Nine full-page & one double-page woodcut illus. and one vignette. Four vols. 8vo, orig. wrappers, old stitching. [China]: Dun hua tang 敦化堂, 1718.

A commercial edition of the Confucian Document Classic, probably intended for candidates for the civil service examinations.

The Document Classic, or Venerated Documents, “was recognized during the Han dynasty as one of the ‘Five Classics’ and has served for more than two-thousand years as the foundation of Chinese political philosophy. The text contains the earliest writings in China’s traditional literature, with some chapters dating nearly a thousand years before its recognition as a classic” (Edward... More