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ByFrançois Louis
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“A book is the only place in which you can examine a fragile thought without breaking it.” –Edward Morgan
Synopsis
Before there were antiquaries who studied classical antiquity through recovered artifacts, Chinese scholars envisioned the distant past through transmitted illustrations and the classical texts. Among the most important illustrated commentaries was a book called Sanli Tu, or Illustrations to the Ritual Classics, whose origins are said to go back to the great commentator Zheng Xuan. The book survives in the version produced in the late 950s by Nie Chongyi, a classics professor at the court of the Later Zhou (951 960) and Northern Song (960 1127) dynasties. It is now mostly remembered (if at all) for its controversial entries and thus as a quaint predecessor of more empirical antiquarian scholarship done since the mid-eleventh century. But despite such criticism, the book never lost its scholarly authority entirely. In fact, for the first hundred years of the Song era it was outright normative, playing a crucial role in the dynasty s perception of ancient ritual and the construction of its own Confucian state cult. Design by the Book discusses the history and significance of the Sanli Tu, and gives a chronological account of its creation and reception. |
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