A Study On Li Tiaoyuan And His Philological Activities

Li Tiaoyuan(1734-1803),from Luojiang,Sichuan.Famous poets and bibliophiles in the Qing Dynasty,together with Zhang Wentao and Peng Duanshu,were called’ Three Talents in Shu in the Qing Dynasty’.Li Tiaoyuan has written a lot in his life.His representative works include" Tongshan Poetry Anthology,Tongshan Essays,Quhua,Yucun Poetry,etc.and the compilation of ancient books runs through his life,including visiting rare books,compiling books,compiling large-scale series and subsequent revisions.He extensively collected information about the Bashu literature of the past dynasties and compiled the Hanhai series of books.From his publication,he can also reflect the engraving situation in Sichuan at that time.This paper takes Li Tiaoyuan and his philology activities as the main research object,and explores his philology thoughts in collation and version from Li Tiaoyuan’s editing activities.The textual research on Li Tiaoyuan ’s family life is based on the Chronicle of Mr.Li Yucun written by Yang Maoxiu in the Qing Dynasty,the Tongshan Self-Record and Li Tiaoyuan’s Spectrum written by Li Tiaoyuan in his later years and other writings in the past dynasties.The article intends to verify the three periods of his study stage,official stage and leisure stage.The part of his family background intends to introduce the deeds of his ancestors and brothers based on his genealogy and biographies in local chronicles.Li Tiaoyuan was born in a scholarly family.His great-grandfather Li Panwang,his grandfather Li Wencai and his father Li Huanan were all recorded in the Luojiang County Annals of Jiaqing.The folks have the reputation of "a four Jinshi,brother three Hanlin." According to the object of his friendship,he is divided into three groups:poets of Song poetry school,students of academy,scholars of Imperial College and scholars of Hanlin Academy.Li Tiaoyuan traveled to Jiangnan with his father when he was 13 years old,and was known as a child prodigy.He traveled to Zhejiang with his father when he was 20 years old,and then he traveled to Beijing and became an official in Guangdong.He traveled to many places and had a wide range of friends.Therefore,he classified his friends and studied the literati ’s friendship.Engraving activities throughout Li Tiaoyuan ’s life,he collected the writings of Shu,built ten thousand volumes,and published books.From this perspective,he can be called a philologist.This paper studies his philology activities from four aspects:his literature writings,book compilation and publication,literature collection and compilation of local chronicles.It can be found that there is no systematic thought of collation in Li Tiaoyuan’s existing writings.However,the strict cultural policies in the Qianjia period allowed most scholars to choose to bury the scriptures,and the style of textual research prevailed.Textual research in the Qianjia period became the mainstream of academic research.Therefore,many scholars did collation work while studying knowledge.When Li Tiaoyuan compiled Hanhai,he personally revised the compiled books and made prefaces one by one,so we can see Li Tiaoyuan ’s thoughts on collation.At the same time,Li Tiaoyuan attached great importance to the version of books in the activities of visiting books,collecting books and editing.Although he did not have a systematic thought on edition,his thoughts on edition can be seen from his collection and compilation.When compiling Hanhai,Li Tiaoyuan attached great importance to the selection of the original version and would make a detailed examination of the version used.As a representative of Qianjia Puxue,Li Tiaoyuan devoted most of his time to collation and textual research,and collected a large number of local documents,compiled Hanhai,compiled Shuya,etc.which made great contributions to the protection and dissemination of local documents.