School-compiled Complete Tang Poems (Upper, Middle, and Lower)

Author: Wang Qixing, Editor-in-Chief
Publisher:
Publishing Time: Not Available
Features: The Qing edition of Complete Collection of Tang Poems compiled by Qing scholars includes over 2,000 authors and nearly 50,000 poems, totaling 900 volumes. It is a massive and profoundly influential anthology of Tang poetry. Due to the haste in compilation, numerous errors and inaccuracies were introduced. Since the late Qing Dynasty to the present, scholars have repeatedly supplemented and corrected it, and plans have been made to reorganize and revise it. However, due to its vast volume, the project remained unfinished. Only Zhonghua Book Company made minor corrections, such as punctuating and printing certain obvious errors, while the rest remained unchanged. Now, at the invitation of Hubei People's Publishing House, Complete Collection of Tang Poems has been preliminarily organized by Meiluo, aiming to contribute to the promotion of Chinese culture and the flourishing of Chinese academia.
The organization of this book is based on the photocopied edition of Complete Collection of Tang Poems from the Kangxi era, published by the Yangzhou Poetry Bureau in Shanghai. The poets are generally rearranged in chronological order. Those with verifiable birth and death years are arranged by birth year, while those without are organized based on their official career or major interactions. The poets and poems in the "Unverified Category" and "Supplementary Category" of the original text have been carefully verified, with duplicates marked for reference, but their original order remains unchanged. Poems by emperors, empresses, concubines, and poets from the Tang and Five Dynasties periods, as well as those by Taoist, Buddhist, and female poets, are arranged according to their historical eras. The original text's categorized poems, such as Yuefu, Immortal Poems, Ghost Poems, Dream Poems, Wine Games, and Ci poetry, are preserved in their original form and appended to the end of the book. The appendix of the photocopied edition, which includes three volumes of Complete Collection of Tang Poems Excluded by Shang Maohe from Japan, is retained at the end. The order of each poet's poems remains unchanged as in the original text. Errors, omissions, inversions, and missing texts in the original have been carefully corrected by selecting authoritative editions.
In cases of textual additions or omissions, instead of using square or round brackets to supplement or delete them in the original text, annotations are used to mark them, with corrections recorded or explained in the annotations. Missing texts are indicated by ellipses, with the number of missing characters represented by the number of ellipses. Variant characters and colloquial forms are directly corrected without annotations. The reference books used for this edition, excluding collected works and local gazettes, are listed separately with their full titles, abbreviations, and versions. The original text contains misattributed poems, including those by non-Tang authors, poems mistakenly included in other collections, and spurious works. These have not been removed in this edition but have been carefully verified and marked in the annotations.
The original text has a severe issue of repeated poems, numbering over 6,000, involving more than 700 authors, including self-repeats, mutual repeats, poems appearing twice, thrice, or even four times, and partial repetitions. The poet biographies remain as in the original text, with errors corrected in the annotations. The number of poems is noted after each biography, with volume numbers removed. The original poem titles and annotations within the poems are retained. When converted to horizontal layout, adjustments were made based on the content and length of the annotations to ensure clarity and readability. Issues with poem titles and annotations are also corrected in the annotations. All corrections are clearly referenced. The annotations are concise and accurate, with detailed citations and textual research generally avoided.
This edition uses simplified horizontal layout and modern punctuation marks. It is divided into three volumes: Upper, Middle, and Lower. Each volume is organized by poet or thematic category, divided into chapters. Each volume includes a table of contents at the beginning, and the final volume provides an index of authors and titles for easy reference.