Wújùn zhì 吳郡志
Gazetteer of Wú Commandery [Sūzhōu] by 范成大 (zhuàn 撰)
About the work
A 50-juan prefectural gazetteer of Píngjiāngfǔ 平江府 / Sūzhōu 蘇州 (the historical Wújùn 吳郡) compiled in his late retirement years by Fàn Chéngdà 范成大 (1126–1193), the Sūzhōu-born senior Southern-Sòng official, ambassador to Jīn, and pastoral poet — one of the most highly regarded local gazetteers of the entire Sòng. The work was substantially complete by Shàoxī 3 (1192), but its publication was suppressed by local detractors after Fàn’s death in 1193 and the manuscript remained immured in the prefectural school for some thirty-five years until Lǐ Shòupéng 李壽朋 of Guǎngdé took up the prefecture in early Shàodìng (1228–1229) and brought it to print, with a Shàodìng 2 (1229) preface by Zhào Rǔtán 趙汝談 of Biàn 汴 (Kāifēng), as well as further interpolations supplied by the prefectural school officer Wāng Tàihēng 汪泰亨 to bring administrative coverage down to the Shàodìng era — interpolations cast in the manner of Chǔ Shàosūn’s 褚少孫 supplements to the Shǐjì. The work is structured in 39 mén and is universally rated, alongside Zhōu Yīnghé’s 周應合 Jǐngdìng Jiànkāng zhì KR2k0021, as one of the two finest specimens of the Southern Sòng prefectural gazetteer genre.
Tiyao
We respectfully note: the Wújùn zhì in 50 juan is by Fàn Chéngdà 范成大 of the Sòng. Chéngdà, zì Zhìnéng 至能, hào Shíhú jūshì 石湖居士, was a man of Wúxiàn 吳縣. He passed the jìnshì in Shàoxīng 24 (1154) and rose in office to cānzhī zhèngshì 參知政事; his career is given in his biography in the Sòng shǐ. This book is a work of his last years. Fellow townsmen Gōng Yí 龔頤, Téng Mào 滕茂, and Zhōu Nán 周南 jointly assisted in bringing it to completion. At that time someone had sought to have a certain matter included in the registers but had been refused; on Chéngdà’s death he started a slander, claiming that the book had not in fact issued from Chéngdà’s brush, and accordingly publication was suppressed and did not go forward. Hence the preface of the Zhìyuán Jiāhé zhì 至元嘉禾志 says that the Wújùn zhì was unable to be printed because of false aspersion.
In the early Shàodìng (1228), Lǐ Shòupéng of Guǎngdé first cut the blocks; Zhào Rǔtán wrote the preface, citing Zhōu Bìdà’s 周必大 epitaph for Chéngdà to fix the work as in fact Chéngdà’s own composition, and stating that Gōng Yí and the other two had once gathered material on Chéngdà’s behalf — and so the slander has its root, and the matter is now settled. Shòupéng moreover, observing that the book runs only to Shàoxī 3 (1192), and that the great later prefectural foundations such as the Bǎiwàncāng 百萬倉 (Million-shí Granary), the new town of Jiādìng 嘉定, the Xǔpǔ 許浦 marine garrison, and the Gùjīng 顧涇 garrison transfer were therefore not registered, ordered the school officer Wāng Tàihēng 汪泰亨 to supplement them — claiming the precedent of Chǔ Shàosūn’s supplements to the Shǐjì, but failing to set the supplements off as a separate continuation gazetteer (xùzhì 續志); they are accordingly intermixed with the original work.
The book is divided into 39 mén; its citations are abundant and its narrative concise — a fine exemplar of the gazetteer corpus. Printed copies have long been lost; the present text-witness is from the old Shàodìng cut. There are frequently jiāzhù (interlinear notes) within jiāzhù. In examination, before Chéngdà’s time, only Yáo Hóng’s 姚宏 supplemented annotation to the Zhànguócè 戰國策 had this practice — but not nearly to the extent of this book — so that this too may be called an innovative form of authorship.
Reverently collated and submitted, sixth month of Qiánlóng 44 (1779). Editors-in-chief: Jì Yún 紀昀, Lù Xīxióng 陸錫熊, Sūn Shìyì 孫士毅. General collation officer: Lù Fèichí 陸費墀.
Abstract
The Wújùn zhì is one of the central monuments of Sòng fāngzhì 方志 writing. Fàn Chéngdà undertook it in retirement at his Shíhú estate after his return from Sìchuān (1177) and brief later service at court; the work is securely dated to his last years, and most modern scholarship places its substantial completion shortly before his death — in or just before Shàoxī 3 (1192), the year to which the original 50-juan recension carries its registers. CBDB id 7211 confirms 1126–1193 for Fàn.
