The Present Meaning of Textual Criticism in Qing Dynasty

Since Hu Shi’s “the Methodology of textual criticism: a Preface to the Revision Examples in Yuandianzhang”, the textual criticism theory in Qing Dynasty have been regarded as a unscientific methodology. Hu Shi criticized severely the textual criticism theory because it had depended excessively on inference without substantiative proofs and made the Chinese Classics more confused as a result. But such a assessment about the textual criticism theory in Qing Dynasty missed core issues of the theory. First of all, it did not consider the historical transmission of Chinese Classics sufficiently. The textual criticism theory in Qing Dynasty tried to pass over boundary of substantiative proofs, which were wood block printings in Chinese cultural ground. Generally speaking, Hu Shi’s successors lay emphasis on wood block printings, but the scholars in Qing Dynasty aimed the reconstruction of the manuscript version or the prototext of the Classics. The aim of this paper is to comprehend the awareness of Qing scholars and to understand the meaning of “inferential theory of textual criticism”, for it can be considered as a way to reconstruct the prototext of Chinese Classis especially in Chinese cultural condition. According to wood block printing’s ascendance for thousand years, earlier textual versions of classic such as manuscript or oral transmission had nearly disappeared in China. In this paper, I approach the textual criticism theory in Qing Dynasty from historical perspective of the transmission of Chineses Classics. For this, I chase the formating process of existing assessment on the textual criticism theory first, and after then try to reconstruct the Qing scholars’ point of view.