Chūnqiū dìmíng 春秋地名
Place-Names of the Spring and Autumn Annals
by 杜預 (撰)
About the work
A one-juàn anonymous extract presenting the place-name (tǔdì míng 土地名) and water-name (shuǐ míng 水名) material from 杜預 Dù Yù’s (222–284) Chūnqiū shì lì 春秋釋例 (KR1e0012) as a stand-alone toponymic handbook to the Chūnqiū and Zuǒzhuàn. The text is preserved in CHANT (CH2e1126) without authorial attribution; internal evidence (long verbatim quotations of Dù Yù’s Shì lì preface and the year-by-year toponymic glosses) makes the parent text unambiguous.
Abstract
The work opens with a series of Chūnqiū passages exemplifying the “one place — two names / two places — one name” (yī dì èr míng / èr dì yī míng 一地二名／二地一名) problem that the Zuǒzhuàn solves by explicit identification (e.g. gōng huì Zhèng-bó yú Shílái 公會鄭伯于時來 = 犬丘; Xǔ qiān yú Yí 許遷于夷 = 城父; Qí-hóu, Wèi-hóu cì yú Chuíjiā 齊侯衛侯次于垂葭 = 郥氏; etc.). This opening sequence reproduces the cases that Dù Yù enumerates as paradigms in the Tǔdì míng preface.
A long verbatim quotation marked Shì lì yuē 釋例曰 follows, reproducing Dù Yù’s general preface to his place-name treatment: heaven has its constellations, earth has its mountains and rivers; the Yǔ gòng 禹貢 and Shānhǎi jīng 山海經 give the outline; the Chūnqiū gives the detail of state and city names. He then explains that he has consulted the Tàishǐ 泰始 (265–274) imperial map of commanderies and counties, charted the present-day toponyms with mountains, waterways, and roads, and matched the Chūnqiū’s meeting- and covenant-places against this — titling the chart-supplement Gǔjīn shū Chūnqiū méng huì tú 古今書春秋盟會圖 and appending a one-juàn annotation to the Shì lì. The preface continues with the methodological distinction between jīng-recorded names that the zhuàn re-identifies and jīng-names that have changed and are clarified by the zhuàn. The substantive body then proceeds year by year through the Chūnqiū (隱 to 哀), giving for each named place its present-day commandery–county location, with explicit quē 闕 (“missing”) notes where Dù’s information failed. The compilation closes with the water-name (shuǐ míng) summary: “right: 58 waters, 13 missing; the Méng huì tú shū 盟會圖疏 appended” — exactly the close of Shì lì chapter 9.
The substantive content is therefore Dù Yù’s. The dating bracket (270–285) follows the period in which the Shì lì was compiled; per the Sìkù tíyào (see KR1e0012), Dù’s Tǔdì míng drafting predates the conquest of Wú 吳 (280), since it records Late-Hàn / Three-Kingdoms commanderies that no longer obtained under the Jìn. The compiler of the present standalone extract is unattested — likely a late-imperial jíyì 輯佚 hand drawing on either the integral Shì lì (the Yǒnglè dàdiǎn 永樂大典 Qīng reconstruction) or earlier zhèngyì citations. No preface or colophon names the compiler.
The work is a useful single-volume companion to Chūnqiū / Zuǒzhuàn reading, surveying every named place and water-course as a toponymic dictionary; for the underlying scholarly programme see KR1e0012.
Translations and research
No substantial Western-language secondary literature located on this extract specifically. For the parent work see Sūn Yǎngzhì 孫永治, Dù Yù Chūnqiū shì lì yánjiū 杜預《春秋釋例》研究 (Sānlián 2018); Newell Ann Van Auken, The Commentarial Transformation of the Spring and Autumn (SUNY 2016) discusses Dù Yù’s Shì lì as a whole. The standard reference for Chūnqiū toponymy now is Gù Jiégāng 顧頡剛, Chūnqiū dìmíng kǎo 春秋地名考 (Běijīng túshūguǎn, 2006, posthumous), itself titled after Gāo Shìqí’s 高士奇 (1645–1704) early-Qīng study.
Other points of interest
The opening Shì lì yuē preface excerpt is a witness to the integral text of the Shì lì place-name preface as it stood before the Míng-era loss, since the present standalone extract is independent of the Yǒnglè dàdiǎn reconstruction tradition. The variant readings between the two preserved branches (this extract vs. the Yǒnglè dàdiǎn witness preserved at KR1e0012) are minor.
Links
- Chinese Text Project — Chūnqiū shì lì: https://ctext.org/wiki.pl?if=en&res=549168