Jiang Fan Chronicle Supplement

Jiang Fan (1761-1830), one of the most important scholars of Yangzhou School in the Qianlong and Jiaqing periods of the Qing Dynasty, worshiped the Han academic tradition very much and was a perfect master of classical works of philosophy, history, and literature. His works On Inheriting the Han Academic Tradition is a must-reading for study of the academic history of the Qing Dynasty. He wrote a large number of poems and classical pieces of ci. He was generous and romantic in character and had made friends anywhere he visited such places as Qi, Jin, Yan, Zhao, Min, Yue, Jiang and Zhe. However, Jiang constantly failed in examinations for an official position in his life and remained a farmer till his death. So his life and activity were not widely known by people. Though there is a short introduction to him in Collected Biographies of the Qing Dynasty, he is not clearly portrayed. It's fortunate that Min Erchang once compiled in the sixteenth year of the Republic of China A Chronicle of Jiang Ziping's Life (Chronicle for short), so that Jiang's life can be outlined in vague way. But still there are not enough documents for research on Jiang, some of the documents even have errors, some don't note the sources of information which makes it difficult for later researchers to believe or to cite. Recently, Qing Yongxiang has published his great works Study on Jiang Fan and his On Inheriting the Han Academic Tradition, in which there is an appendix A New Compiled Chronicle of Jiang Fan's Chronicle (Qi-Chronicle for short). Compared with Chronicle, Qi-Chronicle has cited several times more documents. But at the same time, Qin's works is specialized in the research on Jiang's works, not on a chronicle of Jiang's life, so there are places where something can be made up or corrected in Qi-Chronicle. The present research makes a detailed comparison of the two chronicles and presents more than one hundred made-up items, scores of corrected items and hundreds of references.