrepreneurship in China and Southeast Asia, 1900–65 (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2015). Wang Shounan ⥟໑फ, comp., Wang Yunwu xiansheng nianpu chugao ⥟䳆Ѩ‫⫳ܜ‬ᑈ 䄰߱〓, 4 vols. (Taipei: Taiwan Shangwu yinshuguan, 1987), 1:112–13. Wang Yunwu, Shangwu yinshuguan yu xin jiaoyu nianpu ଚࢭॄ᳌仼㟛ᮄᬭ㚆ᑈ䄰 (Taipei: Taiwan Shangwu yinshuguan, 1973), 119–20. Wang Yunwu, “Yinxing Wanyou wenku yuanqi” ॄ㸠㨀᳝᭛ᑿ㎷䍋, in Wanyou wenku diyiji yiqianzhong mulu 㨀᳝᭛ᑿ㄀ϔ䲚ϔग。Ⳃ䣘, ed. Wang Yunwu et al. (Shanghai: Shangwu yinshuguan, 1929), 1. Regarding the number of titles associated with each series included in the Complete Library, see “Wanyou wenku bianyi fanli” 㨀 ᳝᭛ᑿ㎼䅃޵՟ in Wang Yunwu et al., Wanyou wenku diyiji yiqianzhong mulu, 2. “Wanyou wenku bianyi fanli,” 2; Leo Ou-fan Lee, Shanghai Modern: The Flowering of a New Urban Culture in China, 1930–1945 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 56–58. Wang Yunwu, Shangwu yinshuguan yu xin jiaoyu nianpu, 250–51. Zhonghua shuju gaikuang Ё㧃᳌ሔὖ⊕ (Shanghai: Zhonghua shuju, 1936), 12–22. Robert J. Culp, The Power of Print in Modern China: Intellectuals and Industrial Publishing from the End of Empire to Maoist State Socialism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019), 166–70. Culp, Power of Print, chap. 4. See, for instance, Daxue congshu mulu ໻ᅌশ᳌Ⳃ䣘 (Shanghai: Shangwu yinshuguan, 1935), 1–8. E.g., Wang Yunwu et al., Wanyou wenku diyiji yiqianzhong mulu, 6–9. Shen Zhifang, “Cong jihua dao chushu” ᕲ㿜ࡗࠄߎ᳌, Shijie 1, no. 1 (1928): 14. Wang Yunwu et al., Wanyou wenku diyiji yiqianzhong mulu; Wang Yunwu et al., eds., Wanyou wenku dierji mulu 㨀᳝᭛ᑿ㄀Ѡ䲚Ⳃ䣘 (Shanghai: Shangwu yinshuguan, 1934). Wang Yunwu et al., Wanyou wenku diyiji yiqianzhong mulu, 20–21. Studies of Chinese literature were also incorporated into the Guoxue xiaocongshu ೟ᅌ ᇣশ᳌. Wang Yunwu et al., Wanyou wenku diyiji yiqianzhong mulu, 13. For different versions of this developmental narrative, see Chen Zhongfan 䱇䧬޵, Han Wei Liuchao wenxue ⓶儣݁ᳱ᭛ᅌ (Shanghai: Shangwu yinshuguan, 1932), 3–4; and Lü Simian ਖᗱ࢝, Songdai wenxue ᅟҷ᭛ᅌ (Shanghai: Shangwu yinshuguan, 1933), 1–7. Wang Yunwu et al., Wanyou wenku diyiji yiqianzhong mulu, 6–10; Wang Yunwu et al., Wanyou wenku dierji mulu, 1–15; Lee, Shanghai Modern, 57-61. Alexander Des Forges, Mediasphere Shanghai: The Aesthetics of Cultural Production (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2007), 78–80, 85–87. Similar kinds of simultaneity might also have been generated by publication of short fiction in journals. Hu Pu’an and Hu Huaichen, Tangdai wenxue ૤ҷ᭛ᅌ (Shanghai: Shangwu yinshuguan, 1931).

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24. Chen Zhongfan, Han Wei Liuchao wenxue. Zhang Zongxiang’s ᔉᅫ⼹ Qingdai wenxue ⏙ҷ᭛ᅌ (Shanghai: Shangwu yinshuguan, 1930) was organized primarily by Qing emperors’ reign periods. 25. Hu Pu’an and Hu Huaichen, Tangdai wenxue, 10–11. 26. Yuan Changying 㹕ᯠ㣅, Falanxi wenxue ⊩㰁㽓᭛ᅌ (Shanghai: Shangwu yinshuguan, 1923); Zhang Yuerui ᔉ䍞⨲, Meilijian wenxue 㕢߽ෙ᭛ᅌ (Shanghai: Shangwu yinshuguan, 1934). 27. Zheng Cichuan, Ou Mei jindai xiaoshuo shi ℤ㕢䖥ҷᇣ䁾৆ (Shanghai: Shangwu yinshuguan, 1931).

CHAPTER 55

LITERARY NEWSPAPERS AND TABLOIDS A L E X A N DER DE S FORGE S

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he Chinese Imperial Post Office was established in 1896; the decision in the following year to create reduced rates for printed matter that could be categorized as newspapers led in a matter of months to an entirely new type of product, the minor paper (xiaobao ᇣฅ) or literary tabloid (wenyi baokan ᭛㮱ฅߞ). Li Boyuan ᴢԃ‫( ܗ‬1867–1906) founded the leading example of the genre, Youxi bao 䘞᠆ฅ (Entertainment daily) in the summer of 1897; within two years, Youxi bao had matched, if not overtaken, the leading mainstream newspaper, Shenbao ⬇ฅ (Shanghai News; founded in 1872) in daily sales and was available in major Chinese cities as well as in Tokyo. Over the next two decades, more than twenty other literary tabloids appeared, most of which were published in Shanghai on a daily basis and distributed more or less widely across the country.1 Certain formal similarities between these tabloids and newspapers such as Shenbao and Hubao Ⓚฅ (Shanghai news) are evident: they were for the most part published daily and included a large masthead on the front page with a title, the date according to Chinese and Western calendars, the price, a list of locations where they could be purchased, and clearly stipulated rates for advertisers. Shanghai novelties were chronicled with much greater attentiveness than in the newspapers: film reviews, discussions of Peking Opera productions set in contemporary Shanghai (xinxi ᮄ᠆ “new-style plays”), and articles about new social phenomena such as leisure rides in rental horse carriages and female factory workers all featured regularly.2 These tabloids also included useful information for Shanghai daily life such as scheduled performances at theaters and storytelling halls

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as well as the going prices of staple foods and canned goods in the city. At the same time, however, there were substantial continuities with earlier genres of biji ㄚ㿬 (casual prose notes) and traditional collectanea (see Son, chapter 53) both in the content—songs, poetry, anecdotes, lantern riddles and drinking games, literary parodies, and other forms of literary leisure—and in the active solicitation of that content from educated individuals who were often acquaintances of the editor. All in all, such contents reflect a multifaceted reader who consults and consumes the tabloid for a range of different types of information. One characteristic of this genre was the unabashedness with which it made explicit the conditions of its production, marketing, and sale. Although literati publications in the Ming and Qing certainly did account for sources of funding, chronicle shortfalls in the time or material conditions available to the author or editor, and even on occasion direct readers to bookstores where those publications could be purchased, this kind of information appeared on an ad hoc basis, in some cases giving the reader a sense of a certain false humility on the part of the producer. Insofar as literary tabloids of the late Qing defined themselves as “newspapers,” however, it was to be expected that pricing for readers and advertisers would be clearly marked in each issue, that advertising would constitute a significant portion of the overall content, and that marketing ploys like the distribution of free copies on Sundays at the most fashionable park in Shanghai would be highlighted. Similarly, the constraints of page size and number of pages were regularly noted as a reason to truncate a story in the middle and continue it the next day. If the editor of collectanea might casually let slip a few words about his publishing travails to create an air of appealingly genteel poverty, the editor of the literary tabloid was eager that readers should understand the extent to which the logic of the printing press and the media marketplace dictated his formatting choices. In each case, the producer aims for readers to have a certain image of the process in mind as they consume the product. For the literary tabloid, the management of information flow becomes a daily drama, and readers are invited to observe, identify with, and even participate in that drama. Readers must have been struck by the frequency with which supplementary material accompanied the tabloid: photos of Shanghai courtesans, address lists for various types of establishments, ballots that readers could return to voice a recommendation for one or another of the aforementioned, and installments of tanci ᔜ䀲 (narrative songs) and other works of long vernacular fiction such as Gengzi guobian tanci ᑮᄤ೟䅞ᔜ䀲 (The national calamity of 1900), Haishang fanhua meng ⍋Ϟ㐕㧃໶ (Dreams of Shanghai splendor), and Guanchang xianxing ji ᅬจ⧒ᔶ㿬 (Officialdom Unmasked).3 The nature of the supplementary material included together with the literary tabloids adds a more enduring dimension to the ephemerality of the daily publications. Photos of courtesans were included as much for their value as collectibles as for their

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newsworthiness; similarly, inserts listing the addresses of courtesan houses, teahouses, and opium halls were meant to be kept and consulted on a regular basis. In the case of tanci and long vernacular fiction that appeared as a page-a-day supplement, readers could collect these pages over a period of weeks and months and then bind them into a more permanent volume form.4 Some of this supplementary material could be explained as a means of exploiting printing presses’ variable excess capacity, but in the case of the photographs and the installment fiction (one produced through a very different material process and the other in a very different format), it becomes clear that the logic of the supplement goes beyond a mere interest in making the most efficient use of machinery and personnel. The literary tabloid is imagined throughout as a vehicle for the presentation of a range of different products that result from distinctly different processes: metal-type printing, lithographic printing, and even printing from photographic film. Perry Link identifies here a logic of “bonus” content over what one originally expected to receive: it is not just the tabloid itself—but the tabloid plus.5 When the bonus content took the form of a photograph, ballot, or short guide to the city, it came as a welcome surprise; when it came in regular installments of fictional narrative at the rate of one or two pages a day, on the other hand, one’s expectation of the supplement grew to match or even to outweigh the anticipation of the tabloid itself. Of these supplements, installment fiction had the most significant formal effects on the journalistic narrative within the tabloid itself. This should come as no surprise, as the vocations of tabloid publisher and author of vernacular fiction were closely linked in turn-of-the-century Shanghai: the best-selling novelists Li Boyuan, Wu Jianren ਇ䎐Ҏ (1866–1910), and Sun Yusheng ᄿ⥝㙆 (1864–1939) were also the publishers of Youxi bao, Shijie fanhua bao Ϫ⬠㐕㧃 ฅ (World splendor daily), Caifeng bao 䞛乼ฅ (Gathered trends daily), and Xiaolin bao ュᵫฅ (Forest of laughter daily) during this period. Indeed, would the pull of installment fiction—don’t miss out on the latest twists and turns experienced by your favorite character!—not have provided a more compelling reason to buy the paper every day than the comparatively random and miscellaneous anecdotes and casual writings of the tabloid itself? In fact, in the decade following the founding of Youxi bao the tabloid narrative itself shifts toward the model of multiple interwoven storylines provided by late Qing vernacular fiction—in particular, those novels set in Shanghai. The anecdotes that appear in literary tabloids in the early years ordinarily work as self-contained stories with a beginning, middle, and end, and the individuals who feature in them often are not identified by name. Within a few years, however, news items that resemble plot developments in a novel with many characters become more common: characters are named, and it is clear that the reader is expected to be familiar with their backstories, chronicled over the preceding weeks and months in similar items printed in the tabloid pages.6 The logic of

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installment fiction included as a supplement now holds for the narratives of actors and courtesans that unfold within the tabloid’s own pages—readers who miss a day or two of news items risk losing track of these stories as well. In its constant movement from one interrupted narrative line to the next, resulting in complexity sufficient that in many cases the storyline requires attentive and constructive effort on the part of readers themselves to take coherent shape, installment fiction set in Shanghai figures a broader mediasphere in which the movement is not only from storyline to storyline but also from one work to another and even from one genre to another as readers move back and forth between different novels and different tabloids, all appearing simultaneously.7 This homology among ostensibly different types of complex narrative quickly became widely accepted enough that one of the primary tasks facing advocates of vernacular fiction in the closing years of the Qing and the early Republican era was to clearly distinguish between the novelist and the newspaperman and to define vernacular fiction writing (xiaoshuo wenzi ᇣ䁾᭛ ᄫ) in contrast to nonfiction—specifically journalistic—writing (jishi zhi wenzi 㿬џП᭛ᄫ). With this aim in mind, Bao Tianxiao ࣙ໽ュ (1875–1973) satirized writers who took items in the gossip columns as the “beef stock” with which one can make a whole bowl of fictional soup.8 Indeed, as late as 1931, one critic read the local news as if it were installments of the turn-of-the century novel Haishang fanhua meng.9 Another intriguing aspect of the literary tabloid is the regular and direct solicitation of material from its readers. Ballots distributed as a supplement to the papers allowed readers to call the editor’s attention to their favorite establishments, and beginning in June of 1901, readers could even cast votes for candidates to be listed in the competitive ranking of courtesans (huabang 㢅ὰ), modeled on the civil service examinations (this can be seen in Shijie fanhua bao no. 85). A more involved type of support was the submission of verse in praise of particular courtesans, an activity that fits well with the other welcomed literary contributions, whether poetry, short prose, or jokes. In this area, the potential for overlap with earlier literati practices of writing is clear. Anecdotes submitted for publication, by contrast, show a slightly different approach from those found in Ming and Qing collections: location is specified not merely to the level of county or town but even down to the very block of a single street in Shanghai; date and time are often provided with extreme exactitude as well. What is more, the basis of the report is not the experience of a direct participant in the event or hearsay; rather, the basis is the reporter’s observation of that event, with their own location and activity at the time duly noted. By foregrounding the reporter function of these contributors, referred to as fangshi ren 㿾џҎ (correspondents), caifang ren ᥵㿾Ҏ (interviewers), or jizhe 㿬㗙 (reporters), the tabloid editor announces that these anecdotal reports should be read not primarily as literary compositions complete in and

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of themselves—as anecdotes had often been in previous centuries—but rather as informative updates on already familiar individuals. It is in fact not clear with these updates whether the “reporter” has written the item in question or has merely passed the informational content on to an editor who writes it up. Contributors to the literary tabloids often remain anonymous, and this is especially true of the “reporters” who provide these updates. The extent to which journalistic narrative and fictional narrative could overlap both in content and in form suggests that a more dependable means of distinguishing between the two types of narrative in the early twentieth century is to focus on the perceived differences in their relation to production: numberless anonymous individuals gathering information and forwarding it to a publisher, on the one hand, versus a single author (zuojia ԰ᆊ) chronicling reality in more or less organized fashion, on the other. Worth noting are two immediate predecessors to turn-of-the-century literary tabloids in the field of literary serial publication. In the years 1872–76, the editors at Shenbao published a succession of literary collections on a regular basis: twelve issues of Yinghuan suoji ◯ᇄ⨷㋔ (Trivial notes from around the world), followed by twelve issues of Huanyu suoji ᇄᅛ⨷㋔ (Trivial notes from across the earth) and finally twelve issues of Siming suoji ಯ⑳⨷㋔ (Trivial notes from the four seas). Closer to what a literary periodical today might contain, these collections included British and Japanese fiction translated into Classical Chinese as well as poetry, essays, and brief notes. Nearly two decades later Han Bangqing 䶧䙺ᝊ (1856–94) published fifteen monthly issues of Haishang qishu ⍋Ϟ༛᳌ (Marvelous writings of Shanghai; 1892–94), each issue consisting primarily of two chapters of his Wu dialect novel Haishanghua liezhuan ⍋Ϟ㢅߫‫( ڇ‬The Sing-song Girls of Shanghai) and a selection of short stories in Classical Chinese. Although these publications broke new ground in form as well as in content, they inspired no immediate imitators, and Haishang qishu left the final thirty-four chapters of Haishanghua liezhuan to appear later in a standard volume edition. Unlike the literary tabloids in years to come, these publications included no information that could be considered local news; it seems likely that the presentation of literary elements, either as one part of a broader range of information or as a supplement to that broad range, was key to the greater interest with which the turn-of-the-century tabloids were received. This broader range of information is tied closely to the concept of daily life in its regularly scheduled arrival, in its emphasis on the local setting, and in its interest in the trivial and ordinary as subject matter. Literary tabloids played an important role in the broader transformation of literary production in the late Qing and early Republican period. Not only did they contribute to the articulation of a mediasphere centered on Shanghai and provide an early venue for the publication of fiction in installments, but also their success led newspapers like Shenbao, Guowen bao ೟㘲ฅ (National

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news), and others to enter the literary market with supplements of their own, drawn on the tabloid model.10 The case of the Guowen bao is particularly well known, as its entry into the field was announced with a justification by reformist intellectuals Yan Fu ಈᕽ (1854–1921) and Xia Zengyou ໣᳒ԥ (1863–1924) that would become one of the touchstones for theorists of vernacular literature in the twentieth century: “Benguan fuyin shuobu yuanqi” ᴀ仼䰘ॄ䁾䚼㎷䍋 (An explanation of the reasons for our publication of a fiction supplement). The periodical press would remain the dominant outlet for literary writing and discussion well into the May Fourth era, with installment fiction published in newspaper supplements joined by shorter works and literary criticism published in journals such as Yueyue xiaoshuo ᳜᳜ᇣ䁾 (Fiction every month) and Xiaoshuo yuebao ᇣ䁾᳜ฅ (Fiction Monthly) that to some extent maintain the heterogeneity of genres of information so notable in the literary tabloids.11

Notes 1. Roswell S. Britton, The Chinese Periodical Press, 1800–1912 (Shanghai: Kelly & Walsh, 1933), 85; Ah Ying 䰓㣅, Wan Qing wenyi baokan shulüe ᰮ⏙᭛㮱ฅߞ䗄⬹ (Shanghai: Gudian wenxue chubanshe, 1958), 55; Tarumoto Teruo ‑ᴀ✻䲘, “Yūgi shujin sentei ‘Kōshi zuikyū kasen’ ” 䘞᠆ЏҎ䙌ᅮᑮᄤ㬞ᆂ㢅䙌, Shinmatsu shōsetsu kenkyū 5 (1981): 15–25; Ping Jinya ᑇ㼳Ѯ, “Shanghai chuban jie suowen” Ϟ⍋ߎ⠜⬠⧤䯏, in Shanghai difang shi ziliao Ϟ⍋ഄᮍ৆䌘᭭, ed. Shanghaishi wenshi guan Ϟ⍋Ꮦ ᭛৆佚 and Shanghaishi renmin zhengfu canshishi wenshi ziliao gongzuo weiyuanhui Ϟ⍋ᏖҎ⇥ᬓᑰখџᅸ᭛৆䌘᭭Ꮉ԰ྨਬӮ (Shanghai: Shanghai shehui kexueyuan chubanshe, 1986), 4:218–44; Zhu Junzhou ⼱ഛᅭ, “Qingmo Minchu qizhong hanjian wenyi baokan gouchen” ⏙᳿⇥߱ϗ⾡㔩㾕᭛㡎᡹ߞ䩽≝, Chuban shiliao (1992.4): 130–41. Li Boyuan’s first effort was in fact the Zhinan bao ᣛफฅ, which to some extent prefigured Youxi bao in style and appeared in 1896–97. Perhaps the first mention of xiaobao as a distinct genre, with ten examples, is in the turn-of-the-century guidebook (Huitu) Shanghai zaji ˄㐾೪˅Ϟ⍋䲰㿬, compiled by the pseudonymous Lichuangwodusheng 咢ᑞ㞹䅔⫳; see Lichuangwodusheng, comp. (Huitu) Shanghai zaji (Shanghai: Wenbao shuju, 1905), 6.3b. 2. See, for example, Youxi bao nos. 51, 54, 66, 67, 74, 94, 119, 448, 451, and 457. These items are often framed within a discourse on “Shanghai customs” that owes a great deal to guidebooks and travel accounts from the preceding two decades, such as Huyou zaji Ⓚ䘞䲰㿬, Songnan mengying ⎲फ໶ᕅ, and Huyou mengying Ⓚ䘞໶ᕅ, all reprinted by Shanghai guji chubanshe in 1989. 3. For more detail on the publication of installment fiction set in Shanghai during this period, see Alexander Des Forges, Mediasphere Shanghai: The Aesthetics of Cultural Production (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2007), 22–23. 4. Britton, Chinese Periodical Press, 122–23. Even the very tabloid pages themselves may on occasion have found a market as a collectible: Youxi bao no. 661 announces that the first two years’ editions are available in a reprint version. 5. Perry Link, Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies: Popular Fiction in Early Twentieth-Century Chinese Cities (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), 151. 6. Des Forges, Mediasphere Shanghai, 83–85.

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7. Des Forges, Mediasphere Shanghai, 85–92. 8. Alexander Des Forges, “Professional Anxiety, Brand Names, and Wild Chickens: From 1909,” in Rethinking Chinese Popular Culture: Cannibalizations of the Canon, ed. Carlos Rojas and Eileen Cheng-yin Chow (New York: Routledge, 2009): 40–53. 9. Cited in Wu Fuhui ਈ⽣䕝, Dushi xuanliu zhong de haipai xiaoshuo 䛑Ꮦᮟ⌕Ёⱘ⍋ ⌒ᇣ䇈 (Changsha: Hunan jiaoyu chubanshe, 1995), 134. 10. Bao Tianxiao makes this point in Chuanyinglou huiyi lu 䞻ᕅῧಲដ䣘 (Hong Kong: Dahua chubanshe, 1971), 446. On the further development of the newspaper supplement and fiction magazines in the late Qing and Republican period, see Britton, Chinese Periodical Press, 123; and Chen Pingyuan 䰜ᑇॳ, Zhongguo xiaoshuo xushi moshi de zhuanbian Ё೑ᇣ䇈ভџ῵ᓣⱘ䕀ব (Shanghai: Shanghai renmin chubanshe, 1988), 270–77. 11. Britton concludes: “Apart from translation, almost all the literary work of the early 20th century was in short forms, and most of it was published first in the periodical press. For years the periodical press left the book press little more than the reprint and school-book business.” Chinese Periodical Press, 122–23; Britton passes over longer vernacular fiction such as Ershinian mudu zhi guaixianzhuang ѠकᑈⳂⵍПᗾ⧒⢔ and Xiepu chao ℛ⌺╂, but even longer works such as these appeared for the most part first in installments as well. On literary journals of the early twentieth century, see Denise Gimpel, Lost Voices of Modernity: A Chinese Popular Fiction Magazine in Context (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2001), esp. 15–23.

CHAPTER 56

LITERARY JOURNALS JIANLI LI T R A N S L AT E D B Y A N AT O LY D E T W Y L E R

I

n the first half of the twentieth century, journals became China’s premier venue for sharing and discussing all forms of literature, whether original or translated. As a recent import from the West, the journal both managed literary information and, materially speaking, was itself subject to various regimes of information management, including commercial rights, state censorship, and party propaganda. To understand these levels of operation and the ways in which they interacted and developed, the form of the journal must be situated within multiple fields. Doing so reveals changes in strategies for organizing and circulating literary information while also highlighting the journal’s role in reifying literature (and related genres, such as criticism and reviews) as information in need of management. The Chinese phrase for “literary journal” or “literary magazine” is wenxue zazhi ᭛ᄺᴖᖫ. Although journal and magazine are oftentimes taken as synonyms, the latter’s sense of variety makes it a more precise equivalent to the compound zazhi. Magazine also etymologically captures the form’s informatic function. In English, the use of magazine to denote a kind of commercially minded literary periodical featuring excerpts and stand-alone essays, stories, and poems is traced to the publication of The Gentleman’s Magazine, founded in 1731 by English editor and publisher Edward Cave (1691–1754).1 Cave himself adopted the term from contemporary French usage, though its roots go further back to the Arabic word makhzan and its original meaning of “storehouse” or “stockpile” (meanings that still obtain in English). Much like a periodical can be viewed as a storehouse containing a variety of information, the compound zazhi denotes the inclusion of disparate items within a singular record or work.

