Remaining Volumes of the Setsubun Kibe

A Dictionary Older Than Its Own Printed Tradition

Around the year 100 CE, a scholar of the Later Han dynasty named Xu Shen completed the Shuowen Jiezi, the first dictionary in Chinese history to organize characters by their structural components. He sorted 9,353 characters under 540 radicals and explained how each was built, drawing on six formative principles that East Asian philology still teaches today. Xu Shen's original manuscript vanished centuries ago. The version read in classrooms and libraries around the world descends from a pair of recensions produced by the brothers Xu Xuan and Xu Kai in the tenth century, more than 850 years after the author's death.

That gap is precisely what makes a single damaged scroll in Osaka so extraordinary. The Setsumon Mokubu Zankan, or "fragmentary scroll of the wood radical section of the Shuowen," is a Tang dynasty manuscript copy believed to have been written in the first half of the ninth century. It preserves a portion of the dictionary as it circulated before the tenth-century recensions reshaped the text. Almost nothing else like it survives anywhere.

The scroll is held by the Takeda Science Foundation in Doshomachi, Osaka's historic pharmaceutical quarter, and was designated a National Treasure of Japan on June 9, 1951, in the very first round of designations under the postwar Cultural Properties Protection Law.

What the Fragment Contains

The Shuowen Jiezi groups characters by radical, and this scroll covers part of the "wood" section, the chapter devoted to characters built around the element for tree or timber. Of the 421 characters that the complete wood section is recorded to contain, the fragment preserves 188, written across 93 columns of ink on paper.

The page layout rewards a close look. Each column is ruled in ink and divided into two registers. The upper register presents the headword in small seal script, the formal writing system that the Shuowen was compiled to explain. The strokes taper to fine points in a manner known as kenshintai, the "hanging needle" style, which gives the archaic forms a wiry, almost botanical elegance fitting for a chapter about trees. Below each headword, in ordinary running script of the Tang period, comes the gloss: the character's meaning, its structural analysis, and its pronunciation.

Reading down a column feels unexpectedly familiar. Headword on top, definition beneath. The format of a modern character dictionary is already here, executed by a copyist who worked some twelve centuries ago.

The manuscript also matters for what it does not say. Where its readings differ from the transmitted tenth-century text, scholars gain a rare window onto how the dictionary read in the Tang period, before later editors intervened. Textual critics of the Shuowen treat this fragment as a witness of the first order for exactly that reason.

A Discovery That Sparked a Scholarly Feud

The scroll's modern history begins in China during the final decades of the Qing dynasty. The bibliophile and scholar Mo Youzhi (1811 to 1871) acquired the manuscript and recognized what he held: a Tang copy of a text everyone assumed survived only in Song-era and later transmission. In 1864 he published a woodblock-printed study, the Tang Manuscript Shuowen Jiezi Wood Section with Annotated Variants, presenting the fragment's readings to the scholarly world.

Not everyone believed him. Working only from the printed edition, without ever examining the scroll or even a photograph of it, several eminent philologists, Sun Yirang among them, pronounced the manuscript a forgery. Others, including Yang Shoujing, the Japanese sinologist Naito Konan, and later the linguist Zhou Zumo, defended its authenticity. The dispute flared up again in Chinese academic journals as late as the 1950s and 2000s. Recent scholarship has generally sided with the defenders, pointing out that the original doubters never saw the object they were doubting, though the episode remains a cautionary tale about judging manuscripts at second hand.

The scroll later crossed to Japan and eventually entered the collection assembled by the Takeda family of Osaka, passing to the Takeda Science Foundation, its present owner.

Why It Ranks Among Japan's National Treasures

Japan's National Treasure designation is not limited to works made in Japan. The category of calligraphy and classical books includes Chinese manuscripts and printed editions that survive in Japanese collections, often in better condition or earlier states than anything remaining in China itself. The Setsumon Mokubu Zankan was judged important enough to be included in the inaugural designation list of June 1951, alongside the most celebrated paintings and sculptures in the country.

Three things justify that ranking. First, age: a ninth-century manuscript of any secular Chinese text is a rarity. Second, textual value: this is the principal substantial witness to the Shuowen as it existed before the tenth-century recensions, making it indispensable for the study of the most influential dictionary in the history of Chinese writing. Third, the object itself: the ruled columns, the disciplined seal script, and the hanging-needle brushwork document Tang scribal practice at a high level of refinement.

For anyone interested in how knowledge about writing was organized and transmitted, few objects in any collection compress so much history into a single roll of paper.

Seeing the Scroll: Kyou Shooku Library

The Takeda Science Foundation houses its rare books in the Kyou Shooku, a research library at Doshomachi 2-3-6 in central Osaka. The name means "apricot rain," an allusion to a classical phrase in which the apricot grove symbolizes medicine; the library grew from the collection of Chobei Takeda V, who began buying old medical and botanical texts after the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923 destroyed irreplaceable books in Tokyo. The collection was donated to the foundation in 1977 and opened as a library in 1978.

Kyou Shooku is a working research library rather than a museum, and that shapes a visit. The building opens on weekdays from 10:00 to 16:00 and closes on weekends, national holidays, the year-end period, and two Fridays each month for cataloguing. Admission to the exhibition rooms is possible during opening hours, and the library mounts special exhibitions each spring and autumn in which selected treasures are shown. The Setsumon fragment appears only occasionally; it was displayed nearly in full at the library's 2023 exhibition of fine Chinese editions, and it traveled to the Tokyo National Museum's Yan Zhenqing exhibition in 2019 and to the Japan National Treasures exhibition at the Osaka City Museum of Fine Arts in 2025.

Checking the foundation's website or calling ahead is essential if seeing this particular scroll is the goal of your trip. Even when it is not on view, the permanent exhibition room introduces the collection's medical and pharmacological classics, several of them National Treasures and Important Cultural Properties in their own right.

Doshomachi: The Neighborhood of Medicine

The library's address is no accident. Doshomachi has been Osaka's medicine traders' street since the Edo period, when wholesalers licensed by the shogunate controlled the national drug trade from these few blocks. Takeda, Shionogi, and other pharmaceutical companies that grew into global firms all trace their origins here, and many keep offices in the district today.

A short walk along the street takes in Sukunahikona Shrine, dedicated jointly to the Japanese deity of medicine and to Shennong, the legendary Chinese patron of herbal medicine. Local people still call it Shinno-san, and its November festival hands out papier-mache tiger amulets that originated as a cholera remedy in 1822. Several company museums along the so-called Doshomachi Museum Street document the history of the drug trade. The Kusuri no Doshomachi Shiryokan, a free museum inside the Sukunahikona Shrine precinct, explains the neighborhood's 400-year story with Edo-period trade documents and medicine chests.

The district sits between the Kitahama and Sakaisuji-Hommachi subway stations, one stop from the financial center and within walking distance of Osaka Castle's outer moat to the east and the retro Western architecture of the Kitahama riverfront to the north. A visit to the scroll's home pairs naturally with an afternoon among these streets, where the connection between old Chinese books and the science of healing is not an abstraction but the founding logic of the whole quarter.