Wǔsè xiàn 五色線
Five-Coloured Threads by 闕名 (anonymous, Sòng, zhuàn 撰)
About the work
The Wǔsè xiàn is a short Sòng-period anonymous miscellany in two juan. Each entry consists of a two- to four-character heading — frequently parallel and elegant rather than substantive (e.g. 渾天儀 Húntiānyí, 紫氣黃象 Zǐqì huángxiàng, 星曲似眉 Xīngqū sì méi, 龍尺木 Lóng chǐmù, 鯨海鶴天 Jīnghǎi hètiān, 鯉魚風 Lǐyú fēng) — under which the compiler gathers a small bouquet of quotations from earlier texts. The sources cited are heterogeneous: the Jìnshū tiānwénzhì 晉天文志, the Chūnqiū yuán mìng bāo 春秋元命苞, the Xiàndì chūnqiū 獻帝春秋, Duàn Chéngshì’s Yǒuyáng zázǔ 酉陽雜俎, the Dùyáng biān 杜陽編, the Hòu Hàn shū, Daoist works like the Dòngzhēn dàyǐn shū 洞真大隱書, and Táng poetry. In genre and intent it is closer to a literatus’ commonplace book or bǐjì of curious lore than to a true reference encyclopaedia; this is reflected in the Sìkù compilers’ decision to file it under xiǎoshuōjiā 小說家 (fiction / informal records) rather than lèishū, although in modern bibliographic terms it sits at the bǐjì / lèishū boundary. The Sòng imperial-library catalogue Zhōngxīng guǎngé shūmù 中興館閣書目 (compiled in Chúnxī 5 / 1178 by Chén Kuí 陳騤 et al.) already classed it as anonymous; the Máo Jìn 毛晉 colophon to the Jīndài bìshū 津逮秘書 / Jígǔ gé 汲古閣 edition cites that catalogue’s notice verbatim.
Tiyao
(Translated from the Sìkù quánshū zǒngmù tíyào, 子部五十四 小說家類存目二, recension at the Kyoto University Zinbun digital text 0299602. The work appears in the Sìkù catalogue only as a cúnmù entry, and the KRP digital text — derived from the Jīndài bìshū line — carries no tíyào of its own.)
Editor’s name omitted. Included in Máo Jìn’s Jīndài bìshū. The Zhōngxīng guǎngé shūmù records this title. However, this book miscellaneously cites the strange and fanciful sayings of various xiǎoshuō, sometimes failing to give the source; the careless cuts and mistakes cannot be itemised in full. It even claims that the story of King Xiāng of Chǔ’s dream of the goddess comes from the Shǐjì — its commonplace ignorance is therefore evident. It is uncertain whether this is really an old Sòng-period text.
Abstract
The text is anonymous in every catalogue from the Sòng onward and the present knowledge-base accordingly carries persons: [[闕名]]. The compositional window adopted here (notBefore 1100, notAfter 1178) takes the Zhōngxīng guǎngé shūmù (preface dated Chúnxī 5 / 1178) as the terminus ante quem and the late Northern Sòng as a defensible terminus post quem on internal grounds — none of the citable sources or compositional habits in the body of the text demands a date earlier than the Yuányòu / Xuānhé era, while the heading-and-citation style is unambiguously Sòng bǐjì. The work cites Táng poets, but no securely post-Northern-Sòng author is identifiable. The Sìkù compilers’ doubt that it is “really an old Sòng-period text” reflects the standard Sìkù scepticism about works transmitted only through Míng cóngshū without earlier printings or catalogue mentions, but is not, on the balance of internal evidence, persuasive in this case: the Zhōngxīng guǎngé shūmù notice cited by Máo Jìn supplies the missing Sòng catalogue witness.
Transmission is documented through two paratexts appended to the printed edition:
(1) An undated colophon (bá 跋) by an editor named Shào Wénbó 邵文伯, sobriquet Hàoránwēng 浩然翁, who copied the work by hand at his lodgings — the Yíyún xuān 怡雲軒 at Hèchéng 鶴城 — then later retrieved a second copy from the studio of one Yětíng xiān-sheng 野亭先生 that was circulating in the Fèngyuǎn lóu 奉遠樓 reading-room of the Yī 伊 family. Out of fondness for the book (“好書成癖”) he then had it cut into woodblocks.
(2) A colophon by Máo Jìn 毛晉 (1599–1659), dated to Zhúzuì rì 竹醉日 (5/13 by tradition; the printed line reads “已竹醉日” — the yǐ 已 is most likely a typographical slip for sì 巳, preserved here as in the source), composed aboard a boat at Báilóng tán 白龍潭. Máo Jìn quotes the Zhōngxīng guǎngé shūmù notice verbatim, then compares the work favourably with Hóng Mài’s Róngzhāi sānbǐ wǔbǐ 容齋三筆五筆 and the Yúnxiān zájì 雲仙雜記, contextual maneouvres that gave the Wǔsè xiàn a more enduring afterlife than its modest scope might otherwise have allowed. Máo signs himself “湖南毛晉” — Húnán here is a local epithet referring to “south of the [Tài-]lake” rather than the modern province; Máo was a native of Chángshú 常熟 and his press, the Jígǔ gé 汲古閣, stood on the south shore of Tàihú.
In the standard bibliographic division between the strictly imperial Sìkù quánshū corpus and the wider transmitted lèishū / xiǎoshuō tradition, the Wǔsè xiàn belongs squarely to the latter: the Sìkù compilers did not print it (it appears only as a cúnmù entry under xiǎoshuōjiā); it survived solely through Máo Jìn’s Jígǔ gé imprint and the jiācáng manuscript line that lay behind it.
The frontmatter person [[闕名]] follows the Kānripo catalogue convention of treating “anonymous” as a notional person; the actual transmission-history figures (Shào Wénbó, Máo Jìn) are mentioned in the prose body only.
Translations and research
No substantial secondary literature located. The Wǔsè xiàn is occasionally cited in studies of Sòng bǐ-jì and the Máo Jìn Jí-gǔ gé publishing programme, but no monograph or critical edition is available. For the Jí-gǔ gé / Jīn-dài bì-shū publishing context see Ulrich Theobald, “Jindai mishu 津逮秘書,” www.chinaknowledge.de. The Sìkù quánshū zǒngmù tíyào notice translated above is the only authoritative bibliographic discussion in print.
Other points of interest
The presence of headings such as Liángzhōu děng sì míng 涼州等四名 — citing an anecdote that Tiān-bǎo-era court music took the names of frontier prefectures (Liáng, Gān, Yī…) which were then “exhausted by being captured by Tǔbō” — shows the compiler still working in a notably Táng-saturated horizon of literary memory, consistent with a Northern Sòng date when this nostalgic register was strong. The Sìkù compilers’ specific complaint that the Wǔsè xiàn attributes King Xiāng of Chǔ’s Shénnǚ fù 神女賦 dream to the Shǐjì (when it is in fact Sòng Yù’s 宋玉 fù prefaces, transmitted through the Wénxuǎn) is a fair representative sample of the kind of looseness the Sìkù editors objected to — the work freely confuses high classical and popular-literary horizons of citation.