容齋隨筆

Róngzhāi suíbǐ 容齋隨筆

Random Notes from the Tolerant Studio

by 洪邁 (Hóng Mài, 1123–1202; zì Jǐnglú 景盧, hào Yěchǔ 野處 / Róngzhāi 容齋, posthumous Wénmǐn 文敏)

About the work

The most famous and most cited of all Southern-Sòng bǐjì 筆記 — the foundational example of the kǎo-zhèng-cum-anecdote notebook genre that flourished from the twelfth century onward and a model self-consciously imitated (cf. KR3j0033 Yījuéliáo zájì, KR3j0034 Nénggǎizhāi mànlù, KR3j0035 Yúngǔ zájì) by every subsequent Southern-Sòng author of philological notebooks. The full work is in fact a five-collection compilation totalling 74 juan: the Suíbǐ 隨筆 proper (16 juan, the present recension’s nucleus), Xùbǐ 續筆 (16 juan), Sānbǐ 三筆 (16 juan), Sìbǐ 四筆 (16 juan), and Wǔbǐ 五筆 (10 juan, broken off at Hóng Mài’s death in 1202). According to Hóng Mài’s own preface to the fourth collection (1197), he spent eighteen years writing the first collection, thirteen on the second, five on the third, and one on the fourth — a working span of about forty years, from approximately 1162 (his return from the Jīn embassy and assignment to a series of provincial posts) to 1202. The 1,217 entries cover philological and antiquarian points in the Classics and Histories, official titles, ritual protocol, institutions, prose criticism, and poetic commentary — Hán Yù 韓愈, Lǐ Bái 李白, and Sū Shì 蘇軾 in particular.

The Kanripo recension is the Sìbù cóngkān 四部叢刊 (SBCK) photolithograph of a Sòng-period print, with the principal preface by Hé Yì 何異 (Bǎomógé zhí xuéshì 寶謨閣直學士) dated Jiādìng rénshēn 嘉定壬申 = 1212 — composed in Hóng Mài’s hometown of Pó’yáng 鄱陽 (Jiāngxī) at the request of Hóng Mài’s grand-nephew Hóng Jí 洪伋 (then prefect of Gànzhōu) ten years after Hóng Mài’s death.

Catalogued under Záxué zhī shǔ 雜學之屬 of the Zájiā 雜家 division.

Tiyao

The Kanripo SBCK witness contains the original 1212 preface by Hé Yì 何異 in lieu of a Sìkù tíyāo. The Sìkù tíyāo (preserved in the imperial Zǒngmù) is not in this base text.

The opening total preface by Hé Yì 何異, Bǎomógé zhí xuéshì 寶謨閣直學士 etc., dated Jiādìng rénshēn 嘉定壬申 (1212), reports as follows. The prefect of Gànzhōu, the sìbù official Hóng Jí 洪伋 (a grand-nephew of Wénmǐn 文敏 = Hóng Mài), wrote to Hé Yì:

“From the Department of the Right my grandfather Wénmǐn went out as prefect of this district more than forty years ago. How fortunate I am to follow his footsteps and continue his line of office; idle in my prefect’s hours, I take down the Suíbǐ records of Wénmǐn — first to fourth, each in sixteen juan, and the Wǔbǐ of his absolutely-final brush, which has only ten — and have them all carved on woodblock here at the prefect’s office to show the men of the district. Recalling his manner, his clap of the palm, his style — vivid as if still here. Will you compose for me a preface?”

Hé Yì replies that he had served briefly as a xiànmù 憲幕 (judicial-staff) attendant at Gàn for two years — arriving only ten or so days after Wénmǐn had departed, and so missing him; and that fifteen years later, when Wénmǐn was at the Hànlín Academy and going out to govern Zhèdōng 浙東, Hé Yì had again come up too late, missing him by another ten days. Hé says he never met Wénmǐn in life but became acquainted with his sons Tàishè 太社 [Hóng Yáo 洪轑?] and grandson the cānjūn Hóng Yǎn 洪偃, and acquired more and more of Hóng Mài’s writings — most of the Suíbǐ materials in the present compilation come from after Hóng’s Zhèdōng retirement.

Hé extols the work’s range: “Kě yǐ jī diǎngù; kě yǐ guǎng wénjiàn; kě yǐ zhèng émiù; kě yǐ gāo bǐduān” 可以稽典故,可以廣聞見,可以證訛謬,可以膏筆端 — “It can verify institutional precedent; it can broaden one’s hearing and seeing; it can rectify error and slip; it can fatten the tip of one’s brush.” It is, he says, truly the place where the Confucian student’s progress is grounded — far more than a mere consolation for those of Gàn who missed Hóng Mài’s departure.

