Jiàngshǒu jūyuánchí jì 絳守居園池記
Record of the Garden-and-Pond of the Prefect-Residence at Jiàng[-zhōu] by 樊宗師 (撰), 趙仁擧 (注), 吳師道 (補正), 許謙 (補正)
About the work
A 777-character single-text commentary edition built around Fán Zōngshī 樊宗師 樊宗師 (fl. 820, zì Shàoshù 紹述)‘s notorious garden-record, composed in Chángqìng 3 (823) when he was cìshǐ of Jiàngzhōu 絳州 (modern Shānxī Jiàngxiàn). Fán’s gǔwén style — lauded by Hán Yù as innovative, condemned by every subsequent reader as deliberately impenetrable — is here exemplified at its purest: 777 characters of essentially un-parsable diction. The catalog records the WYG copy with three layered Yuán commentaries:
- Zhào Rénjǔ 趙仁擧 趙仁擧 (Yuán; little known) — base annotation, supplementing the lost Táng commentaries by Wáng Shèng 王晟 and Liú Chén 劉忱.
- Wú Shīdào 吳師道 吳師道 (1283–1344) — Huángqìng 2 (癸丑 = 1313): adds 22 supplementary notes and corrects 60 places in Zhào’s commentary.
- Xǔ Qiān 許謙 許謙 (1270–1337) — Yányòu 7 (庚申 = 1320): adds 41 further supplementary notes.
Wú then re-cuts the text in Zhìshùn 3 (1332), incorporating Xǔ’s supplements — the recension that reaches the WYG.
Tiyao
Jiàngshǒu jūyuánchí jì zhù in 1 juǎn — by Fán Zōngshī of the Táng. Annotated by Yuán Zhào Rénjǔ, Wú Shīdào, Xǔ Qiān. Zōngshī’s life is in Hán Yù’s epitaph. This piece is Chángqìng 3, when Zōngshī was cìshǐ of Jiàngzhōu and, while resident at the prefect’s lodge, built a garden-pond and recorded it himself. The prose is so corrupt-and-obscure (pìsè) it cannot be parsed. Dǒng Yōu’s Guǎngchuān shūbá records that he obtained the old stele at Jiàngzhōu and, scraping and washing it clean, found Zōngshī’s own gloss appended at the end — but it only briefly identifies the names of the tíng and xiè (pavilions and arbors); the prose remains largely opaque. Hence eccentrics have made many commentaries on it. Lǐ Zhào’s Guóshǐ bǔ records that in the Táng there were two: Wáng Shèng and Liú Chén — both lost. So Zhào Rénjǔ supplemented his own. Huángqìng guǐchǒu (1313), Wú Shīdào, finding it patchy, corrected 22 places and emended 60. Yányòu gēngshēn (1320), Xǔ Qiān still felt it incomplete and added 41 more. Zhìshùn 3 (1332), Shīdào, on the basis of Xǔ’s redaction, re-cut and added a colophon — twenty years of repeated rewriting, still not a settled edition. The characters and phrases none follow ancient form, none can be glossed-out; the commentary can only push for cohesion through context-meaning. A piece of just 777 characters generates a tangle of conflicting readings with no settlement — and rightly so. Yet the piece, transmitted long, like an inscribed bronze whose script cannot be read but cannot be denied antiquity, the connoisseur preserves and does not discard. Zōngshī also has a Yuèwáng lóu shī xù of similar obscurity, recorded by Jì Yǒugōng’s Tángshī jìshì — never commented. In our dynasty Sūn Zhīlù 孫之騄 of Rénhé combined the two pieces and annotated them, titled Fán Shàoshù jí, separately catalogued.
Abstract
Jiàngshǒu jūyuánchí jì is the canonical surviving exemplar of the deliberately-archaic gǔwén practice that Fán Zōngshī carried beyond Hán Yù’s reformist program — a piece whose 777 characters generated more commentary text per character than perhaps any other work in the Chinese literary canon. The Yuán-period decision to layer three commentaries (Zhào → Wú → Xǔ → Wú-revised) was an explicit attempt to accumulate enough exegetical effort to secure even a basic semantic reading. Fán was Hán Yù’s protégé — Hán wrote both his epitaph (Fán Shàoshù mùzhìmíng) and a famous defense of his style (Sòng Fán Shàoshù xù) — but the post-Táng critical tradition has always regarded Fán as an extreme case, more curiosity than model. The transmission of the text owes more to Hán Yù’s prestige than to any acceptance of Fán’s style. CBDB id 95000 gives Fán’s dates as 766–824; catalog has only fl. 820, accepting the catalog characterization (fl. 820, traditionally placing his career in the Yuánhé / Chángqìng period).
Translations and research
- 孫之騄 Sūn Zhī-lù. Fán Shào-shù jí zhù. The Qīng combined edition with the Yuè-wáng lóu shī xù, separately catalogued in the Sì-kù.
- McMullen, David. 1988. State and Scholars in T’ang China. CUP. Treats Fán in the gǔ-wén context.
- Hartman, Charles. 1986. Han Yü and the T’ang Search for Unity. Princeton UP. The principal English-language treatment of Fán Zōng-shī as Hán Yù’s protégé.
Other points of interest
The accumulated three-layer Yuán commentary — Zhào, then Wú adding 22 + correcting 60, then Xǔ adding 41 more, then Wú re-editing — is a remarkable exhibit of what determined Yuán philology could achieve on a single 777-character piece. The four commentators between them spent some two decades on the project. The fact that the tíyào compares the work to an unreadable bronze inscription preserved for its antiquity rather than its content is one of the more striking moments in Sìkù aesthetic judgment.