Cèfǔ yuánguī 冊府元龜
Prime Tortoise of the Records Bureau
by 王欽若 (Wáng Qīnruò, Sòng, 奉敕撰) and 楊億 (Yáng Yì, Sòng, 奉敕撰), heads of a twenty-strong imperial commission.
About the work
The third of the Sòng sì dà shū 宋四大書 and the largest of the four — at 1,000 juan (the Tàipíng yùlǎn is also 1,000 juan but contains less text on the page) and approximately 9.4 million characters, the Cèfǔ yuánguī is the most voluminous Northern-Sòng compendium. Commissioned by Sòng Zhēnzōng 真宗 on the third day of the ninth month of Jǐngdé 景德 2 (5 October 1005) and completed in the eighth month of Dàzhōng xiángfú 大中祥符 6 (4 September 1013), the project was directed by Wáng Qīnruò 王欽若 (962–1025) and the great court poet Yáng Yì 楊億 (974–1020), with a commission of roughly twenty senior scholars drawn from the Hànlín and Lóngtú gé. The title was bestowed by Zhēnzōng himself: cèfǔ 冊府 is the imperial archive, yuánguī 元龜 the “great divinatory tortoise” — i.e., the work is “the great oracle of historical precedent kept in the imperial archives”.
Unlike the Tàipíng yùlǎn which is encyclopaedic in scope, the Cèfǔ yuánguī is a political-historical compendium: a topically-organized digest of historical precedents (shìlì 事例) for imperial and ministerial conduct, drawn exclusively from the zhèngshǐ 正史 and a small number of other canonical historical sources, from the legendary Three Sovereigns down to the end of the Five Dynasties. The work is organized in 31 bù 部 (Sovereigns, Empress Dowagers, Princes, Imperial Kindred, etc.) and 1,116 mén 門 (sub-categories), each mén opening with a brief preface and then giving the relevant historical exempla in chronological order without comment. The work is a primary source for early-Sòng access to lost Táng and Five-Dynasties zhèngshǐ readings; in particular, it preserves substantial verbatim quotations from the lost Tàizōng shílù and other early veritable-records.
Tiyao
The KR source for this work is the WYG page-image index, with no transcribed tíyào. The Kyoto Zinbun Sìkù tíyào digital text has no entry for this id. The summary below is drawn from the standard published Sìkù tíyào text.
The Sìkù quánshū zǒngmù tíyào, Zǐbù · Lèishū lèi, Cèfǔ yuánguī entry (Zhōnghuá 1965, juan 135), summarises: “The Cèfǔ yuánguī in 1000 juan, by the Sòng *Hànlín xuéshì Wáng Qīnruò and Yáng Yì by imperial command. In the ninth month of Jǐngdé 2, an edict was issued commanding the Shíguǎn to compile this work, drawing on the dynastic histories with a view to the events of jūnchén shìjī 君臣事跡 — the actions of sovereigns and ministers. The Throne himself fixed the categories: Dìwáng bù 帝王部, Bāngjì bù 邦計部, Jiànbāng 將帥, Yángbīng 揚兵, and so on, in 31 bù; under each, mén of historical exempla. Yuánguī — ‘prime tortoise’ — was the title imperially conferred at its completion in Dàzhōng xiángfú 6. … In selection rule, the work draws only from zhèngshǐ; bǎijiā xiǎoshuō are not included; this is its distinction from the Tàipíng yùlǎn (KR3k0012). … Many of its citations preserve readings now lost from the received zhèngshǐ texts; for the Táng and Five-Dynasties periods it is a major source. Among the Sòng sì dà shū the Cèfǔ yuánguī is the largest in volume; the kǎozhèng tradition has valued it especially.”
