The Sixth and Remaining Volume of the New Book of World

A Scroll That Outlived Its Homeland: The Sesetsu Shinsho Fragment

One hundred seventy-two lines of Chinese characters, brushed onto hemp paper roughly thirteen centuries ago, survive today in the Kyoto National Museum. The scroll is a fragment of the sixth fascicle of the Shishuo Xinshu (in Japanese, Sesetsu shinsho), a celebrated collection of anecdotes about the aristocrats, generals, and wits of early medieval China. In China itself, every Tang-period manuscript of this work has vanished. The copies that crossed the sea to Japan are all that remain of the text as readers of the Tang dynasty knew it, and this scroll is among the oldest of them.

The Japanese government designated the fragment a National Treasure on June 9, 1951. It is a single handscroll, written in China during the Tang dynasty, most likely between the late seventh and early eighth centuries.

The work it carries was compiled long before the scroll itself was written. Liu Yiqing (403–444), an imperial prince of the Liu Song dynasty, gathered hundreds of short anecdotes about the famous personalities of the Later Han through Eastern Jin periods, sorting them into thematic chapters: virtue, speech, statecraft, extravagance, quick thinking. A few decades later the scholar Liu Jun (462–521), better known by his courtesy name Xiaobiao, added a learned commentary that quotes scores of books now lost. Western readers may know the text under its later title, Shishuo Xinyu, translated as A New Account of Tales of the World. The Kyoto scroll preserves the book's original name, a point we will return to.

Why a Chinese Manuscript Became a Japanese National Treasure

Japan's National Treasure designation is not limited to objects made in Japan. It recognizes cultural property of exceptional value held in the country, and imported works that survive nowhere else rank high on that scale.

The dating of this scroll rests on a detail invisible to casual viewers. Within the "Admonitions" chapter, the copyist altered a character to avoid writing the personal name of Emperor Gaozong of Tang, who reigned from 649 to 683. Taboo avoidance of this kind was binding only while the emperor's authority was current, so scholars place the copying after Gaozong's accession, in the second half of the seventh century or the early decades of the eighth. That makes the scroll, together with its sister fragments, the oldest surviving manuscript of the work anywhere in the world. Printed editions from the Song dynasty onward descend from revised texts; the Kyoto scroll shows the book in an earlier state, with wordings and commentary passages that later editions dropped or rewrote.

There is also the matter of the title. The final segment of the original fascicle, now in the Tokyo National Museum, ends with the tail inscription "Sesetsu shinsho, fascicle six." From the Song period onward the book circulated as Shishuo Xinyu, and only this group of fragments proves that Tang readers knew it as Shishuo Xinshu. A single line of ink settled a centuries-old bibliographic question.

One scroll, then, serves three fields at once: it is a primary witness for Chinese literature, a specimen of early Tang calligraphy, and, as explained below, a record of how Japanese monks studied a Chinese book.

What to Look For

The Kyoto National Museum fragment was once the second section of a complete scroll of fascicle six. It contains the latter 111 lines of the chapter "Guizhen" ("Admonitions"), stories of frank advice offered to the powerful, followed by all 61 lines of "Jiewu" ("Quick Perception"), anecdotes of people who grasp a situation faster than everyone around them. The cast includes some of the most storied figures of third- and fourth-century China.

The format rewards a close look. Each sheet of fine hemp paper carries 25 ruled lines. The main text runs about 13 large characters to the line; Liu Jun's commentary is inserted in half-size characters, two columns squeezed into the space of one, at roughly 16 characters per column. The hand is a disciplined standard script, firm in its strokes yet unhurried, and so regular that visitors sometimes compare it to type. Calligraphy specialists prize it as a benchmark of early Tang brushwork.

Look closer still and the scroll begins to speak Japanese. Tiny white dots and faint impressions made with a kakuhitsu, a pointed stylus that scores the paper without ink, mark the text as an aid to reading Chinese in Japanese word order. Someone in Japan worked through this scroll, sentence by sentence, centuries before the Meiji era. Reading marks of this antiquity are scarce, and they make the fragment a key source for historians of the Japanese language as well.

The back of the scroll holds a second text entirely. In the late Heian period, when paper was too valuable to waste, the reverse side was used to copy the Kongōchō rengebu shin nenju giki, an esoteric Buddhist ritual manual, itself annotated in white and vermilion. The scroll long belonged to Kanchi-in, a sub-temple of Tō-ji in Kyoto famed for its library of esoteric texts, which explains how a Chinese storybook came to share its paper with a Shingon liturgy.

Cut into Four: The Modern Fate of Fascicle Six

For most of its life in Japan the fascicle remained intact at Kanchi-in. In the Meiji era it was divided into four sections, which passed into separate collections. Today the opening portion of "Admonitions" belongs to the Agency for Cultural Affairs; the second section, formerly in the Yamada family collection, is the Kyoto National Museum scroll described here; the "Haoshuang" ("The Bold and Dashing") section is in the Tokyo National Museum; and another portion remains in private hands. Each was designated a National Treasure.

Division was a common fate for famous calligraphy in that period, when fragments of celebrated scrolls were mounted separately for collectors of tea-ceremony art. Regrettable as the cutting may seem, it also multiplied the chances of survival, and the four sections have all come down to us.

Seeing the Scroll, and What Else to See Nearby

Like most ancient manuscripts, the fragment is not on permanent view. Works on paper of this age can be exhibited only for short periods under controlled light, so the scroll appears occasionally in the calligraphy room of the Kyoto National Museum's Heisei Chishinkan Wing or in special exhibitions. Check the museum's exhibition schedule before a visit. High-resolution images of the entire fragment can be examined any time on the e-Museum website run by the National Institutes for Cultural Heritage, and the digital reproduction is detailed enough to show the white reading dots.

The museum itself justifies the trip regardless. Its collection of paintings, sculpture, ceramics, and textiles centers on Kyoto's temples and shrines, and the red-brick Meiji Kotokan building of 1895 is a landmark of Meiji-era architecture. The surrounding Higashiyama district concentrates an unusual number of sights within walking distance: Sanjūsangendō with its 1,001 statues of Kannon stands directly across the street, the Toyokuni Shrine and the giant temple bell of Hōkō-ji are a few minutes north, and the gardens of Chishaku-in lie just to the south. Kyoto Station is one stop away by bus or a fifteen-minute walk along Shichijō-dōri.