Hé Yì then recounts a parallel undertaking: he had once instructed Chén Rìhuá 陳日華 to take Hóng Mài’s Yíjiānzhì 夷堅志 (the larger collection of supernatural tales: ten zhì, three zhīzhì, two sìzhì, totalling 320 juan), to extract from it the poems, cí, miscellaneous writings, prescriptions, and incantations, and to print them by category at Húyīn 湖陰; ten juan of compilation. He says he has begun a parallel volume taking from the Yíjiān those passages not of the supernatural — those touching on human affairs and useful for warning and as supplements to broad disputation, not items the Yíjiān itself would naturally include — and intends to print the same by category, also at the prefect’s office of ZhāngGàn 章貢.

He concludes by urging the cānjūn (Hóng Jí) to use his prestige to gather and preserve Hóng Mài’s collected works in their entirety: while the Pánzhōu 盤洲 and Xiǎoyǐn 小隱 collections (those of Hóng Shì 洪适 and Hóng Zūn 洪遵, the elder brothers) have long been preserved in private hands, Hóng Mài’s own Yěchǔ 野處 collection is in jeopardy of dispersal — and “to gather it again will be truly difficult.”

Abstract

Hóng Mài 洪邁 (1123–1202, zì Jǐnglú 景盧, hào Yěchǔ 野處 and Róngzhāi 容齋, posthumously Wénmǐn 文敏; CBDB id 10157) was the third and most learned of the three Hóng brothers of Pó’yáng 鄱陽 (modern Jiāngxī) — Hóng Shì 洪适 the eldest (1117–1184, the great epigrapher of Lìshì 隸釋), Hóng Zūn 洪遵 the middle (1120–1174, the numismatist of Quánzhì 泉志), and Hóng Mài himself the youngest. Jìnshì of Shàoxīng 15 (1145), Hóng Mài rose through the metropolitan and provincial bureaucracy to Hànlín xuéshì 翰林學士 and Duānmíngdiàn xuéshì 端明殿學士, and was an ambassador to the Jīn (1162) where his refusal to bow to the Jīn court precipitated a celebrated diplomatic incident. He was the principal guóshǐ 國史 editor of the Southern Sòng under Xiàozōng 孝宗 (sharing this responsibility with Lǐ Tāo 李燾) and is responsible for an extraordinarily varied corpus: this Róngzhāi suíbǐ (the foundational scholarly bǐjì); the Yíjiānzhì 夷堅志 (the largest and richest classical Chinese supernatural-anecdote collection, 207 of an original 420 juan extant); the Tángrén wànshǒu juéjù 唐人萬首絕句 (the standard pre-modern anthology of Táng juéjù quatrains); and the Yěchǔ lèigǎo 野處類稿 KR4d0260 of his own collected prose and verse. His biography is in Sòng shǐ j. 373.

The Róngzhāi suíbǐ was composed across approximately forty years of working life. Hóng Mài’s own preface to the fourth collection (dated 1197) describes the diminishing intervals as a function of acceleration in his old age: “I spent eighteen years on the first collection; thirteen on the second; five on the third; one on the fourth.” He pays touching tribute to his youngest son, who sat at his writing-table and goaded him to keep at it. The fifth collection (10 juan, incomplete) was broken off by Hóng’s death in 1202 and was assembled and printed posthumously, together with the four earlier collections, by his grand-nephew Hóng Jí 洪伋 in 1212 (Jiādìng 5) — the moment from which the work begins its prodigious career as a citation source.

The dating bracket adopted here (notBefore 1162, notAfter 1202) reflects the working span: the earliest entries pre-date the first preface to the Suíbǐ (1180) by perhaps as much as eighteen years; the latest were written until Hóng Mài’s death.

The Róngzhāi suíbǐ is one of the most cited bǐjì in Chinese scholarship — Wilkinson (cited below) draws on it more than a dozen times in Chinese History: A New Manual alone, on subjects ranging from the Nánshǐ / Běishǐ circulation problem and the size of pre-Hàn China, to the over-reporting of harem numbers in the Xīn Tángshū, to the conventions of yúnián gǎiyuán 踰年改元 (changing era-names after the next new-year), to the historical reading of place-names and the conventions for one-syllable zì 字 in early China. The book’s strength lies in two things at once: first, the breadth of Hóng Mài’s reading (from the Classics through the Histories, the Lèishū, the TángSòng poets, official institutions, calendrical chronology, geographic toponymy, and on to ritual minutiae); second, the sharpness of judgement in adjudicating textual cruxes and historical discrepancies. Wilkinson observes that “Hong Mai was not as learned as Gu Yanwu 顧炎武, but his scholarship and wit is equal to the other Qing commentators on the Histories.” The book is also notable for its many corrections of Hán Yù 韓愈, Lǐ Bái 李白, and Sū Shì 蘇軾 (here labelled “Dōngpō” 東坡), and for entries that incorporate observations Hóng Mài drew from his own busy official life — from drafting the histories of four reigns to negotiating with the Jīn court.

The work is recorded in Chén Zhènsūn’s Zhízhāi shūlù jiětí, in the Sòngshǐ Yìwénzhì, in every Yuán, Míng, and Qīng major catalog, and in catalogs through the modern era. The transmission, while corrupt in detail, is essentially complete — unlike many of the works of its imitators, the Róngzhāi suíbǐ never went out of circulation.