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According to the classic second-century dictionary, the Shuowen jiezi 䁾᭛ 㾷ᄫ (Explaining simple graphs and analyzing complex graphs), the character za 䲰 refers to the “five colors’ mutual correspondence” (wucai xianghe ѨᔽⳌড়), while zhi ᖫ means “to record” or “to write down.” The combination of the two graphs into a compound indicating a type of published textual appeared during the Tang, where the term referred to the “anecdotal writings (ヨ㿬 biji) that recorded fragments of hearsay, apocrypha, and other informal accounts.”2 In this sense, zazhi can be differentiated from other related but decidedly more official records, including the broader and longer-established form of the zhi (record) itself, a term that shows up in historiography (see part II.C on histories), and the local gazetteers (fangzhi ᮍᖫ or difangzhi ഄᮍᖫ), where broad varieties of descriptive information about a topic or subject were collected in one place. Whether it is the English “storehouse” or the Chinese “mutual correspondence between the five colors,” clearly the zhi and the zazhi raise questions of information management. Put succinctly, even though zazhi (magazine) is so named for the miscellaneous state of its contents (za), its very being is a kind of information-management practice (zhi), including practices of filtering, categorization, editing, and storage. Crucially, the historical role of magazines in the development of modern Chinese history can also draw on the metaphoric connection to “munitions depot.” Already, in the mid-1920s, prominent historian Lü Simian ৩ᗱ࢝ (1884–1957) had observed: “The form of the magazine has come to be the strongest force to impact society in the last thirty years. Whenever change is in the air, there are inevitably a couple of magazines leading the change, and the direction of such change faithfully follows these magazines.”3 On this level, as a form of information management, zazhi figures as the clip that supplies the ammunition to direct the “winds of change.” In order for the ammunition inside the clip to exert the greatest force, the clip has to be packaged carefully so as to reach its own readers and turn them into the reading public. Historically, the first modern Chinese-language periodical, Cha shisu meiyue tongjichuan ᆳϪ֫↣᳜㍅㿜‫( ڇ‬Chinese Monthly Magazine), was established by English missionary William Milne in Malaysia in 1815. The tongji ㍅㿜 in its title signifies the breadth of its topical coverage, meaning “there is nothing that goes unrecorded [in its pages], and that its dissemination is broad.”4 Its content primarily concerned Christianity, but the publication also included items of news and scientific knowledge. It circulated at no cost amongst the Chinese-reading communities of Southeast Asia. After eighty issues, the publication was discontinued in 1821 (see Rojas, chapter 57). In its modern guise, the term zazhi initially appeared not as the title of a publication itself but as the title of a regular column, “Zazhi of things seen and heard from overseas” (“Haiwai jianwen zazhi” ⍋໪㽟㘲䲰䁠), which appeared in China’s first literary journal, the Yinghuan suoji ◯ᇄ⨷㋔ (Trivial notes from around the world), from 1872 to 1875. Zazhi was then adopted as a periodical title—and established as the

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name of this emergent form—in the early 1900s, most notably by the long-running Dongfang zazhi ᵅᮍ䲰䁠 (The Eastern Miscellany), founded in 1904. Through the fall of the Qing dynasty in 1911, such magazines had limited circulation and were not nearly as powerful in terms of influencing social life (including literature) as their later counterparts during the New Culture movement (ca. 1917–27). Magazines such as Xin qingnian ᮄ䴦ᑈ (La Jeunesse or New Youth; originally titled Youth Magazine [Qingnian zazhi 䴦ᑈ䲰䁠]), Xinchao ᮄ╂ (The Renaissance or New tide), and Xiaoshuo yuebao ᇣ䁾᳜ฅ (Fiction Monthly) took on the mission of raising public awareness of and support for the new culture (xin wenhua ᮄ᭛࣪) and new fiction (xin xiaoshuo ᮄᇣ䁾). Though they became canonical primarily in hindsight, the (eventual) cultural influence of these literary magazines makes them worthy of analysis with respect to their forms of information management, such as their inaugural issues, columns, advertisements, and illustrations. These became the dominant blueprint for literary magazines and journals going forward. Because of spatial limitations, the present chapter first focuses on the management of information on the copyright page before turning to several other subsequent paratextual elements that shaped the form’s affordances as a cultural medium. The copyright page is a crucial site in terms of a journal’s cultural, economic, and legal identity, and the stability of its presence makes it a convenient lens through which to examine the ways in which the practice of information management changed throughout the twentieth century. Through such analysis, this chapter will explore the ways in which za(zhi), or “miscellaneous (records),” contributed to the formation of a new order and became a kind of paradoxical form of literary information—both unordered and not.

The Copyright Page and Its Management as/of Information Many have observed that the cover pages of a large number of magazines founded in China during the modern era include a title in English or another Western language, along with other information about the publication, as in the case of Xin qingnian, which also printed its French title, La Jeunesse, on the cover. When Fiction Monthly first appeared in 1910, its English title was prominently printed on the cover. This practice was enduring: a decade later the front matter of Fiction Monthly would include even more comprehensive information in English: The Short Story Magazine (Issued Monthly) Commercial Press, Ltd. All rights reserved5

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On its own, this information isn’t particularly valuable. To the Chinese reader who can read foreign languages or the reader whose native tongue is English, such information evokes familiarity but does not actually offer anything substantive, since the contents of the magazine are in Chinese. Those wishing to read the magazine most likely possessed advanced reading proficiency in Chinese. This gives the foreign-language colophon an extraneous, “miscellaneous” quality, where the information lies outside of the magazine’s primary contents. However, considering that these foreign-language colophons appeared during an era of major influxes of new knowledge, objects, and Western culture (see Culp, chapter 54), the addition of such information appears to be an active means of shaping the magazine’s self-image. From its initial appearances in New Culture literary magazines to its proliferation across print culture, this practice constitutes a certain symbolic meaning both for the magazines themselves and for the broader cultural context. Similar to Fiction Monthly’s foreign-language colophon are the guidelines listed on the magazine’s copyright page, which specify that the postage for subscriptions by mail depends on the subscriber’s place of residence, which can belong to one of four categories: local (benbu ᴀප), domestic (benguo ᴀ೟), Japan, and international (waiguo ໪೟). Unfortunately, there are no definitive data on how many international subscriptions magazines like Fiction Monthly actually fulfilled, but the category probably represented a very small percentage of the total distribution. Even so, the magazine’s addition of a foreign postage classification, coupled with the foreign-language colophon, sends a strong signal to readers: this is a new-style magazine; there is nowhere in the world it does not reach, and it is connected to developments elsewhere in the world, a cosmopolitan part of a global, cultural present. The addition of foreign-language information began to disappear after the establishment of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 1949. No foreign languages appeared on the cover and title page of Renmin wenxue Ҏ⇥᭛ᄺ (People’s literature), founded in 1949. Of course, this was connected to the new socialist state’s policies on cultural administration. Besides information such as title, issue number, address, and pricing, the copyright pages of magazines were simplified into a standard protocol, as in the following example:

Editor

China National Literature Workers Association

Chief Editor

Mao Dun

Publisher

People’s Literature Publishing House

Distributor

Ministry of Post and Telecommunications Beijing Post Office

Subscribe at

Any Xinhua Book Store

Sold at

China Book Distribution Company

Printer

Beijing Jinghua Printing House6

Editorial Committee for Translations

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This is the editorial, publishing, ordering, retail, and distribution information for the journal Yiwen 䆥᭛ (Translations) from 1952. By this point, the network of commercial distribution that characterized the New Culture movement had transformed into a state-monopolized national distribution channel. There were far fewer magazines. Authoritative departments housed within the broader work-unit system managed and edited the limited number representing the field of literature, and circulation was planned through the postal service, bookstores, and distribution companies—institutions that, because they were state owned, had absolutely no need to be concerned about their sales figures. Another significant yet overlooked change took place in the classification of serial publications: in official discourse, magazine (zazhi) was formally supplanted by periodical (qikan ᳳߞ).7 On August 16, 1952, the Government Administration Council announced “Provisional Measures for Periodical Registration.” Although the document itself neither required the term magazine to be uniformly replaced by periodical nor prohibited the use of magazine in reference to nonacademic periodicals in daily life, as an official pronouncement it did set an unequivocal example. It also placed the magazine within the broader category of the periodical (which encompasses a broader range of subject areas beyond the magazine’s conventional focus on literature, society, or entertainment). To this day, scholars of modern and contemporary Chinese literary history habitually speak in terms of periodical studies rather than magazine studies (or journal studies) despite the fact that the object of their research may be literary magazines. Changes like this did not merely take place on the level of nomenclature. The “Provisional Measures for Periodical Registration” applied to literary and pictorial periodicals that were serially published at regular intervals (excluding newspapers) and to publications that were edited and printed regularly but not necessarily serially. In other words, even though the document targeted serially published and publicly distributed magazines, it also, in the same stroke, placed intermittently issued magazines within its purview. The document further demanded that a journal, prior to distribution, apply for registration with the local governing organ for publishing; only after having undergone inspection and received a certificate would it then be allowed to release the first issue. (This system of control appears similar to the censorship mechanisms developed by the Nationalist government during the Nanjing decade between 1927 and 1937.8 The primary difference is in implementation: the reach and effectiveness of the PRC’s system were far greater.) A periodical that received the proper registration certificate had to disclose the following on its cover and copyright page: 1. The registration certificate’s serial number must be printed on every issue (loose-leafed publications must display the serial number under the title of

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the periodical; bound publications must display the serial number on the inside of the back cover, near the spine); 2. The copyright page of every issue must clearly indicate the publisher, names of the editors (chief editor), as well as the addresses for editing, printing, and distribution.9

These rules are the legislative basis for the preceding colophon excerpted from Translations’ inaugural issue; they are also the basis for colophonic information contained in all Chinese journals thereafter. On the formal level, the arrangement of such information appears to be highly comparable to that of earlier magazines such as Fiction Monthly. However, while information in the latter was first and foremost managed by the publisher, information in PRC-era periodicals came to be managed by the state. From this perspective, perhaps the usage of periodical rather than magazine in legal documentation results from careful deliberations: after all, periodicity (qi ᳳ) is obviously more orderly (and perhaps less commercially oriented) than miscellany (za 䲰). Basic periodical information such as the registration certificate, the unique serial number (in both intent and function similar to the International Standard Serial Number, or ISSN), and the name of the “executive” or “directly supervising unit” (zhuguan danwei Џㅵऩԡ) is a manifestation of state governance. Familiarity with the reasons and background for the appearance of such information in mainland journals is helpful for the following discussion regarding two forms of information management common to mainland literary periodicals: the editor’s note and the reprint.

Two Distinctive Forms of Information Management: Editor’s Note and Reprint The editor’s note (bianzhe an 㓪㗙ᣝ) has been an important method of managing information in Chinese literary journals since the 1950s. While the name suggests that the author of the editor’s note (along with related terms such as editor’s postscript [bianzhe fuyan 㓪㗙䰘㿔], editor’s comment [bianzhe zhu 㓪㗙⊼], and editor’s words [bianzhe de hua 㓪㗙ⱘ䆱]) is the editor, typically the editor’s name is not provided. The ambiguity of this signature gives the note significant discursive force. Contemporary literary journals will note the managing editor’s name and occasionally list the editorial board and executive editors, but the question of who is after all the editor behind the editor’s note remains unanswered: perhaps it is the managing editor or the section editor, or possibly it is a member of the overarching (quanti ܼԧ) editorial department, or perhaps the editor’s note communicates the voice of the periodical’s holding unit (zhuban danwei Џࡲऩԡ) or even manifests the will of the

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higher-ranking executive unit.10 The author of the editor’s note, in the words of Cheng Guangwei ⿟‫♰ܝ‬, “can be called a ‘super-author’ [chaoji zuozhe 䍙㑻 ԰㗙], or ‘literary superintendent’ [wenxue chouhuazhe ᭛ᄺㅍߦ㗙].”11 Of course, such a practice directly frames and organizes the periodical’s information. The “editorial department’s words,” according to a 1950 issue of Wenyi bao ᭛㡎᡹ (Literature and art journal), are representative of the ideological dimension of such management: The four essays including “On American ‘Music’ ” (“Tan Meiguo ‘yinyue’ ” 䇜㕢೑“䷇Ф”) all expose the degeneracy of American imperialist literature and art. Though such pieces are reactionary in their essence, at the same time we direly need them. Within a fraction of the masses, there are some who have been exposed to the deceptive propaganda of American imperialism and the influence of its reactionary literature and art. We ought to help readers clearly recognize the crimes of American imperialism, and inspire them to put themselves into the struggle even more enthusiastically. We heartily welcome criticism and translations which can concretely analyze and critique American imperialist literature and art as a way of propagating feelings of enmity, disdain, and contempt toward American imperialism.12

This editor’s note moves from introducing the pieces published in that issue to bringing up requests for contributors, thereby directly prescribing that submitted manuscripts propagate “feelings of enmity, disdain, and contempt toward American imperialism.” This note appeared against the backdrop of the “War to Resist U.S. Aggression and Aid Korea” (Kang Mei huan Chao ᡫ㕢ᧈᳱ), or what is in the United States called the Korean War. However, similar editorial notes can be found everywhere in the literary periodicals from the 1950s through the 1970s. Besides its prescriptive force, the editor’s note has another common function—namely, asserting control over the interpretation of the literary work and the space and direction of literary criticism by, for instance, adding some words that imply moral judgment through praise and censure (baobian 㻦䌀) or inviting the reader to note (zhuyi ⊼ᛣ) the mistakes appearing in some piece published in that issue. Such editorial remarks were so widespread that they attracted the ire of authors, including controversial critic Hu Feng 㚵亢 (1902–85). In July 1954, he submitted to the Chinese Communist Party Guanyu jiefang yilai wenyi shijian qingkuang de baogao ݇Ѣ㾷ᬒҹᴹ᭛㡎ᅲ䏉ᚙ‫ⱘމ‬᡹ਞ (Report regarding the state of literary and artistic practice since the liberation; known informally as the Book of three hundred thousand words). This landmark account of the increasing disconnection between socialist realism and the everyday experience of workers takes direct aim at editor’s notes:

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When a certain journal publishes a creative work or critical piece, or [indeed] takes responsibility for carefully reviewing and publishing any piece, all critical responses—regardless of source—should first be discussed with the journal and appear in its pages. Moments of disagreement can launch discussion, but “editor’s notes” that prejudice the masses should not be added. If the original journal isn’t willing to publish the critical response, then any other outlet has the right to publish it, but the journal’s chief editor or other authors all have the right publish their own explanations or counter-criticisms in the journal that publishes the critical response, likewise free of any “editor’s note” (bianzhe an 㓪㗙ᣝ).13

In response, the Wenyi bao specially published a response by a “reader”: Our understanding is exactly opposite of Hu Feng’s. The editor absolutely ought to act this way, because only then can [they] clearly commend or critique something, negate or affirm it. Whatever the issue, if an editor goes so far as to decline to express any opinion about it, without discriminating between black and white, or illuminating right from wrong, then this is actually a failure to take responsibility toward the masses and a dereliction of [editorial] duty!14

Although the Wenyi bao appended the work unit of Jiangsu No. Five Rehabilitation Hospital to the reader’s name, Gan Gu ⫬䈋, the fact that this response was published in Wenyi bao at this time (the Critique Hu Feng movement appeared that year, 1955) suggests that the journal endorsed Gan’s position. The interpretation of the function of the editor’s note to be the framing or ideological containment of literary information was shared by the Wenyi bao. Hu Feng’s suggestion and the reader’s reprimand dramatize the aims, reasoning, and methods of the editor’s note as a form of information management. The reprint (zhuanzai 䕀䕑) is another prevailing method of information management in literary journals of the PRC. When one periodical willingly reprints a literary work or piece of criticism published in another, it bespeaks the former’s confirmation of the importance of the piece (see Liu, chapter 46). But reprinting in Chinese literary periodicals carries a special meaning. When reprinting a piece of literature or criticism from another journal, the main aim is to erect a model for literary creation or criticism. In the seventeen years from 1949 to 1966, Renmin wenxue reprinted 187 pieces from various other newspapers and periodicals, an average of 11 a year, of which more than 6 on average came from domestic outlets.15 How could the Renmin wenxue reprints afterward become models? This is due to the journal’s elevated status as a toprate, comprehensive national journal (guokan ೑ߞ), in contrast to the regional journals (difang kanwu ഄᮍߞ⠽) operated by provincial and municipal units.

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Being reprinted in a national journal was a major honor for a regional journal and its contributing author. After being carried in the Renmin wenxue, a piece of literature or criticism was disseminated more broadly, bringing to the attention of a national readership a relatively unknown writer, thus elevating their reputation and bestowing other social or political benefits. From the perspective of the state, the periodical’s reprint served as a crucial method for managing literary information—on the one hand, encouraging competition between journals and, on the other, plucking out examples to serve as literary models and thereby guide cultural production.

Information Management in More Recent Periodicals: Jintian and Renmin wenxue In the decade after the Cultural Revolution and the loosening of control on cultural output, China’s literary field enjoyed a kind of renaissance. Despite this, in many respects the system of periodical management was continued. Following the relative marginalization of literature’s position in social life, the usage and effect of forms of information management like the editor’s note and the reprint waned significantly, though these methods are still in use today. This concluding section takes up two contrasting cases, the first issue of Jintian Ҟ໽ (Today), published in 1978, and the October 2019 issue of Renmin wenxue, as a means of examining the journal form’s evolution in the wake of the Cultural Revolution. Published over two years, with nine issues in total, the samizdat journal Jintian became one of the most influential venues in the post-Mao literary scene. Featuring a bold design of vertical, fence-like black bars, the first issue’s cover displays the journal title in three separate ways: most prominently, the blue Chinese characters Ҟ໽ appear in the top register, while the pinyin “JIN TIAN” and “THE MOMENT” appear at the top left and lower right-hand side, respectively. In the three decades between 1949 and 1978, usage of English-language titles was extremely uncommon, making “THE MOMENT” particularly eye-catching. Given the typically low level of English at the time, however, the majority of readers would not have understood the meaning or connotations of the foreign title. The translation of jintian as “moment” was idiosyncratic but deliberate, and its story captures the spirit inspiring the journal’s formation. The journal’s cofounder, poet Bei Dao ࣫ቯ (b. 1949), wished to feature an English title, but because foreign titles had nearly disappeared from magazine covers decades earlier, he consulted with a friend from an older generation, translator Feng Yidai ‫ރ‬Ѻҷ (1913–2005). Feng ultimately disagreed with Bei Dao’s choice of translating jintian as “today,” calling it too mundane. As Bei Dao remembers it, “Feng took out an English-Chinese dictionary, and consulted

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with Mrs. Feng, advising me to translate the title as ‘The Moment,’ denoting ‘this instant’ or ‘at present.’ I had no idea that Uncle Feng had an even greater sense of urgency than us cofounders, and that he laid even greater emphasis on this pivotal historical point. For this reason, the inaugural issue’s cover carries Uncle Feng’s interpretation of time: ‘The Moment.’ ”16 Afterward, the English title was changed to “Today!” and printed above the Chinese. However it was rendered, the usage of English itself was significant, both as a throwback to the magazine conventions of the New Culture era and as a resituating within the global present. As the inaugural issue’s introduction put it: “Today, as people lift their eyes once again, they are no longer merely resting a kind of longitudinal gaze on several millennia’s worth of cultural heritage, but instead are casting a kind of latitudinal gaze to look around at the horizons of their surroundings. Only thus can we truly understand our own value, and consequently escape laughable arrogance and self-importance, or tragic resignation to our backwardness.”17Appearing on the issue’s first page, this note resonates with the translingual name on the cover. At the same time, it implicitly explains the reason for the title, where the “latitudinal gaze” corresponds to the translingual movement of literary information that is performed by the cover design. From its first issue, Jintian was positioned as a general-interest literary periodical; therefore, it carried pieces representing a range of genres as well as visual art. In Jintian’s first issue were published fiction, poetry, fables (yuyan ᆧ㿔), informal essays (suibi 䱣ヨ), criticism, and translations. The latter section introduced the work of three foreign writers, two of whom were Nobel Prize recipients: Spanish poet Aleixandre Merlo (1977) and West German author Heinrich Böll (1972). The point of emphasis was a conscious one, for since 1949 official literary journals almost never featured Nobel winners, taking their cue from the Cold War logic to primarily translate and introduce authors representing the socialist or Third World bloc. This detail, then, suggests how, following the Cultural Revolution, some younger writers’ understanding of world, literature, and world literature underwent significant expansion. Jintian’s management of literary information also appears in the manner in which the published pieces are signed. In the first issue, other than the names of translated authors, all other contributors are identified using pen names. The journal’s two founders, Bei Dao and Mang Ke, selected names for each other; Bei Dao (Northern Island) was rich in literary flavor, while Mang Ke is a transliteration of the author’s nickname, monkey (mangke 㡦‫)ܟ‬, which exudes a Western style. Moreover, the editors even chose pen names for two of the older and more established authors, Cai Qijiao 㫵݊⶿ (1918–2007) and Huang Yongyu 咘∌⥝ (b. 1924). Such arrangements perhaps stemmed from the long tradition of adopting various style names but were also likely an attempt to protect the actual identities of the contributors. At that time, Jintian’s poetry

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submissions were quite plentiful, but fiction was not, so Bei Dao felt that he had no alternative but to compose a short story, “Zai feixu shang” ೼ᑳ๳Ϟ (On ruins), which he published in the founding issue under another of his pseudonyms, Shi Mo ⷇咬, plainly to give readers the impression that the journal carried works by many different authors. Bei Dao furthermore exhorted contributors to use their Jintian pen names as much as possible when publishing elsewhere so as to increase the influence of the journal within the literary field. Regarding the management of its metadata, Jintian didn’t include the conventional publishing rights page, merely listing the journal’s mailing address and contact person as a form of filler (bubai 㸹ⱑ). The reason for not including the publication page isn’t entirely clear—perhaps it was because the journal wanted to cut down the number of pages, but more probably it was because Jintian was an unregistered publication; thus, it couldn’t include elements such as the registration certificate, serial number, and executive unit. This omission directly resulted in the discontinuation of Jintian within two years after the local Public Security Department shut down the journal, citing the 1952 “Provisional Measures for Periodical Registration.” But Jintian’s unregistered status was not the result of lack of effort—on the contrary, the editors sought to register multiple times but never received a formal response. Renmin wenxue, was the most authoritative literary magazine within the official system of publication, and its officially sanctioned and awesome symbolism positions it diametrically opposite to Jintian. The following takes the October 2019 issue of Renmin wenxue as a case study for understanding how an official platform manages literary information and to what end. The year 2019 was the seventieth anniversary of the founding of the PRC, and this journal issue marked the all-important National Day of October 1, a fact emblematized by the issue’s all-red cover (symbolizing socialism) and the number 70 prominently arrayed behind the title. Located at the center of the cover is the journal’s title, written out in Mao Zedong’s own hand. Renmin wenxue lacks a proper English title, though its meaning is “people’s literature” or “literature for the people.” This representational role is emphasized in the editor’s introduction, which interprets the thin lines constituting the numerals for 70 as a riff on fingerprints, tree rings, a flowing river, or routes on a map—representing how, for seven decades, Renmin wenxue has grown in lockstep with the country, the nation, and the era, mutually representing the dreams of the sons and daughters of China.18 Besides the typical offerings of midlength fiction, short stories, essays, and poetry, this specific issue includes several special features. The first section appearing in the journal is titled “Selected Works Celebrating the Seventieth Anniversary of the Foundation of the PRC” and showcases a literary film script (dianying wenxue juben ⬉ᕅ᭛ᄺ࠻ᴀ) by Tibetan writer Alai. As its name implies, this section was designed to propagate national successes and display

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works by prominent figures. Concurrently, the journal carries “My Motherland and Me,” a section whose title is drawn from a patriotic song. In accordance with planning by the Propaganda Bureau, in 2019 many areas organized mass singing competitions, which Renmin wenxue symbolically participated in through this column. Besides these two special features, this year the journal included a third column, “Paragons of Our Age,” administered collectively by the Renmin wenxue’s executive unit, the China Writers’ Association, and the Education Unit of the Chinese Communist Party’s Central Propaganda Bureau, as part of the bureau’s initiative aimed at producing nationwide social models for focused propagation. In the October issue, the journal features a story by Dalian public security worker Zi Jin ㋿䞥. In contrast to the typical arrangement whereby authors submit manuscripts for consideration, Zi Jin’s work was commissioned by the journal.19 And this assignment likely was quite detailed, specifying the subject and content of the piece, with the rest up to an implicit understanding on the author’s part. All of this speaks to the top-down logic of information management and solicitation embedded in the journal’s identity as an official outlet. In sum, from its proliferation in the early Republican period to its resurgence in the post-Mao literary renaissance of the 1980s and today, the literary journal continues to serve as a dynamic—albeit increasingly symbolic—platform for producing, circulating, and otherwise managing a wide variety of literary information. It became increasingly symbolic because, on the one hand, the modern journal form’s relatively long history and formal stability endow it with cultural prestige (which, in the case of both unofficial and official journals discussed here, is in turn modulated by political authority). On the other hand, the literary journal is symbolic of its declining influence in the field of cultural production, as the rise of popular online platforms like web-only publications, fan fiction forums (see Feng, chapter 58), and social media makes literary information ever more za and ever less capturable as serialized, modular records of zhi.

Notes 1. Howard Cox and Simon Mowatt, Revolutions from Grub Street: A History of Magazine Publishing in Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 1–3. 2. Deng Shaogen 䙧㒡ḍ, “‘Zazhi’: yici zai Zhongguo de yuanliu yanbian” “ᴖᖫ”:ϔ䆡೼ Ё೑ⱘ⑤⌕ⓨব, Xinwen chunqiu 1 (2011), 30. 3. Lü Simian, “Sanshinian lai zhi chubanjie (1894–1923)” ϝकᑈᴹПߎ⠜⬠ (1894–1923), in Lü Simian lunxue conggao ৩ᗱ࢝䆎ᄺϯ〓 (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 2006), 287. 4. Deng Shaogen, “‘Zazhi.’” 5. See Xiaoshuo yuebao 11, no. 12 (Dec. 25, 1920). 6. Original in Chinese. From Yiwen 1 (July 1953), unpaginated.

