Meng Qian Bi Tan is a record of Shen Kuo's views and experiences in his later years. Including stories, arguments, music, images, personnel, government, power, wisdom, art, calligraphy and painting, skills, use, magic, anomalies, fallacies, ridicule, magazines, medical discussions, etc. 17. It summarizes Shen Kuo's research on science, technology, history, archaeology, literature and art for many years, and preserves a large number of very precious historical materials.
According to textual research, the original 30-volume edition of Meng Qian Bi Tan has more contents than the current edition, but it has long been lost, and only 26 volumes have been engraved and handed down in the Song, Yuan, Ming and Qing Dynasties. In the Song Dynasty, there was Yangzhou block print, and the main road was reprinted in two years. Unfortunately, the engraving of the Song Dynasty does not exist today, so the oldest edition at present is the engraving of Chen Renzi Dongshan Academy in the 9th year of Yuan Dade (1305) collected by the National Library. This book has a large format and is extremely exquisite, but the binding is very small. The binding is a popular butterfly dress at that time and unique.
Chen Renzi, named Grain Rain, was the first in Xianchun in the Southern Song Dynasty, and died in the last five years. After entering the Yuan Dynasty, he vowed not to be an official again, and built a villa in Dongshan of Chaling, specializing in giving lectures, writing books and engraving books.
Gu summarized three advantages of engraving books in Yuan Dynasty in Records of the Day: 1, the mountain chief in charge of the academy was proficient in proofreading, which made the book proofread carefully and had high edition value; 2. Strong funds, engraving and typesetting, and high quality printed books; 3, the book version is hidden in the academy, which is extremely convenient for printing and circulation. These advantages have been highlighted in Dongshan Academy's engraving Meng Qian Bi Tan, which also gives us a better understanding of the large format and small format of Dongshan Academy's engraving Meng Qian Bi Tan.
The book was printed by Zhu in the East Palace Bookstore and in front of the pavilion. There are also seals of books collected by King Pingyang, seals of books collected by Jia Zibing and Mr. and Mrs. Qian Runwen, both of whom took books for refuge. The book was hidden in the palace in the Yuan Dynasty, and was later acquired by Zhu Yuanzhang, the Ming emperor, and handed over to Prince Zhu Biao, and then returned to the "Wenyuan Pavilion" in the palace. Clear out of the palace, has been collected by Art Cloud Jingshe and Songjiang Han. At that time, private books were kept secret, and only a few people had seen this book. This book was later collected by the famous bibliophile Chen Chengzhong. After Chen Chengzhong moved to Hong Kong, in 1965, he planned to sell a number of rare books, including Meng Qian's Bi Tan. Dear Premier Zhou Enlai, in order to avoid the outflow of these precious cultural relics, he personally requested and instructed the Ministry of Culture to appoint someone to handle them. When the country's economy was not well off, he spent a lot of money to buy it back, which became a story in a book. 1976 was photocopied and published by Cultural Relics Publishing House. In 2003, the "China Rare Books Recycling Project" was also produced and published, which provided convenience for the public.
