Early Learning in the Precious Jade Forest: Illustrated Edition of the Chinese Culture Enlightenment Series

Author: Edited by: Wu Xiaohua, Liu Hongxia
Publisher:
Publication Date: 2006-07-01
Features: The Essentials for Children (also known as The Jade Grove of Childhood Stories), written by Cheng Dengji during the Ming Dynasty, originally titled Essentials for Childhood Learning, was later supplemented by Zou Shengmai during the Qianlong era of the Qing Dynasty and renamed The Essentials for Children. It is commonly abbreviated as The Essentials. In ancient times, children at the age of ten were referred to as being in the "year of," and those just beginning school were also called. Thus, it is a children'sliterature. This book extensively compiles various knowledge and allusions from ancient cultural classics, covering a wide range of topics—both political philosophy and ethics, as well as literature, art, myths, and legends; both astronomy and geography, birds and plants, and life, death, clothing, food, and shelter. It is categorized and arranged in neat, parallel couplets, making it highly readable. The language is concise, rhyming, and easy to understand, making it suitable for children to recite and memorize. Reading this book gives one the feeling of "entering a bustling market in the five great cities, where a variety of goods abound." In ancient times, someone commented on this book: "If all children in the world study it diligently, they may not need to read the Six Classics or the various histories and records." While this statement may seem exaggerated, it also explains why the book has become widely popular and beloved. Even middle-aged and elderly readers can benefit from it. There are numerous folk reprints of this book, and during the author's compilation process, nearly thirty versions were encountered, which generally fall into two systems: the original by Cheng Dengji and the supplemented version by Zou Shengmai. Additionally, there are some that were re-edited or even arbitrarily supplemented, though these are rare and mostly from enthusiasts in the early years of the Republic of China. The texts of different editions vary slightly, and some annotations and citations differ. Moreover, the original text is overly brief, which poses certain challenges for compilation. We have adopted the widely circulated supplemented version by Zou Shengmai as the base text, and the content has not been edited to preserve its original form. For idioms and allusions cited in the annotations that have different origins, we have chosen those that are most familiar and commonly used by the public. Considering the potential for repetition between annotations and explanations, we have employed a "translation-explanation" method, integrating annotations into the translated text to save space and facilitate reading. The translated-explained sections are kept concise. Some obvious feudal moralistic and unscientific statements in the main text can generally be discerned by modern readers, so there is no need to point them out one by one for critique. This approach is also an experiment for us, and whether it will be accepted by readers, especially young readers, remains to be seen.