An Examination of the Qing Scholars' Studies on Huainanzi, with Special Emphases on Philological & Textual Problems

Scholars of the Qing dynasty brought studies in Chinese linguistics to new heights. Notable experts in philology and textual studies included Lu Wenchao (盧文弨), Sun Yirang (孫詒讓), Wang Niansun (王念孫), Yu Chang (于鬯) and Yu Yue (俞樾), to name just a few. A text which caught all these scholars’ attention is Huainanzi (《淮 南子》). Case studies on linguistic and textual issues related to Huainanzi by Wang Niansun alone amount to over 900. These valuable fruits of meticulous research, however, have not received their due attention in recent years.The present project, thus, is a pioneering attempt to examine the scholarship of the Qing philologists on Huainanzi systematically and comprehensively. Collated editions of Huainanzi, as well as the Qing scholars’ commentaries on it, will be collected and critically reviewed, with the aim of rectifying errors which have been widely disseminated since the Qing dynasty.Due to the text’s richness in lexical and syntactic phenomena, revisiting linguistic issues in Huainanzi, a work commonly known as an “encyclopedia of the early Han dynasty”, will enhance our understanding of archaic Chinese and in the end, inform the teaching of classical Chinese language.