Among the numerous historical notes in ancient China, Meng Qian Bi Tan written by Shen Kuo in the Song Dynasty can be said to be a rare anomaly: it is one of the few notes highly praised by international sinologists, and Needham called it "the coordinate of the history of Chinese science" in the history of science and technology in China; It is also the most profound note-taking work compiled by China scholars. Mr. Nut Jing, a famous philologist, spent almost most of his life compiling a million-word School Certificate for this note. Meng Qian Bitan is therefore well known by scholars and enjoys a high reputation in academic circles. In order to make it convenient for ordinary readers to use Meng Qian Bitan, Mr. Hu Daojing also made a brief reading on the basis of Meng Qian Bitan-A Newly Revised Meng Qian Bitan. The first edition of this book was nearly half a century ago. For various reasons, the original publishing house did not consider revising and reprinting this version. Readers who want to use Meng Qian Bitan have always lacked a good book. During this period, there are several selected notes of Meng Qian Bitan. As far as I know, Li Notes published by Science Press, Notes on the General Election of China Branch published by Anhui People's Publishing House and Anhui Science and Technology Publishing House, and Selected Notes published by Shanghai Ancient Books Publishing House are of good quality, but these selected books were published twenty or thirty years ago. Mr. Hu Daojing also personally presided over the compilation of Meng Qian's Pen Talk Guide (published by Bashu Bookstore) and Meng Qian's Pen Talk Complete Translation (published by Guizhou People's Publishing House). However, these books can't replace Meng Qian Bitan's collated edition, which is a universal pass. Recently, Meng Qian Bi Tan, published by Shanghai Bookstore Press in its notes series of past dynasties, made up for this deficiency. What is particularly rare is that the book was compiled by Mr. Jin Liangnian, Mr. Hu Daojing's apprentice. According to the "Postscript" of this collation, Jin has been studying Meng Qian Bitan under the guidance of Mr. Hu Daojing since the mid-1980s, and participated in the annotation of Meng Qian Bitan's Guide and Meng Qian Bitan's Complete Translation hosted by Mr. Hu Daojing. On this basis, in order to let teachers continue to carry forward the cause of collating Meng Qian's Bitan, a new revision has been made to Meng Qian's Bitan. After preliminary reading, the author thinks that this new collating has the following special features:
First of all, this book basically draws lessons from the finishing results of the new school "Meng Qian Bi Tan", and indicates the reasons one by one in the collation notes, which makes up for the readers' lack of finding the new school "Meng Qian Bi Tan". ?
Secondly, this book has turned what Mr. Hu Daojing always wanted to do into reality, that is, the 26 volumes of Meng Qian Bitan collected by Beijing Library in the late 1960s could not be used when compiling Meng Qian Bitan School Certificate and the new school Meng Qian Bitan. Now that rare books have appeared, we should use them to sort out past achievements. The new edition has fulfilled Mr. Nutessence's long-cherished wish. In the collation of the first 26 volumes of Meng Qian Bitan, the collation quality of Meng Qian Bitan was further improved by taking Yuan Ben as the base. From the collation notes, we can see that the first 26 volumes were changed to meta-edition as the base edition, which not only reduced a lot of collations to correct the mistakes in later editions, but also got rules from the font mistakes in meta-edition, and even corrected many places that were in doubt and dared not change easily in the past. ?
Thirdly, the newly compiled version has widely absorbed the new research results of Meng Qian's Bi Tan, which has spared readers the pain of looking around when using it. In particular, when Mr. Hu Daojing collated Meng Qian Bi Tan, due to the limitations of ideas at that time, he basically did not go deep into the technical content in his notes, and the new collation made up for the previous weak links in this respect. As far as I know, Jin is a master student majoring in classical literature, and he also dabbles in the history of science and technology to a certain extent. Li was the responsible editor of China's history of science and technology "Paper and Printing" and "Illustration of Ancient Asian Weapons", and he was also interested in mysterious culture. These knowledge backgrounds are very necessary and beneficial for collating Meng Qian Bi Tan. ?
Fourthly, the new collation inherits the tradition of Mr. Hu Daojing's document collation, and makes further comments on the materials in mathematics, astronomy and music. In some places, the newly revised version also adopted the means of "proofreading" cautiously and appropriately, which solved some difficult problems in writing. ?
Finally, all the entries in Meng Qian Bitan are written into the new edition and re-indexed (the newly revised Meng Qian Bitan is not indexed, and the Meng Qian Bitan proofreading card is indexed only by names, while the new edition indexes all the names, documents and year numbers in the book). These small attachments are very convenient for readers. So far, many ancient notes have been published, but there are few indexes. I also hope that the organizers and publishers of ancient books can consider the readers and try their best to attach indexes to the sorted ancient books.