Xīxià Shūshì 西夏書事
Records of Xi Xia Affairs by 吳廣成 (撰)
About the work
Xīxià Shūshì 西夏書事 is a 42-juǎn 卷 historical chronicle of the Xi Xia (Tangut/Xīxià 西夏, 1038–1227) dynasty by 吳廣成 Wú Guǎngchéng (fl. early nineteenth century), courtesy name Xīzhāi 西齋, a native of Qīngpǔ 青浦, Jiangsu (present-day Shanghai municipality). Despite its placement in the Kanripo KR4k fiction collection, Xīxià Shūshì is not a novel but a historical chronicle (biānnián tǐ 編年體) compiled in the Tōngjiàn Gāngmù 通鑑綱目 annals-and-commentary style. It represents a pioneering achievement in Xi Xia historiography and is the most comprehensive Qing-dynasty compilation of materials on the Tangut state.
Tiyao
No tiyao found in source.
Abstract
The work covers the history of Xi Xia from 881 CE — when the Tangut chieftain Tuòbá Sīgōng 拓拔思恭 raised troops against the Huángcháo rebellion and received the Tang imperial surname Lǐ 李 — through 1231, four years after the dynasty’s final destruction by the Mongols in 1227. It thus spans approximately 350 years, tracing the rise of the Tǎngut state through five Tang, five Dynasties, and Song-era phases, the proclamation of the Xi Xia empire by Yuánhào 元昊 in 1038, the dynasty’s complex triangular diplomacy with Song, Liao, and Jin, and its ultimate conquest by the Mongol armies.
The fánlì 凡例 (editorial conventions) explains the author’s method: the official dynastic histories (Song, Liao, Jin, Yuan) provide the main gāng 綱 (structural spine), while supplementary materials — Zīzhì Tōngjiàn 資治通鑑 continuations, memorials, edicts, private histories, local gazetteers, and miscellaneous notes — provide the mù 目 (detailed mesh). The author acknowledges that Xi Xia’s own records (Yuánhào’s Tangut-script court documents) were lost after the dynasty’s destruction, making reconstruction from Chinese sources necessary. He spent approximately ten years assembling and cross-referencing the materials. The chinaknowledge.de entry on the work confirms this methodological description.
吳廣成, courtesy name Xīzhāi 西齋, is recorded in CBDB (id 269594) without birth or death dates, which remain unknown. He is identified in secondary literature as a scholar from Qīngpǔ 青浦, Jiangsu. The fánlì thanks “colleagues who jointly considered and corrected” the drafts, indicating collaborative scholarly review. The work was first published in 1825 (Daoguang 5) by the Xiǎo Xiàn Shān Fáng 小岘山房 press; a 1935 Beijing reprint (Wénkuí 文奎 photolithographic edition) followed. Subsequent Xi Xia historians, including Dài Xīzhāng 戴錫章 and Chén Kūn 陳昆, relied on the Xīxià Shūshì as a primary reference.
The work’s placement in the KR4k fiction division of Kanripo is clearly a cataloging anomaly. By content, genre, and the author’s own intentions, it belongs to the historiographical tradition of “records of affairs” (shūshì 書事) or annalistic chronicles for non-Han states. Its companion works in the Xi Xia historiographical tradition include Zhāng Jiàn’s 張鑑 (1768–1850) Xīxià Jìshì Běnmò 西夏紀事本末 and Zhōu Chūn’s 周春 Xīxià Shū 西夏書.
Translations and research
- Chinaknowledge.de: Xixia shushi (bibliographic description with structural analysis).
- Wilkinson, Endymion. Chinese History: A New Manual. References the Xi Xia historiographical tradition; the Xīxià Shūshì is the principal Qing-period compilation for this subject.
No substantial Western-language monograph specifically on this work located.
Other points of interest
The Xi Xia dynasty (Party-Tangut/Dǎngxiàng 黨項, 1038–1227) is the only major medieval Chinese state for which no official dynastic history (zhèngshǐ 正史) was compiled by subsequent dynasties. The Liáoshǐ 遼史 and Jīnshǐ 金史 were compiled; Xi Xia was not. The Xīxià Shūshì is explicitly motivated by this lacuna, as Wú Guǎngchéng states in his fánlì: “among the three parallel powers [Song, Liao/Jin, Xi Xia], Liao and Jin have histories, but Xia has few dedicated works.” His compilation thus has the character of a surrogate official history. Modern Xi Xia scholarship, which has been transformed by the twentieth-century discovery and decipherment of Tangut-script documents, now reads Wú’s work as an important pre-modern baseline of knowledge about the dynasty derived from Chinese sources alone.