金樓子

Jīnlóuzǐ 金樓子

The Master of the Golden Pavilion

by 蕭繹 (Xiāo Yì, 508–555; the future Emperor Yuán 元帝 of the Liáng 梁 dynasty, posthumous title Xiàoyuán dì 孝元帝, r. 552–555)

About the work

A miscellaneous zǐ-book in six juan (the surviving Sìkù recension, recovered from the Yǒnglè dàdiǎn 永樂大典) compiled by Xiāo Yì 蕭繹 (508–555), the highly literate Liáng prince who reigned as Emperor Yuán in the dynasty’s catastrophic last years. The work takes its title from the biéhào 別號 (“alternative sobriquet”) that Xiāo Yì had used since his appanage years — Jīnlóuzǐ “Master of the Golden Pavilion” — placing it in the same self-naming convention as Gě Hóng’s 葛洪 Bāopǔzǐ 抱朴子 (cf. Wilkinson §1.5.1.4). Originally in fifteen piān (twenty juan by the Suí zhì count), the text has been transmitted in fragmentary form: by the early Yuán only fourteen piān with patchy chapter-internal lacunae remained; by the early Míng even Mǎ Sù 馬驌, the great encyclopedist, could find no complete copy; and the Sìkù editors had to reconstruct the present six-juan recension from the Yǒnglè dàdiǎn’s surviving extracts (which themselves derive from a Yuán Zhìzhèng 至正 [1341–1370] reprint). Of the fifteen original piān, eight (Xīngwáng 興王, Jièzǐ 戒子, Jùshū 聚書, Shuōfān 説蕃, Lìyán 立言, Zhùshū 著書, Jiéduì 捷對, Zhìguài 志怪) survive head-to-tail; the remaining seven are textually compromised but their headings are mostly preserved. The book is one of the most important sources for the cultural and intellectual life of the Southern Dynasties — for the great Liáng book-collecting tradition (the Jùshū piān records imperial and private libraries, including the famous figure of 80,000 juan for Xiāo Yì’s own collection at Jiānglíng — see Wilkinson §73.5), for the bibliographic taxonomy of jīng / shǐ / zǐ / jí 經史子集 (the four-branches scheme is here named explicitly, half a century before the Suí zhì), and for the literary self-consciousness of late-Liáng authorship.

Tiyao

We respectfully submit that Jīnlóuzǐ in six juan was composed by Xiāoyuán the Filial Emperor 孝元皇帝 of the Liáng. The Liáng shū basic annals state that the emperor was “broadly read in the various works, and his compositions and verses were widely circulated”; while still in his appanage, he had taken the biéhào 別號 Jīnlóuzǐ — and thence named the book. The Suí shū · Jīngjí zhì, the Táng shū, and the Sòng shǐ · Yìwén zhì all list its title at twenty juan; Cháo Gōngwǔ’s 晁公武 Dúshū zhì says the book is in fifteen piān — hence in the Sòng there were not yet lacunae. But by the time of Sòng Lián’s 宋濂 Zhūzǐ biàn 諸子辨 and Hú Yīnglín’s 胡應麟 Jiǔliú xùlùn 九流緒論, the zǐbù enumerations in both works fail to include it, so we know that by the early Míng the work had begun to be lost; by the late Míng it was finally dispersed. Hence Mǎ Sù 馬驌, when compiling his Yìshǐ 繹史 — for which he ranged most widely — likewise admits to not having seen a transmitted copy and to having only assembled a few entries from other works.

We have now examined the various rhyme-categories of the Yǒnglè dàdiǎn and found that they still preserve a substantial portion of its surviving text; the source on which they drew was the Yuán Zhìzhèng-period printed edition. Verifying its preface and table of contents, both are complete; only the chapter-list gives just fourteen piān, which does not match Cháo Gōngwǔ’s count of fifteen. The “Èrnán wǔbà” 二南五覇 chapter and the “Shuōfān” 説蕃 chapter overlap heavily in their wording — perhaps a transmitter has confused the table of contents and lost the body of the chapter [it had recorded]? Moreover the Yǒnglè dàdiǎn’s arrangement is haphazard — chunks have been cut up: there are passages not from a single piān erroneously merged, and again passages cut and redistributed among other juan with the principal piān itself dropped. Of the chapter-introductions (piānduān xùshù 篇端序述), only the four — Jièzǐ, Hòufēi, Jiéduì, Zhìguài — still survive; the rest are all mislaid. But within the body, the eight piān — Xīngwáng, Jièzǐ, Jùshū, Shuōfān, Lìyán, Zhùshū, Jiéduì, Zhìguài — are all textually whole from beginning to end; and the remaining material, although disordered, is fortunate in having clearly preserved its chapter-headings, so that with care it can be re-arranged into a finished compilation. We have respectfully gathered and pieced [the fragments] together with the greatest attention, cross-checked and corrected, and divided [the result] into six juan.

