Zuǒ Qiūmíng 左丘明
Pseudo-historical or semi-historical figure traditionally said to have been the author of the Zuǒzhuàn 左傳 (KR1e0001) and the Guó yǔ 國語 (KR3a0001). Sīmǎ Qiān (Shǐ jì 14, Shí’èr zhūhóu nián biǎo xù 十二諸侯年表序) calls him “a great-officer of Lǔ, surnamed Zuǒqiū, given name Míng” (Lǔ jūnzǐ Zuǒqiū Míng 魯君子左丘明) and a contemporary of Confucius (Kǒngzǐ 孔子, 551–479 BCE) who was reputedly blind in later life. The Lúnyǔ itself records (5.25) Confucius praising “Zuǒqiū Míng” for despising falseness — although whether this is the same person was already disputed in the Qīng.
The traditional dating, accepted from the Hàn through the early modern period, would place him in the late 6th to early 5th century BCE; under that account he received the Chūnqiū directly from Confucius and composed the Zuǒzhuàn as its narrative commentary. The traditional view was preserved through the imperial zhùshū tradition (Dù Yù KR1e0002, Kǒng Yǐngdá KR1e0003 / KR1e0004) and defended as late as the Qīng-imperial Sìkù tíyào, which explicitly retained the ZuǒQiūmíng attribution to “dispel the various confusions” raised by Sòng critics (Wáng Ānshí, Yè Mèngdé, Zhū Xī).
Modern scholarship — Karlgren (1926), Bernhard Karlgren’s grammatical analyses; Barry B. Blakeley (2004); Yuri Pines (2002); David Schaberg (2001); Wai-yee Li (2007); the introduction to Durrant–Li–Schaberg (2016) — generally rejects the traditional attribution and dates the Zuǒzhuàn to the mid-to-late 4th century BCE, several generations after the supposed lifetime of Zuǒ Qiūmíng, with composition by several hands rather than by a single author. The figure of Zuǒ Qiūmíng survives in the Kanripo catalog frontmatter and in classical scholarship as the conventional named “author,” but the historical existence of the Lúnyǔ-mentioned figure and his identity (or non-identity) with the named compiler of the Zuǒzhuàn and the Guó yǔ remain open questions.
A surname Zuǒqiū 左丘 is attested at Lǔ in the Spring and Autumn period, and the Sīmǎ Qiān reading takes “Zuǒqiū” as the surname and “Míng” as the personal name; an alternative reading (going back at least to the Sòng) takes “Zuǒ” alone as surname and “Qiūmíng” as a binomial personal name. Both readings circulated.