須溪集

Xūxī jí 須溪集

The Xūxī Collection by 劉辰翁 (撰)

About the work

The reconstructed biéjí 別集 in ten juàn of Liú Chénwēng 劉辰翁 (1232–1297), zì Huìmèng 會孟, hào Xūxī 須溪 — the late-Sòng cí poet, literary critic and yímín of Lúlíng 廬陵, Jiāngxī. Liú’s reputation in his own time rested on three things: his 1262 palace-examination response that openly attacked Jiǎ Sìdào 賈似道 (and that nearly cost him his life), his refusal to serve the Yuán after 1276, and a school-defining body of literary criticism — punctuated and commented editions of Dù Fǔ 杜甫, Shìshuō xīnyǔ 世說新語, and the BānMǎ yìtóng 班馬異同, plus large quantities of cí and shī. The original collection was lost by the mid-Míng — Hán Jìng 韓敬, working on a Late-Sòng anthology, hunted for it in vain — and what survives is the Qiánlóng-era Sìkù reconstruction: extracted from the Yǒnglè dàdiǎn 永樂大典 (poetry, prose, prefaces, miscellaneous writings), supplemented from the Tiānxià tóngwén jí 天下同文集 and the Xūxī jìchāo 須溪記鈔, and arranged in ten juàn. The companion text KR4d0375 Xūxī sìjǐng shī jí 須溪四景詩集 was preserved as a single-circulation work and is therefore catalogued separately.

Tiyao

We respectfully submit: Xūxī jí, in ten juàn, was composed by Liú Chénwēng of the Sòng. Chénwēng, zì Huìmèng 會孟, a man of Lúlíng 廬陵; “Xūxī” is the placename where he lived. As a youth he was admitted as a Tàixué supplementary student. In Jǐngdìng rényù 景定壬戌 (1262) he was placed in the bǐngdì 丙第 (third class) at the palace examination. Pleading the age of his parents, he asked to serve as Mountain-Master (山長) of the Liánxī Academy 濓溪書院. Jiāng Wànlǐ 江萬里 and Chén Yízhōng 陳宜中 recommended him for office in the Historiography Bureau, and he was appointed Erudite of the Imperial Academy (太學博士) — but he refused all of these. After the fall of the Sòng he did not again come out [into office].

When Jiǎ Sìdào was in power, Chénwēng’s palace-examination response stated bluntly that “the lack of an heir to Jìdǐ 濟邸 [Prince of Jì] is something to grieve over; the cruel treatment of the loyal and the good is to be deplored; the failure of moral integrity is to be lamented” — phrasing that nearly got him struck down by Jiǎ Sìdào. From this he earned the name of an honest and unbending man, and his prose came to be valued in the world. His disciple Wáng Mèngyīng 王夢應, in his sacrificial address to him, even said: “After [Hán] Yù 韓愈 and [Ōuyáng] Xiū 歐陽脩, the Master alone, towering above his time, was the great writer of the Qín–Hàn style.”

Yet Chénwēng’s discussion of poetry and evaluation of prose tend to take the sharp-and-new for their meaning, and to sin too much toward the slight and the cunning. His critical-punctuation editions (pīdiǎn 批點) of works like the Dù Fǔ jí 杜甫集, the Shìshuō xīnyǔ 世說新語, and the BānMǎ yìtóng 班馬異同 still have circulating versions today, but most are fragmented and trivial, giving no real assistance to incoming students. As for the verse and prose he himself composed, these too take the strange-and-mighty (奇怪磊落) for their canon, working in the obscure and the dense — his diction is sometimes to the point that one cannot read it through, going beyond the bounds of the rule. But his tracks descend from the Zhuāng[zǐ] tradition, so even his haziness and disorientation have flashes of meaning and never fall entirely into “ox-ghost and snake-spirit” [absurdity]. Moreover, in the wake of the fall of his ancestral state, he longed in his heart for the ruined wheat fields, his entrustments are remote and deep, and the loyal love of his innermost feeling is often seen in his brush and ink — his intent, then, has much in it that is worth preserving, and one need not measure him entirely with the cord-and-ruler of lǐgé 禮格.

The Xūxī jí was seen by Míng men only with the greatest rarity, and even bibliographies often fail to record its juan number. Hán Jìng 韓敬, in selecting and arranging the prose of the wǎnSòng 晚宋 (Late-Sòng) authors, regretted that he could not obtain Liú’s complete collection. Hearing that the manuscript-remains of Hú Yīnglín 胡應驎 of Lánxī 蘭溪 contained the name of the work, he sought it out, but in the end could not obtain it. The collection had long been scattered, and only the Xūxī jìchāo 須溪記鈔 and the Xūxī sìjǐng shī 須溪四景詩 — both very few in count — were extant.

