The 46 hardcover volumes, the original color pictures and the interpretation of the "Rare Qing Dynasty Ruler" (the first series), "Qingxi Old House Ruler" and "Tongyitang Ruler" were unveiled in the Shanghai Library on April 20, which is the result of the collation of the ancient books on both sides of the Straits that took eight years to complete.
The ruler is a letter of the ancients, and as a precious original document, it has always been valued by scholars. The Shanghai Library has a tradition of collecting celebrities, and since Gu Tinglong presided over the United Library in 1939, it has always attached great importance to the collection, collation and publication of manuscript literature. After more than half a century of continuous collection and donations from all parties, at present, the Shanghai Library has more than 120,000 ruler documents from the Ming and Qing dynasties to the early 20th century, which is the largest number of celebrity rulers in domestic public libraries.
"Qingxi Old House Ruler" and "Tongyitang Ruler" are one of the original collections of many rulers in Shanghai Library Chinese with a large number of offerings, involving many characters, high academic content, and difficulty in character recognition. This treasure trove of rare materials centered on the father and son of Liu Wenqi (1789-1854) and Liu Yusong (1818-1867), a scholar of the Qing Dynasty and a representative figure of the Yangzhou School, involves more than 460 people and 3,041 letters. Among them were a group of well-known scholars before and after Daoguang in the Qing Dynasty, such as Ruan Yuan, Wang Mengci, Liu Baonan, Liu Baoshu, Liu Gongmian, Bao Shichen, Wu Rangzhi, Mei Boyan, Zeng Guofan, Wei Yuan, Ding Yan, etc. The characters and lines recorded a large amount of information such as social life, literati exchanges, academic dynamics, and book engravings at that time, which had high historical value.
Chen Xianbin, a research librarian at the Shanghai Library, recalled that in 1980, Liu's descendants donated this batch of precious rulers to the Shanghai Library as a whole, and the above picture immediately organized manpower to repair and frame, sort out and catalog, laying the foundation for further research and collation in the future. In 2010, a delegation from the Taiwan Society for the Protection of Ancient Books visited the Shanghai Library, and the two sides determined the direction of sorting out the Qing Dynasty rulers, and finalized the interpretation of the "Qingxi Old House Ruler" and "Tongyitang Ruler".
Since 2011, the standard interpretation work has been officially launched. "Publishing 'Liu's Ruler' is quite a hard job. First of all, in addition to the background and academic achievements of Liu's father and son, it is necessary to understand the lives of those who communicated with Liu's father and son one by one. Secondly, the difficulty of interpretation as a whole lies in the ability to distinguish words, sometimes, a word error affects the correctness of the sentence reading or even the whole text; sometimes, the background of the communicator is not clear, that is, the meaning of the sentence is not known; sometimes, it is not known that the Qing Dynasty is easy to use variant characters and vulgar character habits, and it is easy to trivially interpret; sometimes, not knowing the terminology used in the world, often suffers from the suffering of a word and cannot be solved. In addition, there are also problems of the original author deleting words and deleting sentences, adding words and adding sentences. Of course, the main difficulty of the whole book lies in the recognition of cursive characters, such as the most common cursive script. Lin Dengyu, president of the Taiwan Society for the Protection of Ancient Books, said that the publication of "Liu's Ruler" is the result of the joint efforts of more than 30 experts on both sides of the strait who participated in the interpretation, proofreading, and review of the manuscript. ”
"The protection of ancient Chinese books has a long way to go. The first release of the new books "Qingxi Old House Ruler" and "Tongyitang Ruler" not only witness the achievements of literature publishing cooperation in the ancient book circles on both sides of the strait, but also reflect the recognition of Chinese culture by scholars on both sides of the strait, which has important academic value and social significance. Chen Chao, director of the Shanghai Library, said that the Shanghai Library will continue to carry out the regenerative protection of ancient books in depth, continuously sort out and publish the library collection of ruler literature, and provide texts that can be used and appreciated by academics and calligraphy art lovers.
Column Editor-in-Chief: Shi Chenlu Text Editor: Shi Chenlu
Source: Author: Shi Chenlu