The Study On Han Yuan

‘Han Yuan’ was scattered and ill preserved in history,with its fragment kept in the Slaughter Future Full Palace,Fukuoka Prefecture,Japan. Jin Yufu transcribed the book in a Japanese library and brought it back to China. Now it is kept in the eighth volume entitled ‘Fan Yi’ in ‘Liaohai Series’. Though languages of ‘Han Yuan’ are simple,the content is very informative. It covers 16 ancient nationalities before the Tang Dynasty, with a vivid description on the historical development of the northeastern nationalities. Its annotation,quoted tons of ancient books before the Tang Dynasty(among them many had been lost),provides very valuable information to researchers in this field. This paper discusses Han Yang in terms of its author,style, content and value.The paper consists of two parts: an introduction and main body. The introduction argues its rationale,academic value and the significance of this topic. It subsumes the academic achievement on “Han Yang’ at home and abroad,and defines the related concepts and discusses methodology of the current research.The paper could be divided into four parts. Chapter One analyzes and identifies the real author of ‘Han Yuan’ – Zhang Chujin. As there were two persons named Zhang Chujin in history, the related records in historical books were quite confusing. This chapter mainly discriminates them from two sources: ancient books and the author’s possible works. From the former,we could predict when Zhang lived,and form the latter,we distinguish which books were written by him.Chapter Two mainly analyzes the background of the book and possible reasons for its writing and then examines the corresponding records in some other documents in history. Due to the different numbers of the volumes in the bibliographic records, a detailed analysis was conducted. Finally,I speculate that ‘Han Yuan’ would probably be a series of books,seven volumes altogether,with a note by Yong Gongrui. I made a brief description on the situations of the existing versions of ‘Han Yuan’ and introduced the gist of the book.Chapter Three is the main section of the paper. In this chapter,I made a thorough and complete collation of and added punctuation marks to the ‘Fan Yi’ – the fragment of ‘Han Yuan’,and then made a comparison between ‘Han Yuan’ in ‘Liaohai Series’ collected and arranged by Jin Yufu and its photocopies conserved at the Kyoto University,Japan. Whenever differences occurred in the two versions,I referred to considerable examples from the other relevant documents. Further,I did collation and annotation for both. It is found that Jin Yufu’s version still had some errors,though it had probably been collated based on the original version.Chapter Four argues the significance and impact of the ‘Han Yuan’ with a focus on its documentary value. ‘Han Yuan’ could be used to correct errors for the existing ancient books,to supplement the fragment of the incomplete books and to restore some disappearing old books. It could provide references to the studies of linguistics and calligraphy and offer some evidence for future research on Sino-Japan relations.