# Eminent Chinese of the Ch'ing Period/A Note on Ch'üan Tsu-wang, Chao I-ch'ing and Tai Chên

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A NOTE ON CH'ÜAN TSU-WANG, CHAO I-CH'ING AND TAI CHÊN
A STUDY OF INDEPENDENT CONVERGENCE IN RESEARCH AS ILLUSTRATED IN THEIR WORKS ON THE SHUI-CHING CHU
By HU SHIH
IN MY Preface to this work, Eminent Chinese of the Ch'ing Period, I cited "the century-old controversy concerning the Shui-ching chi shih" as one of the examples of "fruitful utilization of contemporary Chinese scholarship" by the writers of these biographical essays. During the past year I have spent fully six months in a special investigation of this famous controversy which involves three great names of the eighteenth century: Chao I-ch'ing, Ch'üan Tsu-wang and Tai Chên [qq. v.]. As a result of this investigation, I am now in a position radically to revise the verdict which has been honestly accepted in these biographies as final. I am grateful to the editor of this series for his permission to let me write this note which endeavors to do full justice to all three of these great men.
This cause célèbre centers around three or four collated and emended texts of the Shui-ching chu, which is the Commentary (chu) by Li Tao-yüan (d. 527 A.D., see I, p. 76) on an earlier geographical work known as the Shui-ching, or Book of Waterways. This earlier work, of unknown authorship, probably completed before 265 A.D., consists of a brief account, comprising some 8,250 words, of 137 rivers in China. Li Tao-yüan was a scholar and official under the Northern Wei Dynasty who wrote, on the basis of his own studies and actual observations, a detailed commentary to the Shui-ching, thus expanding the whole work to about 345,000 words. The combined work contains such a wealth of geographical and historical information that it has remained a classic for fourteen centuries.
But the text of this voluminous work suffered much corruption in transmission through the centuries. It seems that even the so-called "complete text", printed in 1087, was in fact a corrupt and incomplete edition. It was incomplete because, although the printed edition laid claim to having forty chapters, it had in fact only thirty-five—the other five being missing. It had, in addition to numerous minor errors, one major textual corruption in that it often confused the text of the earlier Shui-ching with the Commentary (chu) of Li Tao-yüan—a defect which rendered correct interpretation virtually impossible, and one which was not detected or remedied until the eighteenth century.
Modern Chinese scholarship on the Shui-ching chu dates back to the sixteenth century and can be divided into three periods. The first period (1534–1615) saw the publication of three important editions of the Shui-ching chu: one by Huang Hsing-tsêng 黃省曾 (1490–1540) which appeared in 1534; another by Wu Kuan 吳琯 in 1585; and a third by Chu Mou-wei (see I, p. 76) in 1615. The last named edition, which incorporated many important textual collations and the notes of three conscientious scholars, has been the standard text for nearly two centuries and provides the foundation for future research in this field.
​The second period, covering roughly the second half of the seventeenth century, is noted for several great works on historical geography, produced by that galaxy of scholars which Hsü Ch'ien-hsüeh [q. v.], the retired Chinese political leader, brought together for the purpose of editing the Ta-Ch'ing i-t'ung chih (Comprehensive Geography of the Empire, see I, p. 311). These scholars included Yen Jo-chü, Ku Tsu-yü, Hu Wei [qq. v.] and Huang I (see I, p. 335)—all of whom made important contributions to the study of the Shui-ching chu. The last two, however, Huang I and Hu Wei, attempted a further improvement of the text by making use of contemporary geographical knowledge and by working out a series of maps illustrating the course of the rivers. The works of Huang I are only partially preserved in Hu Wei's Yü-kung chui-chih (see I, p. 335) which, with its forty-seven maps, became the most important key to the study of the main waterways in their historical vicissitudes.
The third period (1725–1794) may be described as the era of consummation in the critical study of the Shui-ching chu. Three men stood out pre-eminently in this period: Ch'üan Tsu-wang (1705–1755), Chao I-ch'ing (1711–1764) and Tai Chên (1724–1777). Building on the same cumulative achievements of their predecessors, and applying the same critical methods of research, these three scholars arrived at practically the same solutions of the numerous problems left over from the preceding period. The fact that their methods and results were so impressively similar gave rise, oddly enough, to a suspicion, lasting a century and a half, that one or the other of them had been guilty of plagiarism.
