Not long ago, the "Towards the Tang Dynasty" cultural relics exhibition, which was hosted by National Cultural Heritage Administration and collected more than 300 "national treasures", was held in Hunan Museum. Selected Works of Destiny, a manuscript of Sui people in Dunhuang Research Institute of Gansu Province, has been yellowed and was discovered by archaeologists in Cave 17, Dunhuang, Gansu Province in 1990. There are 22 lines left on the paper, headless and tailless. According to the translator, this manuscript is a remnant of the fate theory in Li's Selected Works of Zhaoming. Li, a litterateur in the Three Kingdoms period, wrote The Theory of Destiny, which explored the relationship between state chaos control and personal affairs. Among them, epigrams such as "the beauty of the wood in the forest will be destroyed by the wind" have been widely circulated so far.
The manuscript is 28.3 cm high and 42.5 cm long and written in regular script. Chen Jianming, director of Hunan Provincial Museum, said that the Sui Dynasty was the period when regular script was formed. According to the analysis of calligraphy characteristics, this manuscript should come from the late Sui and early Tang Dynasties.
Interestingly, among the remaining 400 words in the transcript, 7 words were covered with yellow pigment. Chen Jianming said that this yellow pigment is orpiment. The ancients often used orpiment to correct typos in literature, which is called "orpiment to change words". Over time, orpiment has the meaning of random alteration, and "loose orpiment" is used as a metaphor for nonsense.
This is the earliest correction fluid "orpiment" ~