Zhànguó cè 戰國策
Stratagems of the Warring States by 高誘 (annotator), 姚宏 (supplementary annotator)
About the work
A Western-Hàn redaction by Liú Xiàng 劉向 (77–6 BCE) of an inherited corpus of late–pre-imperial intriguers’ (zòngheng 縱橫) speeches and dossiers, organized into 33 juǎn by the twelve states (Eastern Zhōu, Western Zhōu, Qín, Qí, Chǔ, Zhào, Wèi, Hán, Yān, SòngWèi, Zhōngshān). The Hàn commentator Gāo Yòu 高誘 (fl. 205–212) supplied a partial annotation in 21 (or 32) juǎn, of which the Chóngwén zǒngmù 崇文總目 reports only 8 juǎn still extant in early Sòng times; the Southern-Sòng Yáo Hóng 姚宏 (d. 1146) re-collated and supplied the xùzhù 續注 (“continued annotation”) for the remaining juǎn. The Sìkù base text is in fact Yáo Hóng’s recension, transmitted via Máo Jìn’s 毛晉 Jígǔgé 汲古閣 facsimile-Sòng manuscript, despite the misleading running attribution to Gāo Yòu on every juǎn.
Tiyao
The older recension is attributed to Gāo Yòu 高誘 of Hàn; in fact, examining the work, it is the Sòng recension of Yáo Hóng 姚宏. The Wénxiàn tōngkǎo 文獻通考 cites the Chóngwén zǒngmù 崇文總目: “The juǎn-and-piān of the Zhànguó cè are deficient: numbers 2 to 10 and 31 to 33 are missing. There also exists a recension by Gāo Yòu of the Latter Hàn in 20 juǎn — now missing numbers 1 and 5 and 11 to 20. Only 8 juǎn remain.” Zēng Gǒng 曾鞏’s collation preface says the Gāo Yòu recension has 21 piān, or some say 32; the Chóngwén zǒngmù gives 8, the present 10. The present recension is the Máo Jìn Jígǔgé facsimile-Sòng manuscript. Although every juǎn is rubricated as “Annotated by Gāo Yòu,” the actual annotation of Gāo Yòu is found only in juǎn 2 to 4 and 6 to 10 — eight juǎn, agreeing with the Chóngwén zǒngmù count — and in the last two juǎn (32 and 33), which combined with the eight gives the ten piān that Zēng Gǒng’s preface lists. The remaining 23 juǎn contain only collation notes (kǎoyì 考異) and no annotation. Where annotation does occur, it is mostly headed xù 續 (“continuation”). Where the xù tag has accidentally been dropped — for example the Zhàocè 1 annotation on Què Cī 郄疵 and on Luòyáng, both of which cite Lín Bǎo 林寶’s Yuánhé xìngzuǎn 元和姓纂 (a Táng work); the Zhàocè 2 annotation on ŌuYuè 甌越, citing Kǒng Yǎn 孔衍’s Chūnqiū hòuyǔ 春秋後語 (WèiJìn period); and the Wèicè 3 annotation on Máng Mǎo 芒卯, citing the Huáinánzǐ commentary — all of these are post-Gāo Yòu (and the Huáinánzǐ commentary is itself by Gāo Yòu, so it cannot be self-cited): plainly these are not Gāo Yòu’s own work and need no further argument. At the time of Zēng Gǒng’s collation, the official recension was missing 12 juǎn; the Gāo Yòu recension happened to have 10 of them (lacking only 5 and 31), and the Gāo Yòu recension’s gaps were entirely filled by the official recension (which itself only lacked 5 and 31). Zēng Gǒng must have used the Gāo Yòu recension to supplement the official one, and then drawn on other sources for two further juǎn; this is how the official and Gāo Yòu recensions came to be merged into a single text. But Zēng Gǒng does not say he collated Gāo Yòu’s annotation, so what he took was only the main text. By the time of Yáo Hóng’s recollation, the surviving Gāo Yòu annotation was incorporated, and his preface accordingly says: “Where the collator is not named, and where there is the xù mark, both are my additions” — knowing that Gāo Yòu’s annotation was already entered, he marked the rest xù (“continuation”) to distinguish them. And where there was