Sāngfú gǔjīn jíjì 喪服古今集記
Collected Records on Mourning Dress, Ancient and Modern
by 王儉 (撰)
About the work
A single-juàn reconstruction of 王儉 Wáng Jiǎn’s (452–489) lost Sāngfú gǔjīn jíjì 喪服古今集記 — a collected-records compilation on the canonical Sāngfú drawing from ancient (gǔ) and contemporary (jīn) authorities. Wáng Jiǎn was the leading Southern-Qí classicist and court-ritualist alongside 周捨’s Liáng-era work — see also his KR1d0104 Lǐlùn chāolüè in this corpus. The CHANT reconstruction (CH2e1096) is drawn from Dù Yòu 杜佑’s Tōngdiǎn 通典 citations.
Abstract
The opening preserved fragment records a Liú-Sòng Tài-yù 泰豫 1 (472) court memorial: with the death of Liú-Sòng Míngdì, the Bóshì 博士 Zhōu Qià 周洽 issues a quán-zhì (provisional decision) — during the liàng-àn 諒闇 (formal court-mourning period) the imperial successor should not personally perform the four-seasonal sacrifices. This sets up Wáng Jiǎn’s broader gǔjīn (ancient-and-modern) reference compilation: ancient canonical rulings paired with their post-Wèi-Jìn court-context applications.
The substantive content covers:
(i) The liàng-àn protocol. Imperial successor’s mourning-period restrictions on personal sacrifice and other court duties.
(ii) Cross-period synthesis. Hàn, Wèi, Jìn, Liú-Sòng court-mourning protocols compared and synthesised.
(iii) Wáng Jiǎn’s own court-position judgements integrating prior authorities.
The dating bracket (472–489) reflects the Tài-yù 1 (472) reference in the surviving text and Wáng Jiǎn’s documented death-year.
The CHANT-attributed authorship to 王儉 is consistent with his other Lǐlùn chāolüè in this corpus; both are Southern-Qí court-ritualist compilations.
Translations and research
No substantial Western-language secondary literature located. Wáng Jiǎn is treated in surveys of Southern-Qí court Confucianism.
Other points of interest
The Liú-Sòng Tài-yù 1 (472) liàng-àn ruling preserved in this fragment is doctrinally important for the medieval Chinese-court convention that the imperial successor’s mourning-period restrictions could be quán-zhì-modified — i.e. the canonical mourning rules could be provisionally overridden for state-administrative reasons. This is one of the principal Liù-cháo precedents cited in later Suí-Táng court-ritual debates.
Links
- Chinese Text Project — Tōngdiǎn: https://ctext.org/tongdian