Wuyi Nan Song Xu Weili wenshu ed. by Bao Weimin and Zheng Jiali (review)

Historians of the Song dynasty have long lamented the dearth of true primary documents—written materials of some historical significance that survive physically intact from Song times to the present. Excepting epigraphic sources, we have no parallels to the oracle bones, Zhou bronzes, or Dunhuang documents. True, our major sources for Song political history descend from primary documents; but, in their present form, they are many stages removed from the real thing.¹

Xu Weili 徐謂禮 (1202–1254) was a native of Wuyi 武義 county, southeast of Wuzhou 婺州, the modern Jinhua 金華 in Zhejiang. His father, Xu Bangxian 徐邦憲 (1154–1210) placed first in the departmental jinshi examinations of 1193. The elder Xu had a prominent official career, including a tour as mayor of Lin’an, and the Song History contains his biography. His youngest son’s career, however, was more modest: Xu Weili has no surviving biography,² and Song sources seldom mention him. But now, the archaeological discovery of the primary documents presented in this volume will enable scholars to understand his modest career in greater bureaucratic detail than for any other Song official.

In 2005 a farmer clearing bamboo discovered the tomb of Xu Weili and his spouse in Wuyi county. Together with four accomplices, he then looted the tomb. Among its contents were two nondescript bundles of manuscripts. But the undistinguished calligraphy and lack of official seals rendered them unconvincing to the layman as Song manuscripts. They were thus more difficult to market than other more obviously valuable items from the tomb. So the looters divided the contents of the bundles among themselves, pending later disposition. In the meantime, they circulated photographs of the manuscripts, hoping to attract a buyer. These photographs eventually attracted the attention of authorities who arrested the looters and in July of 2012 reassembled the papers. Bao Weimin of Zhejiang University immediately recognized the importance of the discovery and organized a team of scholars to edit and publish the material. We owe a large debt of gratitude to Bao Weimin and his collaborators, to the Zhejiang Institute of Archaeology, and to Zhonghua shuju for the great dispatch with which they accomplished their task and have thus made the Xu Weili documents accessible to Song scholars the world over.

The volume contains an introductory essay by Bao Weimin (pp. 1–14), photographs of the documents (pp. 3–181), a complete transcription into full-form characters with some annotation by Wei Feng 魏峰 and Wang Yu 王宇 (pp. 185–267), and an archaeological report on the tomb by Li Huida 李暉達 and Zheng Jiali 鄭嘉勵 (pp. 269–290). The two bundles, originally sealed in wax, contained fifteen scrolls of varying length and total about 40,000 characters. The first bundle contained three scrolls with copies of Xu Weili’s eleven gaoshen 告身 (patents of office) and ten chihuang 敕黃 (appointment edicts). Twelve scrolls in the second bundle are copies of his yinzhi 印紙 (stamped papers) that record eighty distinct personnel actions over the course of his career. All of these documents are labeled lubai 錄白 (copies on white [paper]); they contain no seals and are written in a single calligraphic hand. They are thus transcribed copies, not the original documents, which would have been written in many different hands and contained official seals. The modern transcription adheres closely to the original spacing of the text and preserves its line breaks, which are important structural features of the documents. The editors have added a number for each gaoshen, chihuang, and yinzhi entry, devised for each a title based on its content, inserted line numbers and punctuation, and provided cross-references to the plates. The resulting text is easy to read and easy to correlate against the photographs of the originals.

Bao Weimin’s introduction provides a helpful orientation to the documents, and this review owes much to his pioneering effort to describe the discovery and to outline some preliminary implications for larger...