Tùyuán cèfǔ 兔園策府
The Rabbit-Garden Repository of Examination Topics by 杜嗣先 (奉教撰)
About the work
The Tùyuán cèfǔ 兔園策府 — also recorded as Tùyuán cè 兔園策, Tùyuán cèzǐ 兔園冊子, and (with fǔ written as 冊府) Tùyuán cèfǔ 兔園冊府 — is an early-Táng pedagogical lèishū (and proto-examination primer) compiled by Dù Sìxiān 杜嗣先 by command of Lǐ Yùn 李惲 (d. 674), Prince Jiāng 蔣王 and the seventh son of Táng Tàizōng. The work’s title takes its name from the prince’s pleasure-park, Tùyuán 兔園 (“Rabbit Garden”), itself a deliberate echo of the famous garden of Liú Wǔ 劉武, King Xiào of Liáng 梁孝王, in the Former Hàn. The work in its original form ran to thirty juàn and forty-eight chapters (piān 篇), each chapter taking the form of a hypothetical examination question (cèwèn 策問) followed by a model answer (duìcè 對策) in parallel prose. It was meant as a cūnshū 村書 — a village schoolmaster’s primer giving the rural literatus the parallel-prose tags and Confucian quotation he would need to handle the standard cè topics at the jìnshì examination, or simply to “lard his conversation” with the right citations. The received text is reduced to a single fragmentary juàn (the surviving preface and a few topical chapters) recovered from the Dūnhuáng cave finds.
Tiyao
Abstract
Dù Sìxiān 杜嗣先 (Theobald’s ChinaKnowledge article gives lifedates 634–712; CBDB id 92858 carries only “fl. 638” and the present knowledge-base accordingly notes both — birth- and death-years are not securely attested in the standard histories). He served Lǐ Yùn 李惲, Prince Jiāng, the seventh son of Tàizōng (李惲 d. 674), and compiled the Tùyuán cèfǔ on the prince’s order. Because Lǐ Yùn died in 674, the work must have been completed before that year, which gives the firm terminus ante quem used here; the terminus post quem is the prince’s maturity, conventionally rendered c. 650.
Two literary frames structure the surviving witnesses. (i) The author’s preface (the text in the KRP file under “卷第一并序”) opens with Yì and Shū quotations on the principle that the ruler tests his servants with cèwèn and so promotes the worthy; it then traces the genealogy of the duìcè tradition from Liú Xiàng’s reply, Dǒng Zhòngshū’s “陰陽” topic, Sūn Hóng’s “約文切理,” Dù Qīn’s “指事陳謀,” Lǔ Pī, and Mǎ Róng down to the bias of the post-Wèi-Jìn period toward “藻麗漸繁” — ornamental flourish at the cost of substantive matter. The whole preface thus reads simultaneously as a pedagogical mission statement and as a piece of literary criticism aimed at the late Six Dynasties style that Tàizōng’s court was rejecting. (ii) The chapter format is cèwèn (question) followed by duìcè (model answer), both in tightly disciplined four-six parallel prose with classical and zhèngshǐ allusions; the answers are designed for memorisation. Among the Dūnhuáng leaves, the surviving topic-titles include Zhēng Dōngyí 徵東夷 (“On chastising the Eastern barbarians”) and Yú jīn 漁津 (“On the fishing-ford”), among others. The chapter known to Sòng readers from anecdote was a question on agriculture and the resettlement of refugees — the kind of administrative-policy cè that jìnshì candidates faced.
Transmission: the work was widely known in the late Táng and Five Dynasties — the Xīn Wǔdài shǐ 新五代史 juàn 55 preserves the famous anecdote about Féng Dào 馮道 (882–954), who is said to have leaned on the Tùyuán cè to supply the Confucian quotations with which he larded his official talk. From that anecdote derives the depreciatory Sòng-and-later sense of tùyuán 兔園 as “a shallow village-book.” It was also transmitted to Heian Japan, where it is cited by Japanese daigaku scholiasts. After its loss in the Southern Sòng it was known in China only by allusion (e.g. in Méi Yīngzuò’s 梅膺祚 Zìhuì 字彙 dictionary) until the Dūnhuáng recovery of the early twentieth century. The British Library witnesses (Or.8210/S.614, S.1086, etc.) and the Pelliot collection (P.2573, P.2748) together yield enough of the preface and certain chapters to reconstruct the work’s purpose and method, though most of the original thirty juàn and forty-eight piān remain irrecoverable.
For Wilkinson’s treatment of the work as part of the genealogy of cūnshū and the village examination primer, see Chinese History: A New Manual (6th ed., Harvard, 2022), in the section on Táng lèishū and jiàocái: Wilkinson highlights the prince’s Tùyuán garden as the namesake (recalling Liú Wǔ of Liáng’s Hàn-period garden) and the Féng Dào Běimèng suǒyán 北夢瑣言 juàn 19 anecdote as the locus classicus of tùyuán as a metonym for shallow learning.
Translations and research
- Christopher M.B. Nugent, Textual Practices of Literary Training in Medieval China (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2024), chapter 5: “Tuyuan cefu: A Primer for Exams and Officialdom” — the only book-length English treatment to date; situates the work in the Táng exam-preparation textbook tradition and the Dūnhuáng mēngshū corpus.
- Wáng Sān-qìng 王三慶, Dūnhuáng lèishū 敦煌類書 (Gāo-xióng: Lìwén, 1993) — foundational study of the Dūnhuáng lèishū corpus into which the Tùyuán cèfǔ fragments fit.
- Qū Zhímǐn 屈直敏. “Dūnhuáng běn Tùyuán cèfǔ kǎobiàn” 敦煌本《兔園策府》考辨, Dūnhuáng yánjiū 敦煌研究 2001 (3): 126–129; and “Dūnhuáng xiěběn Tùyuán cèfǔ xùlù jí yánjiū huígù” 敦煌寫本《兔園策府》敘錄及研究回顧, Dūnhuángxué jíkān 敦煌學輯刊 2016 (3): 22–32 — the standard codicological survey.
- Liú Jìn-bǎo 劉進寶. “Dūnhuáng běn Tùyuán cèfǔ Zhēng dōngyí chǎn-shēng de lìshǐ bèijǐng” 敦煌本《兔園策府·徵東夷》產生的歷史背景, Dūnhuáng yánjiū 1998 (1): 111–116, 188.
- Gé Jì-yǒng 葛繼勇. “Tùyuán cèfǔ de chéng-shū jí dōng chuán Rì-běn” 《兔園策府》的成書及東傳日本, Gānsù shèhuì kēxué 2008 (5): 196–199, 204 — on the Heian-Japanese reception.
- Zhāng Xīng-wǔ 張興武. “Dūnhuáng xiěběn Tùyuán cèfǔ de wénshǐ shǐliào jià-zhí” 敦煌寫本《兔園策府》的文學史料價值, Nánkāi xuébào (Zhéxué shèhuì kēxué bǎn) 2024 (1): 147–154 — most recent assessment of the work’s value as evidence for Táng intellectual history.
Other points of interest
The Tùyuán cè / Tùyuán idiom takes on a life of its own in Sòng vernacular: from the Féng Dào anecdote onward, “to recite the Tùyuán” (誦兔園) is shorthand for a literatus pretending to learning he does not in fact have, and the Tùyuán cèzǐ becomes a generic term for a shabby village-school primer. Méi Yīngzuò’s Zìhuì still glosses 兔園 in this depreciatory sense, by which time no one in China had seen a copy of the actual text for several centuries.