Huācǎo cuìbiān 花草稡編
The Combined Edition of [Huā-jiān] and [Cǎo-táng] edited by 陳耀文 (編)
About the work
The Huācǎo cuìbiān 花草稡編 is the great mid-late-Míng synthesizing cí anthology compiled by Chén Yàowén 陳耀文 (the principal Míng scholar of textual criticism, jìnshì 1550, of Yīngzhōu 潁州 in Hénán). 24 juǎn, containing 3,280-plus cí with editorial apparatus. The title — “Huācǎo” — declares the volume as the combined heir of the Huājiān jí KR4j0062 (the late-Táng / Five-Dynasties anthology) and the Cǎotáng shīyú KR4j0070 (the popular Sòng anthology): “Huā stands in for the Táng word, Cǎo for the Sòng” (the editorial logic the Sìkù tíyào sharply criticizes). Chén Yàowén’s compilation principle is fully bibliographic: for each cí, the original cítí (rubric) is preserved where given; the source-book is noted where the source is recondite; cíhuà commentary on the piece’s běnshì is appended; gūdiào (lonely-tune) cases are flagged as bèití 備題 (“backup-tune”). The editorial care places the volume in a higher class than its near-contemporary Cǎotáng-line popular anthologies, though it is not the prosodic equal of Wàn Shù’s Cílǜ KR4j0087 nor the critical equal of Zhū Yízūn’s Cízōng KR4j0075. Chronologically prior to both, however, it stands as the founding-stone of Míng cí-philology.
Tiyao
Huācǎo cuìbiān, 24 juǎn. Edited by Chén Yàowén of the Míng. Yàowén has the Jīngdiǎn jīyí KR1a0021 separately catalogued. This volume collects gēcí of the Táng and Sòng, with some Yuán, although the Yuán selections are rather thin. Yàowén says he was inspired to the work by the Huājiān jí of the Táng and the Cǎotáng shīyú of the Sòng, hence the title. To take only “huā” and “cǎo” from those two and synthesize them by a single character is itself a weak titular principle; to take “huā” for “Táng” and “cǎo” for “Sòng” — using the part to stand for the whole — is even more unsteady on the zhèngmíng test. Yet the volume’s draft is unusually rich. Where a cí has its original tí (rubric), the tí is preserved; where the source is recondite, the source-book is named. Where the cí has its běnshì (background occasion), the cíhuà on it is appended at the end. Where the cí is not particularly fine but its tune is otherwise unattested (a gūdiào 孤調), the piece is registered as bèití 備題. The editorial ordering is not careless. Of the Míng scholars, only Yàowén still kept up the philological discipline; he was not given to cháofēng nòngyuè (boudoir twittering and idle moon-watching). Although the strictness of correction is not the equal of Wàn Shù’s Cílǜ, and the discrimination of selection not the equal of Zhū Yízūn’s Cízōng, the labour of gathering this body of material stands ahead of those two; what is begun is hard to perfect, and one cannot let the work be eclipsed by what comes later. This volume is bound in the same format as Yàowén’s Tiānzhōng jì, evidently his own old printing; but the first juǎn now bears a preface by Chén Liángbì 陳良弼, dated Yányòu 4 (1317): the cutting is crude, the strokes barely shaping the characters — yet its text is in Yàowén’s exact words. Evidently the bookseller obtained the old blocks, then added a counterfeit preface to pass them off as a Yuán edition. — Qiánlóng 46 / 1781, 4th month.
Abstract
The Huācǎo cuìbiān was compiled across roughly three decades in the Jiājīng / Wànlì transition, by Chén Yàowén’s own report “over more than two cycles” (二紀, i.e. 24 years). The Sìkù catalog meta gives a date of “1550” (Chén’s jìnshì year) as the floruit, but the work was probably effectively complete only in the Wànlì early decades; the cutting in question is the editor’s own. The Yuán-period false preface by Chén Liángbì (1317) is a bookseller’s interpolation, exposed and dismissed by the Sìkù editors. The 3,280-plus pieces preserved (the Quán Sòng cí compilers’ single largest source after Máo Jìn’s Liùshí jiā cí) include many Northern-Sòng pieces otherwise unattested, and substantial cíhuà drawn from now-lost sources. The Sìkù judgment that the Huācǎo cuìbiān deserves canonical status — that it is “the founding-stone” of Míng cí-philology — has been broadly endorsed in modern cí-textual scholarship.
Translations and research
- Táng Guī-zhāng 唐圭璋, Quán Sòng cí — Huā-cǎo cuì-biān is one of the principal source-texts.
- Wú Xióng-hé 吳熊和, Táng-Sòng cí tōng-lùn — discusses Huā-cǎo cuì-biān in Míng anthology-history.
- Stuart Sargent, “Tz’u,” in Mair, ed., Columbia History of Chinese Literature.
Other points of interest
The bookseller’s fake “Yányòu 4 / 1317” preface by “Chén Liángbì” — exposed by the Sìkù — is a textbook case of late-Míng / early-Qīng book-trade forgery designed to pass Míng cuttings off as Yuán incunabula.