續資治通鑑長編

Xù Zī zhì tōng jiàn cháng biān 續資治通鑑長編

Long Draft of the Continuation of the Comprehensive Mirror in Aid of Governance by 李燾 (Lǐ Tāo, 1115–1184, zhuàn 撰)

About the work

The principal Sòng-period continuation of the Zī zhì tōng jiàn (KR2b0007). Originally a vast 1,063-juan annalistic chronicle of the Northern Sòng (Tàizǔ Jiànlóng 1 / 960 to Qīnzōng Jìngkāng 2 / 1127), composed over four decades by Lǐ Tāo and submitted to the throne in four instalments between 1163 and 1174. Most of the original was lost between the Yuán and the early Qing; the modern recension reconstituted from the Yǒnglè dàdiǎn by the Sìkù editors comprises 520 juǎn, covering Tàizǔ through Yīngzōng (960–1063) plus most of Shénzōng and Zhézōng (with substantial gaps in Xīníng–Shàoshèng and missing the Huīzōng / Qīnzōng portions entirely). One of the great Chinese historical works.

Tiyao

Xù Zī zhì tōng jiàn cháng biān, 520 juǎn. (Yǒnglè dàdiǎn recovery copy.) By Lǐ Tāo of the Sòng. Tāo’s Shuō wén jiě zì wǔ yīn yùn pǔ is already on record. Tāo was vastly read; his special concern was administrative-historical detail; finding that contemporary scholars and dàfū each believed what they were transmitted, never investigating against the veritable records, with each historian’s house going its own way, he followed Sīmǎ Guāng’s Tōng jiàn example and exhaustively gathered the affairs of one founder and eight successor reigns, gathering and discussing, for this work. As Guāng in compiling the Tōng jiàn first composed the cháng biān, so Tāo modestly did not call his a Xù Tōng jiàn but only Xù Zī zhì tōng jiàn cháng biān.

The Wénxiàn tōng kǎo records his four memorials of presentation:

• one in Lóngxīng 1 (1163), as prefect of Róngzhōu, presenting first 17 juǎn of Jiànlóng through Kāibǎo affairs;
• one in Qiándào 4 (1168), as Lǐbù láng, presenting 108 juǎn organising Jiànlóng 1 through Zhìpíng 4 third-month-intercalary five-reign affairs;
• one in Chúnxī 1 (1174), as prefect of Lúzhōu, presenting 280 juǎn of post-Zhìpíng through Jìngkāng;
• one in Chúnxī 1 (1174), as prefect of Suìníngfǔ, re-copying and presenting again, with appended Jǔyào mù lù, 1,063 juǎn in 687 books.

Hence Zhōu Mì’s Guǐxīn záshí records that Hán Yàngǔ pirated copies of the work amounted to two cabinets full. But the Wénxiàn tōng kǎo records only 168 juǎn of cháng biān and 68 juǎn of Jǔyào — the discrepancy with the memorials is enormous.

On Chén Zhènsūn’s Shū lù jiě tí: the juan-numbers are as recorded, but the volumes go beyond 300 — apparently each juǎn was further subdivided into sub-juǎn, sometimes into a dozen or so. So the 1,063 figure counts sub-juǎn; the Wénxiàn tōng kǎo’s figure is the master juǎn-count.

According to Tāo’s memorials, the work in fact ends at Qīnzōng. But Wáng Míngqīng’s Yùzhào xīnzhì says that the Shàoxīng 1 (1131) Hú Yànxiū memorial is appended in the note after cháng biān 159 — seemingly extending into Gāozōng. Perhaps where matters were continuous, he marked the eventual outcome and appended at the end of a note, like the Zuǒ zhuàn “after the Classic ends, the affairs end” precedent.

The Guǐxīn záshí further records that Tāo, in making the cháng biān, used a wooden cabinet of ten compartments, each compartment with twenty drawer-boxes, each box marked with a cyclical-sign sign — for any year’s events, whatever he heard of must go into the corresponding box, ordered by day and month. So orderly. — That his power and persistence were both deep is here glimpsed.

The book’s volume was very great; in his time copying was difficult; the bookshop printings and the Shǔ old printings already had detail-and-conciseness divergences. Further, the ShénZhéHuīQīn four-reign portions were in Qiándào only handed down to the Bìshū shěng, copied in a single set on Tōng jiàn paper sample, never woodblock-cut, circulating with diminishing frequency. From the Yuán onwards, the world had few transmitted texts. In the Kāngxī era of the present dynasty, Xú Qiánxué of Kūnshān first obtained a text from the Jì family of Tàixīng, totaling 175 juǎn. He once memorialized to present it; the side-copy circulated, all treasured as a secret repository. Yet what it contained ran only down to Yīngzōng Zhìpíng; from Shénzōng onwards still missing.

