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東南紀聞

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Text ID
KR3l0078
Date
1276–1368
Dynasty
元

Dōngnán jìwén 東南紀聞

Records of Things Heard in the Southeast by 闕名 (撰)

About the work

A three-juàn anonymous bǐjì (anecdote-record), composed under the Yuán by a Jiāngzuǒ yímín 江左遺民 (loyalist of the fallen Southern Sòng polity) and concerned almost exclusively with Southern-Sòng court and country matters. The original was long lost; the present three juàn are a Sìkù reconstruction extracted, rhyme-section by rhyme-section, from the Yǒnglè dàdiǎn 永樂大典. The title’s Dōngnán 東南 (“the southeast”) is the standard Yuán-period periphrasis for the Southern-Sòng territorial polity centred on Línān 臨安 — a usage the Sìkù compilers single out as a key piece of internal evidence for the work’s Yuán date and for the author’s loyalist standpoint.

Tiyao

Your servants report: Dōngnán jìwén in 3 juàn; the compiler’s surname and given name are not recorded, nor is the work listed in any catalog. Investigating the book, we find an entry on the bǐngzǐ events that says “no longer the campaign of [the year] gēngshēn” — bǐngzǐ being Zhìyuán 13 (1276), the year after Bóyán 巴延 [i.e. Bayan] crossed the Yangtze and Línān fell. The work must therefore be by a man of the Yuán, which is why it calls the Sòng “the Southeast” Dōngnán. Within it, the entry on Zhèng Shēn 鄭紳 says “of imperial in-laws receiving life-enfeoffment to princely rank, the Sòng begins with Shēn”; the Lùn chéngjiào 論乗簥 entry says “before the Sòng court crossed [the Yangtze] southward, the present sort of sedan-chair did not exist”; the Lùn sānwǔjiǔ yuè 論三五九月 entry says “in these three months, the Sòng court did not issue the mutton allowance” — all phrasing of a Yuán man. Yet of the various Sòng emperors he uses língmíng (tomb-name), miàohào (temple-honorific), and niánhào (reign-titles), with frequent insider’s tone — so it is perhaps a recollection set down by a Jiāngzuǒ yímín (Southeast leftover-subject of the Sòng).

Of what is recorded, only the Lùn chíhǎi 論蚳醢 and Lùn yī 論揖 entries touch on antiquity; the rest are all yìwén (lost reports) of Northern and Southern Sòng — at points overlapping with other books, suggesting that he also gathered material from shuōbù (anecdote-fiction). As for Hán Biāo’s 韓淲 qīngjié (pure integrity), Hé Zì’s 何自 kàngzhí (upright resistance), Zhāng Wéixiào’s 張惟孝 rènxiá (knightly chivalry), Shàn Wěi’s 單煒 calligraphy, Zhào Zhízhōng’s 趙執中 mùjiàn (wooden arrow), Shǐ Sōngzhī’s 史嵩之 zhìrěn (jealous cruelty), and also the Huīzōng era of ruìqín (auspicious birds) greeting the imperial carriage demonstrating the wit of a market-broker, and in the Shàoxīng era Empress Wéihòu’s wish to view the stone pagoda, leading to a temple-monk’s witty remonstrance — all are matters omitted from the standard Shǐzhuàn (Histories and Biographies) and sufficient to supplement what those records lack.

Only the entry on Yáng Tán 楊談 squandering Tea-Bureau official cash — sufficient to show the slack of Sòng government — is set down by the author as if it were a háojǔ (gallant act), which cannot be taken as a precedent. Likewise, the Wāng Bó 汪勃 tiáoguān (transfer-of-office) entry says that Zhāng Jùn 張浚 and Hán Shìzhōng 韓世忠 both ingratiated themselves with Qín Guì 秦檜: Jùn’s mind is not knowable, but Shìzhōng could absolutely never have done so — most likely an erroneously transmitted report. And the Nányuè fūrén 南嶽夫人 entry is especially obscene, falling into the rut of xiǎoshuō (low fiction) and itself defiling the book. Yet the general intent of the records is close to true, and its judgments are close to upright; within the shuōbù (anecdotal-genre) it is still a shànběn (fine work). The original book has long been lost, its number of juàn unknown; we have now gathered what is scattered under the various rhyme-headings of the Yǒnglè dàdiǎn, collated and arranged into 3 juàn.

Respectfully checked, Qiánlóng 46 (1781), 9th month. Chief Compilers: Jì Yún 紀昀, Lù Xīxióng 陸錫熊, Sūn Shìyì 孫士毅. Chief Collator: Lù Fèichí 陸費墀.

Abstract

Dōngnán jìwén is an anonymous Yuán-period bǐjì surviving only through the Sìkù compilers’ recovery from the Yǒnglè dàdiǎn. As the tíyào notes, the work is unrecorded in any pre-Qīng bibliographic catalog (《宋史·藝文志》, 《文獻通考》, 《直齋書錄解題》, 《郡齋讀書志》, 《崇文總目》 etc.), and the original juàn count cannot be recovered — the present 3-juàn division is a Qīng editorial decision based on the bulk of recovered passages. The work was reconstructed under the Sìkù project and printed in Qiánlóng 46 (1781).

