Song Dynasty Version of Hanshu (published by Keiyuan)

An 800-Year-Old Printed Book That Names the Earliest Japanese

Open the right fascicle of the Hanshu kept at the National Museum of Japanese History and you reach a line that historians treat as the oldest dependable written notice of the Japanese in any Chinese dynastic history: in the sea beyond the Lelang commandery live the people of Wa, divided into more than a hundred communities, who come at fixed seasons to present themselves at the Han court. Those nineteen characters were composed by the historian Ban Gu in the first century, and the volume that carries them here was printed in China around 1195 to 1200, during the Qingyuan era of the Southern Song.

This is the Song-Printed Hanshu (Qingyuan Edition), a National Treasure held at the museum that everyone in Japan simply calls Rekihaku, in the city of Sakura, Chiba. It survives complete in sixty-one stitched fascicles. The Hanshu itself, the standard history of the Western Han dynasty, was assembled by Ban Gu and his family into imperial annals, chronological tables, topical treatises, and biographies. What sits in the display case is not a later copy of that text but a printed edition roughly eight centuries old, its impressions still crisp.

From a Fujian Print Shop to a Yonezawa Domain School

The Qingyuan edition was cut and printed at Jian'an in Jianning Prefecture, a town in Fujian that ran one of Song China's busiest commercial book trades. The same blocks produced a matched set of the three great early histories the Chinese call the San Shi: the Shiji, the Hanshu, and the Hou Hanshu, the Book of Later Han. The museum's copies of all three came down together, and scholars believe they were originally issued as a single three-part set. The Shiji was named a National Treasure in 1966; this Hanshu and its companion Hou Hanshu followed on the same day in June 1967.

How a set of Song books reached a castle town in the snow country of northern Japan is its own story. The volumes passed through the hands of Nanka Genkō, a prominent Rinzai Zen abbot of the late sixteenth century, and then into the library of Naoe Kanetsugu, the powerful chief retainer of the Uesugi house and a famous collector of Chinese texts. From the Uesugi they entered the Kōjōkan, the domain academy at Yonezawa, where generations of samurai students consulted them. For this reason the set is known to specialists as the Uesugi text.

A second complete Hanshu of this same Qingyuan edition is a National Treasure too, kept at the Matsumoto City Library, where six missing fascicles were long ago made up with a Ming reprint. The two copies are close kin, but the Uesugi text can be told apart by what it lacks: the Matsumoto volumes carry a printed note by the publisher Huang Zongren at the end of the table of contents, and the Yonezawa copy does not.

What to Look For in the Case

Song printing rewards a slow look. Each half-leaf holds ten columns of text, eighteen characters to the column, framed by double ruled borders, with smaller paired columns dropping in the commentary. At the center fold sits the fish-tail mark, a printer's guide that told the binder where to crease each sheet before it was stitched into the pouch-bound fascicles you see. The characters imitate the hand of a Song master calligrapher, so the page reads less like a machine product than like a disciplined manuscript.

Look to the margins. Zen monks of Japan's Gozan monasteries, who studied these histories closely, filled the upper and lower edges with notes cross-referencing the Shiji and other works. Their annotations turn the book into a record of how Chinese history was read and taught in medieval Japan, not merely a text imported and shelved.

The Hanshu also contains one of the more curious documents in early Chinese scholarship, the Table of Ancient and Modern People, which sorts historical figures into nine ranked grades, from the highest of the high down to the lowest of the low. When the book is open to that table, the grid of judgments on long-dead emperors and ministers is oddly compelling. And when the museum displays this set, it is the Hanshu that appears in the original; the neighboring Hou Hanshu is usually shown as a facsimile, so the page in front of you really is the eight-hundred-year-old sheet.

Planning a Visit

The National Museum of Japanese History stands on the wooded grounds of the former Sakura Castle, and its six permanent galleries walk you through the Japanese past from prehistory to the present, with full-scale dioramas and reconstructions that make the place worth a half-day on its own. The book is a light-sensitive paper treasure, so it is brought out only for limited periods rather than shown year-round. Anyone making a special trip to see it should check the museum's exhibition calendar before traveling and aim for one of the announced display windows.

Sakura itself rewards a wander, with the castle earthworks, samurai residences, and the gardens of the former Hotta family nearby. The museum sits about fifteen minutes on foot from Keisei Sakura Station, which is roughly fifty-five minutes by limited express from Keisei Ueno in Tokyo; a short bus ride covers the same distance for those who would rather not walk.