Zheng Xuan
The Xiao Erya (; "Little [Er]ya") was an early Chinese dictionary that supplements the "Erya". It was supposedly compiled in the early Han Dynasty by Kong Fu ( 264?-208 BCE), a descendant of Confucius. However, the received "Xiao Erya" text was included in a Confucianist collection of debates, the "Kongcongzi" (; "K'ung-ts'ung-tzu"; "The Kong Family Master's Anthology"), which contains fabrications that its first editor Wang Su (, 195-256 CE) added to win his arguments with Zheng Xuan (, 127-200CE). The Qing Dynasty scholar Hu Chenggong (, 1776–1832), who wrote the "Xiao Erya yizheng" ( "Exegesis and Proof for the "Xiao Erya""), accepted Kong Fu as the author. Liu concludes the "Xiao Erya" reliably dates from the Western Han Dynasty and suggests its compiler was from the southern state of Chu.