The transmission history is unusually well documented because of the suppression episode. The Sìkù tíyào, drawing on Zhào Rǔtán’s preface, lays out the sequence: (1) at the time of Fàn’s death the manuscript was on the verge of being printed by his prefectural successor; (2) a townsman whose name had been refused inclusion claimed the book was a forgery, and the prefect lost his nerve and consigned the manuscript to the prefectural school xuégōng 學宮; (3) it remained there until Lǐ Shòupéng’s prefectural tenure beginning Shàodìng 1 (early 1229), when he had it printed (Wāng Tàihēng having added supplementary materials, especially the major JiāTài and Jiādìng-era institutional changes) and Zhào Rǔtán wrote the preface dated the eleventh-month new-moon of Shàodìng 2 (1229). Zhào appeals to Zhōu Bìdà’s epitaph for Fàn (which lists this title among his works) as documentary refutation of the forgery charge, and concedes that Gōng Yí, Téng Mào, and Zhōu Nán had indeed acted as Fàn’s research assistants — distinguishing collaboration from authorship.
The structural innovation of the work, beyond its 39 mén division, is its dense interlinear annotation: a jiāzhù-within-jiāzhù layered annotation system that the Sìkù editors recognised as a creative formal innovation, comparable only to Yáo Hóng’s Zhànguó cè annotation among Sòng precedents. The thirty-nine sections cover, in addition to the standard topics (administrative history, walls, schools, markets, hydraulics, prefects, eminent persons), distinctive Sūzhōu-specific topics: gardens (yuán-tíng 園亭), academies, hydraulic works of the Tàihú region, the salt monopoly, water-borne tax-grain transport, and detailed treatment of Sūzhōu’s zhuàngyuán and high-ranking jìnshì lineages — Fàn’s own family included.
The work is the principal Sòng-dynasty source on Sūzhōu and underpins the late-Yuán Zhìyuán Jiāhé zhì KR2k0023 (the gazetteer of Jiāxìngfǔ, which crucially preserves the suppression note in its preface), the Míng Gūsū zhì KR2k0029 of Wáng Áo 王鏊 (1506), and Lù Xióng’s 盧熊 Sūzhōu fǔzhì. Modern editions: the SòngYuán fāngzhì cóngkān 宋元方志叢刊 (Zhōnghuá Shūjú 1990) reprints the Sìkù recension; the standard punctuated edition is Lù Zhènyuè 陸振岳 et al. (eds.), Wújùn zhì, Jiāngsū Gǔjí Chūbǎnshè 江蘇古籍出版社, 1986 (later reprinted by Fènghuáng Chūbǎnshè 1999, 2003).
The publication date of 1229 (Shàodìng 2) is the terminus ad quem of the supplemented edition; the terminus a quo of the original Fàn recension is 1192 (Shàoxī 3). The bracket notBefore 1192 / notAfter 1229 reflects the actual composition-and-publication window of the received recension; the supplements bring the zhìguān registers down to the Jiādìng / early Shàodìng era.
Translations and research
No complete English translation. Two of Fàn Chéngdà’s other prose works (the Lán-pèi lù, the Wú-chuán lù, and the Cān-luán lù) have been translated and studied by James Hargett. For the Wú-jùn zhì specifically, the principal modern critical edition is Lù Zhènyuè 陸振岳 et al., Wú-jùn zhì, Jiāngsū Gǔjí Chūbǎnshè, 1986 (with thorough collation against the Shàodìng cut and against quotations preserved in the Yǒnglè dàdiǎn). Substantive secondary studies include: Hēng Sūng-shih 衡宋實 (Liú Zhēn-yún 劉禛雲), “Wú-jùn zhì yǔ Fàn Chéngdà de fāng-zhì sī-xiǎng” 吳郡志與范成大的方志思想, Sūzhōu Dàxué xuébào (1999.4); Bào Wěi-mín 包偉民 (in Sòng-dài dìfāng cáizhèng shǐ yánjiū, 2001); and the chapter “Suzhou and Its Gazetteers” in Joseph R. Dennis, Writing, Publishing, and Reading Local Gazetteers in Imperial China, 1100–1700 (Harvard, 2015), which uses the Wú-jùn zhì as an exemplar of the Southern Sòng tradition that informed the Míng-Qīng fāngzhì corpus. The work is also one of the principal sources cited in the burgeoning Sūzhōu local-history scholarship in Western languages, including Michael Marmé’s Suzhou: Where the Goods of All the Provinces Converge (Stanford, 2005), and Eugene Wang’s studies of the Sūzhōu gardens.
Other points of interest
The jiāzhù-within-jiāzhù feature represents a textual-bibliographic experiment without close parallel in the Sòng prefectural-gazetteer corpus, and is one of the principal philological reasons the Sìkù editors retained the Sìkù-base Shàodìng print rather than substituting a more recent recension. The interpolated material by Wāng Tàihēng — in particular his account of the Bǎiwàncāng (Sūzhōu’s enormous tax-grain depot), the founding of Jiādìngxiàn (1218), and the Xǔpǔ marine garrison — is itself a major source on early-thirteenth-century institutional change in the LiǎngZhè coast. The work was the principal model for Wáng Áo’s Gūsū zhì and through it for the Sūzhōu gazetteer tradition into the Qīng.