On checking the Yǒnglè dàdiǎn’s “Sòng” rhyme, this work is fully recorded. Compared with the Xú text, the first five reigns broadly agree, but the fēn zhù kǎo yì are often more detailed; from Xīníng (1068) down for some thirty-odd years which Xú lacks and Zhū Yízūn took to be lost, all are now brilliantly extant — beginning and end well preserved. Truly a treasure that the realm has never before possessed. Only Huī- and Qīnzōng jì are not present in the original; and seven years of Xīníng-Shàoshèng affairs are also lost — much to be lamented. Yet from Zhézōng up, year as warp and month as woof, exhaustively detailed without omission. Several centuries of famous rú and great-scholars’ wishing-to-see-but-not-getting-it has now been suddenly returned the old object; compared with currently circulating texts, it has increased four or five times. This is a great event of the literary world.

In the Chénghuà era of the Míng (1465–1487), the edict to Shāng Lù et al. to continue the Tōng jiàn gāngmù: at the time the Yǒnglè dàdiǎn was stored in the Inner Court, and the outside-court could not see in. They never knew that Tāo’s old text was wholly preserved within. They sought it everywhere by other means, in the end could not get it — those who comment on this regret it. Now we — meeting our August Lord’s revering the past and esteeming letters, in compiling the Sìkù — have got it again to see in the world. Is this not a matter of obscurity-and-revealing having its time, awaiting a sage age to give forth its glory?

Tāo’s original juan-numbering does not survive; the thousand-some juǎn order cannot be reconstructed. We have respectfully cross-collated and rectified, weighing prolixity and concision, separately divided and adjusted, fixing it at 520 juǎn. Tāo made this work over forty years; from the veritable records, the standard histories, the official documents, down to the home-records and field-notes — all were repeatedly cross-examined, identity and difference verified. Although gathering vast and broad, possibly cannot avoid both empty-and-real preserved, doubt-and-faith mutually visible — not necessarily every one striking the bullseye. Not just the affair of the fǔ sound and the candle shadow [Tàizōng’s accession affair], where the Xiāngshān yě lù’s testimony is unclear, leaving a thousand-year doubt. Even, e.g., Jǐngyòu 2, third month, the imperial gift to Zhèndōngjūn jiétuī Máo Xún’s family of silk and rice — examination against the grave-record by Yú Jìng diverges sharply, as denounced by Zēng Mǐnxíng’s Dúxǐng zázhì — such cases are not few. But Tāo himself in his memorial said: “I would rather err in prolixity than err in conciseness” — broadly gathering and recording, awaiting later authors. His grasp and detail are in any case the historical reader’s kǎozhèng forest.

Abstract

The Xù Zī zhì tōng jiàn cháng biān is the largest single work of Chinese historiography, and the principal Sòng-period continuation of the Tōng jiàn down to the dynasty’s near-end at the Jīn capture of Kāifēng (1126–1127). Lǐ Tāo’s modesty in titling it cháng biān — the second-stage long draft, not the third-stage zhèng wén — is genuine: he conceived the work as a deposit of evidence for some later master to compress, and his characteristic dictum, recorded in his memorial of presentation, was nìng shī zhī fán, wú shī zhī lüè 寧失之繁，毋失之略 (“better to err on the side of fullness than of brevity”).

The compositional method explicitly imitates Sīmǎ Guāng’s Tōng jiàn protocol: a wooden filing cabinet with twenty drawers per compartment, ten compartments — each drawer marked with a cyclical sign — into which Lǐ Tāo deposited every notable fact heard, ordered by day-and-month, then drafted up. As Sīmǎ Guāng had Liú Bīn, Liú Shù and Fàn Zǔyǔ as co-compilers, so Lǐ Tāo had a smaller research circle around him; but the cháng biān is fundamentally the labor of a single scholar over forty years.

