The Sixth and Remaining Volume of the New Book of World

Sesetsu Shinsho, Surviving Fragment of Scroll Six: The World's Oldest Copy of a Chinese Classic

The oldest known manuscript of one of China's best-loved books of anecdotes is not in China. It is a single handscroll, brushed in Tang-dynasty China around the seventh century, and it survives only because someone in Heian-period Kyoto judged the paper worth keeping. Centuries after the Chinese text was written, a Japanese monk turned the scroll over and copied an esoteric Buddhist ritual onto the blank reverse. That act of reuse preserved a page of Tang calligraphy that has vanished everywhere else.

The work is the Shishuo Xinyu, known in Japan by the older title Sesetsu Shinsho (Shishuo Xinshu). This fragment, owned by the Japanese state and held at the Kyoto National Museum, was designated a National Treasure on 9 June 1951.

What the Scroll Contains

The Shishuo Xinyu, or "A New Account of the Tales of the World," was compiled in the early fifth century by Liu Yiqing (403–444), a prince of the Liu Song court. It gathers short, sharply observed anecdotes about the aristocrats, writers, and monks of the late Han through the Eastern Jin, sorted into thirty-six thematic chapters. The Liang-dynasty scholar Liu Xiaobiao later added a dense commentary that quotes many books now otherwise lost, which is part of why the text matters so much to historians.

This fragment preserves part of the tenth chapter, Kishin ("Admonitions"), a section devoted to the art of giving counsel and warning. The original sixth scroll was cut into several pieces during the Meiji era and dispersed among different owners. Today the surviving portions are held by the Agency for Cultural Affairs, the Tokyo National Museum, the Kyoto National Museum, and a private collection. The Kishin chapter itself ended up divided between this state-owned piece and the Kyoto National Museum's fragment.

Why It Became a National Treasure

Scholars regard this scroll as the earliest surviving manuscript of the Shishuo Xinyu anywhere in the world. No copy of comparable age remains in China itself. The brushwork is firm, even, and refined, written in a clear regular script that descends from the tradition of Wang Xizhi, and the quality of the paper points to a date in the seventh century, within the early Tang. For anyone studying how the classics were copied and read in that period, the scroll is a rare primary witness.

Its value runs in a second direction as well. The Chinese text carries red okoto-ten reading marks and kana glosses added by Japanese readers, the marks scholars use to reconstruct how Heian Japanese parsed and pronounced classical Chinese. These annotations show the scroll was already in Japan by the middle of the Heian period, which makes it an important source for the history of kunten, the Japanese system for reading Chinese texts.

What to Look For

The first thing to notice is the writing itself. Each character sits upright and self-contained, almost like printed type, with the disciplined evenness of a court scriptorium. Compared with the looser running hands of later centuries, this early Tang script reads with surprising clarity even today.

The reverse tells the second half of the story. There a late-Heian hand has copied the Kongōchō Rengebu Shin-nenju Giki, a Shingon esoteric ritual manual. By the late eleventh or twelfth century the Chinese text on the front was apparently treated as scrap, and the blank side was the real prize. One of the fragments bears the signature of the Shingon scholar-monk Gōhō (1306–1362), which confirms that the scroll passed through the Kanchi-in sub-temple of Tō-ji in Kyoto. A discarded Chinese classic, salvaged for its paper, became a Buddhist working document, and through that double life it reached the present.

Look also at the okoto-ten: small red dots placed at fixed points around the characters. To a Heian reader these signaled Japanese grammatical endings and reading order, a quiet layer of Japanese voice laid over a Chinese text.

How to Experience It

This is a fragile thousand-year-old manuscript rather than a building or a site, so it is not on permanent display. It appears only occasionally, usually in special exhibitions of calligraphy or East Asian writing at major museums; in recent years it has been shown alongside works connected to Wang Xizhi and Yan Zhenqing. Checking the Kyoto National Museum's exhibition schedule before a visit is the only reliable way to catch it.

The Kyoto National Museum sits in the Higashiyama district, one of the richest corners of the old capital. Within walking distance are Sanjūsangen-dō, famous for its rows of carved Kannon figures, and the great temple complexes of Kiyomizu-dera and Tōfuku-ji a little farther afield. For visitors drawn to where this scroll spent much of its life, Tō-ji and its five-story pagoda stand near Kyoto Station, a short ride to the southwest.