We have now checked the Yǒnglè dàdiǎn: the jì 記, xù 序, miscellaneous writings, and verse it preserves are still numerous. We have respectfully gathered and ordered them, dividing them into ten juàn. Those pieces in the Tiānxià tóngwén jí 天下同文集 and the Jìchāo that are not found in the Dàdiǎn we have separately copied as a supplement, to preserve their general outline. As for the Sìjǐng shī, since it was originally circulated as an independent single-volume work, we have left it under its own catalogue entry and have not absorbed it here.

Respectfully collated, ninth month of Qiánlóng 46 (1781). Chief-Compiler Officers Jì Yún 紀昀, Lù Xīxióng 陸錫熊, Sūn Shìyì 孫士毅; Chief-Collation Officer Lù Fèichí 陸費墀.

Abstract

The Xūxī jí is the principal — and only — surviving large prose-and-verse corpus of one of the most distinctive late-Sòng literary figures, 劉辰翁 Liú Chénwēng (1232–1297). The dating bracket here (1276–1297) reflects the received recension: although Liú composed throughout his adult life from the 1250s onward, the bulk of the surviving prose — and the political-emotional tenor that has interested modern scholarship — postdates the fall of the Sòng in 1276 and is concentrated in his last two decades. The Sìkù editors’ verdict is balanced: they criticise his style as fragmentary, eccentric, dense (he was Zhuāngzǐ-inflected and deliberately resistant to standard prose rule), but defend his loyal-Sòng yímín affect and the documentary value of his jì 記 and xù 序 prose. The Sìkù reconstruction (from Yǒnglè dàdiǎn, Tiānxià tóngwén jí, and the surviving Xūxī jìchāo) is itself the principal modern witness.

Beyond the Xūxī jí, Liú’s most influential work was his program of pīdiǎn 批點 editions of canonical authors — particularly his commentaries on Dù Fǔ and the Shìshuō xīnyǔ, which became central to Míng literary education and to the so-called píngdiǎn 評點 critical tradition that flourished from the 14th to 17th centuries. The Sìkù dismissal of these as “fragmented and trivial” reflects an kǎozhèng-era preference for cohesive systematic commentary and ignores the formative role Liú’s marginalia played in the development of the genre. Twentieth-century scholarship (Wú Chéngxué 吳承學, Yè Jiāyíng 葉嘉瑩) has revived interest in Liú’s píngdiǎn practice as a precursor to vernacular novel commentary.

The catalog meta lists Liú’s dates as 1234–1297; CBDB and the standard reference works place him in 1232–1297, with the 1262 palace examination as the fixed point. The 1232 date is followed in the person note.

Translations and research

• Yè Jiāyíng 葉嘉瑩, Jiā-líng tán cí 迦陵談詞 series (Hong Kong: Zhōnghuá, multiple volumes) — substantial discussion of Liú Chénwēng’s cí.
• Wú Chéngxué 吳承學, Zhōngguó gǔdài wénxué pīdiǎn xué 中國古代文學批點學 (Běijīng: Běijīng dàxué, 2002), with a sustained chapter on Liú’s pīdiǎn method.
• Charles Hartman, “The Tang Poet Du Fu and the Song Dynasty Literati”, in Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews (CLEAR) 30 (2008), discussing Sòng pīdiǎn of Dù including Liú’s.
• Liú Chénwēng cí jiào-zhù 劉辰翁詞校注 (Duàn Dàshēn 段大申 ed., Shànghǎi gǔjí, 1998).
• Sòffel, Christian 2004 Ein Universalgelehrter verarbeitet das Ende seiner Dynastie (Harrassowitz) — although ostensibly on Wáng Yīnglín, discusses Liú as comparator.
• Zhāng Yìlín 張義琳, “Liú Chénwēng yánjiū” 劉辰翁研究, doctoral diss., Sūzhōu dàxué, 2009.

Other points of interest

Liú is paired with 文天祥 Wén Tiānxiáng and Xiè Fāngdé 謝枋得 as the canonical Lúlíng triad of late-Sòng resistance literati; the three were classmates at the Liánxī Academy. The Xūxī jí contains the principal extant prose record of this Lúlíng circle as it dispersed under the Yuán.

Links

• WYG SKQS V1186.3, p401.
• CBDB person 27606 (Liú Chénwēng)
• Wikidata, Liu Chenweng