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7. Translator’s note: Here “periodical” is used to translate qikan ᳳߞ, per convention. However, qikan does not usually include the category of newspapers, while periodical does. Thus, qikan encompasses the same range of publications as what we typically refer to as a journal. At the same time, zazhi ᴖᖫ, in this chapter, refers to publications that are sometimes described as journals in English-language scholarship. Hence, in the interest of balancing clarity and accuracy while heeding the author’s attentiveness to the etymology of magazine and zazhi, only “magazine” is used to translate zazhi, while “periodical” and “journal” are used interchangeably for qikan hereafter. 8. Michel Hockx, Questions of Style: Literary Societies and Literary Journals in Modern China, 1911–1937 (Leiden: Brill, 2003), 222–51. 9. Guowuyuan fazhi bangongshi ೑ࡵ䰶⊩ࠊࡲ݀ᅸ, ed., Zhonghua Renmin Gongheguo fagui huibian 1949–1952 ЁढҎ⇥݅੠೑⊩㾘∛㓪 1949–1952 (Beijing: Zhongguo fazhi chubanshe, 2005), 1:612. 10. Translator’s note: In English, the difference between the executive or directly supervising unit (zhuguan danwei Џㅵऩԡ) and the holding unit (zhuban danwei Џࡲऩ ԡ) may appear indistinct. In practice, the latter is responsible for the concrete, regular duties of management and is one level lower on the management chain. 11. Cheng Guangwei, “‘Wenyi bao’ ‘bianzhe an’ jianlun” “᭛㡎᡹” “㓪㗙ᣝ”ㅔ䆎, Dangdai zuojia pinglun 5 (2004): 20. 12. “Bianjibu de hua” 㓪䕥䚼ⱘ䆱, Wenyi bao 3 (1950): 35. 13. Hu Feng, “Guanyu jiefang yilai de wenyi shijian qingkuang de baogao”, in Hu Feng quanji 㚵亢ܼ䲚 (Wuhan: Hubei renmin chubanshe, 1999), 6:420. 14. Gan Gu ⫬䈋, “Guanyu ‘bianzhe an’ ” ݇Ѣ“㓪㗙ᣝ,” Wenyi bao 5 (1955): 26. 15. Wang Lu ⥟䏃, “1949 nian–1966 nian ‘Renmin wenxue’ xiaoshuo zhuanzai yanjiu” 1949 ᑈ–1966ᑈ“Ҏ⇥᭛ᄺ”ᇣ䇈䕀䕑ⷨお (MA thesis, Henan University, 2015), 5. 16. Bei Dao, “Ting feng lou ji” ਀亢ὐ䆄, Dushu 9 (2005): 63. Notably, Feng Yidai was at that time involved in establishing the (official) journal Dushu 䇏к (Reading). Published since 1979, Dushu has become the longest-running magazine of intellectual culture and criticism, with broad influence amongst educated readers. Even today this journal doesn’t feature an English title to accompany the Chinese but instead merely includes the pinyin DUSHU on its cover. 17. Jintian bianjibu ljҞ໽NJ㓪䕥䚼, “Zhi duzhe” 㟈䇏㗙, Jintian 1 (Dec. 1978): 1. 18. Renmin wenxue bianzhe Ҏ⇥᭛ᄺ㓪㗙, “Juanshou yu” ो佪䇁, Renmin wenxue 10 (2019): 1. 19. See the account in Dalian xinwen wang ໻䖲ᮄ䯏㔥, http://www.dlxww.com/news /content/2019-09/08/content_2332304.htm.

CHAPTER 57

OVERSEAS CHINESE NEWSPAPERS C A R L O S RO JA S

F

rom the beginning, the history of Chinese-language newspapers has not been a strictly national phenomenon but rather a thoroughly transnational one. In fact, the world’s first Chineselanguage newspaper was published not in China but rather in Malacca, in what is now southwestern Malaysia. Established in 1815 by a Western missionary and intended primarily for Malacca’s population of Chinese immigrants, the newspaper was the product of a set of colonial, religious, technological, and demographic developments that were in the process of transforming the ways that people approached information and its dissemination. Overseas Chinese publications—and particularly newspapers—offer a useful glimpse into these interrelated sociopolitical and cultural developments. Newspapers are, of course, not the only kind of overseas Chinese-language publications, but they reflect some of the characteristics of the field as a whole. First, at a practical level newspaper publication requires specific types of technological infrastructure, and, therefore, the earliest Chinese-language newspapers tended to appear in locations where there had already been an investment in Chinese-language publications. Initially, the organizations that were most strongly motivated to support overseas Chinese-language publications were run not by Chinese but rather by Western missionaries, and, therefore, the publications tended to reflect the missionaries’ interests and objectives. Second, although newspapers may be seen as a distinct taxonomical category in their own right, they are actually hybrid entities that incorporate elements from many other print publications. While a newspaper may be defined

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as a printed periodical that is intended for a general readership and that features at least some coverage of contemporary events, in practice most newspapers include many different types of texts, such as fiction, poetry, political edicts, religious texts, letters, announcements, notices, and advertisements. In many early newspapers, moreover, even the category of news itself was eclectic and heterogenous, with fantastic and even outright fictional narratives often being grouped together with descriptions that appear to be more factual. For these reasons, a study of newspapers can offer a snapshot of a region’s broader publication environment. Third, most overseas Chinese newspapers involve a negotiation between the interests of the locality where the newspaper is published and the Chinese nation, with which the language of the publication is often perceived to be affiliated. In Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson famously argues that the spread of what he calls print capitalism (and specifically newspapers) contributed to the formation of the modern nation-state. In particular, he contends that the experience of reading the same news items at more or less the same time helps readers imagine themselves to be part of a shared community—even if in reality those readers will never have the opportunity to meet more than a tiny fraction of the other members of that community. While early overseas Chinese newspapers did help encourage a process of nation formation, they also contributed to other types of (imagined) communities, ranging from imperial to religious ones.1 This chapter considers the early history of overseas Chinese newspapers in Southeast Asia, the United States, and France. Each of these regions would come to have sizable Chinese populations, though in each case Chinese newspapers began to appear remarkably early—either near the beginning of a Chineselanguage printing industry in the region in question or during the first notable wave of Chinese immigration into the area. In considering the circumstances under which Chinese newspapers emerged in each of these three sites, particular attention is paid to the relationship between the conditions under which these newspapers developed and the ways in which these newspapers approached their function of organizing and disseminating information.

Southeast Asia Printing technologies (including both woodblock and movable-type printing) developed much earlier in China than in the West. While Gutenberg didn’t invent the printing press until the fifteenth century, China had been using woodblock printing techniques since the seventh century and movable-type printing technology since the eleventh century. However, despite its early emergence in China, printing technology initially was not widely used and instead

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tended to be employed only for specific purposes. For instance, beginning in the Song dynasty (from the tenth to the thirteenth century) imperial edicts and decrees were printed on a semiregular basis and distributed throughout the imperium. Given that these texts were not intended for general consumption, however, they cannot be considered newspapers as the term is used today, and while early versions of modern newspapers began appearing as early as the late seventeenth century in Europe and North America, it was not until the nineteenth century that they began to appear in East Asia—with English-language and Chinese-language papers appearing almost simultaneously in Southeast Asia at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Between the eighteenth and the early twentieth centuries, much of the Malay Peninsula, Singapore, and the surrounding islands were brought under British control either as direct colonial possessions or as British protectorates with their own local rulers. In the first half of the nineteenth century, meanwhile, the London Missionary Society (LMS) and the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions established missions throughout the region, which in turn invested in developing local publishing apparatuses— and it was this commitment to local publishing that helped lay the groundwork for the region’s earliest papers. More specifically, in Malacca British missionary William Milne founded a local LMS mission, whose publications included a Chinese-language newspaper titled Cha shisu meiyue tongjichuan ᆳϪ֫↣᳜㍅㿬‫( ڇ‬Chinese Monthly Magazine, but rendered more literally as “A monthly record of social manners”). Founded on August 6, 1815, the paper was not only the first Chinese-language newspaper to be published in the Malay region but also the first such paper to be published anywhere in the world. It appeared only nine years after Malaya’s first English-language newspaper (the Government Gazette, founded by Indian entrepreneur A. B. Bone in 1806 on the island of Penang). Printed using woodblock technology and having a run of a few hundred copies per issue, Cha shisu meiyue tongjichuan was published roughly once a month as a pamphlet consisting of forty-four double-sided pages, with each page having seven columns of text and a maximum of twenty Chinese characters per column. The first page of each issue contained a publisher’s statement written from an explicitly religious perspective, and the majority of the articles similarly focused on religious issues. At the same time, however, the paper published other articles introducing Western science, particularly astronomy, as well as articles on an assortment of other topics.2 As Milne (who wrote most of the articles himself) observed, “The essays and papers published  .  .  . have been chiefly of a religious and moral kind. A few essays on the most simple and obvious principles of astronomy, instructive anecdotes, historical extracts, occasional notices of great political events, etc., have at times given a little variety to its pages.”3 Although not the paper’s primary objective, these “occasional notices

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of great political events, etc.” were in effect news items, thereby permitting the publication to be categorized as an early newspaper. Given the paper’s missionary focus, however, the publication was designed more to encourage a set of transnational, religion-based affiliations rather than local or national ones. Cha shisu meiyue tongjichuan was published continuously for six years but was suspended in 1821 when Milne passed away. Over the next several decades, other Western missionaries attempted to establish Chinese newspapers in the region, but all of them proved to be very short-lived. After the LMS relocated to Shanghai in 1846, a British missionary and active publisher named Benjamin Peach Keasberry stayed behind in Singapore and continued his printing operations, which included publishing two early Chinese papers: Difang ribao ഄᮍ᮹ฅ (Local news; 1845) and Risheng bao ᮹छฅ (Rising sun news; 1858). Neither paper lasted very long, and it wasn’t until 1881 that See Ewe Lay 㭯᳝⾂ (1851–1906), a Peranakan (Straits Chinese) merchant in Singapore, established the region’s first long-running Chinese-language daily newspaper, Lat Pau ৏ฅ (the first character in Lat Pau being derived from Hokkien and Cantonese renderings of the Malay word selat ⷇৏, meaning “straits”). Unlike Cha shisu meiyue tongjichuan, Lat Pau did not have an explicitly religious component and instead focused more on current events. To this end, the paper included some independent reporting, but it relied primarily on reprinting articles from Chinese newspapers from Hong Kong and Shanghai and also on translating articles from the local English-language press. Many of the articles focused on business or commercial matters, and the paper also featured a large number of illustrated advertisements. Lat Pau had a circulation of a few hundred copies per issue and was published continuously for fifty-two years, ultimately suspending publication in 1932.4 Early issues consisted of only eight pages, but later issues were considerably longer. Unlike the earlier newspapers that focused on religion, Lat Pau emphasized business concerns—both in a local and in a more cosmopolitan context. Lat Pau’s split affiliation among China, the local Chinese community, and an emergent Eurocentric understanding of globalization can be observed in the newspaper’s struggles with dating conventions—in particular, around the time of the Xinhai revolution (Xinhai geming 䕯ѹ䴽ੑ), which peaked with the Wuchang rebellion on October 10, 1911, and culminated with the abdication of China’s last emperor on February 12, 1912. Beginning with the paper’s earliest issues in 1881, the masthead had printed the date in two formats, with the righthand side specifying the year in relation to the reign period of the current Chinese emperor (e.g., the third year of the Guangxu ‫ܝ‬㎦ reign period) and the left-hand side specifying the year, month, and day as calculated using the traditional Chinese sexagenary cycle (e.g., the first day of the seventh month of the dinghai ϕѹ year). This dating system continued until November 8, 1911, when the reference to the Chinese reign period (by this point, the Xuantong ᅷ㍅

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reign) was removed; instead, the text on the right-hand side of the masthead simply specified the year using the sexagenary cycle (i.e., the Xinhai year), while the text on the left-hand side specified the month and day (calculated by the lunar calendar). Then, on December 11, the paper debuted a new print format and a new dating system, with the text on the right-hand side now specifying the year in reference not to the reign period of the current Chinese emperor (i.e., year three of the Xuantong reign) but rather to the legendary first emperor, followed by the precise date in the lunar calendar system (i.e., year four thousand six hundred and nine, month ten, day eleven). The left-hand side, meanwhile, specified the date in the Gregorian calendar format (though in Chinese characters). Lat Pau maintained this hybrid dating convention at least until the end of 1911, and while issues from the first two and a half months of 1912 are no longer extant, by March 19 the newspaper had abandoned the “Yellow Emperor” dating scheme and had switched to a system where the date on the right-hand side was listed according to the Chinese lunar system (yinli 䱄Ლ), while the date on the left-hand side was listed according to the Gregorian (solar) system (yangli 䱑Ლ). This double dating system was maintained through the end of 1912, but at the beginning of 1913, the newspaper replaced the Chinese lunar dates on the right-hand side with a dating scheme that specified the year in reference to the beginning of China’s first republic (which had been established in January 1912). Although the newspaper’s format would change several more times over the following years, the convention of specifying the date in relation to the founding of the republic remained in place until the newspaper’s final issue, in 1932, though by this point the paper was also using a Western dating system in English. Lat Pau’s struggles with dating around the fall of the Qing dynasty are emblematic of its attempts to serve as a daily news source for the local Chinese population in Singapore and to mediate between different sources of authority and convention.

The United States The next major development in overseas Chinese newspapers occurred in the United States. Following the discovery of gold in California in 1848, the region received a large influx of gold seekers from other parts of the United States and from countries around the world, including China. Between 1849 and 1952, the number of Chinese in California increased from around eight hundred to more than twenty-five thousand. Virtually all of these Chinese immigrants entered the United States through San Francisco, which grew rapidly during this period and came to have the largest concentration of Chinese of any U.S. city.

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In 1853, San Francisco had more than twenty newspapers, and in 1854, missionary William Howard founded a handwritten, lithograph-printed newspaper called Jinshan rixinlu 䞥ቅ᮹ᮄ䣘 (The Golden Hills’ News), which featured news from China as well as local news from San Francisco. In an early issue, he explained the paper’s purpose in an editorial note: “Believing that civil and political knowledge is of infinite importance to the Chinese, both in their individual, social and relative state, [we] have established The Golden Hills’ News for that special mission. The influence of chapel and press is intended to relieve the pressure of religious ignorance, settle and explain our laws, assist the Chinese to provide their wants and soften, dignify and improve their general characters.”5 Published twice a week, this paper was intended primarily for Chinese merchants, and, therefore, in addition to news about China and the United States, it published considerable data on commodity prices and ship schedules.6 Jinshan rixinlu ceased publication after only a few months, but in January 1855, another San Francisco–based paper, titled Tung-Ngai San-Luk ᵅ⎃ᮄ䣘 (The Oriental), was founded by William Speer (1822–1904), who belonged to the same Chinese Mission Chapel that had sponsored Jinshan rixinlu. Published in parallel Chinese and English editions, Tung-Ngai San-Luk initially appeared triweekly in Chinese and weekly in English, but later it slowed to weekly in Chinese and monthly in English before ultimately suspending publication in 1857. Like Jinshan rixinlu, Tung-Ngai San-Luk focused on business and economic topics, and the Chinese portion of both papers was edited by Li Kau ᴢḍ, who had also been involved with Jinshan rixinlu. The Chinese editorial statements of both papers furthermore were very similar; Jinshan rixinlu’s statement read, “Today’s San Francisco is a port where people gather from all over. Every country has its own newspapers, and only the Chinese lack one of their own,” while Tung-Ngai San-Luk’s statement read, “This port is called San Francisco, and is a place where people gather from all over, and it has many inns and restaurants. Every country has its own newspapers, and only the Chinese lack one of their own.” What is interesting about these mission statements and what they say about the ways in which the two newspapers saw themselves is that they both emphasized the locale of San Francisco, the distinctively multiethnic character of the city, and the specific identity and needs of the city’s Chinese community.

France France today has a larger Chinese population than any European nation other than Russia, and the France-based newspaper Ouzhou shibao ℤ⌆ᰖฅ (Nouvelles d’Europe) is currently Europe’s most widely circulating Chinese-language newspaper. Although Chinese began visiting France as early as the beginning of the eighteenth century, the first large influx of Chinese visitors to France

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didn’t begin until the early twentieth century. In 1912, Li Shizeng ᴢ⷇᳒ (1881– 1973), Wu Yuzhang ਇ⥝ゴ (1878–1966), and Cai Yuanpei 㫵‫ܗ‬෍ (1868–1940) founded the Liufa jianxue hui ⬭⊩⁶ᅌ᳗ (Work-study program in France), which brought thousands of Chinese students to study in France while working part-time. During World War I, France and Britain recruited over a hundred thousand laborers from China, and although most of them returned to China after the war, about three thousand stayed behind in France.7 Then, during the early years of the May Fourth movement (between 1919 and 1921), another two thousand Chinese came to France to study—including future political leaders such as Zhou Enlai ਼ᘽ՚ (1898–1976) and Deng Xiaoping 䙧ᇣᑇ (1904–97). Like the laborers, most of the students returned to China upon concluding their studies, though some remained in Europe. France’s first Chinese-language newspaper appeared at the very beginning of this modern influx of Chinese to the region. The weekly Xinshiji ᮄϪ㋔ (New century) was founded in Paris in 1907 by Zhang Renjie ᔉҎ٥ (1877–1950) and Li Shizeng, and it ran until 1910. The paper was focused in large part on political considerations, including calls to overthrow the Qing dynasty. Another early newspaper was the twice-monthly Lü Ou zazhi ᮙℤ䲰䁠 (Travel to Europe), which was founded in 1916 by Li Shizeng, Cai Yuanpei, and Wang Jingwei ∾㊒㸯 (1883–1944). Besides introducing modern scientific and cultural knowledge from the West (to Chinese nationals residing in France), it included reports on contemporary events in China and around the world. The 1920s saw the establishment of several more Chinese-language newspapers, many of which had an explicitly political orientation. In 1922, for instance, the Chinese Communist Youth League in Europe, led by Zhou Enlai, founded Shaonian ᇥᑈ (Youth), and that same year the Chinese Nationalist Party in France founded Sanmin zhoukan ϝ⇥䘅ߞ (Three People’s [Principles] weekly; a reference to Sun Yatsen’s ᄿ䘌ҭ [1866–1925] “Three People’s Principles”—namely, the principles of democracy, nationalism, and the people’s livelihood). In the 1920s, at least seven other Chinese-language newspapers, most with a similarly explicit political orientation, went into circulation in France.8 This first wave of Chinese newspapers in France appeared at a critical turning point in modern Chinese history, with Xinshiji coinciding with the final years of the Qing dynasty and the other newspapers mentioned here emerging during the first decade of China’s first republic (established in January 1912). Similar to Lat Pau, these newspapers closely tracked concurrent developments in mainland China, with the founding of Shaonian and Sanmin zhoukan in 1922 coming just one year after the founding of the Chinese Communist Party and just three years after Sun Yat-sen’s reestablishment of the Chinese Nationalist Party. In this way, these early Chinese newspapers were concerned with not merely representing the external reality that they covered in their reporting but also actively helping shape and transform that same reality itself.

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Notes 1. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1998). 2. An early discussion of this newspaper and of the broader environment of Chineselanguage publications in what is now Malaysia appears in John Lent, “Malaysian Chinese and Their Mass Media: History and Survey,” Asia Profile 2, no. 4 (Aug. 1974): 397–412. 3. Cited in Roswell S. Britton, The Chinese Periodical Press 1800–1912 (Shanghai: Kelly & Walsh, 1933), 18–19. 4. See Lee Ching Seng, “19th-Century Printing in the Chinese Language,” in A General History of the Chinese in Singapore, ed. Kwa Chong Guan and Kua Bak Lim (Singapore: World Scientific Publishing, 2019), 361–416; and Mong Hock Chen, The Early Chinese Newspapers of Singapore, 1881–1912 (Singapore: University of Malaysia Press, 1967), 24–41. 5. H. M. Lai, “A Short History of Chinese Journalism in the United States and Canada,” in Chinese Newspapers Published in North America, 1854–1975, comp. Karl Lo and H. M. Lai (Washington, DC: Center for Chinese Research Materials, Association of Research Libraries, 1977), 28. 6. Mai Liqian 呹⾂䃭 (Him Mark Lai), “Shijiu shiji Meiguo Huawen baoye xiaoshi” कб Ϫ㋔㕢೟㧃᭛ฅὁᇣ৆, Huaqiao lishi xuehui tongxun 2 (June 1983): 26–33. 7. Nan Dai, “Unique Past and Common Future: Chinese Immigrants and ChineseLanguage Media in France,” in Media and Communication in the Chinese Diaspora: Rethinking Transnationalism, ed. Wanning Sun and John Sinclair (New York: Routledge, 2016), 88. 8. Nan Dai, “Unique Past and Common Future,” 90.

CHAPTER 58

INTERNET LITERATURE JIN FENG

A

ll established and emerging literary genres such as poetry, fiction, and comic strips published in Chinese cyberspace can be called web or internet literature. This chapter examines serialized Chinese-language web fiction “written especially for publication in an interactive online context and meant to be read on-screen.”1 Chinese web users—typically young, urban, and relatively well educated—read and write web literature in a search for entertainment and companionship, in the process constructing personal and literary identities. Web-based genre fiction, though disparaged by some as pulp, is immensely popular and garners the largest following of any genre of Chinese internet literature. This emergent form helps illustrate the ecology of Chinese cyberspace, revealing shifts in the production and consumption of literary information and the reinvention of literary traditions. The chapter first traces its relatively short history, paying particular attention to the politics and economy of web publishing. It then outlines the new writing and reading practices engendered by the Web before concluding with a reflection on the question of whether Chinese internet literature signals the birth of a new kind of information altogether, since each work is in a perpetual state of flux, subject to endless editing, modification, and even deletion. The perceived lack of technical sophistication, social consciousness, or writing skills often associated with Chinese internet literature is redeemed by not only the sheer volume and social energy it generates but also the narrative innovations that it makes possible. By lowering the threshold of production and dissemination, web publishing permits more diverse ways of generating

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information than allowed by conventional forms of print media. It also introduces more egalitarian, immediate, and transparent ways of transmitting cultural information than before. Since textual meanings and significances are subjected to constant negotiations between different actors, the categories of author and reader become more fluid and mutually constitutive. Thanks to direct and oftentimes emotionally invested communications among users of literature sites, the practice of Chinese web literature helps establish communities that are not just “imagined” in the sense conceptualized by Benedict Anderson2 but also “imaginary” because users create a virtual meeting ground, establishing, although in a mediated and temporary manner, affective ties that supersede any individual text. Ultimately, rather than delivering set information secured in any one text, Chinese internet literature produces new information on the edge of and at the interstices between works as users’ exchanges resignify, reorient, and recharge texts with fresh relevancy and energy.

The Politics and Economy of Internet Literature China is currently the world’s largest broadband internet market.3 By December 2017, an estimated 772 million Chinese had access to the internet, boasting 55.8 percent coverage nationally, higher than corresponding figures globally (51.7 percent) and for Asia (46.7 percent). Thanks to technologies that enable wide high-speed connectivity, the Chinese web is beginning to surpass mass media channels as a site of dynamic cultural production and consumption.4 Growing alongside this evolving sphere, Chinese-language internet literature arose from relatively humble origins. It was inaugurated in 1989 when a group of Chinese students studying in the United States founded News Digest (Xinwen wenzhai (News Digest) ᮄ䯏᭛ᨬ), later renamed China Digest (Huaxia wenzhai ढ໣ ᭛ᨬ), a listserv accepting submissions of creative writing that was available to overseas Chinese students—and that was even linked to the student demonstrations at Tian’anmen Square at the time.5 In 1991, Wang Xiaofei ⥟ュ亲 established Chinese Poem Net (Zhongguo shige wang Ё೑䆫℠㔥) while a student at the University of Buffalo.6 This was soon followed by the founding of New Threads (Xin yusi ᮄ䇁ϱ), the first literature site based in China, and several others. In 1999, the web novel Diyici de qinmi jiechu ㄀ϔ⃵ⱘ㽾ᆚ᥹㿌 (The first intimate touch), by Taiwan writer Pizi (Bum) Cai ⮲ᄤ㫵 (Tsai ChihHeng 㫵ᱎᘚ), became a landmark in the growth of Chinese-language internet literature by attracting an unprecedentedly large following.7 Following the first decade of its emergence and formation, web literature has been increasingly subject to political and commercial forces. The Chinese state sees the internet as both a forum in need of regulation and an opportunity for economic development. Its surveillance regime comprises multiple levels of

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legal regulation and technical control, ranging from censorship of keywords on social media to the vast Golden Shield Project (Jindun gongcheng 䞥ⳒᎹ⿟), known colloquially as the Great Firewall, which is used to block many websites hosted outside of China. Moreover, China-based literature websites practice their own forms of self-censorship in order to avert government shutdown or other complications. Many use software that automatically deletes “sensitive words,” leaving blanks where forbidden words once existed in online text. Some also enforce a system of reader reporting. If a reader files a complaint, the author will be warned and access to their work temporarily blocked until changes are made and approved by the site’s administrators. Such stringent political control is combined with economic stimulation. To give one prominent example, the Shanghai Shengda Internet Development Company (Shanghai shengda wangluo fazhan youxian gongsi Ϟ⍋ⲯ໻㔥 㒰থሩ᳝䰤݀ৌ) has built a thriving business on internet literature, taking advantage of both state policies and support along with the development of a market-oriented economy. In 2008, it invested close to one billion yuan to buy out five of the most influential literature websites in China, including long-established powerhouses such as Jinjiang ᰟ∳, the largest Chinese women’s literature website, and incorporated them into Shengda Literature Ltd. (Shengda wenxue youxian gongsi ⲯ໻᭛ᄺ᳝䰤݀ৌ).8 Alongside this expansion, Shengda has introduced new profit-making models, requiring readers to pay for access to certain popular works only available to “VIP” subscribers while in turn sharing profits with well-received authors on the basis of their subscriber numbers and literary output. Additionally, Shengda’s websites incorporate elements from gaming culture in an attempt to attract a younger, more technologically savvy audience, in the process helping to precipitate new genres of storytelling such as wangyou 㔥␌ (short for wangluo youxi 㔥㒰␌៣ “webbased computer games”) and xuanhuan ⥘ᑏ (fantasy) fiction.

