Pùshūtíng jí 曝書亭集
The Sun-Drying-Books Pavilion Collection by 朱彝尊 (撰)
About the work
The collected works of 朱彝尊 Zhū Yízūn (1629–1709, zì Xīchàng 錫鬯, hào Zhúchá 竹垞, late-life Pùshūtíng zhǔrén 曝書亭主人) of Xiùshuǐ 秀水 (Jiāxīng, Zhèjiāng) — one of the dominant early-Qīng cí-lyricists, founder of the Zhèxī (Western-Zhejiang) school of cí poetics, and a leading classical-philological scholar (founder, with 毛奇齡 and 閻若璩, of the early-Qīng jīngjiě movement). 80 juan total: poetry, prose, and cí-lyrics, with a one-juan appendix of yèér yuèfǔ 葉兒樂府 (lyric arias attributed in YuánMíng anthology fashion). The collection was author-fixed, printed beginning in jǐchǒu (Kāngxī 48, 1709 — Zhū’s death year), funded by the tōngzhèng officer Cáo Lìxuān 曹荔軒 (i.e., Cáo Yín 曹寅 of Jiāngníng); the work was incomplete at both Zhū’s and Cáo’s deaths; Zhū’s grandson Zhū Jiāwēng 朱稼翁 then traveled the realm soliciting subscriptions from the family’s friends and finally completed the printing in jiǎwǔ of Kāngxī 53 (1714) sixth month. The 1714 imprint is the canonical text; the SBCK reproduces it.
Prefaces
Preface by 潘耒 Pān Lěi (Sūzhōu, Wújiāng), dated Kāngxī wùzǐ (47, 1708), midspring:
Sīmǎ Qiān said: “Select the words that are particularly elegant.” Liǔ Zǐhòu (Liǔ Zōngyuán) said: “Bring them through the Tàishǐ (Sīmǎ Qiān) and so display their cleanness.” Prose: arriving at the elegant and clean, the rank is highest possible; yet it is not merely sloughing off vulgar tone for elegance, nor pruning the surplus phrase for cleanness. Necessarily, talent must be heroic, vision lofty, native gift deep, and cultivation generous; one must thread together heaven and humanity to make one’s learning, and combine ancient and present to forge one’s diction — only then can one truly soar to dàyǎ, refine to jīngjié. Otherwise it is merely empty and shallow. … From the mid-Míng false-prose has arisen in contention — nǐfǎng dǎoxí (mimicked-stolen), fúxiāo gōují (drifty-noisy and crook-thorny) — myriad faults coming forth. Two or three gentlemen tried to rescue with qīngzhēn (pure-true), and could not save it. By the dynasty’s close, xiāntiāo guàijué (delicate-frivolous, strange-perverse) had set in; the path was lost, the prose ruined to the limit. By the present court, men have somewhat awakened: the brush-wielders have looked back to Ōuyáng (Xiū) and Sū (Shì) afar, and looked up to Guī Yǒuguāng and Táng-Sòng-prose-masters near at hand; gradually they have come to know that yǎjié is what should be revered. Yet yǎjié is not easy to speak: without the ancients’ talent and vision, without grasping the root of establishing words, but seeking only the working of the branches and leaves — those who put on the face of Ōuyáng and Sū are no different from those who put on the face of Zuǒ (Zuǒzhuàn) and Sīmǎ; their false-prose is one and the same.
The Xiùshuǐ Zhū Zhúchá master is endowed by Heaven with very high talent and very far-reaching insight. From his youth he was famous for prose. In mid-life his learning grew the more chúnshēn (pure-deep) and his prose the more gāolǎo (lofty-aged). He entered the imperial Hànlín and presided over the great compositions; on retirement he tilled the banks of the Long Water (Chángshuǐ). His chronicling and his compiling continued unbearably into old age. Already he had written several hundred juan of monographs, and now this collected works in another 80 juan. All men marvel at his prose’s copiousness and craft, yet do not know that it is wholly grounded in his learning. The Zhúchá master’s learning is profound in the Classics, vast in the Histories, threaded through the various Masters and Hundred Schools — every text in the realm with a character on it, he has scanned and read; every lost note and recovered tale, he has remembered. … He himself does not master any one school; his prose is tiānrán gāomài (Heaven-given lofty-and-bold), refined gold a hundred times tempered; he pares away the skin to show the root; words are spare and meaning is full; outwardly bland, inwardly rich. Probing it, it is inexhaustible; tasting it, one is never sated. This is true elegance and true cleanness, like stitching the white from a thousand armpits into a coat or fermenting the dew from a hundred flowers into a wine-jug.