Tai Chên, the youngest of the trio, published at about the same time two editions of his Shui-ching chu. One, printed from movable type by the Palace Press, appeared in 1775; a private edition, printed from wood blocks, came out either in the same year or early in 1776. The Palace edition follows the traditional arrangement in forty chapters and has fairly detailed editorial notes. The private edition abolishes the chapter divisions, and rearranges the waterways according to their geographical proximity, but it contains only the text as emended and rearranged by Tai, without a single editorial note.
The Palace edition was based on the text which Tai Chên had prepared for the Imperial Manuscript Library (Ssŭ-k'u ch'üan-shu, see I, p. 121). In preparing this text, he had the rare privilege of using for collation a text contained in the great manuscript encyclopaedia, Yung-lo ta-tien (see I, p. 198), which was first transcribed in the year 1403–08 and re-copied in the sixteenth century. This was probably the only important text that was not known to his senior fellow-workers, Ch'üan and Chao.
Two recently published letters by Grand Secretary Yü Min-chung [q. v.] indicate that, after Tai had submitted his completed text in the summer of 1774, one of the associate directors of the Ssŭ-k'u ch'üan-shu raised some strong objections to it, thus making it necessary for a "compromise arrangement" to be made before it was finally accepted for transcription into the Imperial Library. Hasty conjectures (see II, p. 696) have been made as to the significance of this dispute. My own conjecture is that the objection was perhaps chiefly to Tai's frank opinion of the state of corruption of the Yung-lo text; to his desire to make known that it was his own life-long work which was being used; and that the "compromise arrangement" ordered by the Imperial directors most probably took the form which it now has in ​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—Chu Yün [q. v.] and K'ung Chi-han (see II, p. 637) during his later years, and Hung Pang (see p. 699) and Tuan Yü-ts'ai [q. v.] 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 Ch'ien Ta-hsin [q. v.] 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, p. 121). 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.
​Chao himself was probably to blame for the fact that the much overworked editors should fail to recognize the many important and original contributions in his book. For neither in his own preface, dated 1754, nor in another by his friend and fellow-worker, Ch'üan Tsu-wang, is there any statement or discussion of the main features of the book—in particular, no mention of its most original and most important contribution in sifting and separating the earlier Shui-ching from Li Tao-yüan's chu—a feat which both Ch'üan Tsu-wang and Chao I-ch'ing had achicved about the year 1751, and which Tai Chên accomplished independently in 1765. The only general guiding principle—Tai developed four—which Chao adopted in his important work of textual emendation is embodied in a thirty-word note on Hu Wei in the Appendix, and another fifteen-word note in chüan 6, page 28, of the Supplement. It is not strange, therefore, that a casual reviewer, unfamiliar with the vast literature on the subject, should fail completely to grasp the signal importance of Chao's great work. It was by sheer luck that it was included in the Ssŭ-k'u ch'üan-shu at all.
We now know that, though Chao I-ch'ing wrote his own preface in 1754, he continued to work on his manuscript for another ten years. It is now definitely established that he died in the spring, or early summer, of 1764. But the Shui-ching chu shih (chüan 24, pp. 25–26) contains his lengthy note giving a summary of a series of five essays which he wrote on his sick bed between March 36 and 31, 1764. This, and other internal evidence, proves beyond doubt that his manuscript was still not quite finished at the time of his death. Statements such as the one made by Wang Kuo-wei (see II, p. 856), that copies of Chao's and Ch'üan Tsu-wang's texts were accessible to Tai Chên, at the office of the Viceroy of Chihl in 1768, are unfounded conjectures.
