A Review Of The Literature On The Alchemist In Taiping Guangji

Taiping Guangji is an official reference book of the Northern Song Dynasty,and the earliest and largest ancient novel collection in China.The book contains five hundred volumes and ninety-two categories,which divided into immortal ghosts,monks,spceial people,animal,plants,retribution.Taiping Guangji cites over four hundred other books which most of them is now lost,so it pays an indispensable role on the relevant ancient books of the compilation,collation,complement and recovery.Taiping Guangjicontains different kinds of type stories.In recent decades,the study of the book Taiping Guangji and the types of stories has achieved fruitful results.Among the stories,but few people have studied the Fangshi literature of the scholars.Literature on Fangshi contains some kinds of story typeswith era and cultural characteristics.Fangshi are people who masters some special skills.They are variant of witches in the original period andoriginate in Yanand Qi?s coastal areas in the Warring States period.Fangshuare the skills of Fangshi,covering the yin and yang,the five elements,the prophecy,anthroposcopy,astrology,loneliness,age divination,change divination,miscellaneousdivination,geomancy,dreamdivination,medicine,Taoist sexual practices,alchemy and so on.According to the contents of Fangshu literature,the second part is roughly divided into seven categories: 1)the magic;2)the prophecy;3)anthroposcopy;4)divination;5)Fulu wizardry;6)feng shui;7)others.Among them,the magic and the prophecy are the most common types of Fangshu.There are 35 cited books of the Fangshi literature.These books cover the history notesandstrange novelsfrom the Wei and JinDynasties to the Tang and Song Dynasties.Most of them originate from the Tang Dynasty,others are mainly from Wei and Jin Dynasties,Southern and Northern Dynasties.Most of the cited books are lost now.Few of them can only be seem in descendants of the collection.Fangshi literature in Taiping Guangjicontains a lot of lost text,save the lost books,and embodies the important value of the literature.The Fangshi literature has distinct literary characteristics in the content.They shape the priests,monks,wizards,hermit,professional Fangshi and other types of Fangshi,which contain the diversified alien identity,the narrative mode of the direct narrative style,the literature feature.The Fangshi literaturealso has a high value in the influence of later literature.