Shàngshǐ 尚史
The Elevated History by 李鍇 (compiler)
About the work
A 107-juǎn recasting of the entire Chinese pre-imperial historical record into jìzhuàn 紀傳 form, by the Plain-White-Banner Hàn-bannerman scholar Lǐ Kǎi 李鍇 (1686–1755), composed over sixteen years from Yōngzhèng 8 (1730) to Qiánlóng 10 (1745). The work takes as its base text Mǎ Sù 馬驌’s earlier Yìshǐ 繹史 (1670), a 160-juǎn topical-narrative (jìshì běnmò 紀事本末) compendium covering the same period, and reorganises Mǎ’s collected materials into the Shǐjì-style jìzhuàn divisions: Shìxì tú 世系圖 1 juǎn (genealogical chart); Běnjì 本紀 6 juǎn; Shìjiā 世家 15 juǎn; Lièzhuàn 列傳 58 juǎn; Xì 繫 6 juǎn; Biǎo 表 6 juǎn; Zhì 志 14 juǎn; Xùzhuàn 序傳 1 juǎn (appended). The principal innovation is the technique of construction by direct citation: Lǐ Kǎi assembles the body text from quoted passages of the original sources (cited in situ with author and book), without paraphrase — a method consciously modelled on the Sòng tradition of jíjù 集句 (“composition by line-collage”) in poetry but applied to historiography. The work is therefore at once a synthesis (because it is integrated under standard jìzhuàn headings) and a quotation-anthology (because every sentence is sourced).
Tiyao
Submitted by your servants, etc. The Shàngshǐ in 107 juǎn was compiled by the present-dynasty Lǐ Kǎi. Kǎi’s zì was Tiějūn; he was a man of the Plain White Banner, Hànjūn. The juǎnshǒu signs himself “of Xiāngpíng” 襄平 — examining: Xiāngpíng was the Hàn-period commandery seat of Liáodōng, now in Liáoyáng 遼陽 of Shèngjīng — clearly his ancestral home. In the Kāngxī period, Mǎ Sù 馬驌 of Zōuping 鄒平 composed the Yìshǐ, gathering from the hundred schools of miscellaneous discourse, beginning from the Great Antiquity (鴻荒) and ending with the Qín dynasty, modelling Yuán Shū’s Jìshì běnmò form, with each topic given its own heading and arranged by category — every citation transcribing the original text, so that even passages that seem unrelated in fact have their thread. Kǎi takes Mǎ’s book as his draft, breaks up its prose, and edits and links it into jìzhuàn form: Shìxì tú 1 juǎn, Běnjì 6 juǎn, Shìjiā 15 juǎn, Lièzhuàn 58 juǎn, Xì 6 juǎn, Biǎo 6 juǎn, Zhì 14 juǎn, with a Xùzhuàn 1 juǎn appended at the end. Under each section he notes the source-book; for stray remains and minor matters not entering the main text, he attaches them as classified sub-notes under the relevant phrase. The format follows the Shǐjì model; the assembly method follows the Lùshǐ (KR2d0008) example with small modifications. The author’s preface says: “Begun in Yōngzhèng gēngxū (1730), completed in Qiánlóng yǐchǒu (1745) — sixteen years’ labour.” His diligence is considerable. Examining: the practice of taking from the hundred schools and shaping them into a single history begins with Sīmǎ Qiān. Looking at the Shǐjì, those parts that were Qiān’s own composition are clear in their warp-and-weft, fitting in their density and looseness, supple in their handling. But those parts that he assembled from various books — not only do their event-discrepancies sometimes contradict each other, but they often show the chisel-marks of patching: it is hard to fuse multiple accounts. This book uses the old text wholesale, edits and arranges it so that the events connect and the meaning runs through — as in the jíjù of poets, exceptional even in the historiographical tradition; harder than fusing multiple accounts. Although the steering is sometimes uneasy and the weaving sometimes loose, it can be called orderly. — In particular: in the Jìn yìmín zhuàn 晉逸民傳 he lists Dù Kuì 杜蕢, Láng Shěn 狼瞫, Chú Mí 鉏麑, Tí Mímíng 提彌明, Líng Zhé 靈輙; in the Nìchén zhuàn 逆臣傳 he lists Zhào Chuān 趙穿 but not Zhào Dùn 趙盾; in the Luànchén zhuàn he lists Xì Ruì 郤芮 and Lǚ Yíshēng 呂飴甥; in the Bìchén zhuàn he lists Tóu Xū 頭須 — the Lǔ liènǚ zhuàn 列女傳 lists Shī Shì fù 施氏婦 — the inclusion-and-exclusion is often unsound. Again, the various states’ princes are all given their own biographies, but Lǔ, Sòng, Cài, Cáo, Jǔ, Zhū six states are mixed in with their ministers; the Pànchén zhuàn 叛臣傳 records Wū Húyōng 巫狐庸’s defection from Chǔ to Wú in both Wú and Chǔ; Gōng Shānbùniǔ 公山不狃’s defection from Lǔ to Wú in both Wú and Lǔ — these are double-listings; whereas Qū Wū 屈巫 is in Chǔ but not in Jìn, Miáo Bēnhuáng 苗賁皇 is in Jìn but not in Chǔ — each disturbing his own format. Such instances are numerous, and not always perfectly precise — there is no need to whitewash. First month, Qiánlóng 54 (1789). Chief compilers, etc.
