Page:Eminent Chinese Of The Ch’ing Period - Hummel - 1943 - Vol. 2.pdf/370

 the editorial review (t'i-yao) which makes no mention of the previous labors of Tai Chên and assigns undue importance to the discovery of the text in the Yung-lo ta-tien. This "compromise" probably was much resented by Tai and his friends. In his own preface to his private edition or the Shui-ching chu, he said nothing about the Yung-lo text or about the Emperor's poem written in special eulogy of his Palace edition. And at least four of his friends— and K'ung Chi-han (see II, ) during his later years, and Hung Pang (see ) and after his death—took special pains to record that Tai entered the Office of the Inperial Library with his own Shui-ching chu aiready completed and partially cut on wood blocks, and that the text finally used was, in the words of Chu Yün, "his own text which he had collated throughout a lifetime" (其生平所校水經注本) and which had the benefit of a final checking against the Yung-lo text.

The Shui-ching chu of Tai Chên—especially the Palace edition with notes—was immediately accepted by such competent contemporary scholars as Chu Yün and as the best text then in existence. Almost unanimous praise was given to his sifting and separating of the confused passages of the ching from the chu. With masterly induction and synthesis, Tai laid down four principles which should serve as criteria in distinguishing the earlier Book from the Commentary.

Tai Chên died on July 1, 1777. The catalogue of the Imperial Manuscript Library was completed in 1781 (see I, ). Among its 3,450 titles selected for inclusion in the Library, there was another great work on the Shui-ching chu—namely, Chao I-ch'ing's Shui-ching chu shih, in 40 chüan, together with an appendix in 2 chüan and a supplementary Shui-ching chu chien k'an-wu ("Corrections of Errors in Chu Mou-wei's Edition"), in 12 chüan. The editorial review of this work. was written by a man evidently so ignorant of the three preceding centuries of scholarship on the Shui-ching chu as to be unaware that Chao's work had never been printed, and so praised it as the best of "the many printed texts in existence"! His review shows absolutely no knowledge or understanding of the great merits of a work to which the author had devoted more than thirty years of patient research and which was undoubtedly comparable to Tai Chên's two texts.

This review provides clear evidence that Chao's manuscript was never assigned to Tai Chên for examination and report. The manuscript copy was one of the 4,600 works "presented by the Province of Chekiang", and one of the 10,230 titles commented on and reviewed by the editors of the Ssŭ-k'u ch'üan-shu. It should have reached the office of the Imperial Library (in the Hanlin Academy) by the spring of 1774. Several years probably elapsed before this work by a relatively unknown author was sorted out and commented on: Since it is clear from a letter of Yü Min-chung of August 7 (first day of the seventh moon), 1774, that Tai Chên's Shua-ching chu was finished by the early summer months of that year, he could not have examined Chao's text before he had completed his own work. In April 1776 Tai became seriously ill and, from that time till his death, was unable to go to the office of the Library, having to work at home on the many mathematical and classical texts which he was editing for the Imperial collection. The fact that Chao's work was assigned to some non-expert editor for a perfunctory review indicates clearly that the reviewing was done either during Tai's absence from the office or after his death.