[Pān goes on to recount his and Zhū’s parallel careers: their Bóxué hóngcí of Kāngxī 18 (1679), their subsequent retirement; the imprint funded by Cáo Yín; the death of both Zhū and Cáo before the 80-juan corpus was complete; Zhū’s grandson Jiāwēng’s continuation of the printing through 1714.]
Abstract
The Pùshūtíng jí is one of the great early-Qīng biéjí: founder-text of the Zhèxī 浙西 cí school, with its program of erudite, classically-allusive cí-lyric drawing on the Sòng masters Wǔ Wényīng 吳文英 and Zhāng Yán 張炎. Zhū’s Jiāngcūn xiāoxià lù 江村銷夏錄 (the great bǐjì on art collecting), Rìxià jiùwén 日下舊聞 (his Beijing topographical-bibliographic gazetteer, expanded by 于敏中 in the 1770s as the Rìxià jiùwén kǎo), Jīngyì kǎo 經義考 (his monumental 300-juan classical bibliography), and Míng shī zōng 明詩綜 (his Ming poetry anthology) are all major separate works. The Pùshūtíng jí preserves his literary output proper — poetry, prose, cí — with the supplementary 1-juan yèér yuèfǔ aria-section as appendix.
The work is not in the Sìkù quánshū under WYG (the catalog meta lists WYG as edition, but the source-tree witness is SBCK and the recension preserved is the 1714 Jia-jǐng family imprint, transmitted via the SBCK). Zhū was not on any proscription list, but the Sìkù compilers did not include the Pùshūtíng jí in the early-1780s WYG copy — possibly because the work was so widely-circulated in private imprints that it was deemed not to need imperial transmission, or because of the bulk of Zhū’s other works (Jīngyì kǎo etc.) already taken up. Modern critical editions follow the 1714 imprint.
Composition window: 1645 (Zhū’s earliest dated pieces, post-Míng-fall) through 1709 (his death). The 80-juan curated form is his own final design.
Translations and research
Stephen Owen, ed., The Cambridge History of Chinese Literature, vol. 2 (Cambridge, 2010) — substantial discussion of the Zhè-xī school.
Daniel Bryant, “The Rise of Cí Poetry,” in Cambridge History, vol. 2 — Zhū as the leading founder figure of the Zhè-xī cí style.
Cynthia J. Brokaw, Commerce in Culture (Harvard, 2007) — references the Xiù-shuǐ literary network.
Yán Dí-chāng 嚴迪昌, Qīng cí shǐ (Jiāngsū gǔjí, 1999) — central chapter on Zhū.
Lín Mèi-yí 林玫儀, Zhū Zhúchá yánjiū 朱竹垞研究 (Taipei: National Taiwan University, 1988).
Other points of interest
The appendix Yèér yuèfǔ 葉兒樂府 is unusual in a 17th-century biéjí: it preserves sànqǔ lyric arias in the YuánMíng mode, marking Zhū as a deliberate revivalist of the earlier-Yuán dramatic-lyric tradition. The “Pùshūtíng” name — Sun-Drying-Books Pavilion — references the Lùn yǔ’s “Pù shū yú rì” (sun-drying books in the sun) trope, a literati signal of book-collecting commitment; Zhū’s library was one of the largest privately held in the Kāngxī period, supplying material both for the Jīngyì kǎo and for the Rìxià jiùwén.
Links
- Wikidata Q1054961 (Zhu Yizun)
- ECCP 182–185 (Tu Lien-che)
- Wilkinson 2018, §66687 (Zhū as Qing book collector)