In recent years, the research group has paid special attention to the new historical materials related to my doctoral dissertation, and the recent appearance of the Northern Song Dynasty historical material "The Great Song Dynasty Celestial Documents" has provided new materials for the field of stellar observation in the Northern Song Dynasty. Based on the book, we have completed a new article for academic discussion.
On January 3 this year, netizen hjahsk (later known as Mr. Li Su) disclosed the "Song Astronomical Chronicles" in the above picture on the book grid, and believed that the book was the lost "Astronomical Chronicles of the Song and Song Dynasties"; In the afternoon of the same day, when we learned the news, we immediately began to investigate and research, and found that there was also a copy in the Nanjing Library, so we went to Nantu the next day to investigate and confirm that the content was consistent. After several days of research, we came to a preliminary conclusion: the book is the "Great Song Tianshu" compiled by Wang Anli and others, and then further investigated its historical source, historical circulation, etc., and found that the book is mostly based on the "Jing Yu Qianxiang New Book", and its text was quoted in the Yuan and Ming dynasties, and was called "Song Zhi" or "Song Tianwen" by the people of the time, and scholars in the past mistakenly thought that "Song History: Astronomical Chronicles". The attached "Butian Song" is also unusual, but in view of the fact that this song has little to do with the previous text, it should be attached as a postscript, so it was decided not to pay attention to it for the time being. We prepared the framework of the article on the 12th and started writing, and submitted the manuscript on January 22nd. Later, I learned that the National Museum book "Song Tian Wen" had Wang Anli's title on it, which was basically the same as the previous one. The comparison of the three, combined with some clues, can basically conclude that the book is the Northern Song Dynasty "Great Song Dynasty Heavenly Documents". During the writing period, I learned that scholars such as Zhang Jingle and Chen Zhihui had also discussed the book, and although there was still room for further discussion, it was of little significance to discuss the "authenticity" at this time. Therefore, we shifted the focus of the article entirely to the historical origins, the way in which the book was written, and the circulation of the book to future generations. However, feeling that the cycle of literary and historical journals is too long, after learning about the pre-printing platform of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (ChinaXiv), I decided to try to publish it on the platform for Fang Jia's correction.
Interested colleagues can log in to the ChinaXiv platform to download the article (https://chinaxiv.org/abs/202406.00411), and also click "I want to comment" at the bottom right to express their comments. On this open, transparent platform, we welcome any useful comments related to the book. If you don't want to dig deeper, just look at the summary:
The Great Song Dynasty Heavenly Document is a book of occupation compiled by Si Tianjian Feng Yi during the Yuanfeng period of the Northern Song Dynasty. Its overall structure is rigorous, the chapters are orderly, and the content of individual volumes is innovative, and the whole has strong theoretical and practical value. At present, there are three kinds of books in the National Museum, the above picture and the South Picture Book, and the latter two are more related to the version than the National Museum. The authors of the book are Wang Anli, Ouyang Fa and others, and the purpose of compilation is to solve the phenomenon of contradictory words in the book at that time, to achieve a compromise and to facilitate the examination of the book. This paper finds that Ouyang Fa et al. used the "Jingyou Qianxiang New Book" as the main historical source, and selected, simplified and integrated the various astrological words to form a new astrological text. Through literature citation, it can be determined that the book has been circulated in the Tiantai of the Jin Dynasty under the name of "Song Tianwen Chronicles", and has played an important role in the Yuan and Ming literary institutions. The fifteen-volume "Lingtai Secret Garden" is mainly based on this book, and it is not the original work of Yu Jicai of the Northern Zhou Dynasty. The Great Song Dynasty Astronomical Documents preserve many unique astronomical historical materials of the Northern Song Dynasty, such as armillary spheres, star maps, sundial shadows, missing inscriptions, etc., which have important historical value.
Say something off-topic. Recently, we have seen some scholars calling for domestic humanities and social sciences papers to publish preprints, so we have learned about the form of preprints: before submitting the manuscript to the journal or the paper is published, it will be published on the platform, so that the academic community can see the latest research results as soon as possible, so that their papers can be cited by themselves and their peers in the unpublished state. We thought it was a good format and decided to give it a try. At present, arXiv is a popular preprint platform in foreign countries, and ChinaXiv, which is mainly in the field of science and engineering, and PSSXiv, a preprint platform for philosophy and social sciences, are popular in China. This article has been submitted to these two domestic platforms, and the latter is still under review.