Page:Eminent Chinese Of The Ch’ing Period - Hummel - 1943 - Vol. 2.pdf/376

 ts'ung-shu (see I, ). After scores of pages had been engraved on wood blocks, the project, for reasons unknown, was abandoned.

This (alleged) text of Ch'üan Tsu-wang's Shui-ching chu was not published until forty years later, early in 1889, it was printed under the patronage of, after it had undergone a slight re-editing by another Ningpo scholar named Tung P'ei 董沛 (1828–1895). This edition of 1889 was so highly valued as documentary evidence against Tai Chên that the afore-mentioned Wang Kuo-wei, one of the most critical scholars of our own time, declared in 1924: "Since the publication by Hsüeh Fu-ch'êng of Ch'üan's text, in Ningpo, the charge that Tai was guilty of plagiarism is now practically a settled verdict."

After making a detailed study of this alleged Ch'üan text, I have written a 40,000-word account in Chinese which proves conclusively that the entire work, including its seemingly learned Introduction, was a deliberate bat clumsy forgery put together by Wang Tzŭ-ts'ai in the years 1837–1848, and slightly doctored by Tung P'ei in 1888. I have shown beyond doubt that neither of these men had access to any of the numerous "manuscripts" which they claimed to have unearthed. Wang Tzŭ-ts'ai merely combined Chao's text with the two by Tai Chên, and extracted all of Ch'üan Tsu-wang's comments as preserved in Chao's own work. When he found that he had not enough of these genuine comments to make a book, he borrowed annotations from Tai and Chao and attributed them to Ch'üan.

Fortunately Wang and Tung were by no means expert students of the Shui-ching chu, and the forgery they perpetrated was made in great haste. Twice Wang admitted that his copy of the entire text in 40 chüan was completed in less than 75 days (from February 20 to May 2, 1848). It was therefore easy for me to show, in the article mentioned above, that he did not even take the trouble to study his sources with care or to pilfer accurately from them; and that even the genuine comments of Ch'üan were clumsily distorted or inaccurately transcribed. The so-called Ch'üan text is full of stupid blunders, many of which are so self-evident that one cannot help but wonder how they escaped detection for as long as a hundred years.

One item of evidence will suffice to show how malicious was the intent of the forgers to fabricate false evidence in order to prove their case against Chao I-ch'ing and Tai Chên. In chüan 9, page 19, of the forged book, there is an alleged "note by Ch'üan Tsu-wang" which asserts that old texts give a place-name as "Nan- yang hsien" 南陽縣), a reading that is patently wrong, since Nan-yang was the name of a much larger area known as a chün, and not the name of a hsien; and that Chao I-ch'ing's text, following the Yüan-ho chün-hsien chih (see II, ), reads "Nan-yang Lu-hsien" (南陽魯縣), which is likewise wrong. Then comes the assertion, "I have studied the case and found it ought to read 'Nan-yang Lu-yang hsien' 魯陽縣)". Chang Mu triumphantly cites this instance as concrete proof that the reading, "Nan-yang Lu-yang hsien," in both the Chao and Tai texts must have been taken" from the Ch'üan version. Forty years later Tung P'ei added an editorial note to the fabricated Wang Tzŭ-ts'ai text, saying: "The printed texts of both Chao and Tai have adopted Ch'üan's reading; but I have investigated the original manuscript of Chao's text, and have found that it actually reads 'Nan-yang Lu hsien'"