Great Commentary on the Documents Classic / Shangshu dazhuan尚書大傳
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- ISBN 9780295753041
- Weight: 748g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 04 Feb 2025
- Publisher: University of Washington Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
- Language: English
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An early commentary on one of the Chinese Five ClassicsThe Documents classic (Shangshu) was central to the political life of imperial China. This owed much to the lively commentarial activity surrounding the text in the first two centuries BCE. The Great Commentary serves as a lens on this commentarial work and reveals how the Documents classic was used to provide answers to pressing societal questions of the time.
In this first English translation of the Great Commentary, Fan Lin and Griet Vankeerberghen engage with the historical realities that produced the work. They explore the complex relationship between the Documents classic and its commentarial traditions at a time when neither classic nor commentary had acquired fixed form. They view Master Fu (260?–161? BCE), the Han court academician to whom the Great Commentary is traditionally ascribed, not as the text's author but rather as the figure who lent his authority to subsequent generations of Documents scholars. Lin and Vankeerberghen also trace how late imperial scholars reconstructed the text largely from fragments in collectanea. With facing pages of Chinese and English text, this volume provides a comprehensive introduction and detailed annotation that reveal the work's relevance to law, prognostication, and politics, along with its value as an important source for the study of the classical tradition and of early Chinese history.
Fan Lin is university lecturer in Chinese art and material culture at Leiden University. Griet Vankeerberghen is associate professor of history and classical studies at McGill University. She is author of The "Huainanzi" and Liu An's Claim to Moral Authority and coeditor of Chang'an 26 BCE: An Augustan Age in China.
