Xuxue congshu 許學叢書

Xuxue congshu 許學叢書 "Collectanea of Studies on Xu Shen" is a series of collectanea (congshu ) specialized on studies to Xu Shen's 許慎 (c. 58-c. 147) character dictionary Shuowen jiezi 說文解字 from the Later Han period 後漢 (25-220 CE). The series includes 14 texts in three collections (ji 集) with a total length of 56 juan, and an appendix of 4 juan. It was compiled by the Qing-period 清 (1644-1911) scholar Zhang Bingxiang 張炳翔, who hailed from Changzhou 長洲 (modern Wuxian 吳縣, Jiangsu). The collection was printed in Zhang's Yixu Studio 儀許廬 in a pocket edition in 1887.

Studies on the Shuowen jiezi flourished during the Qing period, as a result of a new approach to the exegesis of the Confucian Classics with the help of philological methods (see Qian-Jia School 乾嘉學派). Yet a specialized school on "Shuowen studies" or "Xu (Shen) studies" (Xuxue 許學) never came into being. A solitary study of the ancient dictionary had been produced by the brothers Xu Xuan 徐弦 and Xu Kai 徐鍇 during the tenth century. The early Qing-period scholar Hui Dong 惠棟 (1697-1758) was the first who recognized the value of the Shuowen for philological studies of the Classics, and he was followed by numerous researchers, like Xu Shichang 席世昌 (Du Shuowen ji 讀說文記), Duan Yucai 段玉裁 (1735-1815, Shuowen jiezi zhu 說文解字注), Wang Yun 王筠 (1784-1854, Shuowen judu 說文句讀) or Gui Fu 桂馥 (1736-1805, Shuowen yizheng 說文義證).

The most important of these studies is the book by Duan Yucai. Yet his book includes a lot of omissions and in some points even contradicts the transmitted text of the Shuowen jiezi. In the late 19th century, when the oracle bone inscriptions of Anyang 安陽, Hebei, the location of the last capital of the Shang dynasty 商 (17th-11th cent. BCE), were discovered, a new wave of Shuowen studies rose that used the chance of these findings to critically check Xu Shen's interpretations of Chinese characters. The most important representatives of these late scholars are Sun Yirang 孫詒讓 (1848-1908) and Wu Dacheng 吳大澂 (1835-1902).

The Xuxue congshu is thus a quite modern collection that also includes archaeological findings like a Shuowen fragment of 188 characters (not entries!) from the Tang period 唐 (618-907) discovered in Dunhuang 敦煌 that was investigated by Mo Youzhi 莫友芝 (1811-1871).

The texts Shuowen yiyi 說文疑疑 by Kong Guangju 孔廣居 (1732-1812) and Zhuanzhu guwen kao 轉注古義考 by Cao Renhu 曹仁虎 (1731-1787) focus on the problem of characters of the zhuanzhu 轉注 type (see Chinese characters). Niu Shuyu's 鈕樹玉 (1760-1827) text Duanshi Shuowen zhuding 段氏說文注訂 is dedicated to the correction of errors made in Duan Yucai's important study. Song Bao 宋保 tries in his book Xuesheng buyi 諧聲補逸 to add characters of the xiesheng 諧聲 type that are missing in the received version of the Shuowen and seem to have been cut out by the brothers Xu. Xu Yu's 許棫 (1799-1881) Du Shuowen zashi 讀說文雜識 is a biji 筆記 "brush-notes"-style book that adds many important observations of the Shuowen text. Tao Fangqi 陶方琦 (1845-1884) wrote a chronological biography of Xu Shen, the Xu Jun nianbiao 許君年表. The book Shuowen ziyuan yunbiao 說文字原韻表 is a phonetic study of the Shuowen radicals by Hu Zhong 胡重 (1741-after 1811), but without a commentary.