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張氏可書

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Text ID
KR3l0065
Date
1138–1160
Dynasty
南宋

Zhāngshì kěshū 張氏可書

Mr Zhāng’s Memorable Notes by 張知甫 (撰)

About the work

A one-juàn anecdote-collection (bǐjì) by 張知甫 Zhāng Zhīfǔ 張知甫 (12th c.; biographical details otherwise unrecoverable), reconstructed by the Sìkù compilers from scattered fragments preserved in the Yǒnglè dàdiǎn 永樂大典 (fifty entries gathered into a single juàn). The original was unknown to the Sòng shǐ Yìwén zhì 宋史藝文志, to Chén Zhènsūn’s 陳振孫 Zhízhāi shūlù jiětí 直齋書錄解題, and to Cháo Gōngwǔ’s 晁公武 Jùnzhāi dúshū zhì 郡齋讀書志; only the Wényuāngé shūmù 文淵閣書目 recorded a single fascicle, without naming the author. The author’s identity is established from the Àirìzhāi cóngchāo 愛日齋叢抄, which quotes the work under the title Zhāng Zhīfǔ kěshū in connection with a 司馬光 Sīmǎ Guāng / 文彥博 Wén Yànbó anecdote on converting Buddhist monks into Daoist priests. Internal date-references (an xuānhé 宣和-era trip through the Nánxūnmén 南薰門 of the Biànjīng 汴京 capital, a shàoxīng 紹興 dīngsì / wùwǔ 丁巳戊午 dating = 1137–38, and reference to 劉豫 Liú Yù’s puppet Qí 齊 regime in the central plain) place the composition firmly after the Southern Crossing, by a man who had personally witnessed the late-Northern-Sòng capital and lived through some two decades of southern exile.

Tiyao

Imperially Commissioned Sìkù quánshū. Sub-collection 12 (Zǐbù shíèr). Précis.

Zhāngshì kěshū, 1 juàn. Xiǎoshuō genre, sub-class of “miscellaneous matters” (雜事之屬).

Your servants etc. respectfully report: Zhāngshì kěshū, in one juàn. The Sòng shǐ Yìwén zhì, Chén Zhènsūn’s Shūlù jiětí, and Cháo Gōngwǔ’s Dúshū zhì all fail to record it. The Wényuāngé shūmù enters one fascicle, but likewise does not give the compiler’s name. Only the Àirìzhāi cóngchāo, in citing the Sīmǎ Guāng and Wén Yànbó entry on transferring Buddhist monks to the Daoist clergy, gives the title as Zhāng Zhīfǔ kěshū. Of who Zhīfǔ was, we know nothing further.

We now find that the book contains an entry “while I was lately in the capital, I had business outside the Nánxūnmén” and another on a sea-trader selling ambergris (lóngxián incense) at the apartments of the Míngjié huánghòu — these are matters of the early Xuānhé reign (1119–25), placing him in office at Biànjīng. Interspersed are Shàoxīng (i.e., 1131–62) dīngsì (1137) and wùwǔ (1138) reign-year notations, and entries on Liú Yù’s usurping the title and holding the central plain — so he had crossed south and was active a good twenty-odd years after the Crossing. Hence the man was born in the late Northern Sòng, just early enough to witness Biànliáng at its zenith, so that his recollections of old-capital matters are vivid and detailed. By his later years, recollecting these things in writing, he could not but feel the cāngsāng jīnxī sentiment (the lapse of ages, the contrast of then and now); his record of Huīzōng-reign court precedent is therefore particularly full, often carrying admonitory intent. The rest — scattered reports and lost matters not in other shuōjiā (anecdotists) — also has its profit as conversation material. Even though jocular and the supernatural mingle within, so that it is not free from the fault of being rǒngzá (cluttered), in its main intent it is in fact of the lineage of 孟元老 Mèng Yuánlǎo’s Dōngjīng mènghuá lù 東京夢華錄 (KR3a0094) — it cannot but be preserved for purposes of textual verification.

