The Remaining Ninth Volume of the Jade Chapter

The Yupian, Volume Nine: A Lost Dictionary Preserved in Tokyo

The Yupian was a Chinese character dictionary, finished in the 540s by Gu Yewang, a scholar serving the Liang court in southern China. It originally ran to thirty volumes and sorted characters under 542 radical headings. For each head character it gave a pronunciation, built up a definition by quoting widely from the classics and their commentaries, and now and then added Gu's own opinion under the label "Yewang's note." No complete copy of the work survives anywhere, including the country that produced it.

Volume nine, held by Waseda University in Tokyo, is among the oldest portions still in existence. It is a manuscript copied by hand in China during the Tang dynasty, dated on the evidence of its brushwork to the eighth century. Japan designated it a National Treasure on June 9, 1951.

The piece is a handscroll. Its writing surface stands about 27 centimeters tall and runs past sixteen meters in length. Each entry opens with a boldly written head character, followed underneath by the pronunciation and explanation in smaller script. Later readers left vermilion and ink notes in the margins. Sections have dropped out over the centuries, so the scroll carries visible gaps; it was repaired in 1954.

Why an Old Copy Matters More Than the Text Itself

The value of this volume lies in its date relative to the words it carries. In 1013, scholars under Chen Pengnian revised and enlarged the Yupian into a new edition, the Daguang yihui Yupian. That version spread quickly and pushed the older text out of circulation. The dictionary as Gu Yewang actually wrote it, now called the "original Yupian," disappeared in China altogether.

Only in Japan did pieces of that earlier version survive. Copies had been carried across before the Song revision and kept in temples and private hands, sheltered from the changes that reshaped the text on the continent. The Waseda scroll is one of these survivors. It records how the dictionary read before later editors trimmed and rearranged it.

The surviving original text is thin and scattered. Fragments remain from roughly seven volumes (eight, nine, eighteen, nineteen, twenty two, twenty four, and part of twenty seven), together holding only about a tenth of the whole. Four of these fragments hold National Treasure status, and Waseda's volume nine is one of them. A related aid to scholars is the Tenrei banshō meigi, a dictionary compiled, by tradition, by the monk Kūkai. Its entries follow the order of the original Yupian closely and abridge its definitions, which lets researchers recover something of what the missing volumes once held.

The Buddhist Text on the Back, and What It Reveals

Turn the scroll over and a second work appears. A Buddhist commentary, the Kongōkai shiki, was copied onto the blank reverse, and its colophon records that the copying finished on a day in 1021. Paper was expensive, and reusing the empty back of an older roll was ordinary practice. That reuse pins down a date: the Yupian volume had to have reached Japan by 1021 at the latest, since by then its reverse side was already being written on. The colophon adds that the Buddhist text was copied from a master copy known as the Sekisen original.

The middle stretch of volume nine is no longer attached to the Waseda scroll. That gap is not entirely lost to the record. A three-sheet fragment kept at the Kyoto National Museum joins onto the missing section, once part of the same continuous roll. Read together, the two pieces restore a longer run of the dictionary than either holds alone, covering radical sections that begin with the heading for "speech" (言).

The scroll also carries the marks of its later owners. Before it entered the university collection it passed through several hands, including those of the Meiji statesman and collector Tanaka Mitsuaki, whose name is recorded among its former keepers.

Seeing the Scroll, in Person and Online

The original is shown only rarely. Waseda University has put it on view for short stretches during library exhibitions, for a few weeks in the spring of 2017 and again in the autumn of 2022. Anyone hoping to stand in front of the actual scroll needs to time a visit to one of these occasional displays, which are announced through the university library.

For most visitors the more reliable route is digital. The university library has photographed the scroll in high resolution and made the images available through its rare-books database, where the brushwork, the small explanatory script, and the red annotations can be studied closely at any time. The Waseda campus itself sits in the Nishiwaseda district of Shinjuku, within easy reach of central Tokyo, and the university's Aizu Museum nearby holds rotating exhibitions of East Asian art and rare materials that suit a wider trip.