Zhāng Zìxūn 張自勳
Late-Míng historian and Tōngjiàn gāngmù critic. Zì Zhuó’ān 卓菴. Native of Nánchāng 南昌 (modern Jiāngxī). No CBDB entry. Lifedates undocumented; the only secure date is the Chóngzhēn guǐwèi / 1643 completion of the Gāngmù xù lín. Almost no biographical record beyond the colophons of his single major work.
His one major surviving work is the Gāngmù xù lín 綱目續麟 (KR2b0020) in 20 juǎn (with appendices), the most penetrating Míng-period critical apparatus to Zhū Xī’s Tōngjiàn gāngmù. Zhāng’s central historiographical thesis was that the Gāngmù’s fánlì (general principles) and many of its judgments derived from Zhāng Shīyuǎn 趙師淵 (Zhū Xī’s disciple) rather than from Zhū Xī himself, and that Liú Yǒuyì 劉友益 had erred in treating an early-stage redaction as Zhū’s settled view. The work’s Sìkù tíyào endorses this analysis, treating it as a corrective both to Liú Yǒuyì’s Shū fǎ and to the various YuánMíng Gāngmù sub-commentaries that had treated the Gāngmù as wholly Zhū’s autograph.
The work was composed at Nánchāng and presented to print in Chóngzhēn 16 / 1643. Zhāng follows Fāng Xiàorú in refusing to grant zhèngtǒng legitimacy to the Qín, Jìn, or Suí — a position the Sìkù editors note is rúshēng jiāogù (Confucian-pedant rigid) but his particular textual critiques are praised as soundly evidence-based.