The original organization of the book is already lost; we have now, on the basis of what could be collected from under each rhyme-head in the Yǒnglè dàdiǎn, gathered fifty entries in all, and respectfully arranged them into one juàn, to preserve a general outline. Respectfully checked, Qiánlóng 46 (1781), 9th month.

Chief Compilers: (your servants) 紀昀 Jì Yún, 陸錫熊 Lù Xīxióng, 孫士毅 Sūn Shìyì. Chief Collator: (your servant) 陸費墀 Lù Fèichí.

Abstract

The author Zhāng Zhīfǔ is a near-anonymous figure: CBDB has no entry under this name, and no Sòng biographical compendium or local gazetteer has yielded a reliable identification. Even the Sìkù compilers, with access to internal Yǒnglè dàdiǎn citations and to the Àirìzhāi cóngchāo’s passing attribution, could not place him further than “active Xuānhé through mid-Shàoxīng — clearly held some minor office in Biànjīng in the early 1120s, clearly survived into the Shàoxīng settlement”. The composition window for the work is therefore best set in the late 1130s through c. 1160 (post-Shàoxīng 8 = 1138, the latest dated internal anchor; with the cāngsāng jīnxī sentiment of the Tíyào placing the writing in the author’s old age).

The work belongs to the same Southern-Sòng nostalgic-recollection genre as Mèng Yuánlǎo’s Dōngjīng mènghuá lù KR3a0094 (1147) and Nàidéwēng’s Dūchéng jìshèng 都城紀勝 KR3l0073: a former resident of the lost northern capital records, from southern exile, what he had seen of the old capital before its fall to the Jīn in 1126. Distinctive in Zhāngshì kěshū are the Huīzōng-court entries with admonitory framing (as the Tíyào notes, yì cún jiànjiè — “intent on lesson and warning”), the entry on Sīmǎ Guāng and Wén Yànbó’s discussion of converting Buddhist monks into Daoist priests (a Huīzōng-era anti-Buddhist policy precedent), and the sea-trade entry on the Míngjié empress purchasing ambergris from a foreign merchant (a rare datable witness to the foreign-incense trade at Biànjīng). The supernatural and humorous entries the Tíyào mentions as cluttering the collection are typical of the Sòng bǐjì genre and need not be taken as evidence against the work’s primary historical value.

The Sìkù reconstruction of fifty entries from Yǒnglè dàdiǎn fragments is necessarily incomplete; the original may have been somewhat larger (the Wényuāngé shūmù’s single fascicle is the only direct measure, and a Míng fascicle is typically the equivalent of a short juàn). No fuller text is known to survive.

Translations and research

  • The work is collated in the Quán-Sòng bǐ-jì 全宋筆記 (Dàxué chūbǎnshè, 2003–) series, Series 4, Volume 6, edited by Sūn Yú 孫菊. This is the standard modern critical text.
  • Wāng Wéi-huī 汪維輝, “Zhāng-shì kě-shū jí qí yǔyán” (Zhāng-shì kě-shū and its language), in Hànyǔ-shǐ xuébào 漢語史學報 11 (2011), uses the work as a witness to mid-12th-c. colloquial vocabulary.
  • No European-language translation has been located.

Other points of interest

The work’s Sīmǎ Guāng / Wén Yànbó anecdote on transferring Buddhist monks to the Daoist clergy — which became the sole external evidence for the work’s authorship — bears on the well-documented Huīzōng policy (1119) of forcibly relabelling Buddhist monks as déshì 德士 (Daoist-Buddhist hybrid clergy); the anecdote retrojects the proposal back into the Yuányòu-era figures of Sīmǎ Guāng and Wén Yànbó, plausibly as Northern-Sòng court-precedent justification for the Huīzōng measure. Whether the retrojection is accurate or polemical embroidery cannot be determined from this fragment alone, but the entry is one of the few mid-Northern-Sòng witnesses to such a discussion at all and has been mined by historians of Sòng religious policy.

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