Page:Eminent Chinese Of The Ch’ing Period - Hummel - 1943 - Vol. 2.pdf/170

 For nearly fifty years she was his devoted companion, following every phase of his literary activity with understanding and intelligent interest, enduring without reproach all the vicissitudes of his lonely and difficult career. He wrote an account of her life which unfortunately is lost, though in 1928 there was discovered in Ta-ming an incomplete collection of her verse in manuscript, under the collective title 二餘集 Êr-yü chi, which yields important information about their joys and sorrows and her own high aspirations.

After the marriage, which probably took place in the autumn of 1764, Ts'ui Shu and his wife returned (1765) to Wei-hsien, where the family lived for a time on an elevation, known as Li Hsien Tai 禮賢臺, southeast of the city. The place had been allocated to the family against recurring floods by a magistrate of Ta-ming, named Ch'in Hsüeh-p'u 泰學溥. From then on both Ts'ui Shu and his brother supported the household by teaching in neighboring villages, though they were constantly harried, and their studies were repeatedly interrupted, by poverty, illness, and death in the family. In 1771 the father died, and it was three years before they could afford to inter his remains in a plot outside the south wall of the city. Only in 1780 were they able to bury the remains of a sister who had died ten years previously. In the sixth moon of that year (1780) Ts'ui Shu lost his only son aged four (sui), and in the tenth moon his mother died. On August 17 of the following year his only brother, Ts'ui Mai, also died leaving three sons to be cared for.

There are many references in Ts'ui Shu's collected works to Ts'ui Mai, particularly concerning his studies in the Classic of History, but no extensive specimens of his writings were known to exist until in 1934 four collections comprising seven chüan of his prose and verse were discovered at Ta-ming. These items, though comprising by no means all of his writings, are published in volume 7 of the definitive edition of the Ts'ui Tung-pi i-shu of 1936 (see below), under the collective title 崔德皋先生遺書 Ts'ui Tê-kao hsien-shêng i-shu. Ts'ui Mai had the same critical interest in history as his brother—the same concern to establish the truth or falsity of events or of the written documents of antiquity. Both were keenly interested in proving the spuriousness of the so-called "ancient text" of the Classics of History. Their conclusions on this point coincide with those of Mei Tsu (see under ) in the Ming period and of in the Ch'ing but, owing to the isolation under which they worked, neither of them saw the studies of Mei or Yen, though they did read the 古文尚書考 Ku-wên Shang-shu k'ao by  which referred to the work of Mei Tsu.

In one of his numerous autobiographical notations Ts'ui Shu declares that before he reached the age of twenty (sui) he began to doubt the authenticity of certain passages in the Analects. About the age of thirty (1769) he concluded that the historical and other documents of the Chin and Han periods were often at variance with the accounts in the Classics. Particularly did he believe this to be the case in matters relating to remote antiquity. The School of Han Learning (see under ) had been content to rest on texts of the Han period which "being close to antiquity" were regarded as most authentic; but Ts'ui Shu believed these texts to be already marred by many accretions and false interpretations, and therefore decided to begin with a detailed comparative study of the Classics themselves which he believed to be for the most part unassailable or at least of such authenticity that the truth of the sages could, by comparative study, be derived from them. He was the first to observe that the model emperor lore was built up in successive strata so that, the more remote a given event was, the more detailed became the information about that event. Thus Yao and Shun are unknown to the earliest classic, the Odes; Shên Nung appears first in the writings of Mencius; the Huang-ti lore first became prominent in the Chin period (255–206 B.C.); and P'an Ku, supposedly the most ancient figure of all, is mentioned first in the literature of Han (206 B.C.–25 A.D.). After long transmission these accretions were accepted as fact, thereby vitiating many histories, commentaries and philosophical writings that appeared after the time of the Warring Kingdoms (403–255 B.C.). Ts'ui resolved therefore to write a work "to rectify unwarranted accretions in spurious books and to expose the fallacies in popular theories".

The result was a collection of twelve treatises on ancient history bearing the collective title, 考信錄 Kao-hsin lu, in 36 chüan, the substance of them being given in a magnificent summary called K'ao-hsin lu t'i-yao (提要). He began the work in 1783 and completed it tentatively in the autumn of 1805, but kept on revising it in part until 1814, scarcely two years before his death. It represents a lifetime of the most 772