Sānguó shǐ biànwù 三國史辨誤
Distinguishing Errors in the History of the Three Kingdoms by anonymous (闕名)
About the work
A short kǎozhèng monograph in 3 juǎn on textual and factual errors in the Sānguó zhì (KR2a0012) and its Péi Sōngzhī commentary. The author and date of composition are unknown. The work makes 57 individual biànwù (correction) entries: 28 on the Wèi zhì, 8 on the Shǔ zhì, 21 on the Wú zhì.
Tiyao
The author’s name is not given; the date is also unclear. The Sūzhōu fǔzhì records that Chén Jǐngyún 陳景雲, zì Shàozhāng 少章, was a student in the Wújiāng county school and a man of Chángzhōu, who studied under Hé Zhuó 何焯 in his youth, was widely versed in the classics and histories, and excelled at kǎodìng: wherever there were mistakes, he could split a hair to analyse them. He wrote nine works, of which the fourth was a Sānguó zhì jiàowù, which seems to be this book. But examining Hé Zhuó’s Yìmén dúshū jì, where there are three juǎn of Hé’s collation of the Sānguó zhì — at the Wèi zhì, Yáng Fù zhuàn entry on Yáng Fù’s once seeing Mǐngdì wearing an embroidered cap with half-sleeves, the entry says “xiù xiù 褏袖 are ancient and modern characters; Shàozhāng suspects the lower one is interpolated; checking the Sòng shū wǔ xíng zhì it is so,” etc. — this book does not contain that entry. So perhaps it is not Chén Jǐngyún’s work after all. We cannot resolve the doubt; we simply leave the question open.
The Sānguó zhì is concise and well-ordered, justly called a “good history” since antiquity, but contradictions could not be entirely avoided — Sūn Quán’s attack on Héféi was already noted by Sūn Shèng as treated differently in the Wèi and Wú zhì. Since Ming, the southern and northern Directorate impressions, in copying and recutting, have introduced very many errors of letter and word. This work distinguishes errors in Chén’s text and Péi’s commentary: 28 entries on the Wèi zhì, 8 on the Shǔ zhì, 21 on the Wú zhì. Among these — corruptions of single characters such as the Sān shǎodì jì’s “Dìnglíng hóu Fán” 繁 corrected to Yù 毓, “Shàofǔ Bāo” 褒 corrected to Mào 袤; transpositions such as Zhèngyuán 2, 8th month, wùchén 戊辰 not falling after xīnwèi 辛未; conflation of original text and commentary as in the Wáng Sù zhuàn end-note attaching Liú Shí’s words drawn in fact from Péi’s commentary; lacunae in the original text as in Xú Xiáng 徐詳 incorrectly being attached to the Hú Zōng biography — the work cross-references and grounds each correction. Although fewer entries than Hé Zhuō’s, less detailed in his actual collation, it does not (like Hé) wander into mere historical evaluation; and although less broadly evidenced than Háng Shìjùn’s (KR2a0014), it does not (like Háng) drag in miscellaneous citations. Its precision and incisiveness is on a par with the Three Liús’ work on the Hàn shū and Wú Zhěn’s on the Wǔdài shǐ.
(Submission date and chief compilers as for the other zhèngshǐ.)
Abstract
A short kǎozhèng tract on the Sānguó zhì (KR2a0012), of unknown authorship and date. The Sìkù compilers entertain but do not endorse the conventional ascription to the late-Kāngxī kǎozhèng scholar Chén Jǐngyún 陳景雲 (1670–1747), whose Sānguó zhì jiàowù is independently attested in the Sūzhōu fǔzhì but whose specific entries do not match those in the present work. The work is therefore catalogued as anonymous (què míng 闕名).
The work is small in scale (57 entries across 3 short juǎn) but methodologically advanced for its kind: it works at the level of (a) individual character corruption, (b) transposition of dates, (c) confusion of base text with Péi Sōngzhī commentary, and (d) restoration of accidentally-elided biographies. The Sìkù compilers position it methodologically as occupying a productive middle ground between the historical-evaluation method of Hé Zhuó 何焯 (which goes too far afield from textual matters) and the citation-laden method of Háng Shìjùn 杭世駿 in the next-listed work (KR2a0014).
The terminus post quem must be the late Northern Sòng (since the work depends on the Northern Sòng jiānběn tradition). The terminus ante quem is the work’s submission to the Sìkù in 1781. A late-Ming or early-Qing dating is most plausible on stylistic grounds; the date bracket given here (ca. 1100–1700) is therefore conservatively wide.
Translations and research
No translation. Cited in passing in Lú Bì 盧弼’s Sānguó zhì jí jiě 三國志集解 (1936), the standard pre-modern collation. Modern study: Wáng Lì 王利, “Sānguó shǐ biànwù zuòzhě kǎo”, Wénxiàn 1989.3 — discusses but does not resolve the Chén Jǐngyún attribution.