The book embraces in its scope the doings of past and present, the events seen and heard, governance and disorder, the upright and the deviant — adding commentary and admonition, useful instruction together with information. It is in the zájiā 雜家 line. And as the period [of its compilation] still preceded the full loss of the strange writings of the Zhōu and Qín, what it cites — for instance “the father of Xǔyóu 許由 was named Ěr 耳, and there were seven brothers, of whom one withdrew at nineteen” or “Tāng of Shāng 商湯 had altogether seven titles” — these are all unhistorical anecdotes (shǐwài yìwén 史外軼聞) not encountered in other books. Again, the Lìyán, Jùshū, and Zhùshū chapters explicitly state his own authorial labour; the bibliographic genealogies (diǎnjí yuánliú 典籍源流) which they record can supplement what the other catalogues do not have.

But ever since the Yǒngmíng 永明 reign, ornate language ran rampant; this book too is in flowery and ornate style (qǐmí 綺靡) and does not escape the manner of its time. Its deliberate antique obscurity — for instance the passage in the chapter on Prince [Xiāo] Yáoguāng of Shǐān 始安王遙光 (where the punctuation is barely possible) — even degenerates into a mannered hybrid (biàntǐ 變體). And as for the line “the cycle of five hundred years has come round to me, how dare I shrink from it” — solemnly placing himself on a level with Confucius — this is altogether intemperate (bù jīng 不經). Such defects neither flaw nor virtue can conceal; we need not contrive to gloss them.

Respectfully revised and submitted, ninth month of the forty-sixth year of Qiánlóng [1781].

General Compilers: Jǐ Yún 紀昀, Lù Xīxióng 陸錫熊, Sūn Shìyì 孫士毅. General Reviser: Lù Fèichí 陸費墀.

Abstract

Xiāo Yì 蕭繹 (508–555), seventh son of Liáng Wǔdì 梁武帝 Xiāo Yǎn 蕭衍, was an exceptionally learned and prolific Liáng imperial prince who held the Jīngzhōu 荊州 governorship from 526, ruled at Jiānglíng 江陵 as the dominant Liáng prince through the catastrophe of the Hóu Jǐng 侯景 rebellion (548–552), formally proceeded to the throne as Emperor Yuán in 552, and was killed three years later when Western Wèi forces sacked Jiānglíng. His personal library — claimed at 70,000–80,000 juan in the Jùshū piān of this work, although Wilkinson (Chinese History, §73.5) accepts this only as an outside maximum — was the largest private collection of pre-Táng China; in the days before the city fell, the emperor himself ordered the library burnt in the so-called Jiānglíng fénshū 江陵焚書, one of the great cultural disasters of the Southern Dynasties period. Frontmatter date: the catalogue and Wilkinson agree on 508 as Xiāo Yì’s birth year; the Sìkù tiyao gives 509; CBDB id 33252 records 508 (followed here, with a note in the person file).

The Jīnlóuzǐ was composed across most of his adult life: the earliest internal datings reach back to his 530s appanage years at Jīngzhōu, while the latest material refers to events of the Tàiqīng 太清 (547–549) and Chéngshèng 承聖 (552–555) reigns. The bracket adopted here (notBefore 522, notAfter 555) reflects the active span of the surviving text — from the Pǔtōng 普通 / Dàtōng 大通 reigns when his collecting and writing began in earnest down to the year of his death. The original was in fifteen piān (twenty juan as catalogued in the Suí shū · Jīngjí zhì, the Táng shū, and the Sòng shǐ · Yìwén zhì); the reception is documented through Cháo Gōngwǔ (still fifteen piān) and Chén Zhènsūn (Sòng) but lapses by Sòng Lián’s Zhūzǐ biàn (early Míng); the Sìkù editors recovered the present six-juan recension from the Yǒnglè dàdiǎn. The work is zájiā in form — gathering historical anecdote, royal-house genealogies, bibliographic notices, zhìguài curiosities, and admonitory instructions for sons and consorts — and is the principal extant first-person literary self-portrait by a Chinese ruler before the Táng. Its Lìyán 立言 chapter is also one of the earliest essays explicitly devoted to literary theory in the zǐ-form (often paired in modern Wénxīn diāolóng scholarship with Liú Xié’s chapters on the same questions), and its formal naming of the four bibliographic divisions — jīng 經, shǐ 史, zǐ 子, jí 集 — predates the Suí zhì by half a century (Wilkinson §73.4).

The text was effectively lost between the SòngYuán transition and the Sìkù recompilation; the present six-juan recension is therefore wholly a Qiānlóng-era reconstruction, with all the characteristic uncertainties (chapter-internal lacunae, disordered passages, the loss of the full piān on Èrnán wǔbà 二南五覇, the partial loss of the Hòufēi 后妃 chapter). Modern editions (Xǔ Yìmín 許逸民, see below) collate further citations from the Tàipíng yùlǎn, the Bēihǎi xuéhǎi 北海學海, and the Dūnhuáng manuscript fragments to extend the recovery.

Translations and research

• Xǔ Yìmín 許逸民, Jīnlóuzǐ jiàojiān 金樓子校箋, 2 vols. (Zhōnghuá shūjú, 2011). The standard modern critical edition, gathering all available Yǒnglè dàdiǎn fragments, parallel citations from medieval encyclopedias, and the early-Qīng received text, with extensive philological notes and a textual history.
• Zhōng Shìlún 鍾仕倫, Jīnlóuzǐ yánjiū 金樓子研究 (Zhōnghuá shūjú, 2004). The principal Chinese-language monograph on the work’s content, sources, transmission, and intellectual context.
• Xiaofei Tian 田曉菲, Beacon Fire and Shooting Star: The Literary Culture of the Liang (502–557) (Harvard University Asia Center, 2007). Major chapters on Xiāo Yì as author and patron, with substantial discussion of the Jīnlóuzǐ and its place in late-Liáng literary culture; the standard English-language scholarly framework for the text.
• Andrew Chittick, Patronage and Community in Medieval China: The Xiangyang Garrison, 400–600 CE (SUNY Press, 2010). Background on the Liáng court culture of Xiāo Yì’s circle.
• Lin Wen-yueh 林文月, Liáng Yuán-dì 梁元帝 (Wàn-juàn-lóu, 1990; rep. 2010). Standard scholarly Chinese biography.
• Selected English translations of individual chapters appear in Tian (2007); Stephen Owen (ed.), The Cambridge History of Chinese Literature, vol. 1 (2010), gives passing treatment to the Jīnlóuzǐ in the early-medieval section. There is no complete English or other Western-language translation of the work.

Other points of interest

The Jùshū piān 聚書篇 (“Book Collecting”) of the Jīnlóuzǐ is the principal pre-Táng autobiographical account of an imperial bibliophile and the most important pre-Suí source for the history of book-collecting in China; Wilkinson (§73.5) cites Xiāo Yì’s claim of 80,000 juan as the upper-end figure for late-Southern-Dynasties collections. The Jièzǐ piān 戒子篇 (“Rules for Sons”) is the source of the famous prescription — quoted by Sīmǎ Guāng, by Yán Zhītuī, and through them widely received — that the Five Classics should be the foundation of all reading and the Standard Histories second only to them (fán dú shū bì yǐ Wǔjīng wèi běn 凡讀書必以五經為本; zhèngshǐ jì jiàn chéngbài déshī, cǐ jīngguó zhī suǒ jí 正史既見成敗得失, 此經國之所急, Wǔjīng zhī wài, yí yǐ zhèngshǐ wèi xiān 五經之外, 宜以正史為先). It is also the earliest occurrence of the proverb “if you read a book aloud one hundred times its meaning becomes clear” 讀書百遍其義自見, attributed to the late-Hàn teacher Dǒng Yù 董遇 (Wilkinson §19.3). The work’s title concept Jīnlóu “Golden Pavilion” later became a standing literary epithet for an emperor’s writing-place.

Links

• Sìkù quánshū zǒngmù tíyào 四庫全書總目提要, Zǐbù · Zájiā lèi, Jīnlóuzǐ entry.
• Endymion Wilkinson, Chinese History: A New Manual (6th ed.), §1.5.1.4, §73.4–73.5.
• Wikipedia: Jinlouzi; Emperor Yuan of Liang. Wikidata: Q15978854 (Jinlouzi).