Discussion On "The Collection For Loyalism"

"The Collection for Loyalism" is a poetry anthology about history and war edited by Zhao Jingliang from the Yuan Dynasty. It has three parts:"Ten Pomes of Loyalism to Replenish History" by Liu Xun, "Meaningful Poems to Declare Loyalty" by Liu Linrui, and "Poems by Other Authors as Addendum" collected by Zhao Jingliang. And "Meaningful Poems to Declare Loyalty" is the body noun for it devoted most of the space. The mass of the poems in this anthology were written for the heroic and stirring deed of officers and men who sacrificed their life during the war between the Song and Yuan dynasty, for the persistent resistance of soldiers and civilians of the Southern Song dynasty, and for the deep grief at the loss of their nation by the adherents of the Song dynasty. As the collected poems by various authors, "The Collection for Loyalism" has a remarkable feature of "survivor"; at the same time, it recommended the special ages heroically and stirringly in a poetic manner.After a great deal of comparison and investigation, the writer found that there were some differences between "The Collection for Loyalism" and "The history of Song Dynasty". And for its history value, we can rectify deficiencies of the formal history. Subsequently, "Collection of Song Dynasty Poems" and other collections always complied poems from "The Collection for Loyalism" while made mistakes. Therefore, we can update these collections through studying this poetry anthology. Once more, an anonymous author wrote another book named "Record for Declaring Loyalty", whose account was nearly the same as explanatory notes of the "Meaningful Poems to Declare Loyalty" except some details such as the way of numbering the years, the sequence of editing materials, and so on. The later generations ever quoted from both books, however no one has ever discriminated the relationship between them. Consequently, we also can discern the source of correlative history information when researching this poetry anthology.Up till now, the academia hasn't pay much attention to "The Collection for Loyalism". Although Zhu Shangshu has done some probable references work about the source of its versions in his work "Comments on the sylloge of Song", others only quoted while referring to this poetry anthology. On the basis of predecessor's research, this paper will do further systematic study on "The Collection for Loyalism" including its version source, its value as historical data, the extraction and life of interrelated writers and so on. It is be hoped that after contrasting analyzing kinds of relevant historical materials, we can verify the accuracy of this poetry anthology, and also can comprehend people's life under the special historical background macroscopically, especial the deep grief at the loss of their nation by the writers of the poetry anthology. And it is also be hoped that all of these researches will be helpful for investigators so that they can make use of the poetry anthology better.