Gāo Yòu’s annotation and Yáo Hóng made further corrections, he placed his correction in an inner inset within the interlinear annotation, distinct from the juǎn without Gāo Yòu annotation, indicating that at the time of his collation the annotation already stood beside the main text. The prefaces and colophons of Zēng Gǒng, Lǐ Gé 李格, Wáng Jué 王覺, and Sūn Pǔ 孫朴 at the head of the volume all bear standard headings naming each author; only Yáo Hóng’s preface is set off by a blank line, placed at the end without a heading. The format described in the preface matches the book in every detail. That this is Yáo Hóng’s recension is beyond doubt. The juǎn-by-juǎn attribution to Gāo Yòu is presumably a copyist’s interpolation made to falsify the work for greater antiquity. In the collation notes: those marked “Zēng” 曾 are from Zēng Gǒng’s recension; “Qián” 錢 from Qián Zǎo 錢藻; “Liú” 劉 from Liú Chǎng 劉敞; “Jí” 集 from the Jíxián Yuàn 集賢院 (Hall of Worthies) recension; the unattributed corrections are those Yáo Hóng’s preface calls “no collator named — these are my additions.” His critical work is exact and detailed. Wú Shīdào 吳師道 in his Zhànguó cè Bào zhù bǔzhèng 戰國策鮑注補正 KR2e0005 also calls it the best recension; this confirms that in the Yuán still it was known to come from Yáo. Why Máo Jìn’s Sòng print should bear the running Gāo Yòu rubric is not clear. Zhōu Mì’s 周密 Guǐxīn zázhì 癸辛雜識 reports that Jiǎ Sìdào 賈似道 once printed this work; perhaps his retainers Liào Yǐngzhōng 廖瑩中 and others, all idle profligates careless of textual care, mis-attributed it on a whim, and Máp Jìn happened to use that print as his manuscript exemplar. Recent Yángzhōu prints derive from this and continue to mis-attribute to Gāo Yòu — a perpetuated error. Here we mark “Annotated by Gāo Yòu, collated and supplemented by Yáo Hóng” only on the juǎn that actually contain Gāo Yòu’s annotation; on the juǎn whose original Gāo Yòu annotation has perished, only “Collated and supplemented by Yáo Hóng” appears, with no mention of Gāo Yòu — so as to preserve the truth of each. Yáo Hóng’s zì was Lìngshēng 令聲 (some say Bóshēng 伯聲); he was a man of Shànchuān 剡川. He served as a Deletion Officer (shāndìng guān 刪定官); for resisting Qín Huì 秦檜 he was thrown into the Court of Judicial Review (dàlǐ 大理) prison and died there of disease — a man of resolution and integrity, and not only his book is to be esteemed.
(Editorial note appended:) The Hàn Yìwén zhì 漢書·藝文志 places the Zhànguó cè in the same category as the Shǐjì, and successive bibliographic catalogs followed suit. Cháo Gōngwǔ 晁公武’s Dúshū zhì 讀書志 first reclassified it under the Masters (zǐbù 子部) under the Zòngheng (intriguers) school, and the Wénxiàn tōngkǎo followed. But Bān Gù says Sīmǎ Qiān composed the Shǐjì using the Zuǒ and Guóyǔ, drawing on the Shìběn and the Zhànguó cè, going on with the ChǔHàn chūnqiū, etc. — so the Zhànguó cè is unquestionably a history. Furthermore, the term “Master” (zǐ 子) properly designates a person and by extension the doctrines of one school; only a single-doctrine work qualifies. The Zhànguó cè is Liú Xiàng’s compilation of various records assembled together — the authorship is not a single hand and the various sources cannot be named. What Master would it represent? Cháo Gōngwǔ’s reclassification treats a record-book as a doctrinal book and a miscellaneous compilation as a single-school work — manifestly unsound. We here restore it to the Histories section.
