Zhèng Qiáo 鄭樵
Style name Yúzhòng 漁仲, sobriquet Master Jiājì 夾漈先生 (after Mt. Jiājì 夾漈山 above his Pútián 莆田 family residence in Fújiàn). Born 1104, died 1162. Sòng jīngshǐ (classics-and-history) polymath whose vocation lay outside the regular jìnshì track: he refused to take the metropolitan examinations on principle and lived as a scholar-recluse on Mt. Jiājì for over thirty years, supporting himself by teaching and by his family’s modest means. Sòngshǐ j. 436 gives him a substantial biography in the Rúlín liè zhuàn.
His vast project — eventually presented to court in 1149 — was the Tōngzhì 通志 (KR2d0006), a 200-juàn universal history modeled formally on SīMǎ Qiān’s Shǐjì and on Liú Zhījī’s Shǐtōng but ambitiously expanded to embrace the entire zhèngjīng corpus, the philological treatises, the bibliographical record, and the institutional history of the Chinese empire. He was finally received at court in 1149 and granted the post of Bìshūshěng zhèngzì 秘書省正字 (Corrector at the Secret Pavilion) — but only briefly, and the rest of his life was spent in editorial revision. The Tōngzhì was officially deposited in the imperial archives in 1162, the year of his death.
His specifically classical works include the Shī biàn wàng 詩辨妄 (a sharp critique of the Máo preface tradition, of which only fragments survive), the Liù jīng ào lùn 六經奧論 traditionally attributed to him in KR1g0011 (but which the Sìkù compilers convincingly demonstrate to be a Sòng-end pseudonymous compilation, not by him — see the tíyào there), and a number of smaller philological and bibliographical works embedded in the Tōngzhì monographs (Liù shū lüè 六書略, Qī yīn lüè 七音略, Yìwén lüè 藝文略, etc.).
He is in scholarly posterity as much an institutional historian and a philologist as a classicist; his Liù shū lüè is the founding statement of Sòng systematic xiǎo xué, and his Qī yīn lüè the first thoroughgoing Chinese phonological treatise to integrate Sanskrit-derived phonological method.