Zeng Minxing Studied "Independence Magazine"

Minxing Zeng was an ordinary scholar in the Southern Song Dynasty. He had strong desires for study when he was a little child. However, he had to give up the Imperial Examinations due to illness, after which he devoted himself to study on calligraphy, painting, astronomy, medicine and architecture for about 30 years. He once wrote three volumes of Yingyanfang and ten volumes of Duxingzazhi, but only Duxingzazhi was handed down by later generations.Duxingzazhi was written by Minxing Zeng and edited by his son Sanpin Zeng. There are ten volumes and two hundred and fifty five articles throughout the entire book. And it is rich in content of four aspects, involving character anecdotes, political system, military and social condition of Jiangxi province, among which the content of character anecdotes occupies a larger proportion of this book. As an ordinary scholar, Minxing Zeng's description of characters is more vivid than official historians and he enriches the image of character a lot than official historians does; his records about political system is very specific, he describes related systems with specific details and executive routines, which benefits us a lot in understanding political systems; in the respect of military, there are some military actions of Song Dynasty recorded, especially the records on military strategy and tactics mistakes, which opens another angle for us to study the cause of the North Song Dynasty's perdition. In addition, Minxing Zeng uses a large part of this book describing people of his hometown, monasteries, temples, historical sites, economic, custom and so on. These contents provide us many important reference to study the social situations of Jiangxi Province in Song Dynasty.Duxingzazhi's value embodies in many ways. From the perspective of historical data, the contents in this book cannot only make up for the insufficient of historical records, but also can be the literature reference for the later generations; from the perspective of documents, its value reflects in compiling and emending; from the perspective of literature, the records of poets and literatis in Song Dynasty illustrate the situation of literati's contacts, travels and their creation of literary works.