Collations On Ji & Biao Of The Historical Records

The Historical Records (shiji) is the first biographic general history book in China which was finished 2000 years ago. There are many misprints in it as it was copied by writing and engraving in long time. The prevalent edition with three kinds of annotations published by Zhonghua Publishing House remains a lot of shortcomings, such as: having shown not enough respects to the copy which it relied on for republish, having no separate collative records, making use of the notes written by Zhang Wenhu improperly, still many misprints left, etc. Therefore, it is necessary to do more collating work on Zhonghua edition which was republished based on the edition of Jinling Publishing House. The Jinling edition was published in the fifth years of Tongzhi in Qing Dynasty. It is one of the best edition among all editions of the Historical Records existed since it was collated with other editions particularly and absorbed many corrections from other edition. Nevertheless, there are still some mistakes and oversights in the Jinling edition. The Wuyingdian edition was published in the forth year of Qianlong in Qing Dynasty. It was based on the Beijian edition of Ming Dynasty and collated by many famous scholars in early Qing Dynasty. Therefore it has become an important edition with great influence during the whole Qing Dynasty.This article has selected the two parts of twelve Benji and ten Biao in the Historical Records and collated them with the Dian edition based on the Jinling edition, consulted the book of A Collation and Supply to the Collection of Annotations and Textual Research on the Historical Records as reference. According to the above, this article makes a research on 200 pieces of variant character between two editions by way of investigating the self-proofs in the Historical Records, checking other ancient books and sometimes by a reasoning way. Most conclusions of this article can be used to emend the Jinling edition.