The Study Of Ren Fang’shu Yi Ji

The two volumes of Ren Fang’s Shu Yi Ji,one of the masterpieces of the Six Dynasties geography-museum genre of the chi-chi novel,have long been suspected of being forgeries due to the absence of pre-Song historical records.The present edition of Ren Fang’s The Records of the Strange was engraved in the fourth year of the Qingli era of the Northern Song Dynasty(1044),and is essentially a “half-truth,half-forgery” book created by a forger who,on the basis of a damaged original,copied a large number of books from Zangning’s Dongpo Wulei Xianggan Zhi,Wu Shu’s Shi Lei Fu Zhu and Lu Guimeng’s Songling ji.In the process of writing and circulating Ren Fang’s Shu Yi Ji,attention must always be paid to the distinction between the “original” and the “modern”.The majority of the original Ren Fang’s Shu Yi Ji was a geographic museum,while a small part of it was closer to a miscellany of biographies,and its sources should have included both Ren Fang’s Di Ji and t Ren Fang’s Za Zhuan,thus forming a book that was written from a wide variety of sources.The present edition of Ren Fang’s Shu Yi Ji was written with the inclusion of new literature,and the forger also achieved the same effect by transcribing the classical book Shi Lei Fu Zhu(Notes on the Fortunes of the Classes of Things)and the museum novel Wulei Xianggan Zhi(The Sense of Things).The original Ren Fang’s Shu Yi Ji was already popular in the Tang dynasty,and it was cited in Yi Wen Lei Ju,You Yang Za Zu and Su Shi Yan Yi.In the early Song dynasty,the book was most frequently cited in the Taiping Yilan,which preserved its original form to the greatest extent possible.The distribution of the quotations in the present edition of Ren Fang’s Shu Yi Ji in the Taiping Yu Lan and the Taiping Guang Ji shows that the present edition can be clearly divided between the original and the later forgeries.At the same time,the textual differences between the quotations in the Taiping Yu Lan and Taiping Guang Ji and the present text indicate that the present version of Ren Fang’s Shu Yi Ji was not created by a later owner by combining quotations from similar books with those from other books,but by adding to a damaged original.The present edition of Ren Fang’s Shu Yi Ji contains a total of 312 entries,of which 183 can be identified as original.Of the one hundred and twenty-nine entries identified as forgeries,nineteen have been confirmed as having been copied from Wulei Xianggan Zhi,thirty-one from Wu Shu’s Shi Lei Fu Zhu,ten from Lu Guimen’’s Songling Ji,and one from Li Bai’s poem.In other words,about half of the forged entries have been clearly copied from their sources,and the remaining half can be found in similar documents.In terms of the number of entries,60% of the original entries and 40% of the forged entries were made by later generations.In terms of the number of entries,the original entries account for 60%,while the forged entries account for 40%,and in terms of the length of the text,the forgery accounts for 60% of the content,while the original content is only 40%.The present edition of Ren Fang’s Shu Yi Ji is indeed a book of “half-truths and half-fakes”.The preface to the present edition of Ren Fang’s Shu Yi Ji is also a forgery by the same person who first published the present edition in the fourth year of the Qingli era(1044),the same person who forged and added to the present edition of Ren Fang’s Shu Yi Ji.He not only deliberately rewrote the text of the present edition to cover up the traces of the transcription,but also interspersed the forged entries from the three books in order to achieve a mixture of authenticity and falsity.