This Text That Is Not One Although shaped by various governmental and economic forces, Chinese internet literature destabilizes older hierarchies between the authoritarian state and its sanctioned authors, on the one hand, and between creators and consumers of information, on the other. Women’s literature websites offer a good example: not only do they ostensibly offer an alternative to male-dominant culture, but also they serve as a venue for controversial works that are potentially sexually subversive to heteronormative discourse.9 Web writing has also enabled young, obscure writers to realize literary careers that previously would have been unattainable in print media without professional support and financial backing. Since an author can get a book contract by virtue of their number of

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followers, they can bypass state-run publishing houses that are more politically conservative and that are subject to more stringent censorship. In the face of the censorship system and the rampant commercialism of online publishing, many authors strive for politically and artistically independent expression. Their struggles are emblematic of the multivalent and contradictory nature of cultural production in postsocialist China. Much of Chinese web fiction incorporates elements of fantasy, especially the trope of time travel; other subgenres such as workplace intrigues (zhichang 㘠എ) adopt a realist and contemporary setting. Male web authors frequently describe how a man travels back to the past, changes history by using modern technology, performs amazing feats in public life, and becomes the object of devotion of multiple beautiful women. Female authors likewise use time travel but insert gender-bending themes and plots to create new subgenres such as danmei 㘑㕢, male-male homoerotic tales written mostly for women’s consumption; nüzun ཇᇞ, matriarchal tales; and tongren ৠҎ, fan fiction that recasts elements lifted from existing works without the original authors’ express permission. In some cases, web fiction’s mode of production challenges demarcations between media by incorporating into the text elements of music, images such as illustrations, and cinema. The historical evolution of web fiction can be described by broad changes in focus and social concern as well. The public prominence and success typical of the first generation of time-traveler fiction has given way to more domestic concerns, where familial relationships and economic competition become central plot concerns. The recent popularity of novels featuring a “magic space,” a metaphor for the protagonist’s subjectivity and “inscape,” marks a further retreat toward the sanctity of the individual’s interiority. This trend echoes what Shuyu Kong calls the “personal writing” typical of Chinese fiction since the late 1980s, as authors increasingly describe collective historical experiences primarily through the lens of personal memory.10 Another example of how internet literature pursues this inward turn is the emergence of new reading and writing practices that blur the boundaries between author and reader. Digital platforms and editing allow writers to experiment with narrative devices and change the structures of their stories retroactively. For instance, female authors frequently use fanwai ⬾໪ (special features or extra chapters) to insert chapters into a story from the perspective of a character other than the dominant narrative voice or the central consciousness (the latter typically represented by the story’s heroine). In Japanese, the kanji compound of fanwai originally referred to scenes that have been shot but edited out of the final version of a film. In Chinese web fiction, fanwai is often used to explore male psychology and subjectivity. Using fanwai, a writer seeks to induce affective identification, leading the reader to see the gentler side of the male figure and understand, if not endorse, the protagonist’s relationship

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with him. In practice, fanwai serves not only as a teaser but also as a narratorial delaying tactic in response to reader demand for more story material. The internet also fosters new behaviors on the reader’s part. Interactive features help change readers into active contributors by allowing them to respond to, challenge, and potentially help shape the works they consume. For example, at Jinjiang the commentary space placed under each chapter facilitates the free exchange of information between readers and author, combining the functions of writer’s workshop, opinion column, and virtual social space. Here authors and readers discuss the craft of novel writing more generally. They also share opinions on a variety of controversial topics such as homosexuality, occasionally branching into political satire and social criticism. Perhaps users navigate to this space not so much for information and ideas as for the communal energy and emotional support that it offers. Readers who comment share a unique idiom. They often use the pinyin initials of Chinese characters, words from other languages, or puns in place of the original names or words.11 This style further strengthens feelings of group recognition and identification. Because of the serialized nature of the novels, readers’ comments and authors’ responses to them constitute a negotiation over plot and characterization. Some readers post their own fanwai in commentaries, while others publish related fan fiction in a separate space. Authors’ own fanwai typically aim at explaining character transformations that would typically go unexamined in conventional romances, whereas readers use this device to expand the narrative object according to their own predilections, adding branch texts to the main trunk that ultimately add up to a fictional universe far more complex and contradictory than is typical of a stand-alone print work. Users of literature websites also share several common interpretive practices. First, their comments touch on elements of contemporary sociopolitical life, whether local, national, or even global. Second, they tend to adopt a biographical or autobiographical mode of reading, interpreting the author’s motives through online news and gossip about the author, while applying their own life stories to vouch for or question plot developments. Rather than practicing detached aesthetic appreciation, then, they strongly believe that fiction and life can and should directly reflect each other. They also often interpret a story in ways that the author has directly disavowed. From early on, the structure of BBS (bulletin board system) forums provided fertile soil for such behavior, as readers can carry out a trial of the author or work while also egging each other on. Repetitive plots and recurrent literary devices in many of the most popular works have conditioned readers to feel justified about, and indeed to enjoy, indulging in speculation about authorial intentions and shortcomings. Some argue that this style of reading—mixing narrative information with public opinion and gossip, applying personal experience to interpretation, and

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focusing on a story’s social world rather than its plot—reflects a gender-specific approach.12 But rather than being intrinsically feminine, such reading practices reveal strategies that women readers have adopted to rewrite male-centered narratives in ways that better serve their interests.13 Equally important, reading web literature alongside like-minded fellow users is a social process by which individual interpretations are reshaped and reinforced through ongoing discussion with others. Such discussions not only expand the experience of the text beyond an individual encounter but also integrate it in comprehensive ways that go beyond casual or focused literary reading. With the encouragement of their fellow community members, readers contest or defy authorial intentions. These interactions constitute a form of meaningful play through which readers express fears, desires, and fantasies that they would perhaps lack the means and security to explore fully elsewhere—especially in the social world outside the internet. Therefore, the lively conversations occurring around web fiction impart it with extraordinary formal fluidity and narrative significance. Because authors aspire to positive reception, they take care to respond to comments left by webmasters and readers. The reading community of any work is thus able to produce almost concurrent, “interlinear” commentary that can change the shape of the text precisely because of the instantaneity of feedback. Given that high-ranked web novels often catch the eye of publishers, this malleability on the author’s part is not just a goodwill gesture but also an effective way to adapt to the literary market, making their manuscripts publishable and profitable.14 In this way, individual authors exercise some form of agency and contribute to the economy of web publishing in their own ways. Chinese internet literature brings together readers and authors into “a community of imagination,”15 constituted through the perception of shared affect and experience. Even though the internet has fostered a culture of imitation marked by repetition and appropriation, web-based serials lack neither literary merit nor social relevance. Echoing the “poetics of intimacy and immediacy” of early twentiethcentury literary serials,16 Chinese internet literature builds upon many of the practices and effects of serialized literature explored in this volume. At the same time, digital platforms and real-time feedback have intensified these characteristics, transforming the production and consumption of literary information in new and markedly unpredictable ways.

Notes 1. Michel Hockx, Internet Literature in China (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), 4. 2. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1998), 6.

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3. David Barboza, “China Surpasses U.S. in Number of Internet Users,” New York Times, July 26, 2008, https://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/26/business/worldbusiness/26internet .html. 4. Birgit Linder, “Web Literature,” in Encyclopaedia of Contemporary Chinese Culture, ed. Edward L. Davis (London: Routledge, 2005), 896. 5. Li Dajiu ᴢ໻⥪, “Wangluo wenxue qiyuan de jizhong butong shuofa (yi)” 㔥㒰᭛ᄺ䍋 ⑤ⱘ޴⾡ϡৠ䇈⊩(ϔ), Li Dajiu de boke ᴢ໻⥪ⱘमᅶ, January 5, 2010, http://blog .sina.com.cn/s/blog_5223ef410100hiid.html. 6. Li Dajiu ᴢ໻⥪, “Zuizao de chunwenxue wangluo meiti shiliao” ᳔ᮽⱘ㒃᭛ ᄺ㔥㒰ၦԧ৆᭭, Li Dajiu de boke, June 13, 2010, http://blog.sina.com.cn/s/blog _5223ef410100k7nj.html. 7. Pumin Yin, “Web Writing,” Beijing Review, August 25, 2005, 31, http://beijingreview .sinoperi.com/en200534/694468.jhtml. 8. Wang Xiaoming ⥟ᰧᯢ, “Liufen tianxia: Jintian de Zhongguo wenxue” ݁ߚ໽ϟ˖Ҟ ໽ⱘЁ೑᭛ᄺ, Wenxue pinglun 5 (2011): 76. 9. See Jin Feng, “Addicted to Beauty: Web-Based Danmei Popular Romance,” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 21, no. 2 (Fall 2009): 1–41. 10. Shuyu Kong, Consuming Literature: Best Sellers and the Commercialization of Literary Products in Contemporary China (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), 104. 11. Zhou Jianmin ਼ᓎ⇥, “Wangluo wenxue de yuyan yunyong tedian” 㔥㒰᭛ᄺⱘ䇁㿔 䖤⫼⡍⚍, Wuhan jiaoyuyuan xuebao 19, no. 5 (Oct. 2000): 64–70. 12. David Bleich, “Gender Interests in Reading and Language,” in Gender and Reading: Essays on Readers, Texts, and Contexts, ed. Elizabeth A. Flynn and P. P. Scheweickart (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 239. 13. Henry Jenkins, Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture (London: Routledge, 1992), 113. 14. Yin, “Web Writing,” 31–33. 15. Matt Hills, Fan Cultures (London: Routledge, 2002), 180. 16. Michel Hockx, Questions of Style: Literary Societies and Literary Journals in Modern China, 1911–1937 (Leiden: Brill, 2003), 127.

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CONTRIBUTORS

Sarah M. Allen, associate professor in the Program in Comparative Literature, Williams College. Jennifer Altehenger, associate professor in the Department of History, University of Oxford. Ann M. Blair, Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor in the Department of History, Harvard University. David Prager Branner, independent scholar. Cynthia Brokaw, Chen Family Professor in the Department of History, Brown University. Jack W. Chen, associate professor in the Department of East Asian Languages, Literatures, and Cultures, University of Virginia. Kaijun Chen, assistant professor in the Department of East Asian Studies, Brown University. Xi Chen, PhD candidate in the Department of East Asian Studies, University of Toronto. Tarryn Li-Min Chun, assistant professor in the Department of Film, Television, and Theatre, University of Notre Dame. Timothy Clifford, independent scholar. Robert J. Culp, professor in the Historical Studies Program, Bard College. Kirk A. Denton, professor in the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures, Ohio State University. Alexander Des Forges, associate professor of Chinese, University of Massachusetts, Boston. Anatoly Detwyler, assistant professor in the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures, University of Wisconsin–Madison.

612

Contributors

Ronald C. Egan, Confucius Institute Professor in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, Stanford University. Jin Feng, Orville and Mary Patterson Routt Professor in the Department of Chinese and Japanese, Grinnell College. Devin Fitzgerald, Curator of Rare Books and History of Printing, University of California, Los Angeles. Ariel Fox, assistant professor in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, University of Chicago. Michael A. Fuller, professor in the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures, University of California, Irvine. Imre Galambos, reader in Chinese Studies at the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, University of Cambridge. Stefano Gandolfo, DPhil candidate in Oriental Studies, University of Oxford. Shaohua Guo, associate professor in the Department of Asian Languages and Literatures, Carleton College. John Christopher Hamm, professor in the Department of Asian Languages and Literature, University of Washington. Zev Handel, professor in the Department of Asian Languages and Literature, University of Washington. Yuming He, associate professor in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, University of California, Davis. Natasha Heller, associate professor in the Department of Religious Studies, University of Virginia. Michael Gibbs Hill, associate professor in the Department of Global Studies, College of William and Mary. Martin W. Huang, professor in the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures, University of California, Irvine. Michael Hunter, associate professor in the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures, Yale University. Theodore D. Huters, professor emeritus in the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures, University of California, Los Angeles. Lisa Indraccolo, associate professor in the School of Humanities, Tallinn University, Estonia. Joan Judge, professor in the Department of History, York University. Uluğ Kuzuoğlu, assistant professor in the Department of History, Washington University in St. Louis. Ling Hon Lam, associate professor in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, University of California, Berkeley. Charles Laughlin, Ellen Bayard Weedon Professor in the Department of East Asian Language, Literatures, and Cultures, University of Virginia. Jianli Li, professor in the Department of Chinese Literature, Guangzhou University (China).

Contributors

613

Xiao Liu, assistant professor in the Department of East Asian Studies, McGill University. Michael Love, founder and president of Pleco Software. Yue Meng, associate professor in the Department of East Asian Studies, University of Toronto. Dirk Meyer, associate professor in the Faculty of Oriental Studies, University of Oxford. Thomas S. Mullaney, professor in the Department of History, Stanford University. Evan Nicoll-Johnson, visiting assistant professor in the Department of East Asian Studies, University of Alberta. Christopher M. B. Nugent, professor in the Department of Asian Studies, Williams College. Michael Nylan, professor in the Department of History, University of California, Berkeley. Gregory Patterson, assistant professor in the Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures, University of South Carolina. Zeb Raft, assistant research fellow in the Institute of Literature and Philosophy, Academia Sinica. Carlos Rojas, professor in the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, Duke University. Bruce Rusk, associate professor in the Department of Asian Studies, University of British Columbia. Anna M. Shields, Gordon Wu ‘58 Professor of Chinese Studies in the Department of East Asian Studies, Princeton University. Maria Franca Sibau, assistant professor in the Department of Russian and East Asian Languages and Cultures, Emory University. Suyoung Son, associate professor in the Department of Asian Studies, Cornell University. Donald Sturgeon, assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science, Durham University. Xiaofei Tian, professor in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, Harvard University. Griet Vankeerberghen, associate professor in the Department of History and Classical Studies, McGill University. Nathan Vedal, assistant professor in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, Washington University in St. Louis. Jidong Yang, Head of the East Asian Library, Stanford University. Yurou Zhong, associate professor in the Department of East Asian Studies, University of Toronto.

INDEX OF PEOPLE AND SELECT INSTITUTIONS

Academia Sinica, 465–66, 468, 515 Adorno, Theodor, 454, 455n17 Ah Ying 䰓㣅, 273, 274, 282, 405n19, 504–5 Alai, 558 Allen, Young J., 397–98, 405n10 Anderson, Benedict, 520, 562 Ba Jin Ꮘ䞥, 19, 287, 450–51 Bai Juyi ⱑሙᯧ, 181, 229 Balaz, Etienne, 372 Ban Gu ⧁೎, 358, 386, 414, 478–80, 481n9, 481–82n11, 482n14, 482n15, 486 Ban Zhao ⧁ᰁ, 237, 359 Bao Tianxiao ࣙ໽ュ, 544, 547n10 Bao Tingbo 入ᓋम, 530 Bao Zhao 入✻, 165 Baoweng laoren ᢅ⫩㗕Ҏ, 255 Barrett, T. H., 148 Bates, Marcia, xxv Bateson, Gregory, xxiv Bei Dao ࣫ቯ, 556–58 Beixin Bookstore (Beixin shuju ࣫ᮄкሔ), 98 Benedict, Barbara M., 201 Benjamin, Walter, 522n4 Bibliotheca Zi-Ka-Wei (Xujiahui cangshulou ᕤ ᆊ⒭㮣᳌ῧ), 438 Bing Xin ‫ބ‬ᖗ, 450 Blair, Ann M., xxi, xxii, 295, 306, 458

Böll, Heinrich, 557 Boltz, Judith M., 248n7 Boltz, William G., 250 Bone, A. B., 563 Bottéro, Françoise, 27 Briet, Suzanne, xxv–xxvi, 208, 349n1 Britton, Roswell S., 547n11 Brokaw, Cynthia J., 234 Cai, Pizi (Bum) ⮲ᄤ㫵, 570 Cai Qijiao 㫵݊⶿, 557 Cai Yong 㫵䙩, 381, 417–18 Cai Yuanpei 㫵‫ܗ‬෍, 18, 19, 287, 288, 567 Caldwell, Samuel Hawks, 39–41, 44 Camel Xiangzi Museum (Luotuo Xiangzi bowuguan 做偐⼹ᄤम⠽佚), 455n4 Cang Jie ‫䷵ם‬, 17 Cao Cao ᳍᪡, 147, 155n8, 181, 401 Cao Yin ᳍ᆙ, 224 Cao Yu ᳍⾎, 282, 340, 450 Cao Zhi ᳍ỡ, 302, 336 Cai Tao 㫵㌯, 165 Carruthers, Mary J., 302–3 Cave, Edward, 548 Cen Shen ብগ, 228, 229 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, xxii Chang Jian ᐌᓎ, 219 Chao Gongwu ᰕ݀℺, 426

616

Index of People and Select Institutions

Chao, Yuen Ren 䍭‫ܗ‬ӏ, 18, 20–21, 50, 71, 74, 75, 76 Chekhov, Anton, 280 Chen Baichen 䰜ⱑᇬ, 451 Chen Chen 䱇ᗅ, 175–76 Chen Chun 䱇⏇, 86 Chen Di 䱇㄀, 81 Chen Guoqiu 䰜೑⧗, 396 Chen Han 䱇㗄, 251 Chen Heqin 䱇厈⨈, 22 Chen, Jack W., 373 Chen Jiru 䱇㑐‫ۦ‬, 184, 188, 236, 237, 319, 524 Chen Kehan 䰜‫ܟ‬ᆦ, 98 Chen Kui 䱇俸, 221 Chen Lifu 䱇ゟ໿, 44 Chen Menghong 䱇໶㱍, 319 Chen Nong 䱇䖆, 414 Chen, Ping, 15n2–n3 Chen Pingyuan 䰜ᑇॳ, 395, 397, 398, 404, 405n2, 405n18 Chen Shiyuan 䱇຿‫ܗ‬, 88n2 Chen Tingjing 䱇ᓋᭀ, 193 Chen Wangdao 䱇ᳯ䘧, 136–37, 139 Chen Yuan 䰜ॳ, 101 Chen Yubi 䱇Ѣ䰯, 386, 388–90, 391, 392 Chen Zhensun 䱇ᤃᄿ, 426 Chen Zhongfan 䱇Ё޵ / 䱇䥒޵, 404, 538 Chen Zilong 䱇ᄤ啡, 391 Chen Zi’ang 䱇ᄤᯖ, 228 Cheng Daheng ⿟໻㸵, 264 Cheng Hao ⿟丹, 150 Cheng Qiong ⿟⪞, 186–88 Cheng Yi ⿟䷸, 150 Cheng Yinzhao ⿟㚸‫ܚ‬, 528 Cherniack, Susan, 156n10 Chia, Lucille, 420n23 China Academic Journals Full-Text Database (Zhongguo xueshu qikan quanwen shujuku Ё೑ᄺᴃᳳߞܼ᭛᭄᥂ᑧ), 457–58 Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Language Research Institute (Yuyan yanjiusuo cidian bianjishi 䇁㿔ⷨお᠔䕲‫݌‬㓪䕥ᅸ), 100 Chinese Mission Chapel, 566 Chinese University of Hong Kong. See Institute of Chinese Studies Chinese Writers Association (Zhongguo zuojia xiehuiЁ೑԰ᆊणӮ), 505, 559 Chu Guangxi ‫ܝ܆‬㖆, 219 Chunming Bookstore (Chunming shuju ᯹ᯢ кሔ), 98 Clarke, Bruce, xxv, 519

CNKI Ё೑ⶹ㔥 (China National Knowledge Infrastructure), 456, 457–58 Coblin, W. South, 55, 71 Commercial Press. See Shangwu yinshuguan Confucius (Kongzi ᄨᄤ), xxvi–xxvii, 145, 146, 160, 206–13, 352, 415, 471, 479–80, 494 Constantino, Nicholas, 156n19 Cooperation Committee of the American Library Association, 459 Cui Xian የ䡥, 234 Cuiyuge ㊍࿯䭷 (Jade Pavilion of Pleasure), 524–25 Dahui Zonggao ໻᜻ᅫᵆ, 244 Dai De ᠈ᖋ, 415 Dai Mingshi ᠈ৡϪ, 286 Dai Sheng ᠈㘪, 415 Dai Zhen ᠈䳛, 72 Dante, 401 Dao’an 䘧ᅝ, 489n7 Daoxuan 䘧ᅷ, 217 Deng Xiaoping 䙧ᇣᑇ, 442, 462, 463, 567 Deng Yuanxi 䛻‫ܗ‬䣿, 386 Deng Zhimo 䛻ᖫ䃼, 320 Dewey, Melvil, 440 Dharmarakৢa (Zhu Fahu ノ⊩䅋), 487 Ding Ling ϕ⦆, 451 Ding Xilin ϕ㽓ᵫ, 281 Dong Meikan 㨷↣៵, 281 Dongguan ᵅ㾔 (Eastern Tower), 430 Drège, Jean-Pierre, 416, 417 Du Dingyou ᴰᅮট, 32–34 Du Fu ᴰ⫿, 121–23, 164–67, 186, 228, 229, 230–31, 335 Du Mu ᴰ⠻, 229 Du Shenyan ᴰᆽ㿔, 228 Duan Yucai ↉⥝㺕, 58, 81 Duan Zhijian ↉ᖫෙ, 246 Duke of Zhou ਼݀, 150, 206 Edkins, Joseph, 76 Egan, Ronald C., 469 Elman, Benjamin A., 293, 534 Empress Lü ਖৢ, 188 Engels, Friedrich, 442, 457 Erudition, 467 Fan Jun ῞偣, 340 Fan Qin 㣗ℑ, 427–29 Foucault, Michel, 25 Fang Bao ᮍ㢲, 238

Index of People and Select Institutions Fang Hui ᮍಲ, 166 Feng Kebin 侂ৃ䊧, 531n13 Feng Menglong 侂໶啡, 249, 254–55 Feng Qiyong 侂݊ᒌ, 175 Feng Yidai ‫ރ‬Ѻҷ, 556–57, 560n16 Ferry, Anne, 201 Fowler, Robert L., 292 Fu Donghua ٙᵅ㧃, 537 Fu Sinian ٙᮃᑈ, 18 Gan Bao ᑆᇊ, 258n24 Gan Gu ⫬䈋, 555 Gao Bing 催ẙ, 166 Gao Fengqian 催勇䃭, 98 Gao Zhongwu 催ӆ℺, 219–20 Giles, Lionel, 331n2, 511 Gimpel, Denise, 521 Gongsun Shu ݀ᄿ䗄, 165–66 Graf, Emily Mae, 455n12 Gregory, Lady Augusta, 280 Gu Yanwu 主♢℺, 81 Guo Moruo 䛁≿㢹, 19, 271, 272, 281, 450 Guo Pu 䛁⩲, 188 Guo Shaoyu 䛁㌍㰲, 287, 397, 404 Guo Songtao 䛁ጽ⟒, 288, 437 Guo Zhida 䛁ⶹ䘨, 165–66 Guy, R. Kent, 332n9 Han Bangqing 䶧䙺ᝊ, 545 Han Donglang 䶧‫ހ‬䚢, 188 Han emperor Cheng ⓶៤Ᏹ, 414, 418, 478 Han emperor Wu ⓶℺Ᏹ, 237, 478 Han emperor Zhang ⓶ゴᏱ, 206 Han Feizi 䶧䴲ᄤ, 288 Han Yu 䶧ᛜ, 81, 165, 228, 229, 230, 236, 239, 381, 391 Hanan, Patrick, 176, 177n9 Handel, Zev, 22–23 Harbsmeier, Christoph, 115 Hartman, Charles, 375 Harvard-Yenching Institute, 512, 514–16 passim Harvard-Yenching Library, 444 Hayot, Eric, xxii He, Yuming, 240 Heisig, James, 107 Hockx, Michel, 521 Homer, xviii Hong Mai ⋾䙕, 312 Hong Shen ⋾⏅, 273, 277, 280–81 Howard, William, 566 Hu Daojing 㚵䘧䴰, 313

