Fu Yue
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Fu Yue ("Mentor Yue"), also known as Hou Que (侯雀; ''Hóu Què'', "Lord Sparrow"), was a mythical figure who served as minister from Fuyan (present-day
Pinglu County Pinglu County () is a county in southern Shanxi province of China. It is under the administration of the prefecture-level city of Yuncheng and has a population of approximately 200,000. Pinglu is historically an agricultural county, producing appl ...
,
Shanxi Shanxi (; ; formerly romanised as Shansi) is a landlocked province of the People's Republic of China and is part of the North China region. The capital and largest city of the province is Taiyuan, while its next most populated prefecture-lev ...
) under the king
Wu Ding Wu Ding (); personal name Zi Zhao, was a king of the Shang dynasty who ruled China around 1200s BC. He is the earliest figure in Chinese history mentioned in contemporary records. The annals of the Shang dynasty compiled by later historians were o ...
武丁 of the
Shang The Shang dynasty (), also known as the Yin dynasty (), was a Chinese royal dynasty founded by Tang of Shang (Cheng Tang) that ruled in the Yellow River valley in the second millennium BC, traditionally succeeding the Xia dynasty and f ...
商 dynasty, who reigned around – BCE. He has also been defined anachronistically a "premier."


Life

Fu Yue was originally a labourer, skilled at making walls for defence. Being unable to subscribe towards the repair of certain roads, he then worked upon them himself. According to the '' Records of the Historian,'' Wu Ding dreamt he would obtain a sage person named Yue 說, and dispatched his officials throughout his reign to find him according to the features seen in the dream, Fu Yue was discovered in a workshed and received the appointment. The life is also narrated in the voice of minister Bai Gong Zi Chang (白公子張) in the '' Guoyu''. At his death, it is said that he became the constellation known as the Sieve (
G Scorpii G Scorpii (abbreviated G Sco), also named Fuyue, is a giant star in the constellation of Scorpius. It has an apparent magnitude of +3.19. It is approximately 126 light-years from the Sun. Nomenclature ''G Scorpii'' is the star's Bayer ...
), one of the twenty-eight constellations of the zodiac, which forms a part of Sagittarius.


Textual sources

The ''
Shangshu The ''Book of Documents'' (''Shūjīng'', earlier ''Shu King'') or ''Classic of History'', also known as the ''Shangshu'' (“Venerated Documents”), is one of the Five Classics of ancient Chinese literature. It is a collection of rhetorica ...
'' chapter "Yue ming" 說命 represents a dialogue between Wu Ding and Fu Yue;
Yan Ruoqu Yan Ruoqu (; November 11, 1636 – July 9, 1704) was an influential Chinese scholar of the early Qing dynasty. He was born to a scholarly family in Taiyuan, Shanxi. Yan Ruoqu is most famous for proving that the "Old Text" chapters of the Confucia ...
閻若璩 demonstrated that this chapter is one of the 25 that he believed were created by
Mei Ze Mei Ze (; fl. 4th century), also known as Mei Yi (梅頤), was a Confucian scholar and government official of the Eastern Jin Dynasty of ancient China. A native of Runan (汝南, present-day Wuchang District, Hubei province), Mei Ze served as gov ...
(Fl. 4th CE). These are known as the ''guwen'' 古文 chapters, often labelled as "forgeries." In 2012, a bamboo manuscript divided in three sections titled "Fu Yue zhi ming 傅說之命" (or, one may say, three distinct manuscripts bearing the same title; the title appears on the verso side of the last strip in each section) has been published in the third volume of the Tsinghua manuscripts collection. While initial claims were made that this represents the "real" (''zhenzheng'' 真正) chapter "Yue ming" originally belonging to the ''Shangshu'' and later replaced by Mei Ze, this seems unlikely for several reasons, among which: * All the existing evidence points at the fact that the ''Shangshu'' became a stable collection around the end of the
Western Han The Han dynasty (, ; ) was an Dynasties in Chinese history, imperial dynasty of China (202 BC – 9 AD, 25–220 AD), established by Emperor Gaozu of Han, Liu Bang (Emperor Gao) and ruled by the House of Liu. The dynasty was preceded by th ...
dynasty, and there is no evidence that a chapter named "Yue ming" existed until later; * The ''
Liji The ''Book of Rites'', also known as the ''Liji'', is a collection of texts describing the social forms, administration, and ceremonial rites of the Zhou dynasty as they were understood in the Warring States and the early Han periods. The ''Book o ...
'' contains a total of 5 quotations from the "Yue ming", only one of which is found in slightly different wording in the Tsinghua "Fu Yue zhi ming." This must be taken into account in arguments supporting the idea that the Tsinghua manuscript is the "real" chapter. *There are redundancies and discrepancies among the three sections if one were to read them as a single continuous text.


References

Year of birth missing Year of death missing Chinese government officials Characters in Chinese mythology {{China-bio-stub