Page:Eminent Chinese Of The Ch’ing Period - Hummel - 1943 - Vol. 2.pdf/169

 (see below), brought together parts of this collection, but this too is lost, except for one delightful essay, 備廬說 Pei-lu shuo ("My Well-stocked Hovel"), which Ts'ui Shu had copied in his youth and later incorporated in his own collected works. A poem by Ts'ui Chi-lin also appears in the anthology of Chihli poets, 畿輔詩傳 Chi-fu shih chuan, compiled by T'ao Liang (see under ) and printed in 1839.

The second son of Ts'ui Chi-lin, named Ts'ui Lien 崔濂, was the grandfather of Ts'ui Shu and a military hsiu-ts'ai. The eldest son of Ts'ui Lien, named Ts'ui Yüan-sên 崔元森, was Ts'ui Shu's father. He became (1745) the adopted son of his uncle, Ts'ui Han 崔瀚, who died in 1744. At the age of seventeen (sui) Ts'ui Yüan-sên received instruction in composition from the classical scholar, Chao Kuo-lin (see under ). About the year 1724 he married a daughter of Li Chiu-ching 李九經 a local scholar whose ancestors had come from Hsiang-yüan, Shansi. One of these ancestors, named Li Yang-chêng 李養正, rose to be president of the Ministry of Justice. Ts'ui Shu's mother, née Li (her personal name is not known), was born in 1706 and died in 1780. She was a woman of great force of character and also of some education, for she gave her sons their first instruction in the Great Learning and in the Doctrine of the Mean. Ts'ui Shu's father, Ts'ui Yüan-sên, was likewise imbued with scholarly ambitions which, owing to extreme poverty, he could not fulfill. During the years 1726–36 he competed five times in vain for the chü-jên degree and finally resigned himself to the life of a village schoolmaster and to giving his sons a rigorous training in the classics. He was an ardent admirer of the practical aspects of Chu Hsi's philosophy and that of, and opposed the intuitional approach of Wang Yang-ming (see under ). With considerable critical foresight, he insisted that his sons should acquaint themselves with the unannotated texts of the classics before taking up the commentaries of others—a method that Ts'ui Shu highly commended in his later years. When Ts'ui Yüan-sên died his epitaph was composed by Wang Shih-han 汪師韓, a noted director of-several Academies in North China. Ts'ui Yüan-sên had three sons and four daughters. The eldest son died at the age of eleven, the second was Ts'ui Shu, and the third was Ts'ui Mai 崔邁 who showed intellectual promise equal to that of Ts'ui Shu but died an untimely and much lamented death at the age of thirty-nine (sui).

When Ts'ui Shu was fifteen sui (1754) he and his brother, Ts'ui Mai, went to Ta-ming to take the preliminary examinations. The prefect of Ta-ming, Chu Ying 朱煐, a native of Shih-p'ing, Yunnan, and a chin-shih of 1724, was so impressed by the talents of the two youths that he arranged for them to be instructed along with his own son, in a studio, Wan Hsiang T'ang 晚香堂, in the courtyard of his yamen. This studio had been erected about 1570 and was still standing though in a dilapidated condition, when Ku Chieh-kang 顧頡剛 (b. 1893), William Hung 洪業 and others visited the site in 1931. In that studio the two brothers pursued their studies under congenial circumstances for eight years (1755–62). In the autumn of 1762 both received the chü-jên degree. The following spring they went to Peking to compete for the chin-shih degree. They were unsuccessful, but Ts'ui Shu at this time made the acquaintance of, as we know from a consolatory poem which the latter dedicated to Ts'ui. Previously, however, the River Chang had overflowed its banks (1757) with the result that the ancestral home was ruined, and the family was left in abject poverty. In the tenth moon of that year the family moved its abode four times; and when, in the seventh moon of 1761, the city was again inundated, three more removals became necessary. More than once, when the sons set out to visit their parents, they rowed over a great expanse of water, and once at least crossed the top of the walled city of Wei-hsien by boat.

According to verses which Ts'ui Shu has left us, it seems reasonably certain that in the spring of 1764 he went to Shensi to marry Ch'êng Ching-lan 成靜蘭, a daughter of Ch'êng Huai-tsu 成懷祖 , a native of Wei-hsien who served as a second-class assistant department magistrate in Pin-chou, Shensi, in the years 1750-66. The Ch'êng family came originally from Hung-tung, Shansi, moved to Chihli in the Yung-lo reign-period (1403–25) and became one of the leading families of Ta-ming. (For ancestors of note in this family see under ). Ch'êng Ching-lan was born in the same year as Ts'ui Shu and died two years before her husband. 771