Yúshù lèigǎo 漁墅類稿
Drafts by Category from the Fisher’s-Cottage by 陳元晉 (撰)
About the work
Yúshù lèigǎo is the 8-juǎn Sìkù reassembly of the biéjí of Chén Yuánjìn 陳元晉 (jìnshì 1211), an upright provincial official of the late Southern Sòng. The collection is named for the Yúshù shūyuàn 漁墅書院 he founded. The original 10-juǎn recension recorded by Jiāo Hóng was lost; the present 8 juǎn are reconstituted from the Yǒnglè dàdiǎn.
Tiyao
We respectfully submit: the Yúshù lèigǎo in 8 juǎn was composed by Chén Yuánjìn of the Sòng. Yuánjìn has no biography in the Sòngshǐ; only the Jiāngxī tōngzhì records that his zì was Míngfù and that he was a man of Chóngrén; that he took the jìnshì in Jiādìng 4 (1211); first appointed sub-prefect of Yúdū, transferred to Prefect of Fúzhōu and Róngzhōu, accumulating offices to Pacification Commissioner of Yōngguǎn. He once founded the Yúshù shūyuàn, after which the collection is named. We have however examined Zhào Fǎng’s 趙汸 Dōngshān cúngǎo, in which there is a xíngzhuàng of Yú Jí 虞集 saying that Jí’s grandfather, on resigning office, passed through Línchuān and was lodged by Mr. Chén Yuánjìn, whose wife was Jí’s [paternal] aunt — so Yuánjìn too was a man of Shǔ who had taken refuge in Chóngrén; the tōngzhì, then, did not investigate fully. Jiāo Hóng’s Jīngjí zhì records the Yúshù lèigǎo in 10 juǎn; no other catalogue lists it. Today, examining the Yǒnglè dàdiǎn, we still find more than eighty miscellaneous prose pieces and more than one hundred and ten poems in various meters; we have edited them by category and arranged them into 8 juǎn. The Jiāngxī gazetteer says Yuánjìn loved learning and good action, was much regarded by his fellow-villagers, and produced visible administrative results wherever he held office. Looking at the collection: the memorial Qǐng chā jiǎshǒu cuī kē zhāzǐ exhausts the abuses of the day in conscription and tax-collection; the letter Shàng Zēng Zhīyuàn sets out vigorously a strategy for the upper Yangtze defense, saying that the trouble is not that meritorious work is hard to set up, but that men’s hearts cannot be reconciled, and that when frontier alarm sounds, untrained levies are summoned from the prefectures and forwarded to waste their grain by the southern Yangtze in the name of “river-defense”; when distant alarm comes they scatter and slacken, and are again forgotten — a habit of palsy chronic since Kāixǐ (1205). For the Sòng habit of dilapidation, contention, and gridlock his diagnosis pierces to the marrow. His memorial to Wèi Liǎowēng 魏了翁 likewise observes that “the strength of the good has fallen, lent now to flatterer, now to worthy: the artery of upright opinion barely persists, mute and self-resigned; men race the shortcut, take softness for adroitness, becoming greasy through habit, the disease entering the bone-marrow.” All this is the speech of a man indignant at the age, of upright temper unwelcome to his time; reading his remains, one can yet see the man. Respectfully collated, Qiánlóng 46 (1781), 9th month. Chief Editors (subject) Jì Yún 紀昀, Lù Xīxióng 陸錫熊, Sūn Shìyì 孫士毅; Chief Collator (subject) Lù Fèichí 陸費墀.
Abstract
Chén Yuánjìn was a jìnshì of 1211 who served his way up from Sub-prefect of Yúdū to Pacification Commissioner of the Yōng frontier. Apart from the Sìkù tíyào and the Jiāngxī tōngzhì, the chief biographical clue lies in the xíngzhuàng of Yú Jí preserved by Zhào Fǎng, which corrects the local gazetteer by establishing that the family was originally from Shǔ. The collection’s value lies less in its verse than in its memoranda — particularly the zhāzǐ on conscription abuse and the long letter on the upper-Yangtze defense — which are among the more concrete documents of late-Jiādìng civil administration and military breakdown. The original 10-juǎn edition had vanished; the present 8 juǎn are the Sìkù reconstitution from the Yǒnglè dàdiǎn, comprising c. 80 prose pieces and c. 110 poems organised by genre.
Translations and research
No substantial secondary literature located.
Links
- Wilkinson, Chinese History: A New Manual, §28.1.