STUDIES IN MIDDLE ARCHAIC CHINESE

THE SPRING AND AUTUMN ANNALS 1)

BY

W. A. C. H. DOBSON

INTRODUCTION

The SPring and Autumn Annals purports to be the chronicles of the city-state of Lu from the year 721 to the year 482 BC. Pyima facie there is little reason to doubt that it is what it purports to be. The Annals consists of brief dated entries, arranged by year, season, month and sometimes by day, recording the accessions and deaths of the rulers of Lu, their marriages, their visits to other states, the visitors they received, and similar matters of consequence to the Court. Some entries concern other states,-particularly those which have to do with inter-state relations. They record the covenants, for example, into which Lu entered with its neighbours. Apart from this, there are entries concerning unseasonal weather, catastrophes, and ominous portents. In short, the SPring and Autumn Annals is the sort of primitive archive-type record which might plausibly be expected to have been kept at this period,-a cumulative record made by the recorders of the Court. There is, however, a persistent Chinese tradition that Confucius either 222 composed, or had a hand in the editing of, the SPring and Autumn Annals. This is partly because entries cease shortly before Con- fucius' death and because Mencius in certain passages seems to suggest that he did so 1). From the point of view of the historian of the Chinese language, however, the authorship of the Annals is only of importance in establishing the date of compilation. If the Annals is the cumulative production of archivists from the 8th to the 5th Centuries BC, then the Annals provides evidence for a form of Archaic Chinese, how- ever conventionalised and stylised, of a broad period, and from several hands. If, on the other hand, the Annals is thought to be from one hand, it must date from after its last entry, namely 482 BC, and it then provides evidence for the language of a narrower period, i.e. the early 5th Century BC. Whatever the answer, the Annals is the only surviving literary document (with the possible exception of the "genuine" Analects and the late Songs) of either the narrower or the broader period. Together with dateable bronze inscriptions, it is the best source we possess from which to abstract the grammatical features of Archaic Chinese at this period. Linguistic analysis, in fact, shews quite clearly that the language of the Annals stands as a sort of half-way mark in the evolution from Early Archaic Chinese to Late Archaic Chinese, tending, if anything, to favour Early Archaic Chinese. Such contributions as linguistic evidence might make to the problem of dating and authorship, would tend to support the theory that the Annals is, as Mencius says, in the "annalists' style" 2), and that that style became conventional in the 8th and 7th Centuries, and was retained by the annalists, with all its lapidary conventions, as long as entries