Treatises of the Supervisor and Guardian of the Cinnamon Sea: The Natural World and Material Culture of Twelfth-Century China

Translator’s Note

XVII Translator’s Note This book is full of personal names, place-names, technical terms, and other specialized vocabulary. The Chinese characters for these names and terms can be found in the GlossaryIndex . As a general rule, I have included Chinese characters (for names and terms) in the body of the text and footnote apparatus only when possible confusion begs clarification. Complete references for sources cited in the footnotes are included in the Bibliography. Titles of sources cited frequently in the footnotes are given in abbreviated form (for example, WXTK for Wenxian tongkao ). For the complete titles of these sources, see Abbreviations Used in the Notes and Bibliography. Readers with a special interest in technical matters such as scientific nomenclatures, various units of measurement, office titles, Song dynasty administrative terminology, and so on, may want to read through the section of the Introduction titled “Terminology, Measurements , and Dates” before turning to the translation. On some occasions Chinese characters will appear in brackets, as in the following example: Fubo Yan 伏[洑]波巖. This indicates that the character in brackets is an alternate and, on some occasions, more correct, written form of this particular name. In the example XVIII Translator’s Note just given, the commonly used character for fu is 伏, though strictly speaking the correct character is written 洑. Map 1 includes most of the Southern Song (ca. 1175) place-names mentioned in Treatises. Some of these toponyms have more than one written form in Chinese, for which readers may consult the GlossaryIndex . On several occasions in the text, different names are used to refer to the same place. On Map 1, the official name is given first, followed by the alternate name (or names) in parentheses: for example, Jingjiang (Gui, Guilin, Guizhou). ...