It was not until about 1772 or 1773 that copies of the final manuscript of Chao's Shui-ching chu shih were made by his family. One copy was sent to Peking by the provincial authorities and was transcribed, as stated above, into the Imperial Manuscript Library. Another copy, slightly defective in transcriptien, was kept by the family, and it was from this copy that the first printed edition was made by his sons in 1786 under the patronage of the scholar-governor, Pi Yüan [q. v.]. This first printed edition is in general similar to the manuscript copy in the Ssŭ-k'u ch'üan-shu and contains not a few minor errors. Shortly after 1786 these errors were corrected on the wood blocks, a few additions and eliminations were made in the Appendices, and scores of new notes were added in the Supplement. A copy of this corrected edition is now in the Library of the University of Chicago. The Library of Congress possesses a copy, printed in 1794 from the same wood blocks but containing a few more corrections.
It is therefore correct to say that, in the years between 1786 and 1794, some learned hand was engaged by the Chao family to make these minor revisions—all in the name of the long deceased Chao I-ch'ing. But all the corrections that were made concerned minute details and were done with a view to making the book more perfect. In all major features, the printed editions of 1786–94 are practically the same as the copy in the Ssŭ-k'u ch'üan-shu, of which there is a complete though imperfect transcript in the Gest Chinese Library, Princeton, N. J.
In a short bibliographical note, Chao I-ch'ing acknowledged his indebtedness to his friend Ch'üan Tsu-wang. "Working during his illness," said Chao, "Mr. ​Ch'üan one day [about 1751] suddenly discovered that, in a number of chapters of the Shui-ching chu dealing with some of the major rivers, the text of the Shui-ching had often been mixed with that of Li Tao-yüan's Commentary [chu]. He took the trouble to send a letter across 3,000 li to Peking to inform me of his great discovery. When I first read it, I spent a whole night studying it, and his theory becarne quite clear to me. Ther. I took my text and made all the corrections in the light of this new discovery. This autumn [1754] Mr. Ch'üan came to stay in my garden [in Hangchow]. We showed each other, our corrections for mutual confirmation, and we found that we had reached exactly the same results. We raised our cups to each other and laughed heartily. He then wrote a preface to my book."
Ch'üan Tsu-wang died in August, 1755, less than a year after that memorable meeting. He had seven times collated the Shui-ching chu (see I, p. 205), and his seventh and final text was to contain all the important corrections resulting from his great discovery. But he had been dangerously ill during the years when he was working hard on it and so never had the time or energy to complete it. Some thirty short studies of the Shui-ching chu have been preserved in the two series of his collected short works. One of these has a footnote bearing a date only two months before his death. He seemed to have given up hope of finishing his great work and was now content simply to work over these short studies. His original manuscripts on the Shui-ching chu; which were described by a witness as "very difficult to edit", remained in the possession of a disciple named Chiang Hsüeh-yung (1725–c.1800, see I, p. 204) who apparently did nothing with them. It seems that these manú- scripts were lost not long after Chiang's death.
These are the essential facts concerning the history of the three works on the Shui-ching chu, namely, the two texts by Tai Chên and the one by Chao I-ch'ing. Ch'üan Tsu-wang never completed his work, and his manuscripts are reported to have been "very difficult to edit" about fifty years after his death. Tai Chên's private edition, which consists only of the emended text without a single annotation, has not been much used. All later controversy revolves around his Palace edition and Chao I-ch'ing's printed text.
The extraordinary similarity of Tai's end Chao's texts soon began to attract the attention of scholars. The above-mentioned Tuan Yü-ts'ai, a disciple of Tai and a great scholar in his own right, fired the first shot in 1809, when he wrote a long letter to Liang Yü-shêng [q. v.] in which he gave high praise to Chao I-ch'ing's Shu-ching chu shih, but pointed out that he could not understand why the ching and the chu, as separated by Chao, should correspond so closely to the work of Tai Chên. Nor could he understand why Chao I-ch'ing, who always took the utmost pains to explain each minor textual reconstruction, should have neglected entirely to state the grounds for the many important instances in which he had differentiated the later Commentary from the earlier Book. Tuan then calls attention to a remark by his old friend, Lu Wên-ch'ao [q. v.], to the effect that Liang Yü-shêng and his deceased brother, Liang Li-shêng (1748–1793, see I, p. 506), had helped to edit Chao's text for publication, and had used Tai Chên's text to improve upon it. "Probably," said Tuan, "you and your brother, though faithful to the Chao text in everything else, found it necessary to follow Tai in all cases where the earlier Book and the Commentary had to be differentiated in order to make the text intelligible."