The work was submitted to Xiàozōng in four instalments — Lóngxīng 1 / 1163 (first 17 juǎn), Qiándào 4 / 1168 (108 juǎn), Chúnxī 1 / 1174 (280 juǎn), and again Chúnxī 1 / 1174 (the full final 1,063-juǎn version with Jǔyào mù lù). The terminal figure of 1,063 juǎn in 687 books, however, includes sub-juǎn (zǐ juǎn) of which there were sometimes a dozen per master juǎn; the master juǎn-count, per the Wénxiàn tōng kǎo, is 168 plus a 68-juǎn Jǔyào lì. The Sòng shǐ Yìwén zhì lists slightly differing figures.

The transmission history is heavy with loss. The Northern-Sòng ShénZhéHuīQīn four-reign portions were never woodblock-cut and circulated only in scribal copy, with the result that they were the first to be lost. By the Yuán the work was rare; by the early Qing only a partial 175-juǎn text from Tàixīng (covering only down to Yīngzōng Zhìpíng) was known, recovered by Xú Qiánxué of Kūnshān 徐乾學 — see KR2b0040. The Sìkù editors’ great recovery from the Yǒnglè dàdiǎn added everything from Shénzōng Xīníng through most of Zhézōng (with seven years of Xīníng–Shàoshèng still missing) and re-organised the entire surviving corpus into the canonical 520 juǎn. The Huīzōng and Qīnzōng portions remain lost — a permanent and consequential gap, since these are precisely the reigns of the imperial collapse before the Jīn invasion.

The standard modern critical edition is the 1979 / 2004 Beijing Zhōnghuá Shūjú edition (Shàng Hǎi Shīfàn dàxué Gǔjí zhěnglǐ Yánjiūsuǒ et al.) in 36 volumes, with full collation against the dàdiǎn fragments, the Xú Qiánxué text, and the Sìkù recension. (See Wilkinson §49.5.)

Methodologically, the cháng biān extends the Tōng jiàn kǎo yì model into the body of the text: variant-source notes are not gathered into a separate apparatus but distributed as in-text fēn zhù 分注 (sub-line notes) below each entry. This gives the modern reader direct access to Lǐ Tāo’s source-base and his editorial reasoning — which is to say, to the entire archive of Northern-Sòng documents he had in hand. The work is therefore not merely a chronicle but, in effect, a partially-pre-digested dossier of Northern-Sòng court history — a primary source of the first order, equivalent in importance for the Sòng to what the Veritable Records are for the Míng.

For dating: the work’s compositional gestation extends over forty years. The earliest secure compositional terminus is set by Lǐ Tāo’s first memorial of 1163, but the work was already substantially under way in his Sìchuān years before the move to court; the dating bracket here (1144–1184) reflects this from his early provincial career through his death.

Translations and research

• Xù Zī zhì tōng jiàn cháng biān, 36 vols. (Beijing: Zhōnghuá Shūjú, 1979–1995; rev. 2004) — standard punctuated critical edition by the Shanghai Normal University Gǔjí team.
• Cài Chóng-bǎng 蔡崇榜, Xù Zī zhì tōng jiàn cháng biān yán jiū 續資治通鑑長編研究 (Sì-chuān dà-xué, 1995).
• Charles Hartman, The Making of Song Dynasty History: Sources and Narratives, 960–1279 CE (CUP, 2021), chs. 4–5 — the major recent English-language treatment.
• Pei-Yi Wu, “Education of Children in the Sung,” in NeoConfucian Education, ed. de Bary and Chaffee (UC Press, 1989), uses the cháng biān as a primary source.
• Patricia Buckley Ebrey, Emperor Huizong (Harvard UP, 2014), regrets the loss of the Huīzōng portion as a major historiographical lacuna.
• Wáng Dé-yì 王德毅, Lǐ Tāo fù zǐ nián pǔ 李燾父子年譜 (Tāi-běi: Tái-wān shāng-wù, 1963; rev. 1996).

Other points of interest

The work is the principal source for the Northern Sòng court politics of the Wáng Ānshí xīn fǎ period — precisely the years of Sīmǎ Guāng’s Luòyáng retreat and Tōng jiàn composition, which Lǐ Tāo’s cháng biān uniquely documents in fine detail from the perspective of the pro-reform government. The fēn zhù notes, in particular, preserve thousands of citations to Northern-Sòng zòu yì (memorials), private records, and historical anecdotes (biji) that are otherwise lost.

Links

• Wikipedia: Xu Zizhi Tongjian Changbian
• Wikidata Q11084102
• ctext.org: Xu Zizhi Tongjian Changbian
• Kyoto Zinbun Sìkù tíyào 0103601.
• Wilkinson, Chinese History: A New Manual §49.5.