Collection of Ouyang Bunchuko Published in the Song Dynasty

A Southern Song Edition of Ouyang Xiu's Collected Works

Around the year 1196, in the riverside prefecture of Jizhou in present-day Jiangxi, a retired chief councillor named Zhou Bida (1126–1204) brought to a close a labour that had occupied him and his collaborators for roughly five years. The task was to produce a corrected, complete edition of the writings of Ouyang Xiu, arranged in 153 fascicles with a further five fascicles of appendices. The blocks were cut at Zhou's own family school. This National Treasure, held today at the Tenri Central Library in Nara, is a surviving impression of that edition, carried across the sea to Japan and kept for centuries in a samurai library near Kamakura.

Ouyang Xiu (1007–1072) was one of the towering figures of the Northern Song: a statesman who rose to high office, a historian who reworked the standard history of the Tang, and a poet and essayist counted among the Eight Great Prose Masters of the Tang and Song. After his death the court granted him the honorary name Wenzhong, and his collected works are accordingly titled the Ouyang Wenzhonggong ji. The Tenri copy preserves thirty-nine of the original volumes in close to complete form.

Why a Printed Book Became a National Treasure

The Song dynasty was the great age of Chinese woodblock printing. Editions cut during these centuries, known to later collectors as Songban, were prized for their careful scholarship and their clean, well-proportioned characters, and a good number reached Japan through trade and through the monks who travelled between the two countries. Among them, Zhou Bida's edition of Ouyang Xiu holds a particular place: it became the authoritative text on which later printings depended, and the imperial Qing compilers of the eighteenth-century Siku Quanshu still treated it as their standard.

What set the edition apart was its method. Zhou and his editors, the veteran scholar Sun Qianyi and the textual specialist Ding Chaozuo among them, gathered older copies and cross-checked them against earlier collected works, recording variant readings and noting where they had altered or rearranged the text. Their approach consciously followed the example of Zhu Xi's critical study of the prose of Han Yu. Passages missing from their base text but found elsewhere were gathered into a separate supplement. The result was less a simple reprint than an early exercise in textual criticism, and it is this scholarly weight, as much as the beauty of the printing, that earned the designation of National Treasure in 1952.

One detail of dating deserves a note. The national cultural-property database records the work under the year 1196, the season in which Zhou Bida's editorial labour was completed. Catalogue scholarship at Tenri places the actual printing of this particular set a little later, in the years around 1201 to 1207, since the blocks were cut over an extended period as material came to hand. Both figures point to the same edition, separated only by the gap between finishing the text and pulling the impression now in Nara.

Reading the Book Closely

A volume of Song printing rewards slow looking. The characters were cut by hand from carefully written copy, and the page balances dense columns of text against generous margins in a way that later, more crowded editions rarely match. For a reader who knows the history, there is a quiet pleasure in the contents as well. The collection gathers Ouyang Xiu's prose memorials, his historical writing, his letters, and his verse, including a poem on a Japanese sword traditionally counted among his works. A Chinese book carrying a Chinese poet's lines about a Japanese blade, printed in the Southern Song and then shipped to Japan to be shelved beside Buddhist scripture, makes for an unusually layered object.

The set also bears witness to its Japanese afterlife. It belonged to the Kanazawa Bunko, the library founded in the thirteenth century by Hojo Sanetoki of the Kanazawa branch of the Hojo family, who served the Kamakura shogunate in senior posts and collected books on government, law, agriculture, military affairs, and literature. The library stood beside his residence at Kanazawa, in what is now a ward of Yokohama, and was placed in the care of the neighbouring temple of Shomyo-ji. Books that passed through it were stamped with the Kanazawa Bunko seal, regarded as the oldest collector's seal used in Japan. When the Kamakura shogunate fell in 1333 the library lost its patrons, and over the following centuries its holdings were carried off by one ruling house after another and gradually scattered. That this set survived nearly whole, and can be traced back to that vanished medieval library, is part of what makes it remarkable.

Around the Library

The book is owned by Tenri University and kept at its Central Library in Tenri, a small city in the Nara basin reached easily from Nara, Osaka, and Kyoto. The library is one of the great repositories of rare East Asian texts in Japan, though its treasures are not on permanent open display. The most reliable way to see this edition, or others of its kind, is through the special exhibitions held periodically at the nearby Tenri University Sankokan Museum or at the university's gallery in Tokyo, where rare Chinese and Japanese books are shown in rotation.

Tenri itself sits at the southern end of the Yamanobe-no-michi, an ancient path that threads past old shrines and burial mounds along the foot of the eastern hills, with the venerable Isonokami Jingu within walking distance. Travellers drawn to the origins of this particular book may also look north to Yokohama, where the Kanagawa Prefectural Kanazawa Bunko museum stands beside Shomyo-ji, its restored Pure Land garden and reflecting pond among the most evocative survivals of the Kamakura age. The museum mounts occasional exhibitions devoted to the old library's books and the seal they carry.