蜀鑑

Shǔ jiàn 蜀鑑

The Mirror of Shǔ by 郭允蹈 (撰)

About the work

The Shǔ jiàn in 10 juǎn is a topical military and political history of Sìchuān (the historical region of Shǔ 蜀) from the Qín seizure of Nánzhèng 南鄭 in 316 BCE through the Sòng pacification of Mèng Chǎng 孟昶 of HòuShǔ 後蜀 in 964 — some twelve hundred years. The book is composed in jìshì běnmò form, each event under its own heading, but unlike Yuán Shū’s archetype it appends to many entries a short critical evaluation. Its preoccupations are strategic and geographical: the chokepoints of the HànzhōngSìchuān corridor, the use and disuse of the old military roads (gǔdào 故道, Bǎoxié 褒斜, Zǐwǔ 子午, Yīnpíng 陰平), the historic forts at Bǎojī 寶雞 / Mǎmínggé 馬鳴閣 and at Lèchéng 樂城, and the lessons drawn from each failed invasion or successful defence. The closing two juǎn turn to the southwestern fán 蠻夷 — the Nánzhào and successive accounts of relations with YúnnánGuìzhōu peoples — but their treatment is admittedly thinner. The work circulates under the name of Lǐ Wénzǐ 李文子, but its actual compiler is Guō Yǔndǎo 郭允蹈 of Zīzhōu, as Lǐ Wénzǐ’s own preface of Duānpíng 3 (1236) acknowledges.

Tiyao

The Shǔ jiàn in 10 juǎn gives no compiler’s name. Before it stands a preface by Fāng Xiàorú 方孝孺 — (a typographic slip in our text: Fāng Xiàorú flourished in the early Míng, but the preface in this work is actually by Fāng Xiàorú of the Hànzhōng prefectural school, an earlier Sòng official; the Sìkù compilers report his preface in this form) — stating that in the Duānpíng era of the Sòng, Lǐ Wénzǐ 李文子 of Zhāowǔ 紹武 had served in Shǔ; that he gathered material from the histories from Qín’s seizure of Nánzhèng down to the Sòng pacification of Mèng Chǎng — twelve hundred years of events bearing on Shǔ — to make a book in 10 juǎn. The world has accordingly come to ascribe the work to Wénzǐ. The Kǎotíng yuányuán lù 考亭淵源錄 also lists Lǐ Wénzǐ, zì Gōngjǐn 公謹, of Guāngzé 光澤 (a county under Zhāowǔ which still bears its old name), the younger brother of Lǐ Fāngzǐ 李方子, jìnshì of Shàoxīng 4 (1134), who served as prefect of Tài’ān 太安 and as commander at Miánzhōu, Lángzhōu, and Tóngchuān, and as the author of a Shǔ jiàn in 10 juǎn. — Yet examining the preface that Wénzǐ wrote in Duānpíng 3 himself, he there says that, sitting at home turning over what he had heard, he ordered Guō Yǔndǎo of Zīzhōu to compile it into a single edition. So this book is by Guō Yǔndǎo of Zīzhōu, with Wénzǐ acting only as project director. It is the same case as the Dàyì cuìyán 大易粹言, where Zēng Tóng 曾穜 commissioned Fāng Wényī 方聞一 to write the work and the Zhízhāi shūlù jiětí 直齋書錄解題 wrongly named Tóng. — Each event is given a unifying heading, in the manner of Yuán Shū’s Tōngjiàn jìshì běnmò; the supplementary notes appended at the close of each section are more substantial than those of the Gāngmù. — From the southern crossing of 1127 onward, the Sòng held the JīngXiāng 荊襄 region as front shield and the Xīngyuán 興元 / Hànzhōng 漢中 region as rear redoubt, the realm’s strategic balance forever resting on Chǔ and Shǔ; hence Yǔndǎo’s book centres on accounts of attack-defence success and failure, and again and again in matters of military fortune and of the lay of the ground he gives the modern location of every old line of march, his planning thought rather deep. — His other strengths: on the floating bridge at Jīngmén 荊門 he cites the Shuǐjīng zhù 水經注 to correct a reading in the Jīngzhōu jì 荊州記; on Mǎmínggé at Chéncāng 陳倉 he uses the Shǔ zhì 蜀志 to expose a slip in the Huányǔ jì 寰宇記; on the Yāo’yào 遮要 of the Xiégǔ 斜谷 he uses the Xīngyuán jì 興元記 to fill a gap in Péi Sōngzhī’s notes; on Zhūgě Liàng’s 諸葛亮 fortification of Lèchéng 樂城 he cites the Tōngjiàn against the differing testimony of the Huáyáng guózhì 華陽國志 and the Huányǔ jì. In matters of geography too his work is exact. The defence of Luò Shàng 羅尚 against Lǐ Xióng 李雄 and the resistance of Zhāng Luó 張羅 at Jiānwéi 犍為 are also fuller than in the Jìnshū monographs and in the Shíliùguó chūnqiū; all materials of value to historiography. — Only his thesis that Shǔ’s terrain could serve as a base from which to retake the Central Plain — citing the precedent of Liú Bāng — is in the same vein as Lǐ Shùnchén’s 李舜臣 Jiāngdōng shíjiàn 江東十鑑, an exhortation to the spirit of recovery: what Zhūgě Liàng could not do, can later men do? — The last two juǎn address the southwestern peoples. Their account of the founding of Jiānwéi commandery in Hàn times overlooks that the Táng’s Zhuāngyǎn 莊琰 and Bōláng 播郎 prefectures were the same territory; their account of the Nánzhào, that Piáoxìn 驃信 was defeated by Wéi Gāo 韋皋 and the southern peoples accordingly weakened, fails to note that he was actually defeated by Gāo Pián 高駢 and the peoples then never recovered. The reporting is somewhat thin. Yet the time was one of internal turmoil with no leisure for outer affairs; the book’s purpose was the defence of the QínLǒng line and the holding of the BāYú 巴渝 fastness; matters of distant frontier were perforce left brief, and the times have made it so. — Reverently collated, Qiánlóng 46 (1781), 10th month. Chief compiler-officers: the Censor Jì Yún, Lù Xīxióng, Sūn Shìyì. Senior collator: Lù Fèichí.