​But Tuan, being an experienced research scholar in historical phonology and classical studies, did not rule out in this letter the possibility that both authors may have arrived independently at similar or even identical solutions. He merely urged Liang to inform him, and the public, of the truth of this matter.
Liang's reply has not come down to us. But five years later, in 1814, Tuan Yü-ts'ai, then seventy-nine years old, published a chronological biography, or nien-p'u, of Tai Chên in which he restates the case very fairly. He remarks first on the friendship that existed between Chao I-ch'ing and Ch'üan Tsu-wang; on their close co-operation and actual sharing of their findings about the Shui-ching chu; then states that their researches had, in numerous instances, resulted in solutions very similar to those reached independently by Tai Chên; and finally concludes that there was here a notable instance of two men of profound learning who, without knowledge of each other's investigations, nevertheless obtained almost identical results in the same field.
Toward the end of his statement, however, Tuan goes on to say, "Moreover, Mr. Chao's work was edited by Mr. Liang Li-shêng before it was printed. At some points where Chao's text was found to be incorrect, the Tai text was used to make the corrections. Therefore, the two texts rarely differ on essential matters."
My own belief is that these remarks were prompted by Liang Yü-shêng's reply which unfortunately was never published. The mention of Liang's deceased brother—and not the two of them—as having done the editing, seems to indicate that Tuan had been so informed by the surviving brother. Tuan Yü-ts'ai died in 1815, the year after his publication of the above-mentioned chronological biography. Liang Yü-shêng lived till 1819; if he had been dissatisfied with Tuan's statements, he had ample time to refute them during the five years after their publication.
We may therefore conclude that, after he had been correctly informed of the facts, as these were known to Liang Yü-shêng, Tuan was willing to abide by the twofold conclusion: that the similarity between the two texts of Chao and Tai was a case of independent investigators having reached the same results, and that Liang, Li-shêng, and not his brother, had used Tai's text in correcting some of Chao's errors.
After six months' study of this historic controversy, I have come to essentially the same conclusion. In justice to the work done by Chao I-ch'ing, I must repeat that the corrections made by Liang Li-shêng are all of a minor character for they had to be effected within the strict limits set by the format of the originial wood blocks. A careful comparison of the printed text of Chao's work with the manuscript copy of it in the Ssŭ-k'u ch'üan-shu establishes beyond doubt that no changes were made in the textual corrections that concern the separation of the original Book from the later Commentary—even in those few places where Tai and Chao radically differ.
The text of a letter which Ch'üan Tsu-wang wrote originally to Shih T'ing-shu 施廷樞 (1714–1758) in Hangchow, announcing to his two fellow-workers, Shih and Chao, his great discovery of the textual confusions, is now preserved in the First Series of Ch'üan's Chi-ch'i t'ing chi (chüan 34, item 11, see I, p. 204), first printed in 1804. In this letter Ch'üan merely remarked on his successful re-ordering of seven paragraphs in chüan seven of the Shui-ching chu. When a copy of it reached Chao in Peking, so inspired was he by Ch'üan's suggestion that though he was working on the same text 3,000 li away, he achieved results "exactly similar" to those of his friend.
​It is a remarkable fact that Tai Chên made the same discovery in the summer of 1764 when he was pondering over the same seven paragraphs in chüan seven which had led Ch'üan Tsu-wang to make his discovery some fourteen years earlier. Half a century before the labors of Ch'üan, Hu Wei had found these paragraphs perplexing, but had "solved" his difficulties by transposing two words in one paragraph and by proposing a new punctuation in another. This solution did not satisfy either Ch'üan or Tai; both solved the problem by recognizing that the first parargaph belonged properly to the earlier Book (ching) and that the next six paragraphs should be restored to the Commentary (chu). By extending this principle to the entire text, Ch'üan and Tai, quite independently of each other, and Chao working on the suggestion of Ch'üan, all succeeded in giving a new order to hundreds of confused paragraphs of the Shui-ching chu.
