7 HISTORY The Source Our history of the sounds of Chinese begins in A.D. 601, when the celebrated rhyming and pronouncing dictionary Qieyun was com­ pleted. One of the formative works of Chinese,civilization, 'this medieval book is also ,~he foundation for what we know ?bout China's linguistic past. In his preface, the compiler Lu Fiiyan describes how Qieyun was created: Once about fifreen or twenty years ago Liu Zhen and others-in all eight persons-came to visit me and stayed the night. When it grew late• and we had been drinking wine for most of the evening, we began 'dis~ussing the sounds and the rhymes. Modern pronunciations are naturally varied; moreover, those ~ho have written 09 the sounds and the rhymes have not always been in agreement. In Wu anq Chu the pronunciation is too light and shallow; in Yan and Zha,o, too heavy and turbid. 1 In Qin and Long the departing tone is pronounced like the entering tone~ in Liang and Yi it is the even tope that·is similar to the departing to,ne. Furthermore, some authors make single rhymes out of a number o,f differenttfhyme categories; some argue that other rhymes have the same final sounds. If one wishes to \\;'iden the circle of readers, then it is all right to allow clear and muddy pronunciations to be inter­ changed; but if one has discriminatirtg tastes, then there must be a distinction between light and heavy. Lii Jing's Yun ji [and other works of its kind] all 'have idiosy,ncracies; the rhyme~ they use from the lower Ya~gtze region are different from those taken from the area north of the Yellow River. So we discussed the rights and wrongs of the North and the South and the comprehensible and incomprehensible of the ancients and moderns. We wanted to select the precise and discard the ex­ traneous, and there was much of this that was decided by Xiao and Yan. Then Compiler Wei said to me, "Up to now we have been talking and arguing and all the questionable points have been re-· solved. Why don't we write down what we have said? If the sev~ral of us decide on something, then it is settled 'once and for all." HISTORY 117 So under the cahdleljght I took up my brush· and jotted down an outline. We consulted each other extensively and argued vigorously. We came close to getting the essence. At this point I went off into various other studies while pursuing my career as a. minor official, and for more than ten years I did not have leisure to put the collection of rhymes into order. Now·L have retired from government service and am giving pri­ vate instruction in composition to several students. Whenever deal­ ing with writing where elegant style is important, one must be very clear about the tones and the rhymes. But since ·I am living in seclu­ sion in the country with my relationships and contacts cut off, there is no place to ask when there are things that I have doubts abouf. As for those among my acquaintances who .have died, the roads of life and death have parted and in vain do I harbor a regret that I am not able to consult with them again; as for those who are living, there is now a social barrier between those noble people and the base person that I hav~ become, and this has insured the disruption of friendship. Consequently, I have taken the sounds and the rhymes of the various speCialists and the dictionaries of the ancients and moderns, and by arranging what those before me have recorded, I have made up the five volumes of Qieyun. The spljts and analyses are exceedingly fine and the distinctions abundant and profus~. Why should I be concerned with recognition? I would not wish to be like that ancient man whose presentation of jade was repeatedly and unjustly rejected by the king; nor do I think my work can match that of the ancient master who offered gold to anyone who suc­ ceeded in improving a single word of his perfect. text. The ancients were amazed at Sima Qian's boasting when he said he would store his work on a famous mountain for future generations; now I sigh in sympathy with the stammering Yang Xiong who was fearful that his book wouHonly be fit for covering sauce jars. The present.work is not my·wanton invention-! am merely transmitting the ideas that all the worthies have left us. Would I dare hope to become well known in the world without having gone out of my• gate, simply be­ cause I present and circulate this book? Written in the year xinyou, the first year of Renshou of the Great Sui (A.D. 601). This relatively short preface is followed by the body of the dictionary itself, a fiv~-volume work that contains a total of about 12,000 character entries. 