617

Hu Feng 㚵亢, 451, 554, 555 Hu Huaichen 㚵់⧯, 538 Hu Pu’an 㚵‌ᅝ, 538 Hu Shi 㚵䘽, 18, 135, 138, 273, 277, 288, 501, 511–12 Hu Wenhuan 㚵᭛✹, 530n1 Hu Yingling 㚵ឝ味, 250 Hu Zhenheng 㚵䳛Ѽ, 167 Hu Zuanzong 㚵㑬ᅫ, 235 Huan Tan ḧ䄮, 250, 419n2 Huang Lin 咗䳪, 404 Huang Tingjian 咗ᒁෙ, 188 Huang Yongyu 咘∌⥝, 557 Huang Yuji 咗㰲》, 385–86, 388 Huangbo Xiyun 咗Ꮰ䘟, 243 Huangshicheng ⱛ৆ᆀ (Imperial Archive of History), 433 Hui Shi ᚴᮑ, 419n1 Hung, William (Hong Ye ⋾ὁ), 157n26, 510, 512 Ilingga (Yiling’a Ӟ唵䰓), 433–34 Index Society, 510 Information Center for Social Sciences of Renmin University of China. See Zhongguo Renmin daxue shuobao ziliaoshe Institute of Chinese Studies (ICS), 514–16 passim Ji Xianlin ᄷ㕼ᵫ, 340 Ji Yun ㋔ᯔ, 427 Jia Yi 䊜䂐, 364, 366 Jiajing emperor ௝䴪ⱛᏱ (Ming Shizong ᯢϪ ᅫ), 313, 385 Jianbao gongsi ࠾᡹݀ৌ (Newspaper clipping company), 456–57 Jianbao ziliao tushu kapianshe ࠾᡹䌘᭭೒ кव⠛⼒ (Newspaper clipping and book indexing office), 457 Jiang Boqian 㫷ԃ┯, 192–93 Jiang Rulin 㫷‫ۦ‬ᵫ, 72 Jiang Weiqiao 㫷㎁஀, 288 Jiang Yan ∳⏍, 366 Jiang Yiqian 㫷ϔࠡ, 25 Jiang Yong ∳∌, 72, 81 Jiao Hong ⛺ジ, 332n21, 333n25, 496 Jiguge ≆স䭷 (Wellspring of Antiquity Pavilion), 424 Jihusou ⭌ャ঳, 173 Jin Shengtan 䞥㘪™, 169, 171–72, 174, 186–87 Jin Yong 䞥ᒌ, 450 Kaiming shudian 䭟ᯢ᳌ᑫ (Kaiming Press), 287 Kang Youwei ᒋ᳝⚎, 93, 293, 438

618

Index of People and Select Institutions

Kangxi emperor ᒋ❭ⱛᏱ, 224, 225, 238, 525 Karlgren, Bernhard, 71, 76 Keasberry, Benjamin Peach, 564 Kong Yingda ᄨ〢䘨, 155n2, 416 Kuipers, Christopher M., 201–2 Kumārajīva (Jiumoluoshi 劽ᨽ㕙Ҕ), 487 Lacan, Jacques, 254 Landauer, Rolf, xxiv Lantai 㰁㟎 (Orchid Terrace), 430 Lai He 䋈੠, 453 Lao Naixuan ࢲЗᅷ, 20 Lao She 㗕㟠, 272, 450–51 Lashali [Lasari] ୛≭ઽ, 193 Lee, Francis Fan ᴢ޵, 39 Lee, Leo Ou-fan, 94n4 Lenin, Vladimir, 271, 442, 457 Lerer, Seth, xxx, 201, 203 Li Bai ᴢⱑ, 228 Li Boyuan ᴢԃ‫ܗ‬, 541, 546n1 Li Dazhao ᴢ໻䞫, 271, 439 Li Gongpu ᴢ݀‌, 19 Li Gui ᴢഁ, 437 Li Guinian ᴢ啰ᑈ, 230–31 Li He ᴢ䊔, 167, 230 Li Jianwu ᴢ‫ع‬਒, 281, 282 Li Jinxi 咢䣺❭, 18 Li Kaixian ᴢ䭟‫ܜ‬, 261 Li Kau ᴢḍ, 566 Li Ke ᴢ‫ܟ‬, 480 Li Rong ᴢᾂ, 71 Li Shan ᴢ୘, 160, 162–64, 165, 167 Li Shangyin ᴢଚ䲅, 167, 188, 228, 229, 230 Li Shi ᴢᆺ, 79 Li Shizeng ᴢ⷇᳒, 567 Li Shizhen ᴢᰖ⦡, 28, 527 Li Shuchang 咢ᒊᯠ, 285 Li Xinkui ᴢᮄ儕, 71 Li Yu ᴢ⥝, 265 Li Yu ᴢⓕ, 176, 249 Li Zhi ᴢ䋘, 170–71, 183–84 Li Zhaoluo ᴢ‫⋯ܚ‬, 336 Li Zhouhan ᴢ਼㗄, 163–64 Li Zhuguo ᴢ᷅೟, 414 Li Zunxu ᴢᇞࢫ, 244 Liang emperor Yuan ṕ‫ܗ‬Ᏹ, 416 Liang Qichao ṕଳ䍙, 93, 176, 277, 332n24, 402, 438, 500–501 Liang Sengbao ṕ‫ڻ‬ᇊ, 72, 73, 74 Liang Shuming ṕ┅⑳, 96–97, 103 Lichuangwodusheng 咢ᑞ㞹䅔⫳, 546n1 Lin Chuanjia ᵫ‫⬆ڇ‬, 395–96, 399

Lin Shu ᵫ㋧, 285–86, 288, 289n2, 534, 536 Lin Xiyuan ᵫᏠ‫ܗ‬, 235, 236, 238 Lin Yutang ᵫ䁲ූ, 38–39, 44, 506 Lin Zexu ᵫࠛᕤ, 437 Ling Mengchu ‫߱▯ޠ‬, 255 Linji Yixuan 㞼△㕽⥘, 243 Link, Perry, 543 Liu An ࡝ᅝ, 205 Liu Bei ࡝‫٭‬, 401 Liu Dajie ࡝໻ᵄ, 399–402, 403 Liu Fu ࡝ᕽ, 287 Liu Guojun ࡝೟䟲, 440 Liu Jibao ߬㒻ֱ, 177n5 Liu Kezhaung ࡝‫ܟ‬㥞, 227 Liu Liang ࡝㡃, 162 Liu Niantai ࡝ᗉ㟎, 527 Liu Xiang ࡝৥, 215, 252, 309, 414–16 passim, 419n11, 477–79, 480, 485, 495 Liu Xiaobiao ࡝ᄱ῭, 147 Liu Xie ࡝ࣄ, xxvi–xxvii Liu Xin ࡝ℚ, 250, 414–16 passim, 477–79, 481n4, 481n9 Liu Yiqing ࡝㕽ᝊ, 147, 252, 309 Liu Yazi ᷇Ѳᄤ, 19 Liu Yongji ࡝∌△, 397 Liu Yuxi ࡝⾍䣿, 381 Liu Zhangqing ࡝䭋॓, 229 Liu Zhiji ࡝ⶹᑒ, 363–64, 368–69, 376 Liu Zongyuan ᷇ᅫ‫ܗ‬, 229, 236, 239, 323n7, 379–82, 391 Loewe, Michael, xiii London Missionary Society, 563 Lord Pingyuan ᑇॳ৯, 480 Lotman, Yuri, 115 Lou Fang ῧᯝ, 221 Lou Ying ῧ〢, 218 Lü Buwei ਖϡ䶟, 205 Lu Chun 䱌⏇, 323n7 Lu Deming 䰚ᖋᯢ, 130 Lu Erkui 䱌⠒༢, 92 Lu Fayan 䱌⊩㿔, 60 Lu Ji 䱌″, 188, 302 Lu Jiye 㯚‫ݔ‬䞢, 279 Lü Shixiang ৩⎥␬, 100 Lü Simian ਖᗱ࢝, 549 Lü Weng ਖ㖕, 253 Lu Wentong 䱌᭛䗮, 320 Lu Xun 元䖙, 19, 22, 102, 139, 271–72, 273, 287, 288, 399, 405n17, 441, 448, 450–51, 453, 454n2, 455n5, 502–4, 505, 508n14 Lu Xunyun 䱌ధ䳆, 88n2

Index of People and Select Institutions Lü Yanji ਖᓊ△, 163 Lü Yanzuo ਖᓊ⼮, 162 Lu You 䱌␌, 312 Lu Zhuangzhuang ⲻ៙ゴ, 20 Lü Zuqian ਖ⼪䃭, 221 Luo Guanzhong 㕙䉿Ё, 401 Luo Jialun 㕙ᆊ‫׿‬, 336 Luo Liantian 㕙㙃⏏, 383n12 Ma Duanlin 侀ッ㞼, 426 Ma Lu 侀䣘, 234–35 Ma Yu 侀䠎, 246 Ma Zhiyuan 侀㟈䘴, 266 MacKay, Donald, xxiv Mang Ke 㡦‫ܟ‬, 557 Manoff, Marlene, 409 Marx, Karl, 271, 442, 457 Mao Dun ⶯Ⳓ, 19, 272, 273, 404, 450, 551 Mao Jin ↯ᰝ, 278, 424, 524 Mao Kun 㣙സ, 236 Mao Lun ↯‫׿‬, 172, 176n1 Mao Qiling ↯༛唵, 79 Mao Zedong ↯╸ᵅ, 21, 39, 96, 99, 102, 442, 450, 457, 558 Mao Zonggang ↯ᅫያ, 172, 176n1, 401 McDermott, Joseph P., 420n23, 425 McGann, Jerome J., 190, 196 McLuhan, Marshall, xv Mei Dingzuo ṙ哢⼮, 254 Mei Lanfang ṙ㰁㢇, 280 Mei Sheng ᵮЬ, 527 Mei Yingzuo ṙ㞎⼮, 28–29, 82–83 Meng Haoran ᄳ⌽✊, 228 Meng Jiao ᄳ䚞, 230 Merlo, Aleixandre, 557 Milne, William, 549, 563–64 Min Qiji 䭨唞ӟ, 237 Ming emperor Chengzu ᯢ៤⼪. See Yongle emperor Ming emperor Shizong ᯢϪᅫ. See Jiajing emperor Mitsukuri Rinshō ㅩ԰味⼹, 293 Mori Arinori Ể᳝⾂, 397–98 Most, Glenn, 145, 153 Münning, Mariana, 100 Murray, Hugh, 437 National Central Library (Guojia tushuguan ೟ ᆊ೪᳌仼), 444 National Copyright Administration of the People’s Republic of China (ЁढҎ⇥݅੠ ೑೑ᆊ⠜ᴗሔ), 462

619

National Library of China (Zhongguo guojia tushuguan Ё೑೑ᆊ೒к佚), 266, 267n1, 432–33, 436n13, 444 National Museum of Modern Chinese Literature (Zhongguo xiandai wenxueguan Ё೑⦄ҷ ᭛ᄺ佚), 410, 448, 450–52, 453, 454 National Museum of Taiwan Literature (Guoli Taiwan wenxueguan ೟ゟৄ☷᭛ᅌ仼), 448, 452–53, 454 New Knowledge Publishing House (Xin zhishi chubanshe ᮄⶹ䆚ߎ⠜⼒), 99 Ni Haishu ‫׾‬⍋Ჭ, 21 Ni Kuan ‫ܦ‬ᇀ, 480 Ning Yue ⬃䍞, 480 Niu Hong ⠯ᓬ, 416 North China Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, 438 Northern Wei emperor Xiaowen ࣫儣ᄱ᭛Ᏹ, 416 Northern Wei emperor Xuanwu ࣫儣ᅷ℺Ᏹ, 416 Nunberg, Geoffrey, 140 Nylan, Michael, 156n19 Oettinger, Anthony, xvi Ong, Walter, 19 Ouyang Xiu ℤ䱑ׂ, 236, 239, 375, 377, 383n9 Ouyang Xun ℤ䱑䀶, 295, 299, 304, 308 Ouyang Yuqian ℤ䱑ќ‫׽‬, 281 Pan Wu ┬℺, 286, 288 Pan Yue ┬ኇ, 162–64 Pi Xirui Ⲃ䣿⨲, 157n26 Plaks, Andrew H., 177n8 Pollock, Sheldon, 154, 157n33 Proquest, 467 Pulleyblank, Edwin G., 71 Qian Daxin 䣶໻ᯩ, 286 Qian Decang 䣶ᖋ㪐, 263–65, 266–67 Qian Jibo 䣶෎म, 399 Qian Qianyi 䣶䃭Ⲟ, 424 Qian Shouzhi 䣶ফП, 188 Qian Xuantong 䣶⥘ৠ, 18, 19–20, 21–22 Qian Zhongshu 䪅䩳к, 340 Qianlong emperor ђ䱚ⱛᏱ, 225, 229, 326–29 passim, 432–33 Qiao Yong ஀∌, 94n5 Qiao Zhizhong Ш⊏ᖴ, 387 Qin Shihuang ⾺ྟⱛ (Qin First Emperor), 87, 205, 206 Qiu Zhao’ao қ‫ܚ‬分, 167

620

Index of People and Select Institutions

Qiwu Qian ㍺↟┯, 219 Qu Qiubai ⶓ⾟ⱑ, 21 Qu Yuan ሜॳ, 161 Queen Mother of the West (Xiwangmu 㽓⥟ ↡), 237 Rea, Christopher, 539n5 Ren Fang ӏᯝ, 366 Ren Hong ӏᅣ, 414 Ren Tingxu ӏᓋᯁ, 397, 405n10 Renmin jiaoyu chubanshe Ҏ⇥ᬭ㚆ߎ⠜⼒ (People’s Educaiton Publishing House), 97 Rolston, David L., 176, 177n1, 279–80 Rouse, Mary A., 292, 296 Rouse, Richard R., 292, 296 Ruan Xiaoxu 䰂ᄱ㎦, 481n6 Rui Tingzhang 㢂ᤎゴ, 218 Sagart, Laurent, 71 Sasakawa Taneo ㄍᎱ。䚢, 396 SAT Daizōkyō group, 466–67 Schaank, Simon, 71 Schuessler, Axel, 71 See Ewe Lay 㭯᳝⾂, 564 Sengyou ‫⼤ڻ‬, 243, 486 Shanghai Library (Shanghai tushuguan Ϟ⍋೒к佚), 438, 444 Shanghai Literature Museum (Shanghai wenxueguan Ϟ⍋᭛ᄺ佚), 449 Shanghai Shengda Internet Development Company (Shanghai shengda wangluo fazhan youxian gongsi Ϟ⍋ⲯ໻㔥㒰থሩ ᳝䰤݀ৌ), 571 Shangwu yinshuguan ଚࢭॄ᳌仼 (Commerical Press), 30, 97, 98, 274, 283n3, 285, 288, 533–37 passim Shannon, Claude E., xv, xxiv, xxxin10, 249 Shao Yong 䚉䲡, 72–73 Shaughnessy, Edward L., xiii Shen Congwen ≜ᕲ᭛, 449 Shen Dao ᜢࠄ, 267n9 Shen Deqian ≜ᖋ┯, 225, 229, 230–31 Shen Fu ≜ᕽ, 288 Shen Jiefu ≜㆔⫿, 528 Shen Jiji ≜᮶△, 253 Shen Rengan ≜ҕᑆ, 462 Shen Zhifang ≜ⶹᮍ, 535 Shen Zurong ≜⼪ᾂ, 440 Shengda Literature Ltd. (Shengda wenxue youxian gongsi ⲯ໻᭛ᄺ᳝䰤݀ৌ), 571

Shengpingshu ⲯᑇ㕆 (Bureau of Ascending Peace), 430–35 Shi Mo ⷇咬, 558 Shi Nai’an ᮑ㗤ᒉ, 172 Shijie shuju Ϫ⬠᳌ሔ (World Book Company), 282, 533, 535 Shu Xincheng 㟦ᮄ៤, 94 Shun 㟰, 209, 211 Sieber, Patricia, 267n5 Sima Guang ৌ侀‫ܝ‬, 377 Sima Qian ৌ侀䙋, 179, 206–13, 221, 239–40, 288, 349, 354–55, 357, 372, 386 Sima Tan ৌ侀䂛, 354–55 Sima Xiangru ৌ侀Ⳍབ, 364, 366, 381 Smith, Alice M., 280 Song Chunfang ᅟ᯹㟿, 281 Song emperor Taizong ᅟ໾ᅫ, 307, 309, 313 Song Luo ᅟ⡪, 526 Song Qi ᅟ⼕, 380–82 Speer, William, 566 Stalin, Joseph, 442 Su Che 㯛䔡, 236 Su Shi 㯛䓒, 167, 236, 239, 253 Su Wu 㯛℺, 181 Su Xun 㯛⌉, 236 Sui emperor Wen 䱟᭛Ᏹ, 416 Sui emperor Yang 䱟❀Ᏹ, 416 Sun Jia’nai ᄿᆊ哤, 405n1 Sun Ke ᄿ⾥, 19 Sun Yat-sen ᄿ䘌ҭ, 192, 271, 567 Sun Yongzhong ᄿ∌ᖴ, 292 Sun Yusheng ᄿ⥝㙆, 543 Sun Yuxiu ᄿ↧ׂ, 288 Sun Zhu ᄿ⋭, 225 Swanson, Rowena, xv Swatek, Catherine C., 268n13 Tagore, Rabindranath, 280 Tan Bitao 㽗ᖙ䱊, 287 Tang emperor Daizong ૤ҷᅫ, 220 Tang emperor Suzong ૤㙙ᅫ, 220 Tang emperor Xuanzong ૤⥘ᅫ, 162, 296, 417 Tang Lan ૤㰁, 23 Tang Shunzhi ૤䷚П, 237 Tang Xianzu ⑃乃⼪, 265 Tang Yuan ૤≙, 506 Tao Hongjing 䱊ᓬ᱃, 243, 488 Tao Xingzhi 䱊㸠ⶹ, 19, 22, 287 Tao Zongyi 䱊ᅫ‫۔‬, 250 Thucydides, xviii Tian Han ⬄⓶, 281

Index of People and Select Institutions Tian, Xiaofei, 291, 293 Tianyige ໽ϔ䭷 (Tianyi Library), 427–29, 429n5 Toqto’a (Toghto, Tuotuo) 㛿㛿, 385 Trubek, Anne, 545n1 Tschanz, Dietrich, 281 Tsinghua Tongfang Co., Ltd. ⏙ढৠᮍ, 458, 560 Tu Long ሴ䱚, 320 Tushu tiyao kapian lianhe bianjizu ೒кᦤ㽕व ⠛㘨ড়㓪䕥㒘 (Book digest and indexing group), 456–57 Twain, Mark, 287 Van Auken, Newell, 359n2 Volland, Nicolai, 539n5 Volpicelli, Zenone, 71 von Foerster, Heinrich, xxxiin14 Wang Anshi ⥟ᅝ⷇, 83–84, 236 Wang Bi ⥟ᔐ, 417 Wang Can ⥟㊆, 418 Wang Changling ⥟ᯠ唵, 219 Wang Chong ⥟‫ܙ‬, 163 Wang Cihui ⥟⃵ಲ, 188 Wang Donglin ⥟ϰᵫ, 96–97 Wang Guowei ⥟೟㎁, 278, 280 Wang Heng ⥟㸵, 236 Wang Ji ⥟㐒, 218 Wang Jingwei ∾㊒㸯, 567 Wang Jizhong ⥟ᄷ䞡, 188 Wang Meng ⥟㩭, 175 Wang Mingsheng ⥟勈ⲯ, 480 Wang Tao ⥟䶰, 437 Wang Wei ⥟㎁, 219, 228, 229 Wang Wengao ⥟᭛䁹, 167 Wang Sanqing ⥟ϝᝊ, 291 Wang Shifu ⥟ᆺ⫿, 187 Wang Shizhen ⥟຿䉲, 253–54 Wang Su ⥟㙙, 420n24 Wang Xiang ⥟Ⳍ, 227 Wang Xianpei ⥟‫ܜ‬䳜, 176n1 Wang Xianqian ⥟‫ܜ‬䃭, 285 Wang Xianzhi ⥟⥏П, 488 Wang Xilian ⥟Ꮰᒝ, 174 Wang Xizhi ⥟㖆П, 299, 488 Wang Yan ⥟㿔, 528 Wang Yan ⥟⨄, 243 Wang Yao ⥟⨸, 402–3 Wang Yi ⥟䘌, 160–61, 162, 215 Wang Yuanhua ⥟‫࣪ܗ‬, 340

621

Wang Yunwu ⥟䳆Ѩ, 30–32, 34, 92, 512, 534–35 Wang Zhao ⥟✻, 20 Wang Zhe ⥟౲, 246 Wang Zhuo ⥟᰿, 525, 528, 531n6 Wang Zhu ⥟⋭, 165 Weaver, Warren, xxiv Wei Jiangong 儣ᓎࡳ, 100 Wei Jiao 儣᷵, 84 Wei Yingwu 䶟ឝ⠽, 228, 229, 230 Wei Yuan 儣⑤, 437 Wei Zheng 儣ᖉ, 217, 481n10 White Deer Grotto Academy (Bailudong shuyuan ⱑ呓⋲᳌䰶), 423 White, Hayden, 348 Wiener, Norbert, xxxin9 Wilkinson, Endymion, xii, 313 Wood, Mary Elizabeth, 439 World Book Company. See Shijie shuju Wu Chengquan ਇЬ⃞, 239 Wu Dazhi ਇ໻㙋, 239 Wu Jianren ਇ䎐Ҏ, 543 Wu Jingzi ਇᭀṧ, 406n21 Wu Yong ਇ∌, 531n13 Wu Yu ਇế, 81 Wu Yuzhang ਇ⥝ゴ, 567 Wu Zhensheng ਇ䳛⫳, 186 Wu Zuguang ਇ⼪‫ܝ‬, 282 Xi Zhongxun дӆ࢟, 98 Xia Yan ໣㸡, 340 Xia Zengyou ໣᳒ԥ, 546 Xiahou Sheng ໣փࢱ, 150 Xiao Gang 㭁㎅ (Liang emperor Jianwen ṕㇵ᭛Ᏹ), 217 Xiao Hong 㭁㋙, 19, 287 Xiao Jun 㧻‫ݯ‬, 451 Xiao Qian 㧻ђ, 451 Xiao Tong 㭁㍅, 160, 161, 220 Xie Bingde 䃱ᵟᖋ, 221, 227 Xie Chen 䃱≜, 222 Xie Gaoyu 䃱ⱟ㖑, 526 Xie Jin 㾷㏝, 310 Xie Lingyun 䃱䴜䘟, 165, 298, 366 Xie Zhuang 䃱㥞, 298, 299 Xinwenxi yinshuachang ᮄ䯏㋏ॄࠋॖ (Printing house of the department of journalism), 456–57 Xiong Foxi ❞ԯ㽓, 28 Xiong Zhong ❞ᖴ, 72 Xu Guangping 䀅ᒷᑇ, 271 Xu Lanying ᕤ㰁㣅, 225

622

Index of People and Select Institutions

Xu Qianxue ᕤђᅌ, 238 Xu Shen 䀅ᜢ, 9, 26–27, 58, 151, 157–58n20, 308. See also Shuowen jiezi Xu Wei ᕤ␁, 240 Xu Weinan ᕤᝄफ, 535 Xue Fucheng 㭯⽣៤, 288 Xun Xu 㤔ࢫ, 495 Xunzi 㤔ᄤ, 156n18 Yan Fu ಈᕽ, 136, 536, 546 Yan Kejun ಈৃഛ, 239 Yan Shigu 丣᏿স, 416, 481n11 Yan Zhenqing 丣ⳳ॓ (709–85), 524 Yan Zhitui 丣П᥼, 417 Yang Bojun ἞ԃ֞, 193, 194 Yang Hansheng 䰇㗄ロ, 451 Yang, Lien-sheng ἞㙃䰲, 39 Yang Mo ᴼ≿, 451 Yang Tianyu ᴼ໽ᅛ, 156n15, 156n27, 157n31 Yang Weizhen ἞㎁Ἴ, 230 Yang Xi ἞㖆, 488 Yang Xiong ᦮䲘, 61, 78, 145, 146, 153, 157n30, 235, 417 Yanzi ᰣᄤ, 480 Yao Mingda ྮৡ䖒, 326, 491 Yao Nai ྮ哤, 238, 285 Yao Xie ྮ⟂, 174–75, 177n7 Yao Xueyin ྮ䲾൴, 451 Yao Yong ྮ䦲, 336 Ye Shengtao 㨝㘪䱊, 19, 21–22, 287 Yin Fan ↋⩴, 218–19 Yin Shifu 䱄ᰖ໿, 323n7 Yin Shouheng ልᅜ㸵, 386 Yin Xian ልઌ, 414 Yin Zhiping ልᖫᑇ, 246–47 Yongle emperor ∌ῖⱛᏱ, 310 Yu Dafu 䚕䘨໿, 273 Yu Dingsun ֲ哢ᄿ, 530n1 Yu Jiaxi ԭ௝䣿, 481n9 Yu Jing ֲ㍧, 530n1 Yu Shangyuan ԭϞ≙, 281 Yu Xiangdou ԭ䈵᭫, 170, 316–18 Yuan Hongdao 㹕ᅣ䘧, 240 Yuan Jie ‫ܗ‬㌤, 219 Yuan Shikai 㹕Ϫ߅, 271 Yuan Yongjin 㹕␻䘆, 507 Yuan Zhen ‫」ܗ‬, 251 Yuan Zhongfu 㹕Ё໿, 183 Yuanjue Zongyan ೧㾎ᅫⓨ, 243 Yuelu Academy (Yuelu shuyuan ኇ呧᳌䰶), 423