Date. Internal evidence places the author’s standpoint firmly in the Yuán: the bǐngzǐ 丙子 reference is to Zhìyuán 至元 13 (1276), the year Bayan 巴延 (= 伯顏, the Yuán general Bayan of the Baarin) led the army across the Yangtze and Línān 臨安 capitulated, ending Sòng resistance in the south; and Dōngnán (the Southeast) is the Yuán administrative shorthand for the former Southern-Sòng territories administered, under the Yuán, by the Jiāngzhè děngchù xíngzhōngshūshěng 江浙等處行中書省. The author’s tone toward the Sòng (use of miàohào, língmíng, and the insider phrasing flagged by the Sìkù) marks him as a yímín (Sòng loyalist) writing in early-to-middle Yuán. The composition window can therefore be set to the Yuán dynasty (1271–1368), most plausibly the late-13th to early-14th century, but without a sharper terminus the bracket here is left at the full dynasty’s span; the catalog meta gives no tighter date.

Author. Anonymous; the Sìkù compilers explicitly note “the compiler’s surname and given name are not recorded”. Frontmatter therefore records the conventional Sìkù placeholder 闕名 (literally “name missing”). The author’s social position can be inferred only from the Sìkù characterization as a Jiāngzuǒ yímín — i.e., an educated southerner with court-adjacent informants (court ritual, imperial in-laws, the late-Sòng chief councillors Shǐ Sōngzhī and Qín Guì all feature) who chose not to serve the new Yuán dynasty.

Content. The work is overwhelmingly anecdotal material on the Southern Sòng (with a smaller residue on the Northern Sòng and only two entries on antiquity, Lùn chíhǎi and Lùn yī). The Sìkù tíyào enumerates the principal entries: Hán Biāo’s 韓淲 integrity (the son of Hán Yuánjí 韓元吉 and a Southern-Sòng shī-poet), Hé Zì’s 何自 outspokenness, Zhāng Wéixiào’s 張惟孝 chivalry, Shàn Wěi’s 單煒 calligraphy, Zhào Zhízhōng’s 趙執中 wooden-arrow incident, Shǐ Sōngzhī’s 史嵩之 cruelty (the late-Sòng councillor who arranged the disastrous Duānpíng recovery of the three capitals in 1234), the Huīzōng auspicious-bird episode, and Empress Wéi 韋后’s Shàoxīng-period stone-pagoda visit. The work also preserves uncommon material on Southern-Sòng material culture — the introduction of the jiào 簥 sedan-chair after the southern crossing, the seasonal regulation of mutton allowances, and the practice of life-enfeoffment of imperial in-laws to princely rank, beginning (per this work) with Zhèng Shēn 鄭紳 the father of Empress Zhèng 鄭皇后 of Huīzōng. Several entries flagged as unreliable by the Sìkù: the calumny on Hán Shìzhōng’s collusion with Qín Guì, the obscene Nányuè fūrén 南嶽夫人 (Lady of the Southern Marchmount) story, and the moral lapse of treating Yáng Tán’s 楊談 squandering of Tea-Bureau cash as a “háojǔ” gallant deed.

Editorial status. The Zhōnghuá Sòng Yuán bǐjì xiǎoshuō dàguān 宋元筆記小說大觀 includes the work in its survey of recovered Yuán bǐjì; the Quán Sòng bǐjì 全宋筆記 series, taking the work’s content (rather than its date) as decisive, also collates it. No fuller, non-dàdiǎn-derived copy has been identified.

Translations and research

  • Quán Sòng bǐjì 全宋筆記 (Dàxiàng chū-bǎn-shè), latest series, includes Dōngnán jìwén with collation against the Sìkù recovery; the most reliable modern point-edition.
  • The work is cited piecemeal by historians of the late-Southern Sòng court (e.g. on Shǐ Sōng-zhī and the Duān-píng policy) and by historians of Sòng material culture, but no monographic study or European-language translation has been located.
  • No substantial Western-language secondary literature located.

Other points of interest

The work is one of a small group of Yuán-period anonymous bǐjì preserving Southern-Sòng material from a loyalist standpoint, surviving only through Yǒnglè dàdiǎn recovery. The Sìkù compilers’ explicit linguistic test — the use of “Dōngnán” for the Southern-Sòng polity, the past-tense reference to Bayan’s 1276 Yangtze crossing as already accomplished, and the bureaucratic-rhetorical phrasing of the jiào sedan-chair and mutton-allowance entries — is a model of the Sìkù’s technique for dating anonymous works by internal idiom rather than external attribution. The work’s transmission history (lost original → Yǒnglè dàdiǎn fragmentation → Sìkù reconstitution) parallels that of KR3l0050 Zhēnxí fàngtán and other recovered SòngYuán bǐjì, and illustrates the Yǒnglè dàdiǎn’s role as a survival-of-last-resort archive for minor Yuán-era anecdotal literature.

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