Tai wrote of this experience in a rather long colophon to his newly rearranged text, of the Shui-ching chu. This colophon by Tai, the above-mentioned letter by Ch'üan, and Chao's bibliographical note on Ch'üan, afford a very interesting instance of independent though convergent discovery in the intellectual history of China. The fact that all three scholars began their work from the same seven perplexing paragraphs and the same unsatisfactory interpretations by Hu Wei, exemplifies admirably the universal law which underlies all such phenomena of independent but converging discoveries and inventions. This law may be stated as follows: Given a common cultural foundation, similarly trained minds working on similar problems can often achieve, at approximately the same time, similar or even identical inventions or discoveries. The history of science and the records of the patent-offices of all countries are full of such examples of almost simultaneous, parallel inventions and discoveries. Miss Dorothy Thomas, in her article, "Are Inventions Inevitable?" (Political Science Quarterly, Vol. XXXVII, i), lists 148 inventions and discoveries made independently by two or more persons. (See also William Fielding Ogburn's Social Change, Part II, Chapter 5.)
Tuan Yü-ts'ai was entirely correct and fair in recognizing the work of Chao I-ch'ing and Tai Chên on the Shui-ching chu as an instance of independent convergence in scholarly research. Using the standard editions of the sixteenth century, building on the historical-geographical scholarship of the seventeenth, and puzzling over the same intellectual perplexities inherited from s preceding age, Ch'üan Tsu-wang, Chao I-ch'ing and Tai Chên, within the space of two decades (1751–1772), naturally and almost inevitably arrived at more or less similar conclusions on many hundreds of problems—problems which involved not only the separation of confused texts belonging to two works of different age and authorship, but also of other and minor forms of textual emendation, reconstruction and transposition.
A fragment illustrating Tai Chên's method of textual restoration and emendation—worked out by him in 1765, and copied by an unknown admirer into a 1753 printed edition of the Shui-ching chu—has come to light in the Chinese Library of Harvard University. It shows clearly what form Tai Chên's text had at the time he first discovered the criteria which eventually guided him in his disentanglement of the entire text. Moreover, it confirms, many statements in Tuan Yü-ts'ai's biography of Tai which relate to Tai's text of 1765.
​Such is the true story of the three famous scholars of the eighteenth century and their works on the Shui-ching chu. What follows is a different story, a tragic story of conscious deception and forgery, and of unconscious prejudice and uncritical judgment.
A quarter of a century after Tuan's death the controversy was revived, and this time it took a course diametrically opposite to the one which Tuan maintained in 1809. Critics now openly accused Tai Chên of having plagiarized the researches of Ch'üan Tsa-wang and Chao I-ch'ing; they suspected him of having seen and utilized the latter's manuscripts prior to their publication.
Two events contributed to the revival of the controversy. The first relates to the fact that in 1841 two scholars, Chang Mu and Wei Yüan [qq. v.], had an opportunity to inspect the manuscript copy of the Shui-ching chu as transcribed in the years 1403–08 in the Yung-lo ta-tien. Chang Mu asserted that he "copied all of its variations on a current text, including even those which are easily recognized as errors". He did nothing of the kind, for we know that he was not even aware that the Yung-lo text contained considerable passages—in one instance over 400 characters in length—which were missing from all printed editions. Wei Yüan made an equally untrue statement, namely, that "the text in the Yung-lo ta-tien is the same as the one used by Chu Mou-wei and others, except that it has preserved Li Tao-yüan's preface, which is missing from all others". On the basis of an apparently casual perusal of the Yung-lo text, both Chang Mu and Wei Yüan leaped to the conclusion that Tai Chên made no use of it, and that whatever he claimed to have taken from it was in fact purloined from the unpublished manuscripts of his senior contemporaries.
