Essentials of the Two Han Dynasties Literature

Author: Chen Xindian
Publisher:
Publishing Date: 2000-12-01
Features: Since the late Qing Dynasty and early Republic of China, Mr. Gao Buying has made outstanding achievements in the selection and annotation of classical Chinese literature. He has compiled and annotated numerous works, many of which were printed and published before the liberation, and were later re-edited and published with punctuation in the 1950s and 1960s. Works such as A Selection of Tang and Song Poetry and A Selection of Tang and Song Prose received praise from academia. Gao Buying (1873–1940), styled Lanxian, was a native of Ba County, Hebei, and a student of Hao Ruyun (Zhipu), the later master of the Tongcheng School of classical Chinese prose. In the 1920s of this century, he taught at Beijing Normal University and Women's Normal University. Due to his profound foundation in the principles, textual research, and stylistic aspects of classical Chinese, coupled with years of teaching experience, his selected texts are prominent and exemplary, and his annotations are extensive, meticulous, and rigorous, often offering new insights. He is indeed a master of selection. Mr. Gao's manuscripts for selection and annotation are numerous, and our office currently holds six of them: A Selection of Prose (Pre-Qin Period), A Selection of Classics, Histories, and Philosophers' Prose, A Selection of Prose (Han Dynasty Period), A Selection of Parallel Prose, A Selection of Prose (Wei and Jin Periods), and A Selection of Prose from the Northern and Southern Dynasties. We plan to uniformly arrange and publish them for the readers' enjoyment. Considering that the content of A Selection of Parallel Prose is already included in A Selection of Prose from the Northern and Southern Dynasties, A Selection of Parallel Prose will not be published. The book A Selection of Classics, Histories, and Philosophers' Prose includes selected chapters from works such as the Book of Rites, the Zuo Zhuan, the Gongyang Zhuan, the Guliang Zhuan, the Records of the Grand Historian, and the Book of Han, but it does not include the works of the philosophers, making it an incomplete work. We plan to extract the selected texts from the Records of the Grand Historian and the Book of Han and incorporate them into the A Selection of Prose (Han Dynasty Period), while the remaining parts will not be published. Additionally, considering that the purpose and style of writing of these selected and annotated works are the same as those of A Selection of Tang and Song Prose, to form a systematic and cohesive whole, we will uniformly name them "A Selection of Prose." That is to say, after punctuating and organizing Mr. Gao Buying's manuscripts, they will be published as A Selection of Prose (Pre-Qin Period), A Selection of Prose (Han Dynasty Period), A Selection of Prose (Wei and Jin Periods), and A Selection of Prose from the Northern and Southern Dynasties. We hope that these works will serve as a useful resource for people's reading and research in classical Chinese literature.