Research And Spread On Biography Of Women By Liu Xiang In Late Imperial China

Biography of Women was written by Liu Xiang in the late of Western Han Dynasty, when he was nominated to collated systematically the ancient books which lasted more than 20years.This book is the first special women biography and women history, which has important historical value. Moreover, this book was aimed to remonstrate the ruler. Therefore, emperor and scholar also paid their attention to this book’s special value. When this book was published, emperor put great emphasize on the book’s civilizing value and many scholar tried to annotate the book, such as Cao Dagu,Ma Rong, Yu Zhenjie, Qi Wusui, unfortunately, all those books didn’t exist at the present time.As cited, a new annotation of Lie Nvzhuan appeared,but they didn’t exist. More and more people kept on annotating in Tang-Song Period. More important, Lie Nvzhuan became a special part in official history under the influence of Liu Xiang. Not only that, Women Lunyu also occurred. Great attention was paid to women’s chastity, with the focus of ruler and the change of social and economical environment, so a large number of scholars were attentive to annotate, emend and write this book. As Queen Ma requested, Chu Yuan-chang commanded Jie Jin to comment this book. Soon, Emperor Zhu Di attached great importance to this book,too. In Qing Dynasty, three women achieved great results, they were Wang Zhaoyuan, Liang Duan, Xiao Daoguan.The study on Biography of Women is not just from edition, Chinese exegesis, emending, but also from the sequel.For example, Jie Jin complied Women in history and Huang Xizhou complied New sequel of Women in history, and so on.The material resource of Lie Nvzhuan could be divided into three parts. The first part was from Lie Nvzhuan by Liu Xiang. The second part was from the official history, local chronicles. The classification was separated two kind, the first kind was according with Liu Xiang. The second kind was arranged by dynasty.There were many people took part in the publish of Lie Nvzhuan and the sequel of Lie Nvzhuan. On one hand, the wide spread of this book strengthens the concept of chastity. On the other hand, the social mode, to some extent, pushes forward the circulation of this book in a large scale. Lie Nvzhuan was very important to late imperial China.