A Philological Study Of Xiao Da Heng’s《bei Lu Feng Su》(《Customs Of The Mongol》)

Chinese historical materials about Mongolian in Ming Dynasty occupy an essential place in all aspect of research works of Mongolian social history of Ming Dynasty. Among them, the most representative one is Xiao Daheng’s 《bei lu feng su》(《Customs of the Mongol》)。As a frontier court official charged with heavy responsibility in Ming Dynasty, Xiao Daheng kept in touch with Mongolians in regular, and learned a lot about the Mongolians’ daily customs. He noted down the daily activities and customs of Mongolian to compile the book 《bei lu feng su》(《Customs of the Mongol》) which is valuable for historical research.The book consists of twenty chapters, such as Marriage, Birth, and etc. Contrasted with most of the Chinese historical records of Ming Dynasty, the most unusual feature of the book is that it specialized in recording the Mongolian customs. It should be seen as an important firsthand historical data and historical literature in the research of Ming Dynasty’s Mongolian customs, especially in the history of folk custom, Mongolian history, history of relationship between Mongolian and Han Chinese, history of relationship between Mongolian and Tibetan, fairs of Mongolian military, religion, law, economy and etc.About the content and the historical value of 《bei lu feng su》(《Customs of the Mongol》), there is a large scale of researches were done by senior scholars, while there is still a long way to go in exploring more by doing systematic researches to its content. So it’s necessary for us to do deeply research on its content to demonstrate its historical value even more. In summery, a systematical research works are still rare on 《bei lu feng su》(《Customs of the Mongol》) although former academia introduced and studied from the view points of more aspects, especially from the view points of philological studies. We deserve to study deeply on it as the Chinese historical materials are weaknesses.On the basis of research findings by predecessors, this thesis makes some trial studies on the author, title and edition of the book from the perspective of historical literature studies. It tries to find out the historical value of this book by comparing and discriminating the basic material of the study-the block-printed edition of 《bei lu feng su》(《Customs of the Mongol》) in1594with some historical literature of Yuan Dynasty and some other historical records of Ming Dynasty.