Luo Zhenyu was the first scholar in the history of Oracle Osteology to study Oracle in China (I)

Luo Zhenyu

Everyone in Lushun knows that there was once the largest private library in the northeast region, the "Dayun Library", and also knows that the owner of the library, Luo Zhenyu, is a universityman, so what work he has done in the research and dissemination of traditional Chinese culture, we will introduce it in a few short articles.

Luo Zhenyu's contributions to the collection, collation, publication, and research of oracle bones are universally recognized, but most oracle bone historians believe that the opinions of oracle bone historians on when he began to conduct oracle bone research are mostly after the publication of his book "Yin Shang Zhenbu Character Examination" in 1910. The History of Chinese Oracle Bone Science by Mr. Wu Haokun and Mr. Pan You, when introducing the early oracle bone research, said: "The initial stage of oracle bone research included nearly thirty years from 1899 to 1927. Among them, the researchers of the previous decade were only Sun Yi rang alone. The reason for calling Sun Yirang the only researcher in the first ten years of oracle bone research was that Mr. Sun wrote the "Qiwen Example" that explained the oracle bone script based on the oracle bone information provided in Liu Hu's 1903 compilation of "Iron Cloud Hidden Turtle". The book was written in 1904, but was not published during the first decade of the Oracle study, but was published by Luo Zhenyu in manuscript 13 years later in 1917. Luo Zhenyu once talked about his impression of the book in the preface to the 1910 edition of the Yin Shang Zhenbu Script Examination: "The deceased friend Sun Zhongrong zhengjun Zhen rang, and also studied its writing, and sent it as a manuscript, but unfortunately failed to analyze the mysteries. Judging from Luo Zhenyu's tone, he was a little disappointed in the book. We speculate that if Luo Zhenyu himself had not conducted a preliminary study of the newly discovered oracle bone, or had not had any experience, I am afraid that he would not have blindly denied this achievement. But what exactly he learned at that time, people do not know. It is therefore understandable to exclude him from the first decade of the Oracle study. In recent years, when the Lushun Museum was sorting out the manuscripts of Luo Zhenyu in the collection, it found several notes on the study of oracle bones written by Luo Zhenyu in 1901, and after careful analysis, it was initially determined that this was one of the earliest "experiences" of Luo Zhenyu's oracle bone research.