SBE 3: Shû King: Introduction: Chapter II: The Credibility of the Records in the Shû

1. Accepting the conclusion which I have stated immediately above, I now go on to enquire whether the documents in the Shû can be relied on as genuine narratives of the transactions which they profess to relate. And it may be said at once, in reference to the greater number of them, that there is no reasonable ground to call their credibility in question. Allowance must be made, indeed, for the colouring with which the founders of one dynasty set forth the misdeeds of the closing reigns of that which they were superseding, and for the way in which the failures of a favourite hero may be glossed over. But the documents of the Shû are quite as much entitled to credit as the memorials and edicts which are published at the present day in the Peking Gazette.

The more recent the documents are, the more, of course, are they to be relied on. And provision was made, we have seen, by the statutes of Kâu, for the preservation of the records of previous dynasties. But it was not to be expected that many of those should not perish in the lapse of time, and others suffer mutilations and corruptions. And this, we find, was the case. Of the eighty-one documents that the Shû at one time contained, only one belonged to the period of Yâo; seven to the period of Shun; four to the dynasty of Hsiâ, much the larger one of Which narrates what was done in the time of Yâo; thirty-one to the dynasty of Shang; and thirty-eight to the first 500 years of that of Kâu. All this seems to bear on the surface of it the stamp of verisimilitude.

2. The Books of Kâu were contemporaneous with the events which they describe, and became public property not long after their composition, They are to be received without hesitation.

Nor are those of the previous dynasty of Shang open to suspicion. We ascend by means of them to Thang the Successful, its founder, with a confident step. The beginning of his rule is placed chronologically in B.C. 1766.

Of the still earlier dynasty of Hsiâ, there are only four documents, and we have no evidence that here were any more when the collection of the Shû was made in the times of Kâu. The first and longest of the four, though occupied with the great achievement of Yü, the founder of Hsiâ, whose chronological place is B.C. 2205-2196, really belongs to the reign of Yâo, and is out of place among the records of Hsiâ. The other three documents bring us down only to the reign of Kung Khang (B.C. 2159-2145), and I see no grounds for doubting their genuineness. In the last of them a celestial phenomenon is mentioned, which has always been understood to have been an eclipse of the sun in Fang, a space of about 5½° from π to σ of Scorpio, on the first day of the last month of autumn. P. Gaubil thought he had determined by calculation that such an eclipse really took place in the fifth year of Kung Khang, B.C. 2155. Doubts, however, have been cast, as will be seen in the next chapter, on the accuracy of his calculation, and therefore I do not avail myself of it here as a confirmation of the truth of the document.

3. We come to the earlier records,--those of the reigns of Yâo and Shun, with which must be classed the Tribute of Yü, the first of the documents of Hsiâ; and it maybe admitted that there is not the same evidence that they existed originally in their present form.

i. The Canon of Yâo and three of the four still existing books of the time of Yü, all commence with the words, 'Examining into antiquity, we find.' They are therefore, on their own showing, the compilations of a later age. The writer separates himself from the date, of the events which he narrates, and while professing to draw from the records

At the same time it must be allowed that the compiler of these books in their present form had in his possession some documents as old as the time of Yâo. To my mind three things render this admission necessary. First, the titles of the high officers of Yâo and Shun are different from those of the corresponding dignitaries at a later age. The principal personage was called the Four Mountains; next to him was the General Regulator; and the Minister of Religion was the Arranger of the Ancestral Temple, It is more probable that the compiler received these and other peculiar designations from old documents than that he invented them himself. Second, the style of these early books is distinguished in several particulars from the style of those of Hsiâ, Shang, and Kâu. I need only specify the exclamations, 'Alas,' 'Ah!' and 'Oh!' which are expressed by characters that we do not elsewhere find used in the same way. Third, the directions of Yâo to his astronomers, telling them how to determine the equinoxes and solstices, by means of the stars culminating at dusk in those seasons, could not be the inventions of a later age. The reader will find this subject discussed in the next chapter, where it is shown how those culminating stars may be employed to ascertain the era of Yâo. No compiler, ignorant of the precession of the equinoxes, which was not known in China till about the middle of our fourth century, could have framed Yâo's directions with such an adjustment to the time assigned to him in chronology.

When the Books of Thang and Yü received their present form, we cannot tell. Probably it was in the early period of the Kâu dynasty, though I am not without a suspicion that some verbal changes were made in them under the short-lived dynasty of Khin, which intervened between

4. It remains for us to consider the case of the Tribute of Yü, the first, as the books are now arranged, of those of Hsiâ, but belonging, as has been already said, to the period of Yâo, or at least to the period when Yâo and Shun were together on the throne. It thus appears out of its chronological order, and must share in the general uncertainty which attaches to the documents of the first two parts of our classic.

Yâo, in what year of his reign we are not told, appears suddenly startled by the ravages of a terrible inundation. The waters were overtopping the bills, and threatening the heavens in their surging fury. The people everywhere were groaning and murmuring: Was there a capable man to whom he could assign the correction of the calamity? All the nobles recommend one Khwăn, to whom Yâo, against his own better judgment, delegates the difficult task, on which Khwăn labours without success for nine years. His son Yü then entered on the work. From beyond the western bounds of the present China proper he is represented as tracking the great rivers, here burning the woods, hewing the rocks, and cutting through the mountains that obstructed their progress, and there deepening their channels until their waters flow peacefully into the eastern sea. He forms lakes, and raises mighty embankments, till at length 'the grounds along the rivers were everywhere made habitable; the hills cleared of their superfluous wood; and access to the capital was secured for all within the four seas. A great order was effected in the six magazines (of material wealth); the different parts of the country were subjected to an exact comparison, so that contribution of revenue could be carefully adjusted according to their resources. The fields were all classified according to the three characters of the soil, and the revenues of the Middle Kingdom were established.' Of the devotion with which Yü pursued his work, he says himself in the Yî and Kî:--'I mounted my four conveyances,'--carriages on the land, boats on the water. sledges in icy places, and

5. While we are thus unable to receive the six earliest documents in our classic as contemporaneous in their present form with the events which they relate, it is not meant to throw doubt on the existence of Yâo, Shun, and Yü as historical personages. More especially does Yü stand forth as the first sovereign of the dynasty of Hsiâ, the man who laid the foundation of the hereditary monarchy in China, its feudal sovereign who 'conferred surnames and lands.' The documents which follow the Tribute of Yü, commencing with the Speech at Kan, delivered in B.C. 2197 by Yü's son and successor, may all be received as veritable monuments of antiquity.

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