TITLE:
Examples of Collation Errors in Collected and Annotated Poems of Chang Jian
AUTHORS:
Jingjing Xu
KEYWORDS:
Chang Jian, Collected and Annotated Poems of Chang Jian, Textual Criticism, Classical Text Compilation, Zhonghua Book Company
JOURNAL NAME:
Open Journal of Social Sciences,
Vol.13 No.11,
November
26,
2025
ABSTRACT: Chang Jian was a famous poet of the High Tang period, with few surviving poems—Song dynasty printed editions contain only fifty-seven poems. In 2017, Zhonghua Book Company published Collected and Annotated Poems of Chang Jian, compiled by Wang Xijiu, which takes the Jiajing 33 (1554) Fuyushan Fang woodblock edition by Huang Guanzeng as its base text and collates fourteen sources, becoming the standard edition of Chang Jian’s collected poems. The author of this article re-examined the base text and nine collated editions and discovered numerous errors in the collation work, totaling over one hundred items. Particularly noteworthy is the “Wang edition” cited in the collation: contrary to the compiled edition’s implication, it is not a Ming printed edition but a Qing manuscript copy. Among Chang Jian’s fifty-eight poems, only eleven show no errors. Problem types include failure to collate, erroneous collation, omission of collation, and spurious collation, involving misinterpretation of character forms, omission of variant readings, errors in collation notes, and fabrication of edition annotations. This article discusses the observed errors in four parts according to textual lineages: 1) Base text errors; 2) Song printed edition (Song woodblock edition, Lin’an edition) errors; 3) Ming-Qing transmission edition (Bi edition, Mao edition, Wang edition, movable-type edition) errors; 4) External collation source (Tang Wencui, Wenyuan Yinghua, Complete Tang Poems) errors. Each item notes the poem title, characters and lines, textual variants and page numbers by edition, with analysis. This article aims to correct errors in the original book and provide reliable textual evidence for the academic community.