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Metamorphic Stylization and the Sabotage of Significance. A Study in Ancient and Modern Chinese Writing
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 March 2011
Extract
The selection of a title is sometimes a choice of evils. Which shall most move us, the desire to attract the many, or the fear of offending the few?
For the heading of this paper, the original aim had been laudable. Pith, brevity, and point were to combine with brilliant exactness of definition, alluring to the reader and doing justice to the theme. “ That,” as they say in the street, “ was the idea.” Followed an interval for intellectual refreshment and repose, and then, “ sudden in a minute,” in a flash, was captured the caption. But the disillusion of it! Gone were the pith and the brevity, and in their stead appeared a sesquipedalian pomposity. But however ponderously, the present title has the merit that it does precisely formulate the baffling and hitherto little noticed phenomena of substitutional types to which this paper essays to call attention by the illustration of a few out of many examples.
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- Copyright © The Royal Asiatic Society 1925
References
page 454 note 1 See Legge's Chinese Classics, vol. v, pt. ii, p. 823 (text), p. 826 (English).
page 454 note 2 See Chavannes, Documents Chinois découverts par Aurel Stein, p. 28.
page 456 note 1 
Yin Hsü Shu Ch’i Tai Wên Pien.
page 458 note 1 It is of interest to note that the modern form, and with its modern meaning of plant, herb, occurs on one of the wooden slips excavated by Sir A. Stein, and published in Chavannes' Documents Chinois, etc. See No. 531, where the word appears in the term 
shih-nan-ts'ao. The date of this document may well have been in Hsü Shên's lifetime.
page 460 note 1 See Chavannes' Documents Chinois, etc., plate xiv, and p. 115.
page 460 note 2 Botanicon Sinicum, part iii, p. 487.
page 461 note 1 Also, in vol. viii, p. 56, of the Chün Ku Ln Chin Wên; also, in vol. iii, p. 8, of Yuan Yuan's Chi Ku Chai, etc.
page 462 note 1 Thus on the 
Kuo chi tzŭ p’an, see the Chün Ku Lu Chin Wên, vol. viii, p. 39.
page 463 note 1 See his 
, etc. Chi Ku Chai, etc., ch. iii, p. 8.
page 465 note 1 Tuan Yü-ts’ai, however, prints the second character 
ssŭ.
page 466 note 1 See in the 
chêng pien Section, p. 65.
page 469 note 1 JRAS., October, 1917, pp. 785–6.
page 469 note 2 Y.H.S.K.K.S., p. 38.
page 469 note 3 Tuan Yü-ts’ai deletes the first two characters as interpolations, and substitutes tung fang chih jên yeh, “ the people of the Eastern region,” in their place, followed by the analysis.
page 472 note 1 Here are a few instances. The passage in D above, is transcribed 
chih yü nan huai jên, etc., in the Chün Ku Lu Chin Wên, vol. viii, p. 69. So too, in passage in E, I pê is transcribed 
jên pê, ibid., vol. vi, p. 86. In both these the sign of repetition is present. The character 
, without the sign of repetition, is transcribed 
jên, ibid., vol. viii, pp. 4 and 12, but as 
chi, as-well-as, in the same inscription in Yuan Yuan's Chi Ku Chai, etc., ch. vii, p. 8. Again, 
, a variant of 
, becomes 
jên in an inscription given in the Chün Ku Lu Chin Wên, vol. viii, p. 53. And perhaps, strangest of all, the character 
occurring in the sequence 
nan i tung i, “ the Southern I and the Eastern I,” is transcribed 
tsieh, seal or joint, in the same work, vol. viii, p. 58, in the continuation of the same inscription, part of which appears in the photograph accompanying the entry on 
man in this paper. This is the more surprising as the terms nan I and tung I were well-known ethnic names. Kanghsi also does not fail to insert the same element with the mark of repetition, as the Ku wên of 
i. So too the Choyokaku Ji Kan.
page 473 note 1 Thus, 
, See the Y.H.S.K., ch. ii, p. 6. Two other examples, Figs. 18 and 19, are given on Plate IX.
page 477 note 1 See JRAS., October, 1917.