Song Dynasty Version of Mao Shi Justice〈Shaoxing Nine Years

A Song-Dynasty Printed Classic in Osaka's Pharmaceutical District

In 1139, a printing workshop in Southern Song China cut woodblocks for the Maoshi zhengyi, the official Tang-dynasty commentary on the Classic of Poetry. Seventeen volumes from that printing survive today, not in Beijing or Taipei, but on a quiet street in Osaka called Doshomachi, where pharmaceutical companies have traded medicine since the seventeenth century. The set is known as the Sohan Moshi seigi (Song Edition of the Maoshi zhengyi), printed in the ninth year of the Shaoxing era, and Japan designated it a National Treasure on June 9, 1951.

Its owner is the Takeda Science Foundation, the philanthropic arm associated with the Takeda pharmaceutical house. The foundation keeps the volumes at Kyo-U Sho-oku (Kyo-U Library), a research library it operates in Doshomachi 2-chome, Chuo Ward, Osaka. The library holds three National Treasures in total, all of them Chinese texts, and the Maoshi zhengyi is the largest of the three at seventeen volumes.

The book carries a second name in its official designation: the Kanazawa Bunko copy. Ownership seals show it once belonged to the Kanazawa Bunko, the celebrated samurai library founded in the thirteenth century by Hojo Sanetoki near Kamakura. A Chinese book printed in 1139, carried across the sea to medieval Japan, shelved in a warrior's library, and now preserved by a pharmaceutical foundation: the volumes have outlived every institution that first made and kept them.

What the Maoshi Zhengyi Is

The Classic of Poetry, or Shijing, gathers 305 poems from China's Zhou period and ranks among the Five Classics of the Confucian canon. The version that survived antiquity descends from the transmission of the Mao school, hence the name Maoshi, "the Mao Poems." Generations of scholars layered explanations onto these poems, and in the seventh century the Tang court decided to settle the arguments. Emperor Taizong ordered the scholar Kong Yingda (574 to 648) and his colleagues to compile authoritative commentaries on the Five Classics, a project completed in 653 under the title Wujing zhengyi, "Correct Meanings of the Five Classics."

The Maoshi zhengyi is the Poetry volume of that project. It became the standard interpretation used in the civil service examinations, which meant that for centuries every ambitious student in China, and many in Japan and Korea, read the Classic of Poetry through Kong Yingda's eyes.

The Osaka set belongs to a textual format that book historians prize. Early printings issued the zhengyi commentary on its own, without the poem texts and older annotations interwoven, a format called a tansho-bon in Japanese, or single-commentary edition. Later publishers found it more convenient to merge everything into combined editions, and the older single-commentary format largely dropped out of circulation. Surviving examples are accordingly scarce, and this set is regarded as an exceptionally rare witness to how the commentary circulated before the merged editions took over.

The colophon dates the printing to the ninth year of Shaoxing, which corresponds to 1139. The timing is poignant. The Song court had lost northern China to the Jin invasion barely a decade earlier and was rebuilding its institutions in the south. Reprinting the Confucian classics was part of that reconstruction, a government asserting cultural continuity after catastrophe.

Why It Became a National Treasure

Japan's designation system reserves the National Treasure rank for objects of the highest historical and scholarly value, and printed Chinese books rarely reach it. This set qualified on several grounds at once.

First, age and rarity. Song printing represents the first great flowering of woodblock publishing, admired ever since for the clarity of its characters and the quality of its paper and ink. Books from the early Southern Song, securely dated by colophon, are uncommon anywhere in the world, and single-commentary editions of the Maoshi zhengyi are rarer still. Scholars have long treated the Kyo-U Library set as essential evidence for reconstructing the text's early transmission, and the library published a full facsimile in four cases between 2011 and 2013 so that researchers could study it without handling the original.

Second, provenance. The Kanazawa Bunko seals stamped on the volumes tie the set to one of medieval Japan's defining intellectual institutions. Hojo Sanetoki, a senior figure of the Kamakura shogunate's ruling clan, assembled his library in the Kanazawa district of Musashi Province, now part of Yokohama, in the latter half of the thirteenth century. The collection mixed Buddhist scriptures with Chinese secular classics and served the scholarly ambitions of the warrior elite. After the shogunate fell in 1333, the library's holdings gradually dispersed, and books bearing its seals surfaced over the following centuries in temples, daimyo collections, and private hands. Each surviving Kanazawa Bunko book is a fragment of that lost whole, and this one shows that a massive Chinese commentary on the Classic of Poetry was available to readers in Kamakura within roughly a century and a half of its printing.

Third, condition and completeness. Seventeen volumes survive as a coherent set, enough to give scholars a sustained run of the text rather than stray fascicles.

Looking at the Volumes

What rewards close attention in a book like this is the craft of the page. Song woodblock printing at its best has a calligraphic vigor that later reprints rarely match. Each character was written by a professional copyist, pasted face down on a pearwood or jujube block, and cut by hand, so the printed page preserves the rhythm of a living brush. The commentary text runs in dense columns, with the large characters of headings and the smaller characters of annotation creating a visual hierarchy that guides the reader through Kong Yingda's argument.

The ownership seals deserve a pause of their own. The Kanazawa Bunko impressions, stamped in vermilion centuries ago, are the documentary thread connecting Song China to medieval Kamakura. Visitors who saw the set during its 2023 exhibition noted how prominently the seals sit on the page, a reminder that in East Asian book culture, marks of ownership were proudly displayed rather than hidden.

A practical note: the original is shown only rarely. Kyo-U Library mounts special exhibitions in spring and autumn, and its regular displays often present fine facsimiles in place of the most fragile originals. The seventeen volumes appeared in the library's 77th special exhibition, "Fine Chinese Books of the Kyo-U Library," held from late October to December 2023. Anyone determined to see the actual National Treasure should watch the library's exhibition announcements and plan around them. The 2011 to 2013 facsimile edition, held by major research libraries, offers the closest substitute and reproduces the pages at full detail.

Doshomachi: Medicine, Merchants, and a Shrine

The library's neighborhood repays a walk. Doshomachi has been Osaka's medicine quarter since the Edo period, when licensed wholesalers controlled the national drug trade from this street. Takeda, Shionogi, and other pharmaceutical firms still keep offices here, and the connection between the district's trade and the library's collecting focus on the history of medicine and pharmacy is no accident.

Two minutes away is Sukunahikona Shrine, dedicated jointly to the Japanese deity of medicine and to Shennong, the legendary Chinese patron of herbal medicine. Locals call it Shinno-san. Its annual festival on November 22 and 23, the Shinno Festival, is famous as the last major festival of Osaka's calendar year, and paper-mache tigers sold as charms recall a cholera remedy distributed here in 1822. The Kusuri no Doshomachi Shiryokan, a small museum of the pharmaceutical trade, stands within the shrine precincts and explains the district's 400-year history.

The library is also an easy add-on to central Osaka sightseeing. Kitahama Station on the Sakaisuji subway line and the Keihan line is a short walk away, Osaka Castle is two stops east, and the retro architecture of the Kitahama financial district, including the red-brick Osaka Securities Exchange building, lines the route toward the river. The Museum of Oriental Ceramics, with its own celebrated Chinese holdings, sits on Nakanoshima island ten minutes on foot to the north.