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Zuo Zhuan

4th century BC Chinese narrative history

  • 16 min read
  • 5 chapters

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Through Narration

For many centuries, the Zuo Zhuan was the primary text through which educated Chinese learned their ancient history. The Zuo Zhuan does not simply explain the wording of the Spring and Autumn Annals, but rather expounds upon its historical background with rich and lively accounts of the history and culture of the Spring and Autumn period (771–476 BC). The Zuo Zhuan is the source of more Chinese sayings and idioms than any other classical work, and its concise, flowing style served as a paragon of elegant Classical Chinese. Its tendency toward third-person narration and portraying characters through direct speech and action became hallmarks of Chinese narrative in general, and its style was imitated by historians, storytellers, and ancient-style prose masters for over 2000 years of subsequent Chinese history.

The Zuo Zhuan has a reputation as "a masterpiece of grand historical narrative", but its origins and early textual history are largely unknown. The titular "Zuo" was traditionally identified as Zuo Qiuming—an obscure figure of the 5th century BC described as a blind disciple of Confucius—but there is little evidence to support this. Today, most scholars believe the Zuo Zhuan was originally an independent work, composed during the 4th century BC, that was later rearranged as a commentary to the Annals.

Textual history

Creation

Despite its longstanding status as the paragon of Classical Chinese prose, little is known of the creation and early history of the Zuo Zhuan. Bamboo and silk manuscripts excavated from late Warring States period (c. 300 BC) tombs, combined with analyses of the language, diction, chronological references, and philosophical viewpoints of the Zuo Zhuan, suggest that its composition was largely complete by 300 BC. No pre-Han dynasty (202 BC – AD 220) sources, however, suggest that the Zuo Zhuan had to that point been organized into any coherent form. Pre-Han dynasty texts do not directly refer to the Zuo Zhuan as a source, although a few mention its parent text Spring and Autumn Annals. The Zuo Zhuan seems to have had no distinct title of its own during this period, but seems to have simply been called "Annals (Chunqiu)" along with a larger group of similar texts.

In the 3rd century AD, the Chinese scholar Du Yu intercalated the Zuo Zhuan with the Annals so that each Annals entry was followed by the corresponding narrative from the Zuo Zhuan. This became the received format of the Zuo Zhuan that exists today. Some modern scholars believe that the Zuo Zhuan originally was an independent work composed during the latter half of the 4th century BC—though probably incorporating some older material—that was later rearranged as a commentary to the Annals. During the Han dynasty, Guoyu was often paired with the text, being seen as an effective preface to it given they cover the same period.

Authorship

Sima Qian's 1st century BC Records of the Grand Historian, the first of China's 24 dynastic histories, refers to the Zuo Zhuan as "Master Zuo's Spring and Autumn Annals" (左氏春秋; Zuǒshì chūnqiū) and attributes it to a man named "Zuo Qiuming" (or possibly "Zuoqiu Ming"). According to Sima Qian, Confucius's disciples began disagreeing over their interpretations of the Annals after Confucius's death. Zuo therefore gathered together Confucius's scribal records and used them to compile the Zuo Annals in order to "preserve the true teachings." The "Zuo Qiuming" whom Sima Qian references was traditionally assumed to be the Zuo Qiuming who briefly appears in the Analects of Confucius when Confucius praises him for his moral judgment.

Other than this brief mention, nothing is concretely known of the life or identity of the Zuo Qiuming of the Analects, nor of what connection he might have with the Zuo Zhuan. This traditional assumption that the title's "Master Zuo" refers to the Zuo Qiuming of the Analects is not based on any specific evidence, and was challenged by scholars as early as the 8th century. Some modern scholars have observed that even if the Zuo Qiuming of the Analects is the "Zuo" referenced in the Zuo Zhuan′s title, this attribution is questionable because the Zuo Zhuan describes events from the late Spring and Autumn period (c. 771 – 476 BC) that Zuo could not have known.

Alternatively, a number of scholars, beginning in the 18th century, have suggested that the Zuo Zhuan was actually the product of Wu Qi, a military leader who served in the State of Wei and who, according to the Han Feizi, was from a place called Zuoshi (左氏). In 1792, the scholar Yao Nai wrote: "The [Zuo Zhuan] did not come from one person. There were repeated accretions and additions, with those of Wu Qi and his followers being especially numerous...."

Commentary status

In the early 19th century, the Chinese scholar Liu Fenglu (劉逢祿; 1776–1829) initiated a long, drawn-out controversy when he proposed, by emphasizing certain discrepancies between it and the Annals, that the Zuo Zhuan was not originally a commentary on the Annals. Liu's theory was taken much further by the prominent scholar and reformer Kang Youwei, who argued that Liu Xin did not really find the "ancient script" version of the Zuo Zhuan in the imperial archives, as historical records describe, but actually forged it as a commentary on the Annals. Kang's theory was that Liu Xin—who with his father Liu Xiang, the imperial librarian, was one of the first to have access to the rare documents in the Han dynasty's imperial archives—took the Discourses of the States and forged it into a chronicle-like work to fit the format of the Annals in an attempt to lend credibility to the policies of his master, the usurper Wang Mang.

Kang's theory was supported by several subsequent Chinese scholars in the late 19th century, but was contradicted by many 20th-century studies that examined it from many different perspectives. In the early 1930s, the French Sinologist Henri Maspero performed a detailed textual study of the issue, concluding the Han dynasty forgery theory to be untenable. The Swedish Sinologist Bernhard Karlgren concluded, based on a series of linguistic and philological analyses he carried out in the 1920s, that the Zuo Zhuan is a genuine ancient text "probably to be dated between 468 and 300 BC." While Liu's hypothesis that the Zuo Zhuan was not originally an Annals commentary has been generally accepted, Kang's theory of Liu Xin forging the Zuo Zhuan is now considered discredited.

Manuscripts

The oldest surviving Zuo Zhuan manuscripts are six fragments that were discovered among the Dunhuang manuscripts in the early 20th century by the French Sinologist Paul Pelliot and are now held at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. Four of the fragments date to the Six Dynasties period (3rd to 6th centuries), while the other two date to the early Tang dynasty (7th century). The oldest known complete Zuo Zhuan manuscript is the "ancient manuscript scroll" preserved at the Kanazawa Bunko Museum in Yokohama, Japan.

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