page_title: Jijiupian
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Jijiupian / History
caption_attribution_description: English: Title page of Jijiupianfuzhu 急就篇補注
context_page_description: The Jijiupian 急就篇, which was compiled by Han dynasty scholar Shi You 史游, was a Chinese primer and a prototype for Chinese dictionaries. This Chinese character abecedarium
  contains a series of orthographic word lists, categorized according to character radical, and briefly explained in rhymed lines. In the Qin and Han dynasties, several similar othographic primers were in circulation, such as Cangjiepian, but the Jijiupian is the only one that survived for two millennia.
context_section_description: The first reference to the Jijiupian and Shi You 史游 is found in the Yiwenzhi "Treatise on Literature" bibliographical section of the (111 CE) Hanshu "Book of Han", listed among early dictionaries: "In the time of Emperor Yuan of Han (r. 48-33 BCE), the court scholar Shi You composed the Jijiupian" (元帝时黄门令史游作急就篇). This section also uses the Jijiu title; Jijiu yipian 急就一篇 "The Jijiu, in one chapter" (tr. Needham, Lu, and Huang 1986: 194).
  In the Western Han dynasty (206 BCE-25 CE), the teaching of characters was emphasized, and scholars compiled other character primers and wordbooks besides the Jijiupian, for instance, the Fanjiangpian 凡將篇 The General Primer by Sima Xiangru (c. 179 – 117 BCE) and 32-7 BCE Yuanshangpian 元尚篇 The Yuanshang Primer by Li Zhang 李長, both of which are lost works (Creamer 1992: 112). These proto-dictionaries facilitated the development of Chinese xiǎoxué 小學 "minor learning; pre-modern 'linguistics'; philology" (which now means "primary school"), and laid the academic foundation for the compilation of wordbooks, vocabularies, and dictionaries (tr. Yong and Peng 2008: 25). The Han dynasty experienced the transition of Chinese lexicography from wordlists and glossaries to character dictionaries and word dictionaries. The Jijiupian generalized the practice of logically classifying characters into different sections, which inspired the "macro-level stylistic format of the Chinese dictionary" (Yong and Peng 2008: 144).
  From the Han to the Six Dynasties (220-589), the most popular character textbook was the Jijiupian (Wilkinson 2000: 49). During the Northern and Southern dynasties (420-589), several other popular textbooks appeared, such as the Qianziwen "Thousand Characters Text", Baijiaxing "Myriad Family Surnames", and Sanzijing "Three-character Classic" (Yong and Peng 2008: 57). By the Tang, the Jijiupian had been replaced by the Qianziwen and Baijiaxing, both of which were deliberately written so that few characters they contain occur more than once. They were memorized generation after generation for over 1,000 years. In the Yuan dynasty (1271-1368) and Qing dynasty (1644-1912), the most popular primer was the Sanzijing (Wilkinson 2000: 49). Contemporary Chinese scholarship admires the Jijiupian because of its high factual content as contrasted with the much more moralistic tendencies of similar later works such as the Sanzijing (Needham, Lu, and Huang 1986: 195).
  The Jijiupian was one of several similar wordbooks that circulated widely during the Qin and Han periods, but it alone survived to the present day, owing to several factors. One reason for its preservation was a model version written by the famous Jin dynasty Chinese calligrapher Wang Xizhi (303–361), which was copied by generation after generation of literati eager to perfect their calligraphy (Needham, Lu, and Huang 1986: 195). The Yuan dynasty calligrapher Zhao Mengfu (1254–1322) also produced an orthographic model Jijiupian. Another factor was the textual explanations written by famous authors in later dynasties. The Tang scholar Yan Shigu wrote a (620) commentary, and the Song scholar Wang Yinglin 王應麟 wrote the (1280) Xingshi Jijiupian 姓氏急就篇 (Needham, Lu, and Huang 1986: 195).
  Modern archeological excavations have found fragments of the Jijiupian, and even some tablets on which the inscriptions were evidently exercises in copying characters (Loewe 1967 2: 418; Needham, Lu, and Huang 1986: 197).
caption: 1875 edition Jijiupianfuzhu 急就篇補注 with the Yan Shigu and Wang Yilin commentaries, Keio University Library
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