Wāng Yuēzhēn 汪曰楨
Style name Gāngmù 剛木 (literally “rigid post,” from the Shuōwén gloss on the graph 楨), also Xièchéng 謝城. Native of Wūchéng 烏程 (Húzhōu, Zhèjiāng). Born Jiāqìng 18 (1813), died Guāngxù 7 (1881). CBDB c_personid 79282 (Qing dynasty), with full lifedates entered. Wilkinson, Chinese History: A New Manual, gives the dates as 1813–82 (a one-year discrepancy with CBDB at the death-year, attributable to the difference between the standard Western year-of-death and the Chinese suì).
The leading mid-nineteenth-century Chinese chronologist. Wāng’s life work was the reconstruction of a year-by-year shuòrùn 朔閏 (new-moon and intercalary-month) apparatus for the entire span of Chinese chronology from the Western Zhōu Gònghé 共和 regency (841 BCE) to the end of the Míng — a project conceived as the recovery of Liú Xīsǒu’s 劉羲叟 lost Sòng-period Liúshì jíshù 劉氏輯術. He spent (per the preface to his Lìdài chángshù jíyào) nearly thirty years on this project, consulting “several hundred kinds” of sources. The full apparatus, in 53 juàn, was originally titled Èrshísì shǐ yuèrì kǎo 二十四史月日考 (“Studies of the Months and Days of the Twenty-four Histories”); but it was “too bulky to be printed” (per Wilkinson) and Wāng abridged it to a 10- (later 14-) juàn compendium published in Guāngxù 3 (1877) as Lìdài chángshù jíyào 歷代長術輯要 (KR3fb023).
The Chángshù jíyào remained the standard Chinese-language chronological reference for the next half-century, and was the principal source for Mathias Tchang’s French Synchronismes chinois (Shànghǎi 1905). It was reprinted in the Zhōnghuá shūjú “Sìbù bèiyào” recension in 1934 and remains in use. Wilkinson cites the work in §39.x as the standard Chinese chronological tool alongside Tchang.
Wāng’s other major works include Hūzhōu fǔzhì 湖州府志 (the Dào-guāng-era prefectural gazetteer for which he served as chief editor) and the SòngYuán xuéàn bǔyí 宋元學案補遺 (a continuation of Huáng Zōngxī’s intellectual history). Active in the mid-Qīng kǎojù tradition that combined philological, historical, and chronological scholarship.