Yuán-period 元 classical scholar and educator, the fourth and last of the BěiShān sì xiānsheng 北山四先生 (Hé Jī 何基 → 王柏 → 金履祥 → Xǔ Qiān), the Wùzhōu / Jīnhuá 婺州金華 transmission of late-Sòng / Yuán ZhūXī orthodoxy. Native of Jīnhuá. Zì Yìzhī 益之; hào Báiyún 白雲 — by which he is universally known in YuánMíng literature as Báiyún xiānsheng 白雲先生; posthumously canonized (Yuán) Wényì 文懿. Lifedates 1270–1337 are firm. Studied directly under 金履祥 (1232–1303) — joining him as a student in 1290 (when Xǔ was 21 and Jīn 59) — and continued the BěiShān lineage’s project of comprehensive ZhūXué scholarship, with particular attention to Shī, Shū, and Sìshū studies.
Career: he refused all official invitations and lived as a teacher; in Yánȳòu (1314+) he had become the most famous lecturer of his generation in southeastern China, with students, by the Yuánshǐ account, drawn from across the empire. Bio in Yuánshǐ 元史 Rúxué zhuàn 儒學傳; epitaph in Huáng Jìn’s 黃溍 Jīnhuá Huáng xiānsheng wénjí 金華黃先生文集.
Major works: (1) Dúshū cóng shuō 讀書叢說 (“Miscellaneous Discourses on Reading the Documents”), 6 juǎn — his Shàngshū commentary, in the Sìkù (KR1b0028); (2) Shī jí zhuàn míng wù chāo 詩集傳名物鈔 — a Shī glossary of names-and-things; (3) Sì shū cóng shuō 四書叢說 — Four-Books-class miscellaneous discourses; (4) Báiyún jí 白雲集 — collected works (all separately in the Sìkù). The Dúshū cóng shuō, Shī míngwù chāo, and Sì shū cóng shuō were all printed together in Zhìzhèng 6 / 1346, posthumously, on a single set of blocks (now lost).
Within the Shàngshū tradition, the Dúshū cóng shuō is one of the few Yuán Shū commentaries to maintain genuine independence from Cài Shěn’s Shū jízhuàn (KR1b0017) under the Yánȳòu-era examination orthodoxy. Substantively Xǔ Qiān draws extensively on his teacher Jīn Lǚxiáng’s Tōngjiàn qián biān 通鑑前編 / Gāngmù qián biān 綱目前編 for the chronological dating of Shàngshū chapters (his opening Shū jì nián 書紀年 chapter is essentially a digest of Jīn Lǚxiáng’s chronological apparatus); methodologically he privileges the philological investigation of names-and-institutions (míngwùdiǎnzhì 名物典制) over the doctrinal-spiritual register that had become characteristic of post-Cài-zhuàn Shū exegesis. The Sìkù compilers single him out for praise as preserving “xiānrú dǔshí zhī yí” 先儒篤實之遺 (“the earnest-and-substantive heritage of the earlier Confucians”) at a time when most contemporaries had drifted into “empty discourse” (xū tán 虛談).