Abstract
The Cèfǔ yuánguī is the third and largest of the four imperial compendia of the early Northern Sòng court, and the only one of them focused exclusively on political-historical precedent. Wáng Qīnruò and Yáng Yì led a commission of approximately twenty scholars. The project’s institutional centre was the Lóngtú gé 龍圖閣, the imperial library founded by Zhēnzōng in 1003; its political purpose was to provide the throne with a comprehensive digest of historical shìlì arranged by category of state action — sovereign virtues and vices, ministerial loyalty and venality, ritual, frontier-defence, finance, education, judgement, and so on — for consultation in policy-deliberation. The work was modelled in genre on the lost Táng Wénsī bóyào 文思博要 and on the Yìwén lèijù; in scope it goes well beyond either. The 31 bù and 1,116 mén form one of the most fully-articulated category-architectures in pre-modern Chinese encyclopaedism.
The Cèfǔ yuánguī’s extraction discipline — drawing only from zhèngshǐ 正史 (the standard histories) and excluding the bǎijiā xiǎoshuō (the narratives and the philosophical schools) that the Yùlǎn embraces — gives it a quite different scholarly value. For students of Táng and Five-Dynasties political history, it is the principal repository of zhèngshǐ citations as read in early-Sòng court editions; in particular, it preserves passages from the lost first redaction of the Jiù Táng shū 舊唐書, from the Tàizōng shílù 太宗實錄 (lost), from the now-fragmentary Wǔdài huìyào 五代會要, and from numerous Five-Dynasties veritable-records lost to fire in the Jìngkāng sack of 1126.
The standard modern edition is the Zhōnghuá shūjú 1960 photographic reprint of the Sòng edition (12 vols.), with the punctuated and indexed Fènghuáng chūbǎnshè 2006 critical edition (12 vols., ed. Zhōu Xūnchū 周勛初 et al.) now the standard scholarly reference. The 1989 Bā Shǔ shūshè Cèfǔ yuánguī yánjiū (Lǐ Bǎoyīng 李寶英 ed.) is the principal Chinese reference monograph.
Translations and research
- Zhōu Xūn-chū 周勛初 (ed.), Cè-fǔ yuán-guī (jiào-dìng běn) 冊府元龜 (校訂本), 12 vols. (Nán-jīng: Fèng-huáng chū-bǎn-shè, 2006). The standard critical edition.
- Hú Dào-jìng 胡道靜, Zhōngguó gǔdài de lèishū (Zhōng-huá, 1982), §Sòng, on the Cè-fǔ yuán-guī.
- Étienne Balazs and Yves Hervouet, eds., A Sung Bibliography (Bibliographie des Sung) (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 1978), entry on the Cè-fǔ yuán-guī (Chia Chien-ya).
- Charles Hartman, “Cefu yuangui”, in Critical Readings on Tang China (Brill, 2018), discusses its value as Táng source.
- Wilkinson, Chinese History: A New Manual §72.1.2.2 (treats the Cè-fǔ yuán-guī among the principal Sòng historical-political compendia).
Other points of interest
The Cèfǔ yuánguī’s extraction-discipline (zhèngshǐ only) makes it the most reliable Sòng compendium for source-critical work on Táng and Five-Dynasties materials. Unlike the Yùlǎn, which often paraphrases or compresses, the Cèfǔ yuánguī mostly quotes verbatim — providing a stable witness to the early-Sòng readings of the dynastic histories. The compilation process produced as by-product the famous XīKūn chóuchàng jí 西崑酬唱集 of mutually-imitative Lǐ Shāngyǐn-style verse exchanged by Yáng Yì, Liú Yún 劉筠 and Qián Wéiyǎn 錢惟演 in the long evenings of compilation, founding the XīKūn tǐ 西崑體 school of early-Sòng court poetry.
Links
- Sìkù quánshū zǒngmù tíyào, Zǐbù · Lèishū lèi, Cèfǔ yuánguī entry.
- Wikipedia (en): Cefu Yuangui; Wikidata: Q1117636.
- Modern critical edition: Zhōu Xūnchū (Fènghuáng, 2006).