Collection of Commercial (with poems)

Author: Ding Ren
Publisher:
Publishing Date: 2000-01-01
Features: In the early years of the Guangxu reign, local farmers in the ruins of the ancient Shang capital (now Anyang, Henan) accidentally discovered some tortoise shells and animal bones inscribed with strange symbols while plowing. Soon, these oracle bones were sent to a pharmacy and sold as medicinal materials. In the 24th year of the Guangxu reign (1898), a merchant in charge of antiques transported the oracle bones to Beijing. The following year (1899), the Jinshi scholar Wang Yirong identified the oracle bones as important ancient relics and preliminarily confirmed their historical value. In 1903, Liu E, the author of A Journey to the West, published the first collection of oracle bone inscriptions, Tieyun Zanggu, which is regarded as the starting point of oracle bone studies. In 1904, Sun Yixiang wrote the first work on oracle bone divinations, Examples of Oracle Bone Script. From then on, inspired by the research of scholars such as Luo Zhenyu and Wang Guowei, the study of oracle bone excavations and the interpretation and research of oracle bone script continued from the modern era to the contemporary period, gradually forming a new discipline—oracle bone studies.
Oracle bones are remnants of ancient divination practices. During the Shang Dynasty, due to low levels of social culture and productive forces, the dominant ideology was the worship of ancestor and natural gods in the form of Shang worship. When people faced difficult decisions, they often sought divine guidance through burning oracle bones or animal bones and interpreting the cracks that appeared on them to determine auspicious or inauspicious outcomes. The practitioners of divination, the divination process, the signs revealed, and the final results were all meticulously recorded on the oracle bones, forming the divination inscriptions, or the symbol script that we see on the oracle bones today. Most of these inscriptions are divinations by the Shang kings, known as "king divinations"; there are also a few divinations by Shang nobles, known as "non-king divinations." The content of the divination inscriptions is quite rich, providing a comprehensive reflection of the political affairs of the Shang Kingdom and the lives of the royal and noble families, supplementing the insufficient historical records of the Shang and Xia dynasties and serving as a reference to existing written materials. They help people understand the social structure, institutions, cultural customs, and historical geographical changes of the ancient period, making them of great value in social history, the history of science, and paleography.
Perhaps for this very reason, for a long time, people's studies of oracle bone script were mostly limited to the social significance level, overlooking the form itself—the unique aesthetic and artistic value of the script lines. Among the existing recognizable Chinese characters, oracle bone script is the oldest, yet it basically embodies all six types of character formation (the so-called "Six Books"), forming a relatively developed system. The structural design of oracle bone script still retains many elements of pictographic representation, and during the writing (carving) process, the stroke order and arrangement were often adjusted based on the habits of the scribes and the convenience of writing. The components of the characters were added, deleted, moved, or resized, and combined with the description in the preface to Examples of Oracle Bone Script—"Since the strokes were carved with knives, they were rough yet ancient and vigorous, with sharp and rounded lines"—they exude a sense of solemnity, antiquity, and natural elegance, which is precisely what has deeply captivated and inspired countless enthusiasts of oracle bone calligraphy.
The earliest known figure to introduce oracle bone script into artistic creation was Luo Zhenyu, followed later by Jian Jinglun, who combined oracle bone script into seals. Since then, more and more people have followed suit, and over the decades, the practice has flourished, especially with the contributions of the members of the Xiling Seal Society. Now, our society proudly presents "Xiling Seal Society—Centennial Legacy: Oracle Bone and Seal Script Calligraphy and Seal Carving," featuring one volume of Collection of Shang Divination Inscriptions and Couplets (with poems) by Ding Fuzhi, one of our society's founding members, and three volumes by the renowned calligrapher and seal carver Liu Jiang: One Hundred Oracle Bone Calligraphy Works, One Hundred Seal Script Couplets, and One Hundred Oracle Bone Seal Carvings. Liu Jiang has long been dedicated to the creation and study of calligraphy and seal carving. This time, we have carefully selected outstanding works from his years of creation for publication, which is a great event for all lovers of calligraphy and seal carving and will also greatly benefit those who wish to learn.
Ding Fuzhi's Collection of Shang Divination Inscriptions and Couplets (with poems) was published in the 1940s. We are now republishing it to honor our readers, to remember our predecessors with gratitude and reverence.