Abstract
The Zhànguó cè is the principal surviving compendium of late–Warring-States political oratory, intriguers’ speeches, and quasi-fictionalized embassy accounts, organized state-by-state in 33 juǎn. The composite work was assembled by Liú Xiàng 劉向 in his Imperial Library editorship under Hàn Chéngdì 漢成帝 (he reports in his preface using six earlier rubrics — Guócè 國策, Guóshì 國事, Duǎncháng 短長, Shìyǔ 事語, Chángshū 長書, Xiūshū 修書 — and selecting Zhànguó cè as the unifying title). The covered period is from the dispersal of the Spring-and-Autumn order (early 5th c. BCE) to the rise of Qín–Hàn (3rd c. BCE). The earliest substantial annotation, by the Eastern-Hàn commentator Gāo Yòu 高誘 (fl. 205–212, also annotator of the Lǚshì chūnqiū 呂氏春秋 and Huáinánzǐ 淮南子), survived only in fragments by the Northern Sòng — Chóngwén zǒngmù records 8 of an original 20 or 21 juǎn. The Sòng scholar Zēng Gǒng 曾鞏 collated the main text from a fragmentary official and a fragmentary Gāo Yòu recension; the Southern-Sòng Yáo Hóng 姚宏 (d. 1146 in prison) added systematic xùzhù 續注 (“continued annotation”) on the juǎn whose Gāo Yòu commentary had perished, marking these throughout with the tag xù 續. The Sìkù editors demonstrate that the text universally circulating in their day under Gāo Yòu’s running attribution is in truth Yáo Hóng’s recension, transmitted via Máo Jìn’s 毛晉 Jígǔgé 汲古閣 facsimile-Sòng manuscript: the running misattribution they trace back to Jiǎ Sìdào’s 賈似道 Sòng print, whose engravers (notably Liào Yǐngzhōng 廖瑩中) attached Gāo Yòu’s name to every juǎn. The date bracket here covers the original Liú Xiàng redaction (late 1st c. BCE) at the early end and Yáo Hóng’s transmissional fixation (1146) at the late end. The Sìkù compilers also reverse Cháo Gōngwǔ 晁公武’s reclassification of the work as a Master-text (zǐbù, zòngheng school) and restore it to the Histories.
Translations and research
- James I. Crump. 1970. Chan-kuo Ts’e: A Translation. Oxford: Clarendon Press. (Revised edition: Ann Arbor: Center for Chinese Studies, University of Michigan, 1996.) The standard complete English translation.
- James I. Crump. 1964. Intrigues: Studies of the Chan-kuo Ts’e. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Foundational study of the rhetorical and historiographical layers.
- Zhū Zǔgēng 諸祖耿. 1985. Zhànguó cè jíjí zhù huìkǎo 戰國策集注彙考. Nánjīng: Jiāngsū gǔjí. The standard modern critical edition with collected commentaries.
- Miào Wényuǎn 繆文遠. 1995. Zhànguó cè kǎo biàn 戰國策考辨. Beijing: Zhōnghuá shūjú.
- Endymion Wilkinson. 2018. Chinese History: A New Manual, 5th ed., §28.2. (Standard placement.)
- Mǎ Yōng 馬雍. 1955. Zhànguó cè jiànzhèng 戰國策箋證. Cited in modern scholarship as a key textual study.
- Zhāng Shùnhuī 張舜徽 et al. (rev. He Jianzhang 何建章). 1990. Zhànguó cè zhùshì 戰國策注釋. Beijing: Zhōnghuá shūjú.
Other points of interest
The Sìkù compilers’ attribution-correction (Yáo Hóng over Gāo Yòu) was decisively confirmed in the 20th century by the discovery in 1973 of the Mǎwángduī 馬王堆 silk manuscript known as the Zhànguó zòngheng jiā shū 戰國縱橫家書, datable to the early Western Hàn, which preserves a parallel pre-redactional layer of the same speech-tradition behind the Zhànguó cè and confirms much of the Zhànguó cè’s pre-Hàn material as authentic, while also exposing the substantial fictional embellishment Liú Xiàng’s redaction received.