Shiki〈Luhouhonki No. 9〉

A Handscroll From 1073 That Carries Ancient China Into Japanese

Inside the Mōri Museum in Hōfu, Yamaguchi, a single paper handscroll holds the ninth chapter of the Shiji, the Records of the Grand Historian that Sima Qian completed in China around 90 BCE. The chapter is the Annals of Empress Lü, which follows the widow of the Han dynasty's founder as she took command of the court. The Chinese text was already a thousand years old when a Japanese scholar copied it out in the first month of 1073, and it is that act of copying, not the original composition, that earned this scroll the rank of National Treasure.

The scholar was Ōe no Iekuni, who came from a lineage that had made the reading of Chinese histories its hereditary work. He wrote out the chapter and then worked across the columns with reading marks: the dots, lines, and small notations that told a Japanese reader how to reorder and pronounce dense classical Chinese. A note at the very end of the scroll records the precise year, Enkyū 5.

That one dated line is what sets the object apart.

Why a Copy Outranks Many Originals

Specialists regard this scroll as the oldest dated manuscript of the Shiji known in Japan, and also as the oldest dated example of kunten, the marking system that let Japanese readers work through literary Chinese. Classical Chinese follows a word order and grammar foreign to Japanese, so readers added marks to signal which characters to read first, where to insert Japanese particles, and how to voice each word. Iekuni applied two colors: vermilion dots placed at fixed positions around the characters to stand for grammatical endings, and black ink for pronunciations and glosses. He also packed the margins and the backs of the sheets with cross-references to the Shiji and with older commentary on the Book of Han.

His undertaking was far larger than the one chapter that survives here. Iekuni copied and annotated something close to the full Shiji, a project running to roughly 130 chapters. Only three of those scrolls remain. All three are National Treasures: this Annals of Empress Lü at the Mōri Museum, the Annals of Emperor Wen held by Tohoku University Library, and the Annals of Emperor Jing in the Daitōkyū Memorial Library in Tokyo. Scholars group them under the name Shiki Enkyū-ten, after the era in which the marks were added.

For his master text Iekuni relied on the Collected Explanations compiled by Pei Yin under the Liu Song dynasty, a standard scholarly edition of the Shiji at the time. The choice tells us that even on the far side of the continent, eleventh-century Japanese learning was tracking the authoritative Chinese commentaries closely.

The scroll first received state protection as a National Treasure under the prewar system in 1931. When the present Law for the Protection of Cultural Properties took effect, it was reclassified as an Important Cultural Property in 1950, then designated a National Treasure again under the current system on 22 November 1952.

What to Look For When It Is on View

The first thing a visitor notices is the layering. Beneath the columns of black characters run the smaller marks in red and black, and once you know what they are, the scroll reads less like a finished book and more like a working tool: a Chinese classic in the act of being understood by someone who did not grow up speaking the language. The discipline of the hand is part of the appeal, since every dot had to land in exactly the right spot to carry its meaning.

The scroll also records its own afterlife. The colophon shows that after Iekuni it passed to a descendant named Ieyuki, that it was checked against a closely guarded reference copy in 1101, and that a chamberlain named Tokimichi read it through in 1196. Few medieval manuscripts let you trace their readers across more than a century so plainly.

There is a family reason the scroll ended up in Hōfu. The Mōri, lords of the Chōshū domain, traced their descent from the Ōe clan, the same scholarly house that produced Iekuni. For the family the scroll was both a national monument and an ancestral keepsake, which helps explain how it survived intact through centuries of warfare and upheaval.

One practical point: the museum rotates its holdings roughly every two months across about seven exhibitions a year, so this scroll is not always on display. Anyone making a special trip to see it should confirm the current exhibition in advance. Photography is not permitted inside the galleries.

Around the Mōri Museum

The museum occupies part of the former main residence of the Mōri family, a vast wooden mansion finished in 1916 and itself designated an Important Cultural Property in 2011. The house sits within a strolling garden of some 25,000 tsubo, laid out around a central pond and recognized as a National Place of Scenic Beauty since 1996. The grounds are at their busiest in mid to late November, when the maples turn and the museum stages its annual special exhibition of National Treasures, the occasion on which Sesshū's celebrated long landscape scroll is usually shown.

Hōfu is an easy stop on the San'yō Main Line. From Hōfu Station the residence is about six minutes by Bōchō bus toward Amidaji, getting off at the Mōri Hontei-iriguchi stop, or roughly eight minutes by car. Drivers coming off the San'yō Expressway at the Hōfu-Higashi or Hōfu-Nishi interchange reach the gate in about fifteen minutes, and parking is free. The garden stays open year round, even during gallery changeovers.