History of Song
Because the "History of Song" was prepared in a hurry and was the work of many editors, it contains a number of unavoidable errors and contradictions; for example, an individual with two biographical entries is Li Xijing (), who appears in chapter 116 of the historical biographies section then again in chapter 222. The work also covers the Northern and Early Southern Song Dynasties in detail with only an outline of the later Southern Song dynasty. There are more biographies of individuals from the Northern Song period, for example the "Wenyuan Zhuan" () covers a total of 96 people of which only 11 are from the Southern Song era. The "History of Song" is also considered the most disordered of the 24 Dynastic Histories. Zhao Yi comments: "When the Yuan dynasty wrote the history of the overthrown Song they probably just arranged preexisting Song texts." The Qing dynasty "Siku Quanshu" () collection of books says that the "main purpose of the "History of Song" is as a tribute to the Song emperors and their Confucianism. Attention is not paid to other matters so there are a great number of errors". In 1977, Zhonghua Publishing issued a new version of the "History of Song" with corrections to the punctuation.