The second event was the sudden appearance in 1844 of a manuscript copy of the first ten chüan of the Shui-ching chu which was alleged to have been copied in turn from the original manuscripts of Ch'üan Tsu-wang. This text, prefaced by 5,000-word introduction and an annotated table of contents of the entire forty chapters, was made known to Chang Mu by a Ningpo scholar named Wang Tzŭ-ts'ai (1792–1851, see I, p. 354). Chang Mu immediately proclaimed its genuineness and welcomed it as important documentary evidence in his accusations against Tai Chên. In a long article, entitled "On the Injustice Done to Ch'üan Tsu-wang's Shui-ching chu", he propounded the theory that Ch'üan's text was the primary source of the efforts of both Chao and Tai. On the basis of the alleged copy of Ch'üan's work, particularly of the "Introduction", he concluded that Tai Chên must have pilfered everything from Ch'üan, including the principles which guided him in separating the intermingled passages of the ching from the chu. He related moreover a story—based entirely on hearsay—to the effect that the sons of Chao I-ch'ing had bought the original manuscript from Ch'üan and had engaged editors to incorporate it into their father's Shui-ching chiu shih.
The whole case was summed up by Wang Tzŭ-ts'ai in one sentence: "Tai pilfered it during his life time; Chao pilfered it after his death".
Encouraged by the credulity of Chang Mu, Wang Tzŭ-ts'ai produced, four years later (1848), an alleged text of Ch'üan's Shui-ching chu complete in 40 chüan. This text he took to Peking in order that Chang Mu might include it in the Lien-yün i ​ts'ung-shu (see I, p. 47). 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 Hsüeh Fu-ch'êng [q. v.], 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, p. 676), 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'"
​I have compared all existing texts of Chao I ch'ing's work, including the transcription in the Ssŭ-k'u ch'üan-shu, and find that all of them not only agree in the correct reading, "Nan-yang Lu-yang hsien", but also contain a note which clearly refutes both the old reading and that of the Yüan-ho chün-hsien chih. It is plain that Wang Tzŭ-ts'ai extracted this reading from Chao and Tai, attributed it to Ch'üan, and then told a deliberate falsehood about Chao having made a wrong reading—all done in order to prove the superiority of his own forged text. Forty years later Tung Pei told another deliberate faisehood about Chao's "original manuscript copy" in order to support the untruth first put into circulation by Wang and thera perpetuated by Chang Mu.
Such is the nature of this newly unearthed monumental evidence which was supposed to have settled, once and for all, the verdict that Tai Chên was guilty of plagiarism!
In 1924 Mr. Liang Ch'i-ch'ao (see II, p. 703) and I sponsored in China a bicentennial celebration of Tai Chên's birth, at which time a number of papers expounding Tai's philosophical ideas (see II, pp. 697–699) were published. This revival of interest in and appreciation of his philosophy seems, however, to have given impulse to a renewal of the attack on Tai by a number of well-known scholars. This time, a new weapon was found in the recovery in recent years of the original volumes of the Yung-lo da-tien (chüan 11,127–11,141) which contain the Shui-ching chu—books which it was supposed had been destroyed in the burning of the Hanlin Academy in 1900. The works were found to be in the custody of two private collectors, and when brought together made the complete text which was reproduced photolithographically in 1935 by the Commercial Press.
Mr. Wang Kuo-wei, after examining a part of this text, wrote in 1924 an article published in the following year (The Tsing Hua Journal, Vol. II, No. 1) in which he re-affirmed the charge against Tai Chên, rade nearly a century before by Wei Yüan and Chang Mu: namely, that Tai had in fact made no use of the Yung-lo text; that he had adopted instead the results of the researches of Chao and Ch'üan; that in order to avoid giving credit to his two eminent predecessors he had professed to have found in the Yung-lo text all that was really useful in their works. Another usually critical scholar, Professor Mêng Sên (see p. 77), published several articles in 1936–37 in which he makes a great display of temper, resorting indeed to acrimonious language in attacking Tai Chên, and offering numerous "proofs" to show that what Tai was supposed to have attributed to the Yung-lo text was actually not to be found there, and hence must have been purloined from Chao's manuscripts prior to their publication. Because of the high scholastic standing of both Wang and Mêng, their views have been generally accepted without much protest. As late as 1943 I also felt that these two esteemed friends of mine would scarcely have made such serious charges against one of the great minds of all ages without some solid basis in fact. Now, however, I am forced to the conclusion that both of them permitted some unconscious prejudice to influence and perhaps to blind their normally very critical judgment, and that their accusations against Tai Chên were based on a misunderstanding and a biased interpretation of what they took to be the facts. Their hasty acceptance of the forged Ch'üan Tsu-wang text is clear evidence ​that, in their eagerness to discredit Tai Chên, they unconsciously waived their normal technique in research, permitting themselves to be deceived by a text which, by a little more critical examination, they could easily have established as a clumsy and malicious forgery.