Zang Maoxun 㞻សᕾ, 261, 265–67, 267n5, 267n7, 278 Zeng Gong ᳒䵣, 236 Zeng Guofan ᳒೟㮽, 285 Zeng Jize ᳒㋔╸, 437 Zeng Zao ᳒᜹, 250 Zhang Ailing ᔉᛯ⦆, 450 Zhang Binglin ゴ⚇味, 286 Zhang Can ᔉগ, 27–28 Zhang Chao ᔉ╂, 528, 529, 531n6 Zhang Deyi ᔉᖋᔲ, 136 Zhang Dihua ᔉ⒠㧃, 294n4 Zhang Henshui ᔉᘼ∈, 450 Zhang Lei ᔉ㗦, 236 Zhang Renjie ᔉҎ٥, 567 Zhang Shi ᔉᣁ, 423 Zhang Shourong ᔉ໑ᾂ, 530 Zhang Taiyan ゴ໾♢, 20 Zhang Xinzhi ᔉᮄП, 175 Zhang Xiumin ᔉ⾔⇥, 531n8 Zhang Xuecheng ゴᅌ䁴, 332n20 Zhang Yingyu ᔉឝֲ, 254 Zhang Yuanji ᔉ‫△ܗ‬, 93 Zhang Yuchu ᔉᅛ߱, 247 Zhang Yushu ᔉ⥝᳌, 88n3 Zhang Yue ᔉ䁾, 296 Zhang Zhao ᓴᰁ, 457 Zhang Zhengmao ᔉℷ㣖, 528 Zhang Zhidong ᔉП⋲, 500 Zhang Zhupo ᔉネവ, 172, 176n1 Zhao Jiabi 䍭ᆊ⩻, 272–73 Zhao Nanxing 䍭फ᯳, 88n2 Zhao Qi 䍭ቤ, 157n30, 194 Zhao Shijie 䍭Ϫᵄ, 237 Zhen Dexiu ⳳᖋ⾔, 221–22, 233, 235 Zheng Boqi 䜁ԃ༛, 273, 281, 282 Zheng Cichuan 䜁⃵Ꮁ, 538 Zheng Guanying 䜁㾔ឝ, 438 Zheng Qiao 䜁 , 330, 492–94, 496–98, 499n5 Zheng Xi 䜁⽻, 251 Zheng Xuan 䜁⥘, 149–52, 154, 156n15, 156n20, 157n24, 157n25, 157n26, 157n27, 501 Zheng Yuqing 䜁们ᝊ, 253 Zheng Zhenduo 䜁ᤃ䨌, 273 Zhi Daolin ᬃ䘧ᵫ, 188 Zhi Yu ᩃ㰲, 216 Zhiyanzhai 㛖⹃唟, 173, 177n4, 177n5 Zhong Xing 。ᛎ, 188 Zhongfeng Mingben Ёዄᯢᴀ, 244 Zhongguo Renmin daxue shuobao ziliaoshe Ё ೑Ҏ⇥໻ᄺк᡹䌘᭭⼒ (Office of books,

Index of People and Select Institutions newspapers, and publications of Renmin University in China; formerly, Information Center for Social Sciences of Renmin University of China), 456, 457, 458–62 Zhonghua dianzi fodian xiehui Ё㧃䳏ᄤԯ‫݌‬ न᳗. See CBETA in “Index of Documents, Publications, and Electronic Resources” Zhonghua shuju Ё㧃᳌ሔ (Zhonghua Book Company, Chong Hwa Book Company), 30, 274, 286, 505, 533–35 Zhongzhou guji chubanshe ЁᎲস㈡ߎ⠜⼒, 196n3 Zhou Deqing ਼ᖋ⏙, 80 Zhou Enlai ਼ᘽᴹ, 22, 567 Zhou Qi ਼㎎, 174 Zhou Weimin ਼‫⇥؝‬, 176n1 Zhou Yongnian ਼∌ᑈ, 329 Zhou Youshan ਼টቅ, 183

623

Zhou Yutong ਼ќৠ, 287 Zhou Zhan ਼␯, 434 Zhou Zhenfu ਼ᤃ⫿, 340 Zhou Zuoren ਼԰Ҏ, 18, 22, 100, 273, 503 Zhu De ᴅᖋ, 21, 102 Zhu Guozhen ᴅ೟⽢, 386 Zhu Mouwei ᴅ䃔⨟, 88n3 Zhu Quan ᴅ⃞, 262 Zhu Xi ᴅ➍, xxvii, 86, 150, 192–94 passim, 423 Zhu Yuanzhang ᴅ‫⩟ܗ‬, 431, 434 Zhu Yun ᴅ㥎, 327, 328, 330 Zhu Ziqing ᴅ㞾⏙, 273, 287 Zhuangzi 㥞ᄤ, 163 Zhuge Liang 䃌㨯҂, 165–66 Zi Jin ㋿䞥, 559 Zuo Gui Ꮊഁ, 531n13 Zuo Shunsheng Ꮊ㟰㘪, 534, 535

INDEX OF DOCUMENTS, PUBLICATIONS, AND ELECTRONIC RESOURCES

ABC Series, 535, 536 Analects. See Lunyu Annals. See Chunqiu Baichuan xuehai ⱒᎱᅌ⍋ (One hundred streams from the sea of learning), 531n13 Baidu baike ⱒᑺⱒ⾥ (Baidu encyclopedia), 341–43 Baihu tong ⱑ㰢䗮 (The Comprehensive Discussions in the White Tiger Hall), 146, 206 Baihua Mengzi duben ⱑ䁅ᄳᄤ䅔ᴀ (Mencius reader in vernacular), 194–95 Baijia xing ⱒᆊྦྷ (Hundred surnames), 227 Baike xiaocongshu ⱒ⾥ᇣশ᳌ (Universal Library), 535, 536–37 Bajia pingpi Honglou meng ܿᆊ䀩ᡍ㋙ ῧ໶ (Dream of the Red Chamber with contributions from eight commentators), 175 Baoguang ji 㨚‫ܝ‬䲚 (Collection of concealing the light), 246 Baoyantang miji ᇊ丣ූ⾬ボ (Secret satchel from the Hall of Treasuring Yan [Zhenqing], 524 Beijing daxue congshu ࣫Ҁ໻ᅌশ᳌ (Beijing University series), 534 Beixi ziyi ࣫⑾ᄫ㕽 (Beixi’s meanings of characters), 86–87, 88–89n14 Bencao gangmu ᴀ㤝㎅Ⳃ, 28

“Benguan fuyin shuobu yuanqi” ᴀ仼䰘ॄ䁾䚼 ㎷䍋 (An explanation of the reasons for our publication of a fiction supplement), 546 “Biaodian zhi gexin” ῭咲П䴽ᮄ (Reform of punctuation) (by Chen Wangdao), 136 Biyan lu ⹻Ꭺ䣘 (The Blue Cliff Record), 248n5 Buddhist Studies Authority Database Project, 516 Caifeng bao 䞛乼ฅ (Gathered trends daily), 543 Caizi Mudan ting ᠡᄤ⠵Ѝҁ (The genius book of The Peony Pavilion). See Mudan ting Cambridge History of Ancient China, The, xiii Cang Jie pian ‫䷵ם‬㆛ (Chapters of Cang Jie), 63n2 CBETA (Chinese Buddhist Electronic Text Association / Zhonghua dianzi fodian xiehui Ё㧃䳏ᄤԯ‫݌‬न᳗), 466–67, 468, 470, 471 Cefu yuangui ‫ݞ‬ᑰ‫ܗ‬啰 (), 331n3 Changchun yuan yushi gongji ᱶ᯹㢥ᕵ䀺ᙁ ㋔ (Account of the imperial examination at Changchun Garden), 525 Changes. See Yijing CHANT (Chinese Ancient Texts / Handa wenku ⓶䘨᭛ᑿ), 466, 467, 514, 515 Chaoyu shiwu yin ╂䁲कѨ䷇ (Dictionary of Chaozhou dialect on the system of fifteen initials), 72

626

Index of Documents, Publications, and Electronic Resources

Cha shisu meiyue tongjichuan ᆳϪ֫↣᳜㍅㿜 ‫( ڇ‬Chinese Monthly Magazine), 549, 563–64 Chen Siwang ji 䱇ᗱ⥟䲚 (Collection of works by Prince Si of Chen), 336 China Digest (Huaxia wenzhai 㧃໣᭛ᨬ), 570 China Historical GIS (CHGIS), 472 Chinese Biographical Database Project (CBDB), 472, 516 Chinese History: A New Manual, xiii Chinese Poem Net (Zhongguo shige wang Ё೑ 䆫℠㔥), 570 Chinese Text Project, 444, 467, 468, 470–72 passim, 515–16 Chonggu wenjue ዛস᭛㿷 (Prose techniques that honor antiquity), 221, 233, 235, 240 Chongwen zongmu ዛ᭛㐑Ⳃ (Comprehensive catalog of the Academy for Venerating Literature), 332n22, 494 Chongyang fenli shihua ji 䞡䱑ߚṼक࣪䲚 (Collection of ten transformations based on Chongyang’s sectioning a pear), 246 Chongyang jiaohua ji 䞡䱑ᬭ࣪䲚 (Collection of Chongyang’s transforming influence), 246 Chongyang quanzhen ji 䞡䱑ܼⳳ䲚 (Chongyang’s Quanzhen collection), 246 Chongyang zhenren jinguan yusuo jue 䞡䱑ⳳ Ҏ䞥䮰⥝䥪㿷 (Instructions on the golden pass and jade lock of the Perfected One Chongyang), 246 Choushi jinnang 䜻Ϫ䣺ಞ (Precious guide to social intercourse), 321 Chuci Ἦ䖁 (Verses of Chu), 160, 163, 202, 215, 301, 486. See also “Jiuge”; “Lisao”; and “Tianwen” “Chunmeng lu” ᯹໶䣘 (Recounting a spring dream) (by Zheng Xi), 251 Chunqiu ᯹⾟ (Annals), 145, 179, 210, 212–13, 330, 352–54, 356, 372, 476, 479 Chunqiu rishi zhiyi ᯹⾟᮹亳䊾⭥ (Inquiry into solar eclipses in the Annals), 526 Chunqiu sanzhuan yitong kao ᯹⾟ϝ‫⭄ڇ‬ৠ 㗗 (Comparative investigation of the three commentaries to the Annals), 526 “Chunye xiyu” ᯹໰୰䲼 (Delighting in the rain on a spring evening) (by Du Fu), 121–24 Chusanzang jiji ߎϝ㮣㿬䲚 (Collected records of the production of the Tripi‫ܒ‬aka), 486–87, 488 Chuxue ji ߱ᅌ㿬 (Record of early learning), 296–304, 304n9, 305n10, 308 Cihai 䖁⍋ (Ocean of words), 91, 94, 96 Ciyuan 䖁⑤ (Source of words), 91, 92–93, 94, 96 Concordance to Hsiao Ching (Xiaojing yinde ᄱ ㍧ᓩᕫ), A, 514

Concordance to the Zhanguoce (Zhanguoce zhuzi suoyin ᠄೟ㄪ䗤ᄫ㋶ᓩ), 514 Cuiyuge pingxuan xingji bixie 㖴࿯䭷䀩䙌㸠ボ ᖙ᫰ (Must-carry-along readings, selected and attached with commentary by the Jade Pavilion of Pleasure), 524–25 Da Dai Liji ໻᠈⾂㿬 (Elder Dai’s Book of Rites), 415, 480 Da Tang xinyu ໻૤ᮄ䁲 (New account of the great Tang), 296, 304 Dahui Pujue Chanshi yulu ໻᜻᱂㾎⽾᏿䁲 䣘 (Recorded sayings of the Chan master Dahui Pujue), 244–45 Daishi 咯৆ (History of eyebrow cosmetics), 526 Danyang ji Ѝ䱑䲚 (Collection from Danyang), 218–19 Daodejing 䘧ᖋ㍧ (Classic of the Way and Its Virtue), 115–16 “Daowang shi sanshou diyi” ᚐѵ䀽ϝ佪㄀ϔ (“Mourning the Departed, First of Three Poems”) (by Pan Yue), 162–64 Daxi ໻㋏. See Zhongguo xinwenxue daxi “Daxu” ໻ᑣ (“Great Preface”), 158–59 “Daxue” ໻ᅌ (“Great Learning”), 175 Dharma Drum Time Authority Database, 472 Difang ribao ഄᮍ᮹ฅ (Local news), 564 “Dili zhi” ഄ⧚ᖫ (Treatise on geography) (from Jiu Tangshu), 377 Diliu caizi shu ㄀݁ᠡᄤ᳌ (The sixth book of genius), 186–87 “Dineng er” Ԣ㛑‫( ܦ‬An imbecile child) (by Ye Shengtao), 21–22 Ding Ling yanjiu ziliao ϕ⦆ⷨお䌘᭭ (Research materials on Ding Ling), 459 Dingqin Chongwenge huizuan shimin wanyong zhengzong buqiuren 哢䢳ዛ᭛䭷ᔭ㑖຿⇥ 㨀⫼ℷᅫϡ∖Ҏ (Guide to all that is useful and correct for scholars and the common people, collected by the Chongwenge, newly cut), 318–19 Diyici de qinmi jiechu ㄀ϔ⃵ⱘ㽾ᆚ᥹㿌 (The first intimate touch), 570 Documents. See Shangshu Docusky, 472 Dongfang zazhi ᵅᮍ䲰䁠 (The Eastern Miscellany), 283n3, 550 Dongwuxue dacidian ࢩ⠽ᅌ໻䖁‫( ݌‬Zoological Nomenclature: A Complete Dictionary of Zoological Terms), 91 Doufu jie 䈚㜤៦ (Abstinence of tofu eaters), 527

Index of Documents, Publications, and Electronic Resources 627 Du Honglou meng gangling 䅔㋙ῧ໶㎅䷬ (General principles on reading Dream of the Red Chamber), 177n7 Dubao shouce 䅔ฅ᠟‫( ݞ‬Newspaper readers’ handbook), 99 Dupian xinshu ᴰ俭ᮄ᳌ (The Book of Swindles), 254 Dushi guanjian 䅔৆ㅵ㽟 (Humble opinions on reading the histories), 526 Dushu 䇏к (Reading), 560n16 Encyclopedia of Geography, Comprising a Complete Description of the Earth, Physical, Statistical, Civil, and Political, 437 Ershinian mudu zhi guaixianzhuang Ѡक ᑈⳂⵍПᗾ⧒⢔ (Strange happenings eyewitnessed over two decades), 547n11 Ershiyi shi Ѡकϔ৆ (Twenty-one histories), 387 Ershisi shi Ѡकಯ৆ (Twenty-four histories), 387 Erya (Approaching the elegant), 54, 55–57, 61, 62, 63, 64n6, 80, 86, 152, 181, 292, 509 Fahua jing ⊩㧃㍧ (Lotus Sutra), 126, 132, 487, 488, 489n10 Fangyan ᮍ㿔 (Regional speech), 61, 78 Fangyin diaocha biaoge ᮍ䷇䂓ᶹ㸼Ḑ (Tables for surveying dialect pronunciation), 75–76 Fangyin diaocha zibiao ᮍ䷇䂓ᶹᄫ㸼 (Characters tables for dialect surveying), 76 Fangshenghui yue ᬒ⫳᳗㋘ (Code of Society of Freeing Captive Animals), 527 Fayan ⊩㿔 (Exemplary Figures), 145, 146, 417 Feng Changbaishan ji ᇕ䭋ⱑቅ㿬 (Account of the bestowal at Changbai Mountain), 525 Fengtu ji 乼ೳ㿬 (Records of local customs), 181 Fenshu ⛮᳌ (A book to burn), 183 Fojiao dacidian ԯᬭ໻䖁‫( ݌‬Great dictionary of Buddhism), 91 Foming jing ԯৡ㍧ (Sūtra of the Buddhas’ names), 132–33 Furen xiewa kao ်Ҏ䵟㼾㗗 (Investigation of women’s shoes and stockings), 526 Fusheng liuji ⍂⫳݁㿬 (Six Records of a Life Adrift), 288 Fuyin baokan ziliao ໡ॄ᡹ߞ䌘᭭ (Periodical and newspaper materials reprint series), 456 Gaiding Yuanxian chuanqi ᬍᅮ‫ܗ‬䊶‫ڇ‬༛ (Revised plays by Yuan masters), 261 Ganqing men zoudui ji ђ⏙䭔༣ᇡ㿬 (Record of an audience with the emperor at Ganqing Gate), 525

Ganze yao ⫬╸䃴 (Rumors of seasonable rain), 251 “Gaozu benji” 催⼪ᴀ㋔ (Basic annals of Gaozu) (from Shiji), 356 Gejing 匓㍧ (Classic of pigeons), 526 Gengzi guobian tanci ᑮᄤ೟䅞ᔜ䀲 (The national calamity of 1900), 542 Gentleman’s Magazine, The, 548 “Geye” 䭷໰ (“Night in the Pavilion”) (by Du Fu), 165–66 Gezhi congshu Ḑ㟈শ᳌, 530n1 Gongyang zhuan ݀㕞‫( ڇ‬Gongyang tradition), 145 Government Gazette (Malaya), 563 “Great Preface.” See “Da xu” Gu suzi lüe (Overview of ancient vernacular characters), 88n2 Guaishi zan ᗾ⷇䋞 (Encomium to strange rocks), 526 “Guan Bali youhua ji” 㾔Ꮘ咢⊍⬿㿬 (Viewing oil paintings in Paris) (by Xue Fucheng), 288 Guanchang xianxing ji ᅬจ⧒ᔶ㿬 (Officialdom Unmasked), 542 Guang Baichuan xuehai ᒷⱒᎱᅌ⍋ (Expanded One hundred streams from the sea of learning), 531n13 Guang Hongming ji ᒷᓬᯢ䲚 (Expanded Collection on the spreading of the light), 217 Guangya (Expanded Erya), 61 Guangyun ([Finely distinguished] rimes, expanded), 61, 66–71, 72, 74, 79–80 Guangzhou youlan xiaozhi ᒷᎲ䘞㾑ᇣᖫ (Short record of a Guangzhou tour), 526 “Guanju” 䮰䲢 (“The Ospreys Cry”) (from Shijing), 211 Guanshi houlu (Sequel to Record of observing rocks), 526 Guanshi lu 㾔⷇䣘 (Record of observing rocks), 526 Guanyu jiefang yilai wenyi shijian qingkuang de baogao (Report regarding the state of literary and artistic practice since the liberation), 554–55 Guanzi ㅵᄤ (Master Guan), 220, 482n21 Guiguzi 儐䈋ᄤ (Ghost Valley Master), 482n17 Guitai wanyan 啰㟎⨀⨄ (Beautiful jades of Tortoise Terrace), 528 Guji jinzhu xinyi congshu স㈡Ҟ⊼ᮄ䅃শ ᳌ (Collectanea of classics with modern annotations and new translations), 193 Gujin nüshi সҞཇ৆ (Women scholars past and present), 237, 240

628

Index of Documents, Publications, and Electronic Resources

“Gujin ren biao” সҞҎ㸼 (Table of figures, past and present) (from Hanshu), 359 Gujin tangai সҞ䄮ὖ (Talk on general matters, old and new), 249 Gujin tushu jicheng সҞ೪᳌䲚៤ (Collected writings and illustrations, past and present), 324–25, 331, 331n2, 332n7, 511 Gujin xiao সҞュ (Laughter then and now), 249 Gujin yunhui juyao সҞ䷏᳗㟝㽕 (Essentials of the collection of ancient and modern rimes), 71–72 Guoshi ೟৆ (History of the state), 496 Guowen bao ೟᭛ฅ (National news), 545–46 Guowen jiaokeshu ೟᭛ᬭ⾥᳌ (National language textbook), 286 Guoxiu ji ೟⾔䲚 (Collection of the kingdom’s outstanding talents), 217, 218 Guoxue jikan ೟ᅌᄷߞ (National learning quarterly), 512 Guoxue xiaocongshu ೟ᅌᇣশ᳌ (National learning small series), 539n19 Guoyu ೟䁲 (Dialogues of the states), 202, 221, 238, 239 “Guoyu luomazi de yanjiu” ೟䁲㕙侀ᄫⱘⷨお (A study of romanized Chinese writing) (by Yuen Ren Chao), 20 Guoyu yuekan ೟䁲᳜ߞ (National language monthly), 18–20 Guoyu zidian ೟䁲ᄫ‫( ݌‬Dictionary of the national language), 91 “Gushi shijiushou” স䀽कб佪 (“Nineteen Old Poems”), 302 Gushi yuan স䀽⑤ (Source of ancient poetry), 225, 229 Guwen guanjian স᭛䮰䥉 (Key to ancient-style prose), 221, 233, 235–36 Guwen guanzhi স᭛㾔ℶ (Pinnacle of ancientstyle prose), 202, 239–40 Guwen leichao স᭛串ᡘ (Ancient-style prose transcribed by category), 235, 236 Guwen pinwai lu স᭛ક໪䣘 (Ancient-style prose beyond the rankings), 236–37, 240 Guwen yuanjian স᭛⏉䨦 (Profound mirror for ancient-style prose), 238, 239 Guwen yuexuan স᭛㋘䙌 (Abridged selections of ancient-style prose), 238 Guwen zhenbao স᭛ⳳᇊ (Genuine treasures of ancient literature), 234 Guwenci leizuan স᭛䖁串㑖 (Ancient-style phraseology compiled by genre), 238, 285

Haiguo tuzhi ⍋೟೪ᖫ (Illustrated treatise of the maritime kingdoms), 437 Haishang fanhua meng ⍋Ϟ㐕㧃໶ (Dreams of Shanghai splendor), 542, 544 Haishanghua liezhuan ⍋Ϟ㢅߫‫( ڇ‬The Singsong Girls of Shanghai), 545 Haishang qishu ⍋Ϟ༛᳌ (Marvelous writings of Shanghai), 545 Han Feizi 䶧䴲ᄤ (Master Han Fei), 206 Han Ganquan gongwa kao ⓶⫬⊝ᆂ⪺㗗 (Investigation of a Han Ganquan Palace roof tile), 526 Hanji. See Scripta Sinica Hanji dianzi wenxian ziliaoku ⓶㈡䳏ᄤ᭛⥏䊛 ᭭ᑿ. See Scripta Sinica Hanshi waizhuan 䶧⇣໪‫( ڇ‬Han Ying’s Illustrations of the Didactic Application of the “Classic of Songs”), 146 Hanshu ⓶᳌ (History of the Han), 181, 206, 208, 351, 358–59, 361–63, 364–66, 368, 378, 386, 414, 480, 483–86 passim Hanyi shijie mingzhu ⓶䅃Ϫ⬠ৡ㨫 (Chinese translations of the world’s famous works), 537 Hanyu dacidian ⓶䁲໻䀲‫( ݌‬Great dictionary of the Chinese language), 106 “Hanzi gaige” ⓶ᄫᬍ䴽 (Reformation of Chinese characters). See Guoyu yuekan “Hanzi geming” ⓶ᄫ䴽ੑ (Script revolution) (by Qian Xuantong), 18–20. Hetu ⊇೪ (River chart), 153 Heyue yingling ji ⊇᎑㣅䴜䲚 (Collection of the finest souls of our rivers and alps), 218, 219 History of the Peloponnesian War, xviii Honglou meng ㋙ῧ໶ (The Dream of the Red Chamber or The Story of the Stone), 173–75, 455n5 “Honglou meng dufa” ㋙ῧ໶䅔⊩ (How to read Dream of the Red Chamber), 177n8 Honglou meng leisuo ㋙ῧ໶串㋶ (Classified reference notes on Dream of the Red Chamber), 177n7 Hongming ji ᓬᯢ䲚 (Collection on the spreading of the light), 217 Hongwu zhengyun ⋾℺ℷ䷏ (Correct rimes of the Hongwu reign), 82, 83, 310, 311, 495 Huainanzi ⏂फᄤ (Master of Huainan), 181, 205, 300–301, 311 Huajian ji 㢅䭧䲚 (Among the Flowers), 202 Huajue ⬿㿷 (Painting formulas), 526

Index of Documents, Publications, and Electronic Resources 629 Huang Ming jingshi wenbian ⱛᯢ㍧Ϫ᭛㎼ (A compilation of statecraft writings from the August Ming), 391 Huang Ming shigai ⱛᯢ৆ὖ (Summary history of the August Ming), 386 Huang Ming shiqie ⱛᯢ৆ゞ (Historical outline of the August Ming), 386 Huang Ming shu ⱛᯢ᳌ (Book of the August Ming), 386 Huangji jingshi shu ⱛὉ㍧Ϫ᳌ (Book for governing the world through the utmost of majesty), 72–73 Huanglan ⱛ㾑 (For imperial perusal), 296, 509 Huanyu suoji ᇄᅛ⨷㋔ (Trivial notes from across the earth), 545 Huayulou congchao 㢅䲼ῧশ䟨 (Collected transcriptions from the Flower Rain Tower), 530 Hubao Ⓚฅ (Shanghai news), 541 Hucong xixun rilu ᠜ᕲ㽓Ꮅ᮹䣘 (A retainer’s daily record of the emperor’s western tour), 525 Hudong baike Ѧࡼⱒ⾥ (Hudong encyclopedia), 342–43 (Huitu) Shanghai zaji ˄㐾೪˅Ϟ⍋䲰㿬 (Random notes on Shanghai, illustrated), 546n1 Huitu Sishu sucheng xinti duben 㐾೪ಯ᳌䗳 ៤ᮄ储䅔ᴀ (Illustrated Four Books quick readers in new format), 191–92 “Huizhen ji” ᳗ⳳ㿬 (Record of encountering a transcendent) (by Yuan Zhen), 251 Huizuan jiali tieshi jiyao ᔭ㑖ᆊ⾂Ꮺᓣ䲚㽕 (Collected essentials of family rituals and model forms), 322 Humong jahoe 㿧㩭ᄫ᳗ (Collection of characters to educate the ignorant), 62 Huyou mengying Ⓚ䘞໶ᕅ (Shadows of dreams of Shanghai travels), 546n2 Huyou zaji Ⓚ䘞䲰㿬 (Random notes on traveling to Shanghai), 546n2 Imagined Communities, 562 Index to Yi Li and to the Titles Quoted in the Commentaries, 513 Index to Shuo Yuan, 512–13 “Indexing Chinese Books” (by William Hung), 510 Inferno, 401 Innocents Abroad, or The New Pilgrim’s Progress, The, 287

