Shǐ Zhào 史炤
Southern Sòng historian, the first systematic phonetic-and-explanatory annotator of the Zī zhì tōng jiàn. Zì Jiànkě 見可. Native of Méishān 眉山 (modern Sìchuān), great-grandson of Shǐ Qīngqīng 史清卿 — one of the famous “three qīng” of Méizhōu (the Méizhōu sānqīng 眉州三卿) revered by Sū Shì 蘇軾 and Sū Zhé 蘇轍 brothers as their hometown senior. Lifedates uncertain; the preface to his Tōng jiàn shì wén by Féng Shíxíng 馮時行 dates from Shàoxīng 30 / 1160 and notes that Zhào was then “nearly seventy” — placing his birth ca. 1090. CBDB entries 29493, 39086, 466410 give no dates.
His sole transmitted work is the Zī zhì tōng jiàn shì wén 資治通鑑釋文 (KR2b0016) in 30 juǎn, the first systematic phonetic-and-explanatory commentary on Sīmǎ Guāng’s Tōng jiàn, completed after a decade of labor in the late Shàoxīng era and printed under Méishān auspices in 1160. The work was the standard Tōng jiàn commentary in Southern Sòng circulation until eclipsed by Hú Sānxǐng’s Yīn zhù in the late thirteenth century. Hú Sānxǐng’s polemical Tōng jiàn shì wén biàn wù (KR2b0012) takes Shǐ Zhào as its principal target, characterising his glosses as “exceptionally shallow and crude”; nonetheless the Shì wén remains a primary witness for the Sòng-period reception of the Tōng jiàn and for several Sòng phonological-lexical traditions that did not otherwise survive.