WU, Tingxie 吳廷燮.

Yongle bie lu 永樂別錄 [Separate Records of the Yongle Reign].

61; 49 folding leaves. Two vols. 8vo, orig. wrappers, orig. stitching. [Shenyang]: Liao hai shu she, Preface dated 1908.

[with]: WU, Tingxie 吳廷燮. Xuande bie lu 宣德別錄 [Separate Records of the Xuande Reign]. 67; 69 folding leaves. Two vols. 8vo, orig. wrappers, orig. stitching. [Shenyang]: Liao hai shu she, Preface dated 1917.

First editions. Wu (1865-1947), a late Qing, early Republican government official, was one of the most indefatigable compilers of chronological tables of office holders. The son of a Qing official, Wu himself served as an official both under the Qing and in several of the regimes that controlled China in the early Republican period. He participated in some of the great scholarly projects of the republic, including the historiography commission that produced the Draft History of the Qing [Qingshi gao 清史稿] in 1927 and in the writing of bibliographical précis for a projected continuation of the Complete Writings of the Four Repositories [Siku quanshu 四庫全書], the Qianlong emperor’s great manuscript library assembled in the 1770s. Before the Japanese invasion of Manchuria, Wu taught in Shenyang and worked there on several editorial projects.

The books Yongle bielu and Xuande bielu are excerpts from the Ming-dynasty court chronicle (the so-called Veritable Records) for Emperors Yongle (r. 1402-24) and Xuande (r. 1425-35). The books were published as appendices of the collectanea Liaohai congshu 遼海叢書 [Collected Writings of the Northeast]. This series of historical sources was published in Japanese-occupied Shenyang by Jin Yufu 金毓黻 (1887-1962). Regional history was on many intellectuals’ minds in this period, when China was politically fragmented and, in some parts, under foreign threat and aggression. Wu and Jin appear to have known each other during the time when they overlapped in Shenyang. Jin wrote, in an obituary after Wu’s death in 1947, that he once sought out Wu for advice on the historian’s craft (余嘗請業門下). This relationship is perhaps the reason Jin included Wu’s books as appendices to his series.

Fine set, preserved in a hantao.

References

Guan Changrong 关长荣, “Jin Yufu Liaohai congshu de wenxian xue jiazhi yanjiu” 金毓黻《辽海丛书》的文献学价值研究, MA Thesis, Dongbei Shifan Daxue, 2013.

Guo Jun 郭郡, “Liaohai congshu de chuban jiqi jiazhi” 《辽海丛书》的出版及其价值, Tushuguan xue yanjiu 1986, no. 3: 114-119.

Jin Yufu 金毓黻, “Wu xiansheng zhuan” 吳先生傳, Guoshi Guan guankan 1948, vol. 1, no 2: 112-113.

Wu Zhenqing 吴振清, “Wu Tingxie ji qi zai bu shibiao shang de chengjiu” 吴廷燮及其在补史表上的成就, Shixue shi yanjiu 1998, no. 3: 51-56.