Jia ᆊ (Family), 451 Jiang Jiuyuan ji ᇛህ೦㿬 (Record of Jiang and Jiu gardens), 526 “Jiangnan feng Li Guinian” ∳फ䗶ᴢ啰ᑈ (“Meeting Li Guinian in Jiangnan”) (by Du Fu), 230 Jiangnan xingye kao ∳फ᯳䞢㗗 (Analysis of constellations [visible in] the Jiangnan region), 526 Jianxia zhuan ࡡִ‫( ڇ‬Biographies of swordsmen), 253 Jiaoshan guding kao ⛺ቅস哢㗗 (Investigation of the inscription on the ancient Jiaoshan Tripod), 526 Ji’en lu ㋔ᘽ䣘 (Record of the emperor’s grace), 525 Jilu huibian ㋔䣘ᔭ㎼ (Collection of records), 528 Jin Ping Mei 䞥⫊ṙ (The Plum in the Golden Vase), 172, 173 Jindai mishu ⋹䘂⾬᳌ (Rare texts reached through waterways), 524 Jindai Ou-Mei dumuju xuan 䖥ҷℤ㕢⤼ᐩ࡛ 䙌 (Contemporary Euro-American oneacts), 280 Jindai wenxue pipingshi 䖥ҷ᭛ᅌᡍ䀩৆ (History of modern literary criticism), 404 Jing Yang tingxiu ji 㤞᦮ᤎ⾔䲚 (Collection of outstanding talents of Jing and Yang), 219 Jingji cuangu ㍧㈡ㆵ䀕 (Exegetic interpretations of classic texts), 512 “Jingji kao” ㍧㈡㗗 (Study of books), 426 “Jingji zhi” ㍧㈡ᖫ (Treatise on bibliography) (from Suishu), 387, 481n8, 483–86, 487, 489n13 Jingshi tongyan 䄺Ϫ䗮㿔 (Accessible words to caution the world), 255 Jingu qiguan Ҟস༛㾔 (Marvelous sightings then and now), 255–56 Jinshan rixinlu 䞥ቅ᮹ᮄ䣘 (The Golden Hills’ News), 566 Jinshi 䞥৆ (History of the Jin), 385 Jinshu ᰝ᳌ (History of the Jin), 181, 363 Jintian Ҟ໽ (Today), 556–58 Jiu Tangshu 㟞૤᳌ (Old history of the Tang), 181, 294n1, 363, 373, 375, 377, 381, 383n9, 387, 417 Jiu Wudaishi 㟞Ѩҷ৆ (Old history of the Five Dynasties), 363, 375 “Jiuge” б℠ (“Nine Songs”) (from Chuci), 160–61, 162

630

Index of Documents, Publications, and Electronic Resources

Jiujia jizhu Du shi бᆊ䲚⊼ᴰ䀽 (Nine scholars’ collected commentary on Du Fu’s poetry), 165 Jiulü 䜦ᕟ (Rules for drinking), 526 Jiyi lu 䲚⭄䣘 (Record of collected strange accounts), 251 Jiyun 䲚䷏ (Rimes with collected scholia), 63, 72 Juben congkan ࡛ᴀশߞ (Play script series), 282 “Jun Shi” ৯ཁ (Lord Shi) (from Shangshu), 151–52 Junzhai dushu zhi 䚵唟䅔᳌ᖫ (Record of reading in my prefectural studio), 332n22 Jushe yue 㦞⼒㋘ (Code of Chrysanthemum Society), 527 Kaiming xinbian guowen duben 䭟ᯢᮄ㎼೟ ᭛䅔ᴀ (Kaiming new national language readers), 287 “Kang wang zhi gao” ᒋ⥟П䁹 (Proclamation of King Kang) (from Shangshu), 114 Kang Ri jiuguo xijuji (Anti-Japanese national salvation drama anthology), 282 Kangxi zidian ᒋ❭ᄫ‫( ݌‬Kangxi dictionary), 29–30, 34, 63, 83, 87, 92, 98 Kangzhan dumu juxuan ᡫ᠄⤼ᐩ࡛䙌 (Selected War of Resistance one-acts), 282 Kexue ⾥ᅌ (Science), 136 “Kongzi shijia” ᄨᄤϪᆊ (Hereditary house of Kongzi) (from Shiji), 208 Kuaishuo xuji ᖿ䁾㑠㿬 (Sequel to On pleasure), 527 “Kuangren riji” ⢖Ҏ᮹㿬 (“Diary of a Madman”) (by Lu Xun), 22 Lansheng tu ᬀࢱ೪ (Board game of visiting scenic spots), 526 “Lanting ji xu” 㰁ҁ䲚ᑣ (“Preface to the Lanting Collection”) (by Wang Xizhi), 299–300, 305n10 Laozi 㗕ᄤ, 115–16, 118n11, 220 Laozi zhigui 㗕ᄤᮼ⅌ (Guide to Laozi), 482n17 Lat Pau ৏ฅ, 564–65 Leishuo 串䁾 (Categorized discourses), 250–51 “Li Wa zhuan” ᴢ࿗‫“( ڇ‬Tale of Li Wa”), 184 “Li zhi” Ლᖫ (Treatise on calendrics) (from Jiu Tangshu), 377 “Li zhi” ⾂ᖫ (Treatise on state ritual) (from Jiu Tangshu), 377 Lianwen shiyi 䗷᭛䞟㕽 (Connected sentence riddles), 527 Liaoshi 䙐৆ (History of the Liao), 385 Liexian zhuan ߫ҭ‫( ڇ‬Biographies of immortals), 181

Liezi ߫ᄤ (Master Lie), 308, 415 Liji ⾂㿬 (Book of Rites), 146, 150, 157n23, 415, 480. See also San Li Linji lu 㞼△䣘 (The Record of Linji), 243–44 “Lisao” 䲶個 (“Encountering Sorrow”) (from Chuci), 160, 181, 186, 188 Liuqiu ru taixue shimo ⧝⧗ܹ໾ᅌྟ᳿ (Story of entering the Imperial College of Ryukyu Kingdom), 526 Liushizhong qu ݁क。᳆ (Sixty plays), 278 Liushu benyi ݁᳌ᴀ㕽 (Original meaning of the six principles of graph formation), 85 Liushu jingyun ݁᳌㊒㯞 (Mysterious essence of the six principles of graph formation), 84–85, 86 Liushu gu ݁᳌ᬙ (Origins of the six principles of graph formation), 85 Liushu tong ݁᳌㍅ (System of the six principles of graph formation), 85 Liushu zheng’e ݁᳌ℷ䄠 (Correcting errors in the six principles of graph formation), 83 Liushu zongyao ݁᳌㐑㽕 (Comprehensive summary of the six principles of graph formation), 85 Liyan jie ֮㿔㾷 (Explanations of colloquial speech), 88n2 Long Shu yuwen 䲈㳔们㘲 (More stories of the Long and Shu regions), 526 Longkan shoujing 啡啩᠟䦵 (Hand mirror of the dragon niche), 28, 29 Lotus Sutra. See Fahua jing Lü Ou zazhi ᮙℤ䲰䁠 (Travel to Europe), 567 Lu Xun quanji 剕䖙ܼ䲚 (Lu Xun’s collected works), 271–72, 502–4 Lu Xun shouji he cangshu mulu 元䖙᠟䐳੠ 㮣кⳂᔩ (Catalog of Lu Xun’s articles of handwriting and collected books), 503–4 “Luming” 呓勈 (“The Deer Cry”) (from Shijing), 211 Lunheng 䂪㸵 (Discourses in the balance), 163 Lunyu 䂪䁲 (Analects), 145, 181, 193, 210, 494, 513 Lunyu 䂪䁲 (Analects; literary journal), 506 Luoshu ⋯᳌ (Luo writing), 153 Luotuo Xiangzi 做偐⼹ᄤ (Camel Xiangzi), 455n4 Lüshi chunqiu ਖ⇣᯹⾟ (The Annals of Lü Buwei), 205 Mantang mopin ⓿ූ๼ક (Mantang’s ranking of inks), 526 Mao Shi ↯䀽 (Mao Odes). See Shijing

Index of Documents, Publications, and Electronic Resources 631 Mao Shi guyin kao ↯䀽স䷇㗗 (An analysis of the ancient sounds in the Mao Odes), 81 MARKUS, 472 Mengzi ᄳᄤ (Mencius), 181, 191–93, 194, 220, 286 Mengzi kao ᄳᄤ㗗 (Investigation of [the chronology of] Mencius), 526 Mengzi xin duben ᄳᄤᮄ䅔ᴀ (New Mencius reader), 192 Mengzi yizhu ᄳᄤ䅃⊼ (Mencius, translated and annotated), 193, 194 Miaodong baike ⾦ពⱒ⾥ (Understanding encyclopedia entries within seconds), 343–44 Miaosu jiwen 㢫֫㋔㘲 (Record of customs of the Miao people), 526 Ming shilu ᯢᆺ䣘 (Ming veritable records), 389–91, 431 Mingchen jingji lu ৡ㞷㍧△䣘 (Records of management by notable officials), 392 Minghe yuyin 勈厈们䷇ (Leftover sounds of the calling crane), 247 Minglun dadian ᯢ‫׿‬໻‫( ݌‬Grand institution for illuminating relationships), 385 Mingshi ᯢ৆ (History of the Ming), 332n22, 385, 389–92 Minguo shiqi zongshumu ⇥೟ᰖᳳ㐑᳌Ⳃ (Complete bibliography of the Republican period), 279 Mingwen gui ᯢ᭛⅌ (Return to Ming writings), 524 Mingwen ji ৡ᭛䲚 (Collection of famous writings), 222 Mingxiang ji ᯢ⼹㿬 (Record of signs from the unseen realm), 243 Mingyuan shigui ৡၯ䀽⅌ (Poetic exemplars from renowned ladies), 202 Mozi ๼ᄤ (Master Mo), 513 Mu Tianzi zhuan 〚໽ᄤ‫( ڇ‬Account of King Mu), 251 Mudan ting ⠵Ѝҁ (The Peony Pavilion), 186, 187, 265 “Mulan ci” ᳼㰁䖁 (“Ballad of Mulan”), 286 Muqian ji Ⳃࠡ䲚 (Collection of [things] before one’s eyes), 88n2 Nanhua फ㧃 (Southern florescence). See Zhuangzi Nanshi फ৆ (History of the Southern Dynasties), 363, 366–67 Neiye ܻὁ (Inward Training), 480 New Threads. See Xin yusi News Digest (Xinwen wenzhai ᮄ㘲᭛ᨬ). See China Digest

“Ni ‘Mingyue he jiaojiao’ ” ᫀᯢ᳜ԩⱢⱢ (“Imitating ‘How Bright the Moon’ ”) (by Lu Ji), 302 Nüjie ཇ៦ (Lessons for women), 237 Odes. See Shijing Order of Things, The, 25 Orphan. See Zhaoshi gu’er ji Ouzhou shibao ℤ⌆ᰖฅ (Nouvelles d’Europe), 566 Pianya 侶䲙 (Elegance of pairs), 88n3 Pianti wenchao 侶储᭛ᡘ (Selections of parallel prose), 336 Pipa ji ⨉⨊㿬 (The Lute), 183 “The Problem of the Chinese Language” (by Yuen Ren Chao), 18 “Proposal for the Implementation of New-style Punctuation.” See “Qing banxing xinshi biaodian fuhao yi’an (xiuzheng an)” Qianfeng yuekan ࠡ䢦᳜ߞ (Avant-garde monthly), 506 Qianjia shi गᆊ䀽 (Poems of a thousand masters), 225–28, 231 Qianqingtang shumu ग䷗ූ᳌Ⳃ (Catalog of Thousand-Acre Hall), 385 Qianzi wen (Thousand character classic), 4, 227, 434, 494 Qie pangzhu shilei jielu 䤹ᮕ䀏џ串᥋䣘 (Quick guide to all categories of things, cut with sideline notes), 320–21 Qieyun ߛ䷏ (Finely distinguished rimes), 54–55, 60–61, 63, 64n6, 74, 79–81 Qiezhong ji ㆟Ё䲚 (Collection from my book box), 219 Qiezi shiyi ߛᄫ䞟㕽 (Dividing character riddles), 527 “Qifa” ϗⱐ (Seven stimuli), 527 “Qiliao” ϗⰖ (Seven remedies), 527 Qilu ϗ䣘 (Seven records), 481n6 Qilüe ϗ⬹ (Seven epitomes), 250, 252, 328–31 passim, 414, 477, 481n2, 481n4, 481n8, 481n9, 481n10, 493, 495–97 “Qin benji” ⾺ᴀ㋔ (Basic annals of Qin) (from Shiji), 355–56 Qin Han wen ⾺⓶᭛ (Qin and Han dynasty prose), 235, 236 “Qing banxing xinshi biaodian fuhao yi’an (xiuzheng an)” 䂟䷦㸠ᮄᓣ῭咲ヺ 㰳䅄Ḝ˄ׂℷḜ˅ (Proposal for the implementation of new-style punctuation [revised version]), 135–36, 137–40

632

Index of Documents, Publications, and Electronic Resources

Qinghe zhenren beiyou yulu ⏙੠ⳳҎ࣫䘞䁲䣘 (Recorded sayings of the northern travels of the Perfected Qinghe), 246 “Qingmiao” ⏙ᒳ (“The Hallowed Temple”) (from Shijing), 211 Qingshi ᚙ৆ (History of emotion), 254 Qingzhong pu ⏙ᖴ䄰 (Register of the pure and loyal), 265 Quan Shanggu Sandai Qin Han Sanguo Liuchao wen ܼϞসϝҷ⾺⓶ϝ೟݁ᳱ ᭛ (Complete prose of Far Antiquity, Three Ages, Qin, Han, Three Kingdoms, and Six Dynasties), 239 Quan Tangshi ܼ૤䀽 (Complete Tang poems), 121–23 passim, 202, 224–25, 270 Quan Tangwen ܼ૤᭛ (Complete Tang prose), 239 “Quli, xia” ᳆⾂ϟ (Ritual punctilio, last section) (from Liji), 155n2 Renmin ribao Ҏ⇥᮹ฅ (People’s Daily), 100 Renmin wenxue Ҏ⇥᭛ᅌ (People’s literature), 551, 555–56, 558–59 Renpu butu Ҏ䄰㺰೪ (Supplementary illustrations to Register of the human body), 527 Renrui lu Ҏ⨲䣘 (Record of people of venerable age), 527 Rijiang Sishu jieyi ᮹䃯ಯ᳌㾷㕽 (Daily lectures on the Four Books with explanations), 193–94 Risheng bao ᮹छฅ (Rising sun news), 564 Rongzhai suibi ᆍ唟䱼ㄚ (Jottings from Rong Studio), 312 Rulin waishi ‫ۦ‬ᵫ໪৆ (The Scholars), 406n21 Ruxue jingwu ‫ۦ‬ᅌ䄺ᙳ (Sudden awakening through Confucian learning), 530n1 Saddharma Pu۬‫ڲ‬arīka Sūtra (Scripture of the Lotus Blossom of the Fine Dharma). See Fahua jing San Bai Qian ϝⱒग (The three, the hundred, and the thousand), 227 San Li ϝ⾂ (Three rites classics), 150, 151 San Li mulu ϝ⾂Ⳃ䣘 (Catalog of the Three rites classics), 501 Sanbaipian niaoshou caomu ji ϝⱒ㆛効⥌㤝 ᳼㿬 (Account of birds, beasts, plants, and trees in Classic of Odes), 526 Sanchao guoshi ϝᳱ೟৆ (National history of the three courts), 389 Sanguo yanyi ϝ೟ⓨ㕽 (Romance of the Three Kingdoms), 172, 173, 401

Sanguo zhi ϝ೟ᖫ (Record of the Three Kingdoms), 368 Sanguo zhi tongsu yanyi ϝ೟ᖫ䗮֫ⓨ㕽 (The popular romance of the Three Kingdoms), 170 Sanjia pingben ϝᆊ䀩ᴀ (Edition with contributions from three commentaries), 174 Sanmin zhoukan ϝ⇥䘅ߞ (Three People’s [Principles] weekly), 567 Sanyan erpai ϝ㿔Ѡᢡ (Three words and two slaps), 202, 255 “Sanyue sanri” ϝ᳜ϝ᮹ (“Third Day of the Third Month”), 299 Sanzi jing ϝᄫ㍧ (Three character classic), 227 Scripta Sinica (Hanji dianzi wenxian ziliaoku ⓶ ㈡䳏ᄤ᭛⥏䊛᭭ᑿ), 361, 465–66, 467, 471 “Seeing Off Qiwu Qian Who Having Failed the Civil Service Examination Is Going Home” 䗕㍺↟┯㨑㄀䙘䛝 (by Wang Wei), 219 Shangshu ᇮ᳌ (Esteemed documents), 114, 146, 148, 150, 151–52, 156n15, 202, 205, 209–13 passim, 221, 364, 478, 480 Shangzheng 㿈ᬓ (Regulations of the goblet), 526 Shanhai jing ቅ⍋㍧ (Classic of Mountains and Seas), 415 Shaonian ᇥᑈ (Youth), 567 Shenbao ⬇ฅ (Shanghai News), 541, 545 Shengshi weiyan ⲯϪॅ㿔 (Words of warning to a prosperous age), 438 Shepu 㲛䄰 (Register of snakes), 526 Shi 䀽 (Odes). See Shijing “Shi’er zhuhou nianbiao” कѠ䃌փᑈ㸼 (Annual table of the twelve regional lords) (from Shiji), 357–58 Shiji ৆㿬 (The Grand Scribe’s Records), 179, 181, 186, 206, 208–10 passim, 221, 239–40, 308, 349, 351, 354–58, 359, 361–63, 364, 372, 378, 485 Shijie fanhua bao Ϫ⬠㐕㧃ฅ (World splendor daily), 543, 544 Shijing 䀽㍧ (Classic of odes), xxvi, 146, 150, 151, 158, 160, 163, 181, 202, 205, 206, 210–13 passim, 214n8, 215, 228, 292, 308, 415, 480 Shiliuguo nianbiao क݁೟ᑈ㸼 (Chronological tables of the Sixteen Kingdoms), 526 Shiming 䞟ৡ (Explanation of names), 61, 80 Shipin 䀽ક (Gradations of poetry), 404 Shipu ⷇䄰 (Register of rocks), 526 Shisanjing कϝ㍧ (Thirteen Confucian classics), 465

Index of Documents, Publications, and Electronic Resources 633 Shishi tongkao Ϫџ䗮㗗 (Comprehensive examination of worldly affairs), 88n2 Shishuo Ϫ䁾 (Tales of the age). See Shishuo xinyu Shishuo xinyu Ϫ䁾ᮄ䁲 (A New Account of Tales of the World), 147, 188, 202, 252, 309 Shitong ৆䗮 (General principles of historiography), 363–64 Shixing yunbian ৆ྦྷ䷏㎼ (Rime dictionary of historical family names), 510 “Shiyue zhi jiao” क᳜ПѸ (New moon of the tenth month) (from Shijing), 168n6 Short Plays by Representative Authors, 280 Shu ᳌ (Documents). See Shangshu Shu Bencao ᳌ᴀ㤝 (Materia medica with reading treatments), 527 “Shui nan” 䁾䲷 (Difficulties of persuasion) (from Han Feizi), 206 Shuihu houzhuan ∈Ⓦᕠ‫( ڇ‬Sequel to The Water Margin), 176 Shuihu zhizhuan pinglin ∈Ⓦᖫ‫ڇ‬䀩ᵫ (The Water Margin with a forest of commentary), 170 Shuihu zhuan ∈Ⓦ‫( ڇ‬The Water Margin or Outlaws of the Marsh), 169–72, 173, 183, 186, 188 Shuijing zhu ∈㍧⊼ (Water classic commentary), 146 Shumu dawen ᳌Ⳃㄨଣ (Questions and answers on catalogs), 500 “Shuo gua” 䁾ऺ (Explication of the hexagrams) (from Yijing), 482n17 “Shuo ziyou” 䁾㞾⬅ (On freedom) (by Zhang Binglin), 286 Shuobu congshu 䁾䚼শ᳌ (Collectanea of fiction), 534 Shuofu 䁾䚯 (Purlieus of discourse), 250–51 Shuoshu 䁾᳌ (On books), 183 Shuowen jiezi 䁾᭛㾷ᄫ (Explaining simple graphs and analyzing complex graphs), 3, 9–10, 17, 26–27, 35, 54, 58–60, 62, 63, 64n6, 80, 84, 86, 88n13, 151, 163, 308, 311, 416, 509, 549 Shuowen jiezi gulin 䁾᭛㾷ᄫ䀕ᵫ (Forest of glosses on Shuowen jiezi), 62 Shuowen jiezi wuyin yunpu 䁾᭛㾷ᄫѨ䷇䷏䄰 (Shuowen jiezi arranged by rime according to five tones), 83 Shuoyuan 䁾㢥 (Garden of persuasions), 181, 202, 252, 309, 512–13 Shuyu 㳔䁲 (The speech of Shu), 79

Shuzhi 㳔ᖫ (Records of Shu), 181 Sibu beiyao ಯ䚼‫٭‬㽕 (Essential writings from the four categories), 535–36 Sibu congkan ಯ䚼শߞ (Collectanea of the four categories), 513, 535–36 Sida qishu ಯ໻༛᳌ (Four marvelous works), 173 Siku quanshu ಯᑿܼ᳌ (Complete writings of the four repositories), xvi, 86, 167n2, 239, 291, 324–31, 332–33n24, 333n25, 387, 426–28, 440, 467, 469, 491–98 passim, 529 Siku quanshu jianming mulu ಯᑿܼ᳌ㇵᯢ Ⳃ䣘 (Simplified catalog of the Complete writings of the four repositories), 326 Siku quanshu zongmu tiyao ಯᑿܼ᳌㐑Ⳃᦤ 㽕 (Catalog with critical abstracts of the Complete writings of the four repositories), 297, 326, 426–27 Sima fa ৌ侀⊩ (Regulations of the colonel), 480 Siming suoji ಯ⑳⨷㋔ (Trivial notes from the four seas), 545 Sisheng yunpu ಯ㙆䷏䄰 (Schema of rimes in all four tones), 72 Sishizhang zhipai shuo ಯकᔉ㋭⠠䁾 (Explanation of forty paper cards), 527 Sishu ಯ᳌ (Four Books), 191–93 Sishu baihua jujie ಯ᳌ⱑ䁅হ㾷 (Four Books, with vernacular explanations verse by verse), 192 Sishu duben ಯ᳌䅔ᴀ (Four Books reader), 193 Sishu yizhu ಯк䆥⊼ (Four Books, translated and annotated), 193 Social History of the Chinese Book, A, 425 Sogou baike ᧰⢫ⱒ⾥ (Sogou encyclopedia), 341–42 Song wenjian ᅟ᭛䨥 (Mirror to Song literature), 235, 238 Songnan mengying ⎲फ໶ᕅ (Shadows of dreams south of Wusong Creek), 546n2 Songren zhuanji ziliao suoyin ᅟҎ‫ڇ‬㿬䊛᭭㋶ ᓩ (Index to Song biographical materials), 516 Songshi ᅟ৆ (History of the Song), 181, 189n5, 332n22, 363, 373, 375, 385, 387 Songshu ᅟ᳌ (History of the Liu-Song), 362–63, 364–68, 370n2 Songting xingji ᵒҁ㸠㋔ (An account of travel to Songting Pass) Soushen houji ᧰⼲ᕠ㿬 (Sequel to In Search of the Supernatural), 258n24

