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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
The Great Commentary on the Documents Classic / Shangshu Dazhuan尚書大傳

The Great Commentary on the Documents Classic / Shangshu Dazhuan尚書大傳

Nylan, Michael
Lin, Fan
Vankeerberghen, Griet

Hardcover

Series: Classics of Chinese Thought

Fiction AnthologiesChinese History

Currently unavailable to order

ISBN10: 0295753048
ISBN13: 9780295753041
Publisher: University of Washington Press
Published: Feb 4 2025
Pages: 472
Weight: 1.75
Height: 1.40 Width: 6.10 Depth: 9.10
Language: English

An early commentary on one of the Chinese Five Classics

The 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.

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