Introduction. i i 



appropriately chosen for such a purpose, and the two characters were 

 modeled after the curious style of that doubtless ancient inscription 

 which a later age has associated without foundation with the name of 

 Yii. It goes without saying that at the time of Yii, if such a per- 

 sonage ever existed, jade tablets of this type had not yet made their 

 debut, for these were purely a creation of the official hierarchy of the 

 Chou dynasty. Thus, it is likewise a legendary anachronism, if the 

 Shu king (Ch. Shun tien, 7) and Se-ma Ts'ien (Chavannes, Vol. I, 

 p. 61) ascribe the five insignia of rank (wu jui) to the mythical emperor 

 Shun, as these are connected with the five feudal princes and the whole 

 system of feudalism and investiture of the Chou period; and Cha- 

 vannes is certainly right in saying that this consideration demonstrates 

 the legendary character of the accounts relative to Shun. There is, 

 further, no ancient text describing a jade tablet of the type here referred 

 to, and if it were by any means an object really going back to times 

 of great antiquity, it would be incredible that the T'ang people should 

 have been so idiotic as to fling such a precious relic down to the bottom 

 of a river. The entire story of the Sung authors, gifted with a lively 

 imagination, is open to grave doubt and suspicion, and may, after all, 

 be a concoction made up by them ad hoc. It does not betray much 

 critical acumen on their part to make these two pieces contemporaneous 

 with Yu. 1 



Our confidence in this production is not increased by considering 

 the two following jade tablets also very generously attributed to the 

 Emperor Yii. The former of these is adorned with ten unexplained 

 and unexplainable characters shaped into strange figures of* insects, 

 fish, and birds; on the back, there is an inscription (in li shu) calling 

 this specimen "a tablet with seal-characters of Yii" {Yii chuan kuei) 

 and giving the period Sheng yiian (937-942 a. d.) of the Nan T'ang 

 (reign of Li King). Nevertheless, we are assured that the writing of 

 Yu cannot be doubted. The latter Yu tablet is provided with ten seal 

 characters, and the same inscription on the reverse as the preceding 

 one. Then we advance to a tablet with twenty-one characters of a 

 different style, said to resemble those on the bells of the Shang dynasty, 

 while the reverse is adorned with the sentence: "Jade tablet of pros- 

 perity of the rulers of the Shang." Three more Shang tablets follow, 

 marked on the reverse as "preserved in the treasury of the period T'ai 

 ts'ing of the Liang dynasty" (Wu ti, 547-550 a. d.). These alleged Shang 

 tablets are just as fictitious as those of Yu ; tablets of this kind did not 

 exist under the Shang, and if they had existed, would not have been 



1 One of these is figured in Conrady's China (Pflugk-Harttung's Weltgeschichte, 

 p. 528). 



