Li Fang’s Practice And Thought On Archival Documents Compilation

With a relatively stable political environment, Song Dynasty’ ruling class began to implement an obvious policy which highlighted the cultural development while disregarded the arms and force growth, such as opened the imperial examinations, valued cultural and education, built schools and so on.Those policies have greatly promoted the development of academic culture, which brought a huge progress to history, literature, science, epigraphy and other academics.In this kind of academic atmosphere, archival documents compilation has achieved unprecedented prosperity.The study on Song Dynasty’s archival documents compilation activities mainly focused on the compilation of the legal documents, imperial edicts, chronological historical files and those stone archives formed and compiled massively since the Dynasty. And category books compiling is also an important documents compiled activity of Song Dynasty. The famous historical category books "Imperial Readings of the Taiping Era ", "Extensive Records of the Taiping Era "/’Finest Blossoms in the Garden of Literature."are three prominent examples of this sort during this period, of which the compiling work was almost completed by Li Fang and his team and whose results also became an important part of the ancient archival documents that can not be ignored. The previous study of Li Fang is mostly focused on his poems and his official career. In this paper, from the point of archival documents compilation, we will have a deep probe into Li Fang’s life experience in order to better understand his compiling achievements and his thoughts in this field.The first part will introduce Li Fang’s personal life. From Li Fang’s official career, his life experience, academic writings and the descriptions about him in History of Song Dynasty, we can own a comprehensive knowledge of him as a basic understanding. The second part mainly describes Li Fang’s archival documents compilation practice. We will introduce to you the three books, "Imperial Readings of the Taiping Era ", "Extensive Records of the Taiping Era ", "Finest Blossoms in the Garden of Literature ", understand the nature of them, including the style, size, compiling background, compiling team, compiling methods of each book, their respective value and the deficiency of them which covers a broad part of content to make us understand all the aspects of the three category books.The third part, on the basis of understanding the three books from previous narrations, will bring us together to explore the main thoughts implied in documents compiling practice.