Research On Yang Mingzhu And His Writings

Yang Mingzhu, a scholar of early Qian Jia Study, had successively held the post of administrator of Xugou county in Shanxi, Ningyang county in Fujian, Ling county in Shandong and other places, and had achieved political success. In the first year of Qianlong Dynasty, Yang Mingzhu persuaded his brother Yang Mingshi to make use of the governmental power to print and publish books. This created the publishing fashion of Wuying Palace in Qianlong Dynasty.From the gathered materials, we can see that Yang Mingzhu limited his activity basically in his hometown Jiangying before he went to the capital in the first year of Yongzheng Dynasty. He affiliated most with his old friends, which limited his academic achievement in some degree. According to "Qing Ru Xue An" by Xu Shichang, Yang Mingzhu's study, which originated from his brother, combined politics with education, without establishing a group. However, this was not true. Yang Mingzhu's academic thoughts were affected by Gu Yanwu actually, which was very clear in Yang's collation for Gu's "Ri Zhi Lu".Yang Mingzhu devoted himself into the textual research on history. A volume of his book "Za Zheng", collected in "Left Works of Changzhou Sage", and then in "Series Integration Sequel", was concise and unprecedented reading notes, which corrected nearly two hundred mistaken records of "Song History", "Wei Shu", "Jin Shu", and "Yuan History". The deficiency of "Za Zheng" lay in the uncritical selection in edition, which led to many subjective mistakes and affected the worth of the whole book.Many of Yang Mingzhu's writings didn't come down except "Za Zheng" and more than three hundred collation notes for "Ri Zhi Lu". The collation notes were all recorded in "Interpretation of Ri Zhi Lu" by Huang Rucheng. The notes focused on the interpretation of the original text, but the value was embodied mainly in the edition, collation, correction, which made great contribution to regaining the original "Ri Zhi Lu" and understanding it.Yang Mingzhu also had a fine hand-copied transcription of "Xu Xiake's Travel Notes"-the only existing copy, now stored in ECNU library. Scholar's study on Yang Mingzhu mainly lay on this. Although it hand-copied Yang Mingshi's transcription, it was especially valuable as the original Yang Mingshi's transcription was not left and other recopied ones were of too many mistakes.Yang Mingzhu's study on history inherited Gu Yanwu, with collation as its main point, but it was not exact enough, reflecting the characteristic of that period of historical research on Qing Dynasty. From the change of history research on Qing Dynasty, we can see that Yang Mingzhu played a role of a bridge connecting Pu Study of early Qing Dynasty and Qian Jia Study. Therefore, research on Yang Mingzhu is very valuable when we do the historical research on Qing Dynasty.