Abstract
The Shàngshǐ is the most ambitious single-author Qīng-period synthesis of Chinese pre-imperial history in jìzhuàn form. Lǐ Kǎi’s project is the methodological mirror-image of Mǎ Sù’s Yìshǐ: where Mǎ assembled the same source-corpus into YuánSòng jìshì běnmò topical-narrative form, Lǐ recasts it into Shǐjì-style jìzhuàn form, and where Mǎ Sù preserves the multi-voice character of his sources by topical grouping, Lǐ Kǎi imposes a unified narrative structure across them. The technique of “history-by-quotation” — assembling running historical narrative from cited primary-source passages without paraphrase — is essentially unprecedented at the scale of 107 juǎn in Chinese historiography and anticipates the modern documentary-history method. The dating bracket here is fixed by Lǐ Kǎi’s own preface: Yōngzhèng gēngxū (1730) to Qiánlóng yǐchǒu (1745), although he continued to revise individual sections in his last decade up to his death in 1755. The Sìkù tíyào identifies a number of inconsistent editorial decisions (in particular about the placement of figures who acted across two states), but generally praises the method as exceptionally rigorous.
The work was not widely studied in late-Qīng / Republican-era Chūnqiū scholarship — partly because of its sheer length, partly because Mǎ Sù’s Yìshǐ had already established the standard reference work in the topical-narrative form for the same corpus. Wilkinson (Chinese History) does not discuss it specifically, but it is regularly cited as a useful supplement to the standard Chūnqiū and Warring-States reference works.
Translations and research
- Lǐ Kǎi 李鍇. Shàng-shǐ 尚史. Sìkù WYG witness; standard modern reproduction in Sìkù quánshū facsimile (Shànghǎi gǔjí, 1987).
- Cáo Pèihuá 曹培華. 1996. “Lǐ Kǎi Shàng-shǐ shù-lùn” 李鍇《尚史》述論. Lìshǐ wénxiàn yánjiū 14: 89–112.
- Wáng Liǎngyú 王良瑜. 2007. Lǐ Kǎi yǔ Shàng-shǐ yánjiū 李鍇與《尚史》研究. PhD diss., Běi-jīng shīfàn dàxué.
- No substantial Western-language treatment located.
Other points of interest
The Shàngshǐ’s relation to Mǎ Sù’s Yìshǐ is a paradigmatic case of intra-tradition methodological dialogue in Chinese historiography: the same source-corpus, structured in two different ways. Together they constitute the most thorough Qīng-period response to Lǐ Kǎi’s own implicit critique that the standard Shǐjì through Hànshū tradition had insufficiently treated the pre-imperial period. The technique of jíjù-style historiography — composition by direct citation rather than paraphrase — anticipates aspects of modern documentary historiography. Lǐ Kǎi’s identity as a Plain-White-Banner Hànjūn with Liáodōng ancestral roots is also notable: he is one of the few major Qīng-period historians of pre-imperial China whose social location lay outside the Jiāngnán academic centres; his focus on the synthesis of pre-imperial materials may reflect, in part, a Qing-loyalist preference for canonical and unproblematic subject matter over the politically risky MíngQīng transition.