The ''Book of Jin'' is an official Chinese historical text covering the history of the
Jin dynasty from 266 to 420. It was compiled in 648 by a number of officials commissioned by the imperial court of the
Tang dynasty
The Tang dynasty (, ; zh, c=唐朝), or the Tang Empire, was an Dynasties of China, imperial dynasty of China that ruled from 618 to 907, with an Wu Zhou, interregnum between 690 and 705. It was preceded by the Sui dynasty and followed ...
, with
chancellor
Chancellor () is a title of various official positions in the governments of many countries. The original chancellors were the of Roman courts of justice—ushers, who sat at the (lattice work screens) of a basilica (court hall), which separa ...
Fang Xuanling as the lead editor, drawing mostly from official documents left from earlier archives. A few essays in volumes 1, 3, 54 and 80 were composed by the Tang dynasty's
Emperor Taizong himself. However, the contents of the ''Book of Jin'' included not only the history of the Jin dynasty, but also that of the
Sixteen Kingdoms
The Sixