Zhàogào rìmíng kǎo 召誥日名考
Investigation of the Day-Names in the Shàngshū Zhàogào chapter by 李銳 (撰)
About the work
李銳 Lǐ Ruì’s (1768–1817) evidential-philological study in 1 juàn of the chronological-calendrical data preserved in the Shàngshū 尚書 Zhàogào 召誥 chapter — the chapter giving the Duke of Zhōu’s address at the founding of the Eastern Capital Luòyì 雒邑, with circumstantial dating in terms of the gānzhī 干支 (stems-and-branches) day-names and lunar phases.
Abstract
The Zhàogào chapter of the Shàngshū is one of the principal pre-Hàn documents preserving circumstantial chronological data: the chapter records the principal events of the Eastern-Capital foundation by giving the gānzhī day-names, the lunar phases (first-quarter, full moon, etc.), and the year-numbering relative to the Zhōu Wǔwáng conquest. Reconciling these data into a self-consistent calendrical sequence — and dating the underlying events to specific Julian calendar dates — was one of the foundational chronological-philological problems of QiánJiā scholarship.
The problem had been engaged by a long sequence of QiánJiā scholars including 江永 Jiāng Yǒng, 戴震 Dài Zhèn (in his Yúgòng dìlǐ tú 禹貢地理圖 and elsewhere), and 阮元 Ruǎn Yuán (in his sponsoring of the Chóurén zhuàn and related projects). Lǐ Ruì’s Zhàogào rìmíng kǎo is the most systematically-mathematical of these treatments: where the earlier scholars had worked primarily from the philological side, identifying the day-names and the lunar phases in the textual record, Lǐ Ruì brings the systematic Hàn-period calendrical algorithms (the Sāntǒng and Sìfēn systems whose reconstructions he provides in the parallel KR3fc051 Hàn Sāntǒng shù and KR3fc052 Hàn Sìfēn shù) to bear on the chronological reconstruction.
The work’s substantive conclusion places the Zhàogào events in specific years of the Western-Zhōu chronology, with the day-names and lunar phases of the chapter reconciled to a particular fixed-calendar sequence. Lǐ Ruì’s reconstruction supports the conventional chronology of the Western-Zhōu founding decade but provides precise day-by-day dating within that decade.
The work is one of the principal documents of the broader QiánJiā evidential-chronological project — the systematic recovery of the precise dates of the foundational events of Chinese antiquity. The project had stakes well beyond chronology proper: the dating of the Shàngshū events bore directly on the authenticity-debates regarding the Shàngshū’s various chapters, which were central to the QiánJiā re-evaluation of the classical canon. Lǐ Ruì’s mathematical contribution placed the chronological-calendrical apparatus of the project on a rigorous procedural footing.
Dating: NotBefore 1795 (allowing for early productive period after Lǐ Ruì’s mid-1790s mathematical formation in Ruǎn Yuán’s circle); notAfter his death year 1817. The work was completed in conjunction with the Hàn Sāntǒng and Hàn Sìfēn reconstructions, plausibly in the closing decade of Lǐ Ruì’s life.
Translations and research
- Elman, Benjamin A. 1984. From Philosophy to Philology. Cambridge, Mass.: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University. — Provides the kǎo-zhèng context.
- Sivin, Nathan. 2009. Granting the Seasons. New York: Springer.
- Cullen, Christopher. 2017. The Foundations of Celestial Reckoning: Three Ancient Chinese Astronomical Systems. London: Routledge. — Treats the Hàn-period calendrical systems that Lǐ Ruì reconstructs.
- Wú Wénjùn 吳文俊, ed. 1985. Zhōng-guó shù-xué shǐ dà-xì 中國數學史大系, vol. 7.