Notes on Water Classics is a masterpiece of ancient geography in China, with a total of 40 volumes. The author is Li Daoyuan in the late Northern Wei Dynasty. Shui Jing Zhu got its name from Shui Jing Zhu. The book Shui Jing Zhu is about 10,000 words.
Water Mirror Notes looks like water mirror notes, but in fact, it takes water mirror as the key link and records more than 1000 rivers and related historical sites, stories, myths and legends in detail. It is the most comprehensive and systematic comprehensive geographical work in ancient China.
The book also records a large number of stone tablet ink and fishing songs and folk songs, with gorgeous words and beautiful language, which has high literary value. Because many documents quoted in the book were lost in later generations, many materials were preserved.
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If you want to know the notes of the water mirror, you must first know what the water mirror is. Water Mirror is the first monograph on water system in China, with more than 10,000 words. It is said that the authors are Guo Pu in Jin Dynasty and Qin Sang in Eastern Han Dynasty.
The water mirror briefly describes the navigation channels of China 137 major rivers. The original text is only 10000 words, which is quite brief and lacks systematicness. Shuijing Annotation is an extension of Li Daoyuan's Shuijing Annotation, which records 65,438+0,252 rivers and waterways, reaching more than 300,000 words, with a total of 40 volumes.
The reason why Notes on Water Mirror was valued by the ancients lies in its extensive records. Although the northern and southern regimes were divided, the geographical scope recorded in Water Mirror Notes was not limited to the territory of the Northern Wei Dynasty. Li Daoyuan focused on describing the natural mountains and rivers and human geography under the Southern Dynasties at that time.
In Notes on Water Classics, the division of regions is completely bounded by natural mountains and rivers, with one mountain, one water, one grass, one tree, one city and one city.
The Water Mirror Notes also records a lot of foreign geography. When Li Daoyuan wrote this book, he collected all the information in the world. Many of the books he quoted are now lost, but because of this, Zhu described the "world" known to China people at that time.
In the first volume "Rivers", Li Daoyuan described in detail the hydrogeology and customs along the Ganges, Indus and Bay of Bengal in southeast India in ancient times. In the south, the geographical scope of records has reached northern Vietnam, Cambodia and Malay Peninsula. In the north, it extends to desert areas outside the Great Wall; The southwest extends to Tibet and Myanmar.
It can be said that Zhu recorded the known geographical range in Li Daoyuan's time. Admittedly, due to its limited footprint and poor documentation, there are many absurd contents, but its vision has gone beyond the traditional China area and reached the "world". In this sense, the book is a geographical work about the known world at that time.
Finally, Li Daoyuan is good at geographical description. Although Zhu also explains geographical phenomena, it is more objective description, so it is appropriate to call it descriptive geography. Li Daoyuan's description of geographical phenomena, the most prominent is to describe the objective truth of geographical phenomena.
Li Daoyuan's scientific description of geographical phenomena is based on the combination of literature analysis and field investigation. On the one hand, Li Daoyuan confirmed the records of ancient books, thus having a deeper understanding of geographical landscape; On the other hand, he also corrected many mistakes in Water Mirror and the false words of predecessors through on-the-spot investigation. Therefore, Water Mirror Zhu Can is a masterpiece of ancient geography in China.
Baidu encyclopedia-Zhu