東觀餘論

Dōngguān yúlùn 東觀餘論

Lingering Discussions from the Eastern Pavilion

by 黃伯思 (Huáng Bósī, 1079–1118), compiled by his son 黃䚮 (Huáng Yīng, fl. mid-12th c.; colophon dated Shàoxīng dīngmǎo = 1147)

About the work

A two-juan posthumous bǐjì of antiquarian, palaeographic, and connoisseurial notes by the Northern-Sòng jīnshí 金石 specialist Huáng Bósī 黃伯思 (1079–1118), assembled and edited by his son Huáng Yīng 黃䚮 in Shàoxīng dīngmǎo (1147). The work consists of two parts: the Fǎtiè kānwù 法帖刋誤 in two juan (Bósī’s celebrated 1108 reassessment of Mǐ Fú’s 米芾 connoisseurial judgements on the Chúnhuà gétiè 淳化閣帖) — and a xià component of miscellaneous lùnbiàn 論辨 and tíbá 題跋 (essays and colophons) on calligraphy, ancient bronze and stone inscriptions, jīnshí 金石 antiquities, palaeographic curiosities, and seal-script. Bósī’s son’s colophon claims the original compilation was in ten juan; the present recension survives in two only — whether through transmissional loss or through deliberate editorial selection by the son, the Sìkù editors leave open. A foundational text of Northern-Sòng jīnshí xué 金石學, ranking with Ōuyáng Xiū’s 歐陽修 Jí gǔ lù 集古錄 and Lǚ Dàlín’s 呂大臨 Kǎogǔ tú 考古圖. Catalogued under Záxué zhī shǔ 雜學之屬 of the Zájiā 雜家 division (subdivision záokǎo 雜考).

The volume opens with the Qianlong emperor’s Yùzhì tí míngbǎn Dōngguān yúlùn 御製題明版東觀餘論 — an imperial poem on the Míng-edition copy of the work — recorded as a frontispiece to this Sìkù recension.

Tiyao

We respectfully submit that Dōngguān yúlùn in two juan is the work of Huáng Bósī of the Sòng. Bósī, zì Chángruì 長睿, hào Xiāobīn 霄賔 and self-styled Yúnlínzǐ 雲林子, a man of Zhāowǔ 昭武 [Pútián 莆田 in Fújiàn], in the Zhènghé 政和 reign rose to bìshū láng 秘書郎. Bósī died at scarcely forty, but his learning was vast and penetrating: Lǐ Gāng’s 李綱 inscription on his tomb states that “in the books of the classics and the histories and the hundred schools, in the doctrines of astronomy, geography, calendrics, and divination, there was nothing he had not penetrated to the bottom”; he was, moreover, a lover of antique writings and rare characters, of the kuǎnshì 欵式 and tǐzhì 體製 [forms and conventions] of bronze ritual vessels — all of which he could investigate, distinguish, and correct. His writings comprise Fǎtiè kānwù 法帖刋誤 in two juan and a Gǔqì shuō 古器説 in 426 piān. In dīngmǎo of Shàoxīng [1147] his son Yīng 䚮 collected his discussions, judgements, and colophons and printed them together under the comprehensive title Dōngguān yúlùn. Yet Yīng’s own colophon claims it was in ten juan; the present text is in only two — perhaps later transmission has compressed it. The number of antique-vessel notices does not reach 426, so we suspect Yīng exercised some selection over what was unfinished in his father’s manuscript: rather than vainly paraded a great mass and refused to distinguish good from bad, vainly displaying his father’s wealth of writing and so unwittingly exposing his weaknesses — his judgement was of high order. Further, the Shūlù jiětí records Bósī’s Bógǔ tú shuō 博古圗説 in eleven juan, with 527 vessels and 45 seals, and no entry by the name Gǔqì shuō, and notes that “later compilers of the Bógǔ tú 博古圖 freely drew upon it” — we suspect that, after the official compendium took the same name, the son retitled his father’s work to avoid encroaching on the imperial title. The book is sharp in its rebuke of Ōuyáng Xiū 歐陽修 for not investigating closely enough; yet Lóu Yào’s 樓鑰 colophon goes on to point out errors of his own — the entries on Shǐ Zhòu’s 史籀 calligraphy, the Yìyuàn 異苑, Wáng Xiànzhī’s 王獻之 Xuántí 璇題, wùwù 勿勿, and the Gānzhè tiè 甘蔗帖 — citing them for Bósī’s own oversights. Such is the nature of kǎozhèng learning: there is no end of it; one generation picks up where another left off. Even so, in essential precision and breadth, this book far surpasses [Ōuyáng’s] Jí gǔ lù 集古録. Respectfully revised and submitted, fourth month of the forty-sixth year of Qiánlóng [1781].

General Compilers: Jǐ Yún 紀昀 (note: 均 in the original is a typographical slip for 昀), Lù Xīxióng 陸錫熊, Sūn Shìyì 孫士毅. General Reviser: Lù Fèichí 陸費墀.

Imperial inscription

Yùzhì tí míngbǎn Dōngguān yúlùn 御製題明版東觀餘論 (the Qianlong emperor):

Mǐ [Fú] has already attacked Wáng [Zhù 王著]; Huáng [Bósī] in turn rebukes Mǐ (see Huáng Bósī’s prefatory remarks). From of old the contestation has been dense as silk: those of a thousand years later argue with those of a thousand years earlier. Of all the things in question, how many are truly real, and how many empty? The text laid out and the words spoken — these inhere in the heart, righting the ancient writings to set down precedent for those that follow. The emphasis Bósī gave to revisiting the Chúnhuà and adding evaluative judgement makes it clear that even Wáng Duó 王鐸 has not yet earned full credit. — Imperial composition.

