Liang Yusheng's critical study of the Doubtful Passages in the Grand Scribe's Records and its impact on modern scholarship

Liang Yusheng's (1745-1819) Shiji zhiyi (Records of Doubtful Passages in the Grand Scribe's Records) is a key work in the history of the study of the Shiji. It continued and further developed the exegetical tradition of the Shiji represented by the "Sanjia zhu" ("Commentaries of the Three Scholars"), which represent the major exegesis on the Shiji through the Tang dynasty, includes or reacts to major commentators from the Song to the mid-Qing dynasty, and at the same time provides important material and opinions for the modern Shiji commentaries. As a distinguished evidential research scholar of his time, Liang Yusheng provided a critical study of what he calls the "doubtful passages". These passages were primarily 1) textual errors; 2) problems with regard to personal names, geography and chronology; 3) deficient accounts; 4) accounts containing inconsistencies or contradictions either within the Shiji itself or with related texts; and 5) fictional accounts or myths and tales from oral tradition. There have been few studies discussing the Shiji commentaries in the large time span from the Tang to the Qing dynasties. This paper aims to remedy this oversight by offering the first English language study of Liang Yusheng's Shiji zhiyi and its significance for modern readers of the Shiji..;The "Introduction" discusses the evidential research scholarship, its methodology, its scholarly orientation and its major achievements. Chapter One provides a biography of Liang Yusheng. Chapter two examines Liang Yusheng's incorporation of evidential research scholarship on the Shiji by his contemporaries. Chapter Three examines how Liang Yusheng incorporated and evaluated previous scholars' commentaries on the Shiji. Chapter Four examines how Liang Yusheng applied an inter-textual approach to his study of the Shiji. The "Conclusion" discusses Liang Yusheng's contribution to the history of Shiji studies. On the one hand it points out that Liang's Shiji zhiyi incorporated much of the important evidential scholarship in the two millennia between the Han and mid-Qing eras.