Hú Sānxǐng 胡三省
Late-Sòng / early-Yuán historian and the standard pre-modern commentator on the Zī zhì tōng jiàn. Zì Shēnzhī 身之; hào Méijiàn 梅磵. Native of Tāizhōu 台州, in modern Zhèjiāng. Jìnshì of Bǎoyòu 4 / 1256 (Sòng Lǐzōng).
Career: under the Southern Sòng he held a series of provincial appointments and served briefly in the household secretariat of the chancellor Jiǎ Sìdào 賈似道 (1213–1275), with whom he quarrelled over historiographical method (Yuán Juè’s 袁桷 Qīngróng jí 清容集 records the dispute). After the Yuán conquest of 1276 he refused service and retired to the home of his maternal-line in-laws, the Yuán 袁 family of Yìnxiàn 鄞縣 (Níngbō), where he completed his great commentary in his last decades.
Lifedates: CBDB id 40009 gives 1229–1302; the catalog meta and many older Chinese reference works give 1230–1287 (the latter date apparently a corruption); the now-standard dating is 1230–1302, followed here. The discrepancy is real and should be noted on every work-note.
Sole surviving major work: Zī zhì tōng jiàn yīn zhù 資治通鑑音注 (KR2b0007, integrated into the WYG transmitted text of the Tōng jiàn) — exhaustive philological, geographical, ritual, calendrical, and prosopographical commentary on Sīmǎ Guāng’s Tōng jiàn, started in the 1250s, lost to Mongol military disruption three times, completed in Yuánzhēn 1 / 1295, sealed in a cellar during the Jǐchǒu (1289) coastal raids, and recovered. Yuán Juè’s notice (citing Sānxǐng’s own preface) describes the long compositional history.
Also: Tōng jiàn shì wén biàn wù 通鑑釋文辨誤 (KR2b0012) in 12 juǎn, a polemic correcting Shǐ Zhào’s 史炤 Tōng jiàn shì wén (KR2b0016). The Sòng shǐ 宋史 (compiled under Yuán Toghto 1343–1345) deliberately omitted Hú Sānxǐng — a politically motivated suppression that left him, despite his stature, without a standard dynastic-history biography. The principal modern study is Chen Yuán’s 陳垣 Tōng jiàn Hú zhù biǎo wēi 通鑑胡注表微 (1945), an extended exposition of Sānxǐng’s covert anti-Yuán political consciousness as encoded in the commentary.