These gentlemen were equally uncritical in using the Yung-lo text as evidence against Tai. In the first place, it is quite untrue to say that Tai failed to make use of this text in the collation of his own manuscripts. I have compared both of Tai's texts with the Yung-lo copy, and have found that he collated it minutely, and made full use of its variations. One clear proof for this is that some of his most peculiar, and sometimes even erroneous, readings—which have been ridiculed by such modern critics as Yang Shou-ching (see I, p. 484) and Ts'ên Chung-mien 岑仲勉—are in fact attributable to his reliance on the Yung-lo text, sometimes even to a fault.
Wang Kuo-wei cited only one instance in support of his charge against Tai and that instance serves only to sh has he himself was prejudiced and very unfair. This instance has to do with a double page or folio in chüan 18 of the Shui-ching chu, which was missing from the editions printed prior to 1774 but was restored by both Chao and Tai. Chao copied it from a text that had been collated in the years 1667–68 by Sun Ch'ien 孫潛 who in turn obtained it from an early sixteenth century text. Tai copied it from the Yung-lo ta-tien, adding to it his own emendations. The Chao text has 418 words to a double page; the Yung-lo ta-tien text has 417; and Tai's text, as emended by him, has 437. Instead of commending Tai for his improvement of the text, Wang Kuo-wei made the following summary judgment: "The double-page restored by Tai corresponds, not to the Yung-lo ta-lien text, but to that of Ch'üan and Chao. This he could not have done without having seen the works of Ch'üan and Chao." Coming from a man noted for his critical researches, this assertion is most unjust because, in the folio under consideration, Tai's text clearly differs from the Chao text, not merely in the number of words, but in at least ten textual variations, in six of which he followed strictly the Yung-lo text, and in the other four of which he supplied his own emendations.
There can be no doubt that Tai made full use of all salient points in the Yung-lo ta-lien. For example, he made transpositions amounting to over 1,000 words in the section on the Ying River in chüan 22—all in accordance with this early Ming text. Chao I-ch'ing made independently almost exactly the same transposition the basis of the Sun Ch'ien text, which, having derived from an early sixteenth century text, was almost as trustworthy as the transcript in the Yung-lo ta-tien. We are thus provided with another instance of independent convergence resulting from the use of similar intellectual tools.
In the second place, it is quite untrue to assert, as these critics do, that Tai attributed all his textual improvements to the merits of the Yung-lo text. He made literally thousands of corrections in his book as a whole without citing any authority or source; he shoulders the full responsibility himself, merely noting in each case that "the current edition erroneously reads so and so". Though this is an entirely legitimate procedure in textual criticism, it has been pointed to by his critics as evidence of his wish to deceive. It was Chang Mu who first gave it this ​interpretation. "By asserting," said he, "that the current editions read so and so, Tai implies that the Yung-lo ta-tien text supplies in each case the correct reading." This weighted interpretation has been unquestioningly accepted by all of Tai's critics for a hundred years. When they discovered that the Yung-lo copy in many cases contained comparable errors, they forthwith concluded that Tai purloined his improvements from other sources, and then attributed all credit to the Yung-lo text in order to win the favor of his Imperial patron, one of whose purposes in creating the Ssŭ-k'u ch'üan-shu was the recovery of lost works from sources like the Yung-lo ta-tien.
