first section containing biographies, which are arranged chronologically under the dynasties, wherever they occur.
XI. 官常 is a list of the various grades of officialdom in the Empire, from the great feudatory princes (宗藩) down to the Governors, Magistrates, and official underlings. Its 800 chüan constitute the third longest section of the encyclopaedia, thanks chiefly to the vast number of biographies included. It winds up with three subheads of a more general description, containing the lives of loyal ministers, high-principled officials, and great statesmen. These alone fill close upon a hundred chüan.
XII. 家範 treats of the natural degrees of kinship and affinity, and ends with a subhead on Slaves, male and female. Mayers' rendering, ' Domestic Laws', and Klaproth's 'Instructions domestiques', both fail to convey an accurate idea of the contents of the section.
XIII. 交誼 is perhaps best translated 'Social Intercourse', comprising as it does the manifold relations between man and man, the ceremonies and routine of everyday life. Mayers' 'Private Relationships' is less appropriate to this than to the preceding section. A number of subheads appear here which might equally well have been included in section XV. Such, for example, are 'Praise and Slander', 'Calumny and Abuse', etc.
XIV. 氏族 is a list of nearly 4,000 different surnames, single, double, and polysyllabic, arranged according to their tones and rhyme-values, with biographies appended to over 2,500 of them.[1] The section, then, practically forms a huge dictionary of national biography.[2] In the Index these surnames are transliterated in roman type, and on account of the paucity of sounds (which may be illustrated by mentioning that no fewer than 33 different surnames are all pronounced Li) they are further distinguished by the four Pekingese tones placed at the right-hand top corner, the entering tone being denoted by an asterisk. For the sake of convenience a large number of uncommon surnames, with no biographies attached and grouped under comparatively few subheads, have been treated as separate entries.
XV. 人事 'Human Affairs' is a favourite category with the Chinese, occurring in almost all their lei-shu, but it cannot be rendered by any satisfactory English equivalent. Mayers has 'Mankind', but objection may be made to this on the ground that it suggests an unintended antithesis to the next section, 'Womankind'. It here includes parts of the body, the stage's of man's life, and the principal states, actions, and affections common to human beings. It is a comparatively short section with short subheads, none occupying more than six chüan.
XVI. 閨媛 'Beauties of the Inner Apartments' is a section devoted entirely to Woman, and may be considered as complementary to section XIV in that by far the larger part of it consists of biographies. These fall into a number of somewhat loosely determined groups, based on the possession of certain prominent qualities, either innate
- ↑ The number of common surnames is much smaller in China than in England, although the population is at least eight times as great. The consequence is that a far larger number of people in China bear the same surname. The six which appear to be the most widely distributed, with the number of chüan here allotted to each, are: 王 Wang (28); 張 Chang (20); 李 Li (18); 劉 (17); 陳 Ch'ên; (14); 朱 Chu(11).
- ↑ The biographies given under special headings, however, will be found much fuller as a rule than those under the surname. The life of 韓信 Han Hsin, for instance, takes up 34 pages under the heading 'Generals' (XI, 445), and only 3 pages in XIV, 159.