634

Index of Documents, Publications, and Electronic Resources

Soushen ji ᧰⼲㿬 (In Search of the Supernatural), 258n24 Suichutan shumu 䘖߱ූ᳌Ⳃ (Catalog of the Hall of Pursuing My Original Intent), 332n22 Suishu 䱟᳌ (History of the Sui), 221, 222, 387, 481n8, 483–86 passim Sunzi bingfa ᄿᄤ݉⊩ (The Art of War), 147 Taihe zhengyinpu ໾੠ℷ䷇䄰 (Formulary of correct sounds for an era of great peace), 262 Taiping guangji ໾ᑇᒷ㿬 (Wide-ranging recorded compiled in the Taiping era), 252– 53, 254, 255, 258n26, 307–9, 313–14, 315n25 Taiping yulan ໾ᑇᕵ㾑 (Imperial readings compiled in the Taiping era), 252–53, 306–9, 313–14 “Taipu zhen” ໾‫ک‬ㆈ (Admonition to the chamberlain for the imperial stud) (by Yang Xiong), 235 Taishō shinshū Daizōkyō (Taishō revised Tripi৬aka), 467 “*Taiyi sheng shui” ໾ϔ⫳∈ (The Ultimate One gives birth to water), 118n11 “Tan Meiguo ‘yinyue’ ” 䇜㕢೑“䷇Ф” (On American “Music”), 554 Tang Huiyuan jingxuan pidian Tang Song mingxian celun wencui ૤᳗‫ܗ‬㊒䙌 Tang liudian ૤݁‫( ݌‬Six institutions of the Tang), 384 Tang Song badajia wenchao ᅟܿ໻ᆊ᭛䟨 (Prose of the eight great masters of the Tang and Song), 236 Tang wencui ૤᭛㊍ (Quintessence of Tang literature), 235, 238 Tan Gong dingwu ⁔ᓧ㿖䁸 (Correction of mistakes in “Tan Gong”) Tangshi biecai ji ૤䀽߹㺕䲚 (Excised collection of Tang poetry), 225, 230, 232 Tangshi pinhui ૤䀽કᔭ (Graded compendium of Tang poetry), 166, 202 Tangshi sanbaishou ૤䀽ϝⱒ佪 (The three hundred Tang poems), 202, 225–32, 232n5 Tangshu ૤᳌ (History of the Tang). See Jiu Tangshu; Xin Tangshu Tangyun ૤䷏ (Tang rimes), 63 Tanji congshu ⁔޴শ᳌ (Collectanea of a sandalwood desk), 525–28 Text Tools (Chinese Text Project), 470, 472 Three Rites. See San Li Tianduge cangshu ໽䛑䭷㮣᳌ (Collected books in the Pavilion of the Heavenly Capital), 528

Tianmu Zhongfeng heshang guanglu ໽Ⳃ Ёዄ੠ᇮᒷ䣘 (Broad records of monk Zhongfeng of Tianmu), 244–45 Tiansheng guangdenglu ໽㘪‫➜ܝ‬䣘 (Extensive lamp record of the Tiansheng era), 243–44 “Tianwen” ໽ଣ (“Heavenly Questions”) (from Chuci), 301 Tongjie fumo Ḥ䱢ࡃ๼ (Supplementary jottings on the tung tree leaves from stairs), 527 Tongsu tushuguan guicheng 䗮֫೪᳌仼㽣⿟ (Regulations on public libraries), 439 Tongzhi 䗮ᖫ (Universal treatise), 492 Tuhua Sishu baihua jie ೪⬿ಯ᳌ⱑ䁅㾷 (Illustrated Four Books with vernacular explanations), 191–92 Tung-Ngai San-Luk ᵅ⎃ᮄ䣘 (The Oriental), 566 “Tuo’eritai linzhong shishi” ᠬ⠒ᮃ⋄㞼㌖ᰖџ (Events surrounding the death of Tolstoy) (by Hu Shi), 288 Tushuguan guicheng ೪᳌仼㽣⿟ (Regulations on libraries), 438–39 Universal Library. See Baike xiaocongshu “Wang zhi” ⥟ࠊ (Kingly regulations) (from Liji), 150 Wanli shilu 㨀Ლᆺ䣘 (Wanli era veritable records), 391 Wanli shuchao 㨀Ლ⭣䟨 (Copies of Wanli memorials), 391 Wanyou wenku 㨀᳝᭛ᑿ (Complete Library), 535, 537–38 “Wen Shangyuan furen” ଣϞ‫ܗ‬໿Ҏ (Question to the Lady Shangyuan) (attributed to Queen Mother of the West), 237 Wenjin ᭛⋹ (Ford of writing), 525 “Wenwang” ᭛⥟ (“King Wen”) (from Shijing), 211 Wenxian tongkao ᭛⥏䗮㗗 (Comprehensive examination of authoritative sources), 426 Wenxin diaolong ᭛ᖗ䲩啡 (The Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons), 404 Wenxuan ᭛䙌 (Selections of Refined Literature), 160, 161–62, 167, 202, 216, 220, 222, 235, 292, 298, 302 Wenxue xingguo ce ᭛ᅌ㟜೟ㄪ (Strategies for the vitalization of the country through wenxue), 397–98 Wenyi bao ᭛㡎᡹ (Literature and art journal), 554–55

Index of Documents, Publications, and Electronic Resources 635 Wenyuan yicheng ᭛ᅯ⭄々 (Pen names of members of literary circles), 527 Wenyuan yinghua ᭛㢥㣅㧃 (Fine blossoms from the literary garden), 202 Wenyuange shumu ᭛⏉䭷᳌Ⳃ (Catalog of the Literary Depths Library), 332n21, 494, 495–96 Wenxue jiben congkan ᭛ᅌ෎ᴀশߞ (Basic literature series), 282 Wenze ᭛ࠛ (Principles of prose), 221–22 Wenzhang guifan ᭛ゴ㽣㆘ (Models for literary composition), 221 Wenzhang liubie ji ᭛ゴ⌕߹䲚 (Collection of literature arranged by genre), 216 Wenzhang zhengzong ᭛ゴℷᅫ (Orthodox lineage of literary compositions), 221–22, 233–35 passim, 240 Wenzhi ᭛㟈 (Finest specimens of prose), 237 What Is an Index?, 510 “*Wu xing” Ѩ㸠 (Five aspects of virtuous conduct), 117n3 Wu Yue chunqiu ਇ䍞᯹⾟ (Annals of Wu and Yue), 181 “Wuhe fu” 㟲厈䊺 (“Rhapsody on Dancing Cranes”) (by Bao Zhao), 165 Wujing wenzi Ѩ㍧᭛ᄫ (Characters of the Five Classics), 27 Wujing zhengyi Ѩ㍧ℷ㕽 (Correct readings of the Five Classics), 146, 416 “Wuxing zhi” Ѩ㸠ᖫ (Treatise on the five phases) (from Hanshu), 359 Wuxue bian ਒ᅌ㎼ (Compendium of my studies), 392 Xiandai duanju yicong ⧒ҷⷁ࡛䅃শ (Modern short drama in translation), 280 Xiandai dumuju ⧒ҷ⤼ᐩ࡛ (Modern oneacts), 280, 282 Xiandai Hanyu cidian ⦄ҷ∝䇁䆡‫݌‬ (Contemporary Chinese dictionary), 97, 100 Xiandai Zhongguo wenxue shi ⦄ҷЁ೑᭛ᄺ৆ (History of literature in modern China) (by Qian Jibo), 399 Xiandai Zhongguo xiju xuan ⧒ҷЁ೟᠆࡛ 䙌 (Selections of modern Chinese drama), 280, 282 Xiandai zuijia juxuan ⧒ҷ᳔Շ࡛䙌 (Best of modern drama), 280 “Xiang Yu benji” ䷙㖑ᴀ㋔ (Basic annals of Xiang Yu) (from Shiji), 356 Xianquan ji ወ⊝䲚 (Collection of the mountain spring), 247

Xiaolin bao ュᵫฅ (Forest of laughter daily), 543 “Xiaoshuo yu qunzhi zhi guanxi” ᇣ䁾㟛㕸 ⊏П䮰֖ (“On the Relationship between Fiction and the Government of the People” (by Liang Qichao), 402 Xiaoshuo yuebao ᇣ䁾᳜ฅ (Fiction Monthly), 521, 546, 550–51, 553 Xiaoxing pu ᇣ᯳䄰 (Manual on concubines), 527 “Xici zhuan” 㐿䖁‫“( ڇ‬Treatise on the Appended Remarks”) (from Yijing), 145 Xie Gaoyu nianpu 䃱ⱟ㖑ᑈ䄰 (Chronological biography of Xie Gaoyu), 526 Xifang yaoji 㽓ᮍ㽕㋔ (Essential notes on the West), 526 Xihua xianlu 㽓㧃ҭ㈭ (Immortal talismans from the Western Florescence Palace), 528 Xijing zaji 㽓Ҁ䲰㿬 (Miscellaneous records of the Western Capital), 181 Xikao ᠆㗗 (Research into plays), 279 Xin fahua jing ᮄ⊩㧃㍧ (The new dharma flower sūtra). See Fahua jing Xin qingnian ᮄ䴦ᑈ (La Jeunesse or New Youth), 550 Xin Tangshu ᮄ૤᳌ (New history of the Tang), 222, 291, 363, 373, 377, 379–81 Xin Wudaishi ᮄѨҷ৆ (New history of the Five Dynasties), 363 Xin yusi ᮄ䇁ϱ (New threads), 570 Xin Zhongguo weilai ji ᮄЁ೟᳾՚㿬 (The future of New China), 176 Xin zidian ᮄᄫ‫( ݌‬New character dictionary), 98 Xinchao ᮄ╂ (The Renaissance), 550 Xinding neige cangshu mulu ᮄᅮܻ䭷㮣᳌Ⳃ 䣘 (New catalog of the Library of the Grand Secretariat), 332n21, 495 Xinding yiqie jinglei yin ᮄᅮϔߛ㍧串䷇ (Newly established classified pronunciations for all sūtras), 28 Xinfu pu ᮄ်䄰 (Manual for brides), 527 Xinfu pubu ᮄ်䄰㺰 (Supplement to manual for brides), 527 “*Xing zi ming chu” ᗻ㞾ੑߎ (Nature derives from Heaven), 117n3 “Xingyi shuya tishi” 㸠⿏㕆ᢐ储ᓣ (Templates for official correspondence), 432 “Xingyi wanglai shili” 㸠⿏ᕔ՚џ՟ (Precedents for official correspondence), 432, 436n11

636

Index of Documents, Publications, and Electronic Resources

Xinhua zidian ᮄढᄫ‫( ݌‬New China character dictionary), 96–97, 99–102 “Xinjiapo Hongjia huayuan” ᮄࡴവ⋾ᆊ㢅೦ 㿬 (A visit to the Hong family gardens of Singapore) (by Guo Songtao), 288 Xinkan zengru wenquan zhuru aolun cexue tongzong ᮄߞ๲ܹ༻䂪ㄪᅌ㍅ᅫ (A trap for prose and comprehensive guide to studying policy essays with profound teachings from various Confucian scholars, newly carved and expanded), 234 Xinke Hanhui shanfang jizhu gujin qizha yunzhang ᮄࠏ৿䓱ቅ᠓䔃䀏ଳᴁ䳆 ゴ (Hanhui Studio-edited and -annotated elegant models for ancient and modern correspondence, newly cut), 319–20, 321 Xinke leiji gushi tongkao pangxun ᮄࠏ串䔃ᬙ џ䗮㗗ᮕ㿧 (Comprehensively researched and categorized allusions with sideline notes, newly cut), 320–21 Xinke Tianxia simin bianlan Santai wanyong zhengzong ᮄࠏ໽ϟಯ⇥ϝৄ㨀⫼ℷᅫ (Santai’s infinitely useful [guide to] how to do everything right for the convenient consultation of all the four classes under heaven, newly cut), 316–17 Xinping xiuxiang Honglou meng quanzhuan ᮄ 䀩㐵‫ڣ‬㋙ῧ໶ܼ‫( ڇ‬Complete edition of the Honglou meng, with new commentaries and illustrations), 174 Xinshiji ᮄϪ㋔ (New century), 567 Xinmingci cidian ᮄৡ䆡䆡‫( ݌‬Dictionary of new terms), 98–99 Xinwenhua congshu ᮄ᭛࣪শ᳌ (New culture series), 534 Xinxu ᮄᑣ (New arrangements), 252 Xinzhishi cidian ᮄⶹ䆚䆡‫( ݌‬Dictionary of new knowledge), 98–99 Xiepu chao ℛ⌺╂ (Huangpu tides), 547n11 Xiqing shihua 㽓⏙䀽䁅 (Xiqing comments on poetry), 165 Xiuru ji 㐵㼺㿬 (Tale of embroidered gown), 184–85 “Xiwei liu jueju” ᠆⚎݁㌩হ (“Six Quatrains Done Playfully”) (by Du Fu), 231 Xixiang ji 㽓ᒖ㿬 (Story of the Western Wing), 183, 186, 187, 319 Xiyou ji 㽓䘞㿬 (Journey to the West), 173 Xu Baichuan xuehai 㑠ⱒᎱᅌ⍋ (Sequel to One hundred streams from the sea of learning), 531n13

Xuanshi ji 䙌⷇㿬 (Account of selecting rocks), 526 “Xue fu” 䲾䊺 (“Rhapsody on Snow”) (by Xie Lingyun), 165 Xuetang mopin 䲾ූ๼ક (Xuetang’s ranking of inks), 526 Xunzi 㤔ᄤ (Master Xun), 415 Yanju biji ➩ሙㄚ㿬 (Jottings in leisurely lodgings), 251, 258n17, 258n18 Yanlin ⹃ᵫ (Forest of inkstones), 526 Yanshi jiaxun 丣⇣ᆊ㿧 (Family Instructions for the Yen Clan), 417 Yanyi bian 㡋⭄㎼ (Compendium of the romantic strange), 254 Yi ᯧ. See Yijing Yi Zhoushu 䘌਼᳌ (Remnant documents of Zhou), 146, 209 Yiheming bian ⯲厈䡬䕼 (Analysis of the “Inscription on the Burial of a Crane”), 526 Yijing ᯧ㍧ (Classic of Changes), 26, 72, 145, 210, 212, 428, 480 Yili ‫( ⾂۔‬Book of Etiquette and Ceremonial), 146, 513. See also San Li Yimen guandu ་䭔ᒷ⠬ (), 531n19 Yinci yushu ji ᘽ䊰ᕵ᳌㋔ (Record of books granted by the emperor), 525 Yinghuan suoji ◯ᇄ⨷㋔ (Trivial notes from around the world), 545, 549 Yingkui lüsui ◯༢ᕟ傧 (Luminaries of essential regulated verse), 166 Yingwen Hangu 㣅᭛⓶䀕 (English grammar explained in Chinese), 136 Yinzhong baxian ling 仆ЁܿҭҸ (Drinking game of the eight immortals), 526 Yiwen 䆥᭛ (Translations), 551–52 Yiwen ji ⭄㘲䲚 (Collected strange hearsay), 251 Yiwen leiju 㮱᭛串㘮 (Collection of literature arranged by categories), 295–304, 304n9, 305n10, 307 “Yiwen zhi” 㮱᭛ᖫ (Treatise on bibliography) (from Hanshu), 414, 416, 477, 480, 481n9, 483 “Yiwen zhi” 㮱᭛ᖫ (Treatise on bibliography) (from Jiu Tangshu), 377 Yiya 䘌䲙 (Lost Erya). See Shiming Yongle dadian ∌ῖ໻‫( ݌‬Great compendium of the Yongle reign), xvii, 239, 278, 293, 306–7, 310–14, 495, 509 Youxi bao 䘞᠆ฅ (Entertainment daily), 541, 543, 546n1, 546n2, 546n4 Youxun ᑐ㿧 (Instructions to young men), 527

Index of Documents, Publications, and Electronic Resources 637 “Yu shu” 㰲᳌ (Documents of Yu) (from Shangshu), 209 “Yuan xiaoyue fu” ᗼᲝ᳜䊺 (“Rhapsody on Resenting the Dawn Moon”) (by Xie Lingyun), 298 Yuanqu jinghua ‫ܗ‬᳆㊒㧃 (Best of Yuan drama), 279 Yuanqu lun ‫ܗ‬᳆䂪 (Theory of Yuan drama), 262 Yuanqu xuan ‫ܗ‬᳆䙌 (Selection of Yuan plays), 260–61, 262, 264–67, 267n1, 278 Yuanren baizhong qu ‫ܗ‬Ҏⱒ。᳆ (One hundred plays by Yuan authors), 261 Yuanren zaju quanji ‫ܗ‬Ҏ䲰࡛ܼ䲚 (Complete anthology of zaju by Yuan authors), 279 Yuanshi ‫ܗ‬৆ (History of the Yuan), 387 “*Yucong 1” 䁲শϔ (Collected sayings 1), 115 Yuding Peiwen yunfu ᕵᅮԽ᭛䷏ᑰ (Imperially commissioned rime storehouse of Peiwen Studio), 88n3 “Yue fu” ᳜䊺 (“Rhapsody on the Moon”) (by Xie Zhuang), 298, 299–300 Yueyu kenqing lu 䍞䁲㚃㎂䣘 (A record of the essential points of Zhejiang dialect), 79 Yueyue xiaoshuo ᳜᳜ᇣ䁾 (Fiction every month), 546 Yuezhong xianxian cimu 䍞Ё‫ܜ‬䊶⼴Ⳃ (Catalog of shrines devoted to past sages in Shaoxing), 502 Yunfu qunyu ䷏ᑰ㕸⥝ (Assembled jade of the treasury of rhymes), 320 Yunjing ䷏䦵 (Mirror of rimes), 66–71 “Yunzhong jun” 䳆Ё৯ (“Lord within the Clouds”) (from “Jiuge”), 160–61, 162 Yupian ⥝㆛, 62–63 Yutai xinyong ⥝㟎ᮄ䀴 (New Songs from a Jade Terrace), 202, 216, 217, 220 Yuyan jianzhi 䇁㿔ㅔᖫ (Language sketches), 62 Yuzu tongpu 㖑ᮣ䗮䄰 (Comprehensive register of birds), 526 “Zai feixu shang” ೼ᑳ๳Ϟ (On ruins) (by Bei Dao), 558 Zaishu qi ‫ݡ‬䗄༛ (Further accounts of the marvelous), 136 Zawen 䲰᭛ (Miscellaneous writings), 222 Zengping butu Shitou ji ๲䀩㺰೪⷇丁㿬 (The Story of the Stone with additional commentaries and illustrations), 174 Zengping buxiang quantu jinyu yuan ๲䀩㺰‫ڣ‬ ܼ೪䞥⥝㎷ (Fully illustrated romance of

gold and jade with additional commentaries and illustrations), 174 Zengping huitu Daguan suolu ๲䀩㐾೪໻ 㾔⨷䣘 (Trivial record of the Daguan Garden with additional commentaries and illustrations), 177n6 Zhangshi cangshu ᔉ⇣㮣᳌ (), 531 Zhanguoce ᠄೟ㄪ (Strategies of the Warring States), 239, 415, 514 Zhaodai congshu ᰁҷশ᳌ (Collectanea of a glorious age), 525–28 Zhaoling liujuntu bian ᰁ䱉݁俓೪䕼 (Analysis of the six images of horses at the Zhao mausoleum), 526 Zhaoshi gu’er ji 䍭⇣ᄸ‫ܦ‬㿬 (Orphan of the Zhao family), 179–82 Zhengao ⳳ䁹 (Declarations of the perfected), 243, 488, 490n16 Zheng fahua jing ℷ⊩㧃㍧ (The standard dharma flower sūtra). See Fahua jing “Zhengbo ke Duan yu Yan” 䜁ԃ‫↉ܟ‬ᮐ䛶 (The Earl of Zheng vanquishes Duan in Yan) (from Zuozhuan), 240 Zhengzi tong ℷᄫ䗮 (Comprehensive rectification of characters), 83 “Zhenzhong ji” ᵩЁ㿬 (Record of what was inside the pillow) (by Shen Jiji), 253 Zhibuzuzhai congshu ⶹϡ䎇唟শ᳌ (Collectanea from the Studio of Insufficient Knowledge), 530 Zhinan bao ᣛफฅ (Compass daily), 546n1 Zhiwo lu ⶹ៥䣘 (Record of my friends), 527 Zhiwuxue dacidian ỡ⠽ᅌ໻䖁‫( ݌‬Botanical Nomenclature: A Complete Dictionary of Botanical Terms), 91 Zhizhai shulu jieti Ⳉ唟᳌䣘㾷丠 (Explanatory notes to a record of books in the Upright Studio), 332n22 “Zheng shijia” 䜁Ϫᆊ (Hereditary house of Zheng) (from Shiji), 356 “*Zhong xin zhi dao” ᖴᖗП䘧 (The Way of fidelity and trustworthiness), 116 Zhongguo dabaike quanshu Ё೑໻ⱒ⾥ܼк (Encyclopedia of China), 340–41 Zhongguo guowen duben Ё೟೟᭛䅔ᴀ (National language readers for middle schools), 284–85 Zhongguo jianzifa yange shilüe ji qishiqi zhong xin jianzifa biao Ё೟⁶ᄫ⊩⊓䴽৆⬹ঞϗ कϗ䥒ᮄ⁶ᄫ⊩㸼 (A brief history of the development of Chinese indexing methods), 25

638

Index of Documents, Publications, and Electronic Resources

Zhongguo sijia cangshu shi Ё೑⾕ᆊ㮣к৆ (A history of private book collecting in China), 425 Zhongguo tushu fenleifa Ё೟೪᳌ߚ串⊩ (Classification of Chinese books), 440–41 Zhongguo tushuguan fenleifa Ё೑೒к佚ߚ㉏ ⊩ (Chinese library classification), 442–43 Zhongguo tushuguan shi: gudai cangshu juan Ё ೑೒к佚৆˖সҷ㮣кो Zhongguo wenxue fadashi Ё೟᭛ᅌⱐ䘨 ৆ (History of the flourishing of Chinese literature), 403 Zhongguo wenxue fazhanshi Ё೟᭛ᅌⱐሩ ৆ (History of the development of Chinese literature), 399–402 Zhongguo wenxue Guoyu buchong duben Ё೟᭛ ᅌ೟䁲㺰‫ܙ‬䅔ᴀ (Supplementary reading for middle school Mandarin), 282 Zhongguo wenxue pipingshi Ё೟᭛ᅌᡍ䀩৆ (History of Chinese literary criticism) (by Guo Shaoyu), 404 Zhongguo wenxue pipingshi Ё೟᭛ᅌᡍ䀩৆ (History of Chinese literary criticism) (by Chen Zhongfan), 404 Zhongguo wenxue shi Ё೟᭛ᅌ৆ (Literary history of China), 395–96 Zhongguo wenxue ziliao huibian Ё೑᭛ᄺ䌘 ᭭∛㓪 (Compilation of Chinese literar materials), 506 Zhongguo xiandai wenxue qikan mulu (chugao) Ё೑⦄ҷ᭛ᄺᳳߞⳂᔩ ˄߱〓˅ (Catalog of Chinese modern literature periodicals, first draft), 505 Zhongguo xiandai wenxue qikan mulu huibian Ё೑⦄ҷ᭛ᄺᳳߞⳂᔩ∛㓪 (Compilation of modern Chinese literary journal indices), 506–7 Zhongguo xiandai wenxue qikan mulu huibian Ё೑⦄ҷ᭛ᄺᳳߞⳂᔩᮄ㓪 (Modern Chinese literary journal indices, newly compiled), 506 Zhongguo xiandai wenxue shi Ё೑⦄ҷ᭛ᄺ৆ (History of modern Chinese literature), 399 Zhongguo xiandai wenxue zongshumu Ё೟⧒ ҷ᭛ᅌ㐑᳌Ⳃ (Complete bibliography of modern Chinese literature), 279 Zhongguo xiaoshuo shilüe Ё೟ᇣ䁾৆⬹ (A Brief History of Chinese Fiction), 399

Zhongguo xinwenxue daxi Ё೟ᮄ᭛ᅌ໻㋏ (Compendium of New Literature in China), 202, 272–75, 280, 281–82, 283, 504 Zhongguo xinwenxue shigao Ё೟ᮄ᭛ᅌ৆ 〓 (Draft history of China’s new literature), 402–3 Zhonghua dadian Ё㧃໻‫( ݌‬Chinese collectanea), 293 Zhonghua dazidian Ё㧃໻ᄫ‫( ݌‬Great character dictionary of China), 30, 91 Zhonghua dianzi fodian xiehui Ё㧃䳏ᄤԯ‫݌‬ न᳗. See CBETA Zhongxing jianqi ji Ё㟜䭧⇷䲚 (Collection of the ministers in the age of renaissance), 219–20 “Zhongyong” Ёᒌ (“Doctrine of the Mean”), 175 Zhongyuan yinyun Ёॳ䷇䷏ (Tones and rimes of the Central Plain), 63, 80–81, 86 “Zhou benji” ਼ᴀ㋔ (Basic annals of Zhou) (from Shiji), 355–56 Zhouli ਼⾂ (Rites of Zhou), 150, 154, 156n19. See also San Li Zhouyi ਼ᯧ (Zhou changes). See Yijing Zhuangzi 㥞ᄤ (Master Zhuang), 163–64, 181, 186, 188, 220, 513 Zhuibaiqiu ㎈ⱑ㺬 (A patchwork coat of white fur), 260, 263–67 Zhupu ネ䄰 (Register of bamboo), 526 Zihui ᄫᔭ (Collection of characters), 28, 82–83 Zishuo ᄫ䁾 (Explanation of characters), 83–84 “Ziyi” ㎛㸷 (“Black Robes”) (chapter in Liji), 157n23 Zizhi tongjian 䊛⊏䗮䨥 (Comprehensive mirror for aid in governance), 377, 383n9, 417 “Zu Chu wen” 䀯Ἦ᭛ (A curse on Chu) (attributed to King Huiwen of Qin), 235 Zuanxilu congshu 㑖୰ᓀশ᳌ (Collectanea from the hut of compiled delights), 502 “Zuishi ge” 䝝ᰖ℠ (“Song while Drunk”) (by Du Fu), 168n11 Zuoshi chunqiu Ꮊ⇣᯹⾟ (Mr. Zuo’s Annals), 479–80 Zuozhuan Ꮊ‫( ڇ‬Zuo Tradition), 145, 179, 181, 188, 221, 238, 239–40, 285, 286, 351, 352–54, 359, 386