Yítáng xiānshēng wénjí 頤堂先生文集
Collected Works of Master Yí-táng by 王灼 (撰)
About the work
The Yítáng xiānshēng wénjí 頤堂先生文集 is the personal literary collection of Wáng Zhuó 王灼 (hào Yítáng), the same Wáng Zhuó who composed the Bìjī mànzhì KR4j0078 and the Tángshuāng pǔ 糖霜譜 (the world’s first technical monograph on sugar-cane refining). Five juǎn in the SBCK arrangement. Contents include gǔfù (juǎn 1: Jīngyù, Hòufù, Cháorìlián, Zuìzhú, Diào Qū Yuán), gǔshī (juǎn 2–3: poems of friendship and Shǔ-region landscape), and prose. The literary register is the conservative learned-late-Northern-Sòng manner, with a Shǔ regional grounding (many of Wáng’s gǔshī are set in Chéngdū, Suíníng, and the Bìjī fāng). The collection has no Sìkù tíyào; it was preserved in fragments and the SBCK reconstitutes it from an extant Sòng / Yuán manuscript line.
Prefaces
The SBCK _000.txt file is a mùlù (table of contents) only; no extant preface survives. The opening juǎn of gǔfù leads with the Jīngyù fù 荆玉賦 (a Chǔ-region landscape fù) and the Diào Qū Yuán 弔屈原 (“Lament for Qū Yuán”); juǎn 2 contains gǔshī sequences on the Jiānlè táng 監樂堂 (with a separate preface), on Bronze-Horse-Songs 銅馬歌, on Wáng Niào 王尼 (with preface), on Shǔ-region Yúzhōu shì 漁舟詩, etc. The poems include presentation-pieces to Liú Qí 劉錡 (general of the Jiànyán / Shàoxīng northern wars), to Zhāng Yuánjǔ 張元舉, and to Fàn Yuántōng 范元通 — testifying to Wáng’s connections with the Shǔ-region official-and-military networks of the early Southern Sòng.
Abstract
The Yítáng xiānshēng wénjí preserves Wáng Zhuó’s shī, fù, and miscellaneous prose alongside his much better-known treatise output. It is the principal source for Wáng’s biography beyond the Bìjī mànzhì and the Tángshuāng pǔ: from this collection’s poems, modern scholars (Lóng Mùxūn 龍沐勳, Wú Xiónghé 吳熊和) reconstruct Wáng’s mid-12th-century Shǔ-region context, his network of friends and patrons, his service as a mùliáo in the Shàoxīng military structure (including the dated presentation-poem to General Liú Qí), and his Suíníng identity. The poetry collection is also a useful corrective to the technical-treatise image of Wáng Zhuó: he was, like Shěn Kuò and several other Sòng polymaths, a writer of considerable poetic ambition as well as a technical innovator. Modern editions (the Quán Sòng shī) draw on the SBCK to collate Wáng’s surviving shī.
Translations and research
- Quán Sòng shī 全宋詩 — collated text of Wáng Zhuó’s shī.
- For the broader Wáng Zhuó context, see secondary literature on his other works at KR4j0078 (Bì-jī màn-zhì) and the Táng-shuāng pǔ in KR3 / sugar-technology scholarship.
- Christian Daniels, “Sugar in China 600–1660: The First Account in the World of Sugar Manufacture” — covers the Táng-shuāng pǔ and references the Wén-jí.
Other points of interest
The Diào Qū Yuán fù in juǎn 1 — composed in the early Southern Sòng with the loss of the north as its proximate occasion — is one of the more often-cited single fù of Wáng Zhuó’s literary output, a Shǔ-loyalist response to the Northern catastrophe in the mode of Qū Yuán reception.