Tínglín yújí 亭林餘集
Supplementary Collection of (Gù Yánwǔ) Tínglín by 顧炎武 (撰)
About the work
A single-juan supplement to Gù Yánwǔ’s collected prose (the Tínglín wénjí 亭林文集 in the same SBCK series), gathering pieces that were excluded from the standard recension by Gù’s disciples on grounds of political sensitivity — chiefly because they touched on his service to the Southern Míng Lóngwǔ regime (under King Táng 唐王 Zhū Yùjiàn 朱聿鍵) or were otherwise too explicit in their Míng-loyalist content for safe printing under the Qīng. The Qiánlóng-period editor 彭紹升 (Péng Shàoshēng, 1740–1796), then a young Sūzhōu scholar, encountered a manuscript copy at Kūnshān during his juvenile tóngzǐ shì examinations, recognized its authenticity, and prepared the supplementary recension; his preface is dated Qiánlóng 38 (1773).
Prefaces
Preface by 彭紹升, Qiánlóng 38, tenth month (1773):
When I was sixteen, in the year I took the tóngzǐ examinations at Kūnshān, my second elder brother came home from our family seat to visit me. One day we went out together to the market and saw a manuscript copy of the Tínglín jí in one bundle; my brother bought it and gave it to me. On reading it through I found that the text contained many emendations and corrections, evidently fixed by the Master’s own hand. Comparing it with the already-printed edition I found ten-odd pieces missing — these had been excised by the disciples at the time of compilation. Yet the Master’s lifelong loyalty and filial piety are in fact made plain here; they cannot be left without transmission. I therefore had it transcribed and prefaced it as follows: the highest writing must take root in the heart’s nature. The ancients held loyalty and filial piety packed within them and overflowing without: bright as the sun and moon, raging as thunder, flowing as rivers and lakes — that energy filled heaven and earth. … The Tínglín Master, a polymath of his era, held the will to uphold the world and establish the teaching, but living through a revolutionary age had no outlet, and his isolated loyalty remained towering unaltered to his old age. The writings he made on the verge of his country’s fall — impassioned and wounding, native nature springing forth — set against Qū Yuán and Jiǎ Shēng (Jiǎ Yì), I cannot say which is first and which last. The Master once held office under the King Táng, and this appears in his writings; thus the original editors could not but obscure it. But looking at the Míng shǐ: every Míng official who held to his post under the various princes was written up in capital characters and openly memorialized — our dynasty’s instruction in loyalty is profound and far-reaching indeed. Those who narrowly busied themselves with concealment — how could they have understood the dàgōng zhī dào, the rule for the eternal establishment of subject-and-son? Long ago Suǒnán’s Xīn shǐ lay submerged in an old well for three hundred years and emerged again into the world; now the Master has been dead nearly a hundred years and these writings have come to me — this is surely no accident.
Abstract
The Yújí preserves writings that contemporary editors of Gù’s prose collection (chiefly disciples like Pān Lěi 潘耒) had suppressed on Qīng political grounds. The most famous suppressed pieces include the Miào hào yì 廟號議 — an essay on the appropriate temple-name for the Lóngwǔ emperor — and various memorials and letters from Gù’s brief service to the Southern Míng court at Fúzhōu in 1645. Péng Shàoshēng’s framing in the preface is doubly significant: he reads Gù into the canonical loyal subject tradition (Qū Yuán, Jiǎ Yì, Zhūgé Liàng, Wén Tiānxiáng, Zhèng Sīxiào), but also retroactively claims that the Qiánlóng state itself authorized this loyalist reading — a delicate gesture made possible by Qiánlóng’s own ideological reframing of late-Míng loyalists in the Míng shǐ and the contemporaneous Qīndìng shèngcháo xùn jié zhū chén lù 欽定勝朝殉節諸臣錄 (1776).
The SBCK reprint draws on Péng’s 1773 recension, supplemented by Sūn Yùxiū’s collation against later Qīng prints. The composition window is identical to that of KR4f0006 (mid-1640s to 1682).
Translations and research
See secondary literature listed under KR4f0006.
Peterson, “The Life of Ku Yen-wu” (HJAS 1968/1969) — discusses the suppressed pieces.
Links
- Wikidata Q381888 (Gu Yanwu)
- ECCP 421–426