Abstract

Huáng Bósī 黃伯思 (1079–1118), zì Chángruì 長睿, hào Yúnlínzǐ 雲林子 (also Xiāobīn 霄賓), was the foremost Northern-Sòng connoisseur and palaeographer of his generation. A native of Pútián 莆田 (the Sìkù tiyao gives Zhāowǔ 昭武, an old name for the same area in Fújiàn) and grandson of Huáng Lǚ 黃履 (1030–1101), he took the jìnshì in the early 1090s and rose to bìshū láng 祕書郎. He died young at 39. His specialty was jīnshí xué 金石學 (the study of inscriptions on bronze and stone), calligraphy connoisseurship, palaeography, and the deciphering of seal-script and ancient unusual characters. The Sìkù tiyao quotes Lǐ Gāng’s 李綱 (the famous statesman, 1083–1140) tomb inscription for Huáng to the effect that there was no field of learning Huáng had not mastered.

The Dōngguān yúlùn is a posthumous compilation. The principal component is Huáng’s celebrated Fǎtiè kānwù 法帖刋誤 KR2n0014 of Dàguān 2 (1108), a critical reassessment of Mǐ Fú’s 米芾 connoisseurial judgements on the Chúnhuà gétiè 淳化閣帖 — the first official imperial corpus of model calligraphies of Sòng — that ranks alongside Mǐ’s own Shū shǐ 書史 as a foundational text of Sòng calligraphy criticism. The remainder of the Dōngguān yúlùn gathers his miscellaneous lùnbiàn (essays and arguments), tíbá (colophons), and antiquarian kǎozhèng notes, including substantial work on Sòng jīnshí — bronze and stone inscriptions, ritual-vessel typology, and ancient writing-systems. Huáng’s son Huáng Yīng 黃䚮 collected and edited the materials, presenting them under the comprehensive title Dōngguān yúlùn in Shàoxīng dīngmǎo (1147); his colophon claims the work originally ran to ten juan, but the surviving recension is in two. Whether the compression resulted from transmissional loss or from later editorial selection, the Sìkù editors are uncertain.

The dating bracket adopted here (notBefore 1100, notAfter 1118) covers Bósī’s mature productive years (the Fǎtiè kānwù itself was completed in 1108) up to his death; the editorial assembly by the son is a separate later moment (1147), but the textual content is squarely Bósī’s.

A signature feature of Bósī’s method is its sharp polemical edge — directed especially at Ōuyáng Xiū’s 歐陽修 Jí gǔ lù 集古錄 for laxity, and at the official Huīzōng-court Bógǔ tú 博古圖 — which provoked counter-criticism by later Sòng jīnshí writers (notably Lóu Yào 樓鑰, whose colophon to the work, recorded in the Sìkù tiyao, lists five specific errors he had caught Bósī committing). The very back-and-forth is itself telling evidence of the maturity of the Northern-Sòng jīnshí enterprise as an organised scholarly community.

The work is included in 《宋史·藝文志》, Zhízhāi shūlù jiětí, the Sìkù, and many compendia.

Translations and research

Modern Chinese scholarship on Huáng Bósī and the Dōngguān yúlùn is substantial:

• Róng Gēng 容庚, Sòng dài jīnshí jiā mùlù 宋代金石家目錄 (in Yānjīng xuébào 燕京學報, 1933) — situates Huáng among the founding Sòng jīnshí scholars.
• Zhū Jiànxīn 朱劍心, Jīnshí xué 金石學 (Shānghǎi: Wénhuà Xuéshè, 1940; rev. eds.) — devotes a section to the Dōngguān yúlùn and the Fǎtiè kānwù.
• Amy McNair, The Upright Brush: Yan Zhenqing’s Calligraphy and Song Literati Politics (University of Hawai’i Press, 1998), and other Western-language calligraphy studies, treat Huáng’s Fǎtiè kānwù as a key source for Sòng calligraphic connoisseurship.
• Liú Tāo 劉濤 (ed.), Zhōngguó shūfǎ shǐ: Liǎng Sòng juǎn 中國書法史·兩宋卷 (Jiāngsū Jiàoyù, 1999) — full chapter on Huáng Bósī and his calligraphic scholarship.
• Modern punctuated edition: Dōngguān yúlùn, in the Quán Sòng bǐjì 全宋筆記 series (Dàxiàng Chūbǎnshè), and in the Lìdài shūfǎ lùnwén xuǎn 歷代書法論文選 (Shànghǎi Shūhuà Chūbǎnshè, 1979).
• Robert Harrist Jr., The Embodied Image: Chinese Calligraphy from the John B. Elliott Collection (Princeton, 1999), passing remarks on Sòng fǎtiè connoisseurship.

No complete European-language translation of the Dōngguān yúlùn exists.

Other points of interest

The Dōngguān yúlùn is one of the canonical sources for the early-12th-century state of jīnshí xué — a scholarly enterprise then at its first peak. Its sustained polemic against the official Bógǔ tú is also testimony to the tense relations between independent scholar-connoisseurs and the imperial Hànlín bureau under Huīzōng. The Qianlong-era frontispiece poem (translated above) is one of the more substantive Qianlong inscriptions on a Sìkù book: the emperor takes Huáng Bósī’s part against Wáng Duó 王鐸 as a corrector of the Chúnhuà tradition.

Links

• Sìkù quánshū zǒngmù tíyào 四庫全書總目提要, Zǐbù · Zájiā lèi, Dōngguān yúlùn entry.
• Huáng Bósī’s Fǎtiè kānwù 法帖刋誤: KR2n0014.
• Wikidata: Q11118207 (黃伯思).