A Review Of The Five Dynasties' Writings Research

The Five Dynasties was a disordered period of Chinese history. Because of this, there were not many writings which mostly recorded the system of the short times or contained trifling emotions of people. But man of Song didn't leave concerning records to us. As a result, we can't find a library catalogue in the books, including"History of the Five Dynasties","New Historical Record of the Five Dynasties", and tow kinds of"History of Nan Tang".In the Qing Dynasty, a lot of persons were willing to compile library catalogues of some periods. Among them, there were five catalogues about the Five Dynasties. Xu Jiong was the first man who worked on this research. His writings,"Wu Dai Shi Ji Bu Kao Yi Wen Kao", whose classification was not very good, only recorded 165 books. Next one was Chen Shan, who lived in the period between Qian Long and Jia Qing. His writings was named"Xu Tang Shu Jing Ji Zhi". The classification of the book was very perfect, but the quantity of gathered books was still not enough. Soon,"Bu Wu Dai Shi Yi Wen Zhi", written by Gu Huaisan, come off the press, which was well-known throughout the country for gathered books'quantity. But its classification was too disordered to examine some books. And there was some wrong of the records in this writings. So it was not the best one. After this, Wang Zhichang completed the writing about"Bu Nan Tang Yi Wen Zhi". This book only was a library catalogue of Nan Tang. But Nan Tang took an important role in the history of Chinese culture, thanks to this, Wang's choice was sagacious. However, his classification was the same as Gu. This point turned into his defect.In modern times, Mr Tang Guizhang had written a book named"Nan Tang Yi Wen Zhi". Perfect classification and careful textual research made it become one of the great writings compared with others. Recently,"Wu Dai Yi Wen Kao"written by Mr Zhang Xingwu, published by Ba Shu Press. It absorbed the quintessence of senior persons'research, and the quantity of gathered books was considerable. Therefore,"Wu Dai Yi Wen Kao"is the best book that researched on writings of the Five Dynasties at present. But its classification was the same as Gu, too. So, we should go on a further reseach into the Five Dynasties'writings.This thesis studied on the time, the quantity, the classification and the interpretation of the books recorded by the writings above. And we discovered some of their advantages and shortcomings, at the same time, put forward some simple proposals.