An early commentary on one of the Chinese Five Classics
The Documents classic (Shangshu) was central to the political life of imperial China. This owed much to the lively commentarial activity surrounding the text in the first two centuries BCE. The Great Commentary serves as a lens on this commentarial work and reveals how the Documents classic was used to provide answers to pressing societal questions of the time.
In this first English translation of the Great Commentary, Fan Lin and Griet Vankeerberghen engage with the historical realities that produced the work. They explore the complex relationship between the Documents classic and its commentarial traditions at a time when neither classic nor commentary had acquired fixed form. They view Master Fu (260??161? BCE), the Han court academician to whom the Great Commentary is traditionally ascribed, not as the text's author but rather as the figure who lent his authority to subsequent generations of Documents scholars. Lin and Vankeerberghen also trace how late imperial scholars reconstructed the text largely from fragments in collectanea. With facing pages of Chinese and English text, this volume provides a comprehensive introduction and detailed annotation that reveal the work's relevance to law, prognostication, and politics, along with its value as an important source for the study of the classical tradition and of early Chinese history.

Fan Lin is a lecturer at Leiden University. She received her PhD in East Asian studies and art history from McGill University in 2015. This is her first book.

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Griet Vankeerberghen is associate professor of history and classical studies at McGill University. She is the author of The Huainanzi and Liu An's Claim to Moral Authority (SUNY Press, 2001); and coeditor of Chang'an 26 BCE: An Augustan Age in China (University of Washington Press).

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Michael Nylan is professor of history at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of The Five "Confucian" Classics (Yale University Press, 2001) and Yang Xiong and the Pleasures of Reading and Classical Learning in China (American Oriental Society, 2011), coauthor of Lives of Confucius: Civilization's Greatest Sage through the Ages (Doubleday, 2010); translator of Exemplary Figures (University of Washington Press, 2013) and The Canon of Supreme Mystery (SUNY Press, 1993) by Yang Xiong; and coeditor of Chang'an 26 BCE: An Augustan Age in China (University of Washington Press, 2014).

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