Sentence Collection Notes

Monzen Shitchu: A Chinese Book That Survives Only in Japan

In 1955, the Japanese government designated nineteen handwritten scrolls in Yokohama as a National Treasure. The text they carry, the Monzen Shitchu (Wen Xuan Jizhu in Chinese), was compiled in Tang-dynasty China as a grand synthesis of commentaries on the Wen Xuan, the most influential literary anthology in East Asian history. In China itself, every copy of this compilation disappeared centuries ago. The work now exists nowhere on earth except in Japan, and the largest surviving portion belongs to Shomyoji, a temple in Yokohama's Kanazawa Ward, where it is kept at the Kanagawa Prefectural Kanazawa Bunko Museum.

The Wen Xuan (Monzen in Japanese) was assembled in the early sixth century under Xiao Tong, the Liang-dynasty crown prince known posthumously as Zhaoming. His editors selected poems, rhapsodies, memorials, and letters spanning roughly a thousand years of Chinese writing, creating the standard textbook of literary style for generations. When China introduced the civil service examinations, mastery of the Wen Xuan became close to a professional requirement. A Song-period saying held that a candidate who had worn out his copy of the anthology was already halfway to passing.

So many scholars annotated the work that by the late Tang period the commentaries themselves needed organizing. The Monzen Shitchu did exactly that. Its unknown compiler arranged the text of the anthology and beneath each passage gathered the major interpretations of the day: the erudite philological notes of Li Shan, the more accessible glosses of the so-called Five Officials, and several other commentaries besides. The original compilation is said to have run to 120 scrolls.

The Shomyoji scrolls are not the Tang original but a manuscript copy made in Japan during the Heian period. The copying is generally placed around the tenth to eleventh century, written in disciplined standard script on paper ruled with fine guide lines. By that time the Wen Xuan had long been required reading for the Japanese aristocracy; Sei Shonagon names it among the finest of books in The Pillow Book, and Kenko would later praise its moving volumes in Essays in Idleness.

Why These Nineteen Scrolls Matter to Scholars Worldwide

The value of the Monzen Shitchu rests on an accident of survival. In China, the printing boom of the Song dynasty standardized the Wen Xuan around two commentary traditions, those of Li Shan and the Five Officials. Once printed editions circulated cheaply, the older manuscript compilations stopped being copied, and the Jizhu vanished from its homeland. Several Tang commentaries it had absorbed disappeared along with it.

The Japanese manuscript therefore preserves material that exists nowhere else. Within its pages survive the annotations of Lu Shanjing, the phonetic guide known as the Onketsu (Yinjue), and the commentary called the Sho (Chao), all works lost in China and recoverable today only through this compilation. The scrolls also transmit an older state of the Li Shan commentary than any printed edition, which makes them a primary witness for textual scholars trying to reconstruct what Tang readers actually saw.

Because the final scroll with its colophon does not survive, the compiler's name and the exact date of compilation remain unknown. Scholarly literature acknowledges this openly, and the question is still debated.

The nineteen Shomyoji scrolls were designated a National Treasure on February 2, 1955, in the category of calligraphy and classical books. Seven further scrolls of the same compilation, which left the Kanazawa Bunko collection in later centuries, are held by the Toyo Bunko in Tokyo and carry their own National Treasure designation. A small number of fragments are scattered among other collections. Everything that remains of the 120-scroll original fits within these holdings.

From a Samurai Library to a Prefectural Museum

The scrolls owe their survival to one of medieval Japan's most bookish warrior families. Hojo Sanetoki (1224-1276), a grandson of the second Kamakura regent Hojo Yoshitoki, served as a senior adviser to the shogunate while building a personal library at his residence in Kanazawa, then a coastal estate south of Kamakura. That library, the Kanazawa Bunko, is the oldest samurai library whose collection still exists. One tradition holds that Sanetoki himself acquired the Monzen Shitchu manuscript, though the early provenance cannot be confirmed.

Three further generations of the Kanazawa Hojo family, Akitoki, Sadaaki, and Sadamasa, enlarged the collection with Chinese and Japanese books. When the Kamakura shogunate fell in 1333 and the family perished with it, the books passed to Shomyoji, the family's mortuary temple next door, which guarded them through the centuries that followed. Many volumes were carried off by later rulers and collectors, yet the Monzen Shitchu stayed.

The library was revived in 1897 through the good offices of the statesman Ito Hirobumi, and in 1930 Kanagawa Prefecture opened the modern Kanazawa Bunko as a public institution dedicated to preserving the Shomyoji materials. The present museum building dates from 1990. A tunnel cut through the hill, successor to a medieval passage, still links the temple grounds to the museum, so the books remain a few hundred meters from where Sanetoki shelved them more than seven centuries ago.

Seeing the Scrolls: What to Look For

The Monzen Shitchu is not on permanent display. Paper this old can tolerate only limited light, so the museum brings out a scroll or two during particular exhibitions, sometimes rotating which volume is open. Recent showings have included Scroll 66, unrolled to reveal about a meter of its opening section. Checking the exhibition schedule on the museum's website before traveling is essential if the manuscript itself is your goal.

When a scroll is out, stand close and let the page resolve into layers. The main text of the anthology appears in larger characters; beneath each phrase, the gathered commentaries run on in smaller writing, each tradition identified so a reader could compare interpretations at a glance. The browned paper carries faint ruled lines, and the regular standard script remains legible to anyone trained in classical Chinese, a thousand years after the brush left the page. Visitors who read the exhibited passage sometimes find familiar ground: one recent display showed commentary discussing Cao Cao, the warlord known to every reader of the Three Kingdoms saga.

Even when the manuscript is resting, the museum rewards a visit. Its galleries present Buddhist sculpture, paintings, and documents from the Shomyoji transmission, including pieces from the other two National Treasures in its care, and a reconstruction of the Shomyoji main hall interior with a radiant Miroku image occupies the rear of the first floor.

Around the Museum: Shomyoji and the Kanazawa Coast

Plan the visit as a pairing. Shomyoji, the legal owner of the scrolls, sits on the far side of the tunnel from the museum. Its Pure Land garden, restored on the basis of a 1323 temple plan that is itself an Important Cultural Property, centers on the Aji-ike pond crossed by a vermilion arched bridge, with the main hall rising beyond. Cherry blossoms in spring and the August lantern festival draw the largest crowds, but on an ordinary weekday morning the garden is quiet enough to hear herons in the shallows.

The museum is reached in about twelve minutes on foot from Kanazawa-Bunko Station on the Keikyu Line, roughly thirty minutes from Yokohama Station and under an hour from central Tokyo. A short bus ride to the Shomyoji stop allows an approach through the temple grounds and the tunnel instead. The surrounding district repays a half day: Umi-no-Koen, the city's only sand beach, lies one station away at Kanazawa-Hakkei, and the Hakkeijima Sea Paradise aquarium complex stands offshore on its island. Kamakura's temples are a short ride further down the peninsula, convenient for joining this visit to a broader Kamakura itinerary.