118 THE CHINESE LANGUAGE ,Qieyun was intended above all as a guide to the recitation of literary texts. This was not the first such work that had ever been written in China; after all, reading the classics correctly had long been perceived as one of the most important of society's needs-Lu Fayan in fact mentions the names of six other rhyming and pronouncing dictionaries that were in circulation at the time. But Qieyun is the oldest guide to Chinese pro­ nunciation that has been preserved. The others have long sihce been lost. Lu Fayan arranged the dictionary a& a book of rhymes. First he sorted all the characters by tone and made them into separate volumes. Since the first, or "even," tone had an especially large number of characters, it occupied two volumes by itself. The other three tone categories of the Chinese of that day took up one volume each. This made five volumes altogether. Then, within each of these volumes, Lu grouped the charac­ ters together by rhyme. The--resulting rhyme groups, 193 in all, form the framework of the dictionary. But what made Qieyun useful as an aid to pronunciation was the fact that it,contained within. this framework a system for "spelling" the read­ ings of characters. This "spelling" system, called fanqie in Chinese, is one in which the reading of a character is indicated by using two other, pre­ sumably known, characters. The first or upper character represents the initial <;onsonant, and 1:he second odower character represents the rest of the syllable-the "final" ~nd its tone. Using! this system, the ·modern Mandarin syllable kuiing, for example, could be spelled with two charac­ ters pronounced, respectively, ke and huang, i.e., k(e) + (h)uang = kuang.' Such fanqie spellers may seem a rather crude and cumbersome expedient, but they were the most powerful tool for describing actual pronunciations ,available in China at the time. Until the early :centuries A.D. the only way a pronunciation had been indicated was with a homophone. If no homophone or near-homophone existed,,the reading simply could not be recorded. In this kind of situation, the invention of the fanqie system was something of a major linguistic breakthrpugh. Lu Fayan and his contemporaries were nqt the innovlftors-the system had already been in use for several hundred years by their time. But the exam­ ples of fanqie that they gave us in Qteyun are the oldest• that have been preserved intact. Lu Fayan used fanqie to detail a general literary standard. These fanqie and the literary standard that they represented were carefully constructed to reflect the tastes and sensibilities of upper-class Chinese from all areas of the country. They did not represent an actual dialect spoken by Lu Fayan or by any other single person. The nine gentlemen at the wine HISTORY 119 Figure 7. A page from the Qieyim Rhyming Dictionary. This page shows the beginning of the first rhyme in the first volume of the dictionary. The first character in the rhyme is * 'East.' Under its entry can be found the fanqie reading ~U. which has been deciphered as follows: t(ak) + (gh)ungt = tungt, the Middle Chinese pronunciation of * 'East.' 120 THE CHINESE LANGUAGE party chose readings from among the "rights and wrongs of the North and the South" and ....-arious writings ancient "nd modern, and what Lu finally wrote down ,that night was something very eclectic. It was a di­ alect co,mpromise designed to satis,.fy everyone, and that is perhaps one reason why Qieyun was in the end so successful. Lu Fayan probably pever suspected how important his fanqie spellers would become. Literary matters were his main concern, as is evident throughout the preface 'that he wrote for the dtctionary. To be sure, he complains about the strange, accents ~heard" in certain areas of the country, but only be,cause they affected the proper reading of classical texts, "Pro­ nunciations are,naturally 'Varie$1,'' he wrote; and he probably had never given a thought to changing these natural, regional variations in speech. The formal recitation of literature was what mattered. Lu Fayan lived 'in an aristocratic age. He and the guests at his wine party were Chinese gentlemen, and their world extended no farther than the "gates and gar­ dens" of a, few rich and powerful families. Lu Fayan was writing for a r.~latively small, elite group of men with "discriminating tastes" who were interested in the fine points of literary elegance. Yet'; more than any other. work, Qieyun and the·fanqie spellers that jt contained helped standardize pronunyiations of Chinese characters in ev­ ery land reached by Chinese civilizafion.