A NOTE ON CH'ÜAN TSU-WANG, CHAO I-CH'ING AND TAI CHÊN
A STUDY OF INDEPENDENT CONVERGENCE IN RESEARCH AS ILLUSTRATED IN THEIR WORKS ON THE SHUI-CHING CHU
By HU SHIH
IN MY Preface to this work, Eminent Chinese of the Ch'ing Period, I cited "the century-old controversy concerning the Shui-ching chi shih" as one of the examples of "fruitful utilization of contemporary Chinese scholarship" by the writers of these biographical essays. During the past year I have spent fully six months in a special investigation of this famous controversy which involves three great names of the eighteenth century: Chao I-ch'ing, Ch'üan Tsu-wang and Tai Chên [qq. v.]. As a result of this investigation, I am now in a position radically to revise the verdict which has been honestly accepted in these biographies as final. I am grateful to the editor of this series for his permission to let me write this note which endeavors to do full justice to all three of these great men.
This cause célèbre centers around three or four collated and emended texts of the Shui-ching chu, which is the Commentary (chu) by Li Tao-yüan (d. 527 A.D., see I, p. 76) on an earlier geographical work known as the Shui-ching, or Book of Waterways. This earlier work, of unknown authorship, probably completed before 265 A.D., consists of a brief account, comprising some 8,250 words, of 137 rivers in China. Li Tao-yüan was a scholar and official under the Northern Wei Dynasty who wrote, on the basis of his own studies and actual observations, a detailed commentary to the Shui-ching, thus expanding the whole work to about 345,000 words. The combined work contains such a wealth of geographical and historical information that it has remained a classic for fourteen centuries.
But the text of this voluminous work suffered much corruption in transmission through the centuries. It seems that even the so-called "complete text", printed in 1087, was in fact a corrupt and incomplete edition. It was incomplete because, although the printed edition laid claim to having forty chapters, it had in fact only thirty-five—the other five being missing. It had, in addition to numerous minor errors, one major textual corruption in that it often confused the text of the earlier Shui-ching with the Commentary (chu) of Li Tao-yüan—a defect which rendered correct interpretation virtually impossible, and one which was not detected or remedied until the eighteenth century.
Modern Chinese scholarship on the Shui-ching chu dates back to the sixteenth century and can be divided into three periods. The first period (1534–1615) saw the publication of three important editions of the Shui-ching chu: one by Huang Hsing-tsêng 黃省曾 (1490–1540) which appeared in 1534; another by Wu Kuan 吳琯 in 1585; and a third by Chu Mou-wei (see I, p. 76) in 1615. The last named edition, which incorporated many important textual collations and the notes of three conscientious scholars, has been the standard text for nearly two centuries and provides the foundation for future research in this field.
970