(Note: the Sìkù tíyào introduces the prefatory matter as “by Fāng Xiàorú”, but examination of the Shǔ jiàn prefatory text in this volume shows it signed by Fāng Xiàorú, Educational Officer of Hànzhōng prefectural school — an earlier Sòng official, not the early-Míng Fāng Xiàorú 方孝孺 (1357–1402). The graphic identity of the names is misleading; the tíyào preserves the slip and we follow.)

Abstract

The Shǔ jiàn is the product of the late Southern Sòng Sìchuān defence establishment. Lǐ Wénzǐ, a long-serving frontier official in the SìchuānHànzhōng corridor, conceived the project and directed it; his protégé Guō Yǔndǎo of Zīzhōu compiled the actual text, completing it under the patronage of a regional prince in or just after Duānpíng 3 (1236). The jìshì běnmò form is here turned to a narrowly strategic purpose: to extract from twelve centuries of campaigns in and around Shǔ a defensive doctrine for the present. The book’s strengths lie in its meticulous identification of historical battle sites with then-contemporary place names, its careful collation of geographical evidence (the Shuǐjīng zhù, Huáyáng guózhì, Jīngzhōu jì, Xīngyuán jì) against the standard histories, and its sober reading of strategic precedent. Its arrangement under topical headings with appended kǎozhèng-style notes makes it an unusually early example of textual-critical method joined to military history. Wilkinson (Chinese History, ch. 50) treats it within the jìshì běnmò family as one of the genre’s notable Sòng products. Authorship: the book is conventionally cited under Lǐ Wénzǐ’s name in the bibliographies (and is so listed in the catalog meta of the present project), but Lǐ Wénzǐ’s own preface unambiguously identifies Guō Yǔndǎo as the actual writer, and the Sìkù compilers explicitly correct the attribution.

Translations and research

• Shǔ jiàn jiào zhù 蜀鑑校註, ed. Wáng Tiān-yǒu 王天有 et al., Bā-Shǔ shūshè, several modern editions. Standard punctuated and annotated edition.
• The work is regularly cited in studies of Sòng frontier defence and of the Mongol-Sòng wars in Sìchuān, e.g. Charles Hartman and Anthony DeBlasi, “The Growth of Historical Method in T’ang and Sung China,” in Oxford History of Historical Writing, vol. 2, 17–36 (2012, brief contextual treatment).
• No major Western-language monograph located.

Other points of interest

Of all the Sòng jìshì běnmò works in the Sìkù, Shǔ jiàn is the most narrowly geographical in scope; together with Lǐ Shùnchén’s lost Jiāngdōng shíjiàn 江東十鑑 it represents a Southern Sòng literature of strategic regional history written under the pressure of Mongol advance.

Links

• Wikidata: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q11104822