But such an interpretation of Tai's editorial procedure is as unjustified as it is untrue. He did not imply that his corrections were based on the Yung-lo copy, for in fact this was only one of numerous texts and works of reference which he consulted in a lifetime of research in this field. A survey of his editorial notes shows that he refers by name to forty-two works of various types. But we know with certainty that there were many other works which he employed but did not regard it necessary to cite in support of his corrections. He rarely thought it worthwhile to state the grounds for reconstructions that could be confirmed by works of reference familiar to every investigator in the field; and for many other proposed readings there were neither older texts, nor works of reference, which would lend authority to them. At many points he found all available texts equally corrupt, and the necessary reference material often quite unreliable. In an unusually long footnote in chüan 25, he points out that, in making the necessary corrections, he found all existing texts—including the Yung-lo copy—equally faulty; and that the one indispensable source for comparison was a forty-word passage in the Han Dynastic History which itself contains eight errors! In a letter to Ts'ao Hsüeh-min 曹學閔 (1720–1788), written in 1770, he again points out that a single passage quoted by Ts'ao from the Yüan-ho chün-hsien chih—one of the indispensable reference works for the study of the Shui-ching chu—contains six grave errors of fact!
For these reasons, all successful students of the Shui-ching chu have been compelled to go beyond the available texts and works of reference. The most notable instance is furnished by chüan 19, in which both Tai and Chao made transpositions amounting to many thousand words, without the benefit of an authoritative source. And in all his separations of the commingled ching and chu, Chao I-ch'ing adopted precisely the same procedure as Tai, merely noting in each case that such and such a passage had been mistakenly placed in the ching or the chu. In all these cases Chao, as well as Tai, held himself responsible for the changes or corrections he made. No sinister motives or intentions can possibly be deduced from this method. For a long line of intelligent scholars to build up a case against Tai Chiên on some such alleged intention is as unfair as it is absurd—unfair because the person accused is long dead and cannot defend himself, and absurd because there is no evidence to support it. The charges made against Tai are hereby thrown out of court as unworthy of serious consideration.
These, then, are my conclusions: (1) That there is absolutely no evidence to show that Tai Chên saw or utilized the work of Chao I-ch'ing on the Shui-ching chu, before he had completed his own text for inclusion in the Imperial Manuscript Library. (2) That during the years 1786–94 the printed edition of Chao's work had the benefit of slight editorial improvements by Liang Li-shêng, but that no ​important alterations were made in the text which remains today substantially as it was when it also was transcribed into the Imperial Manuscript Library. (3) That the many real similarities which are observable in the works of Chao and Tai—both in their masterly separation of the long-confused texts of the earlier ching and the later chu, and in thousands of minor textual corrections—illustrate a natural phenomenon in the history of science, namely that investigators working on similar materials may often arrive independently at convergent or even identical conclusions. (4) That the manuscript notes of Ch'üan Tsu-wang—who reached independently many important solutions similar to those of Chao and Tai, but did not live to complete his work—are no longer extant; and that the so-called Ch'üan-shih ch'i-chiao shui-ching chu (see I, p. 205), printed in 1889, which purports to transmit his work, can easily be shown to be a stupid forgery. (5) That those scholars who charged Tai Chên with plagiarism—principally Chang Mu, Wei Yüan, Wang Kuo-wei and Mêng Sên—were unduly swayed by feelings of moral indignation against him, which rendered them more eager to press their charges than to search out the facts in the case, or even to establish the truth or validity of what they offered as evidence.
In a sense, the long history of the posthumous persecution of Tai Chên was foreshadowed more than a century and a half ago in his own writings. He explicitly warned us that when li (reason) is not viewed objectively as the internal structure and texture in things, but is subjectively regarded as inborn in man and available to a mind unclouded by selfish desires, there is always the danger of a self-right ous man condemning innocent persons to death in the name of li which unhappily is too often nothing more than his own unexamined opinion. "Sympathy," said Tai Chên, "is sometimes expressed for men who are murdered in the name of Law. But who will sympathize with those men who are murdered in the name of Li!" It was the destiny of the philosopher who uttered these prophetic words to be him self condemned to a moral death—almost without redress and without sympathy, for a hundred years—by a long line of righteous men who honestly believed that by stressing their private conceptions of li they were championing the cause of Justice (kung li).
New York City May 31, 1944