124 RECENT BOOKS BY A CHINESE SCHOLAR 



and economics. Inseparably mixed with these philosophic 

 discussions was a medley of linguistic corroboration in which 

 attempts were made to bolster up philosophic opinions by 

 clever etymological distinctions. Out of the weary mass of 

 such inane literary production, there arose the poets of the 

 Tang Dynasty such as Li Po and his successors. There were 

 also brilliant essayists who did their part in creating an 

 elegant style of writing. But as a whole, the body of litera- 

 ture of China down to the end of the 17th and the beginning 

 of the 18th centuries is largely composed of unfruitful argu- 

 mentations. 



All the greater credit, therefore, should be given to the 

 more solid type of scholarship which was introduced by the 

 Emperor Wu Ti of the Liang Dynasty in his preparation of 

 one-hundred twenty volumes recording for the first time the 

 inscriptions on ancient stone monuments. This was unfor- 

 tunately lost. In the Sung Dynasty, Ou-yang Hsiu compiled 

 a treatise on early inscriptions called Tsih Ku Lu. 10 During 

 the same dynasty, Nieh Ts'ung-yi 11 prepared the San Li T'u 

 and Wang Fu 12 edited the Hstian Ho po ku t'u. These two 

 works were prepared from drawings and rubbings which were 

 in the Imperial collection and must have been very valuable 

 at the time of production, although later editions of these 

 books have probably failed to retain the accuracy of the 

 originals. Another important book of the Sung Dynasty was 

 that of Hsieh Shan-kung 13 entitled "Li tai chung ting k'uan 

 chih" in twenty volumes. Hsieh was a careful scholar and 

 a keen antiquarian. His work has formed the basis of all 

 later investigators. He described the shapes of early bronzes 

 and reproduced their inscriptions concerning which he added 

 valuable dissertations. In some of these there is an admix- 

 ture of pure linguistic discussions, but these do not mar the 

 great value of the other features of his work. No great 

 scholars or writers on antiquarian subjects were produced 

 during the Yuan and Ming Dynasties. 



It remained for the scholars of the Kang Hsi — Chi en 

 Lung periods to give a new bent to scholastic attainments 

 under the leadership of these two scholarly emperors. The 

 great dictionary of Kang Hsi united all the scholarship of the 

 preceding periods and gave it a new interpretation. Com- 

 pilation of the P'ei Wen Encyclopaedia had also a new 

 stimulating influence. The compilation of three volumes 

 concerning the Imperial collection of bronzes tended to 

 place scholarship upon the sound basis of recognizing existing 

 monuments rather than literary records as authoritative 