Structural Note

The Róngzhāi suíbǐ is in fact five sequential collections totalling 74 juan, each presented in the SBCK Kanripo recension with its own mùlù:

• Suíbǐ 隨筆 — 16 juan (this base text)
• Xùbǐ 續筆 — 16 juan (continuation)
• Sānbǐ 三筆 — 16 juan (third collection)
• Sìbǐ 四筆 — 16 juan (fourth, prefaced by Hóng Mài himself, 1197)
• Wǔbǐ 五筆 — 10 juan (fifth, broken off at the author’s death in 1202)

The “16 juan” tally in the project meta refers only to the Suíbǐ proper. Modern editions and citations conventionally quote by collection (chūbǐ / xùbǐ / sānbǐ / sìbǐ / wǔbǐ) and juan number, e.g. Róngzhāi suíbǐ bǐ 4, juan 6.

Translations and research

This is one of the most-cited bǐjì in Chinese historical and philological scholarship. The principal modern editions and studies:

• Róngzhāi suíbǐ 容齋隨筆 (5 collections, 74 juan), Xǔ Délín 許德邻, collated and punctuated, 2 vols., Shànghǎi gǔjí chūbǎnshè 1978 (also in Scripta Sinica, Hànjí diànzǐ wénxiàn) — the standard modern punctuated edition.
• Mǎ Yùnyuán 馬潤元, Róngzhāi suíbǐ jiào-jiān 容齋隨筆校箋, multi-volume modern critical edition.
• Wáng Déyì 王德毅, Hóng Mài niánpǔ 洪邁年譜 (Xīnwénfēng, 2006) — the definitive chronological biography.
• Xǔ Jìngtóng 许净瞳, Róngzhāi suíbǐ chéngshū yánjiū 容斋随笔成书研究 (On the making of Róngzhāi suíbǐ), Shèhuì kēxué chūbǎnshè 2013 — book-length study of the work’s composition history.
• Harvard-Yenching Index no. 13 (concordance to the Róngzhāi suíbǐ).

For the related works:

• For Yíjiān-zhì 夷堅志: Alister David Inglis, Hong Mai’s Record of the Listener and its Song Dynasty Context (SUNY Press, 2006); Inglis, ed., Yíjiān-zhì xuǎn 夷坚志选 (bilingual Chinese-English, Wàiwén chūbǎnshè 2009); Cong Ellen Zhang, Record of the Listener: Selected Stories from Hong Mai’s Yijian zhi (Hackett, 2018) — translates 100 stories.
• For Hóng Mài’s biographical context within his brothers’ careers: Wilkinson, Chinese History: A New Manual, §8.10 and §62.3.11.

European-language treatment of the Suíbǐ itself is largely incidental — references in Wilkinson (cited above), in Hilde De Weerdt, Information, Territory, and Networks: The Crisis and Maintenance of Empire in Song China (HUP, 2016), pt. 4 (“Imperial Information Networks”), and in numerous specialized articles. There is no complete European-language translation of the Róngzhāi suíbǐ.

Other points of interest

The Róngzhāi suíbǐ’s authorial preface to the fourth collection — with its candid arithmetic of “eighteen years on the first, thirteen on the second, five on the third, one on the fourth” — is one of the more unusual personal documents in Chinese letters: it records both the obvious (Hóng Mài’s accelerating productivity in old age) and the unexpected (the role of his youngest son as the work’s emotional engine). The fifth collection’s incompleteness at exactly ten juan, broken off at Hóng’s death in 1202, is similarly poignant.

The Hé Yì 何異 preface of 1212 reproduced in the SBCK base text contains a contemporary external assessment of the Suíbǐ’s value — “Kě yǐ jī diǎngù; kě yǐ guǎng wénjiàn; kě yǐ zhèng émiù; kě yǐ gāo bǐduān” 可以稽典故,可以廣聞見,可以證訛謬,可以膏筆端 — that became the formula by which later generations characterized scholarly bǐjì as a genre.

The Róngzhāi suíbǐ’s influence in early-modern East Asia was extraordinary: it is one of the very few Sòng bǐjì to have circulated in Edō Japan and Chosŏn Korea as a regular reference work for kǎozhèng scholarship.

Links

• Wilkinson, Chinese History: A New Manual, §62.3.11 #1 (Hong Mai, Rongzhai suibi) — the principal English-language summary of the work and its scholarly status.
• Hé Yì 何異, Róngzhāi suíbǐ wǔjí zǒngxù 容齋隨筆五集緫序, dated Jiādìng 5 (1212), preserved in the SBCK base text.
• Wikipedia: Rongzhai suibi. Wikidata: Q5260893.
• Sòng shǐ j. 373 (Hóng Mài biography).
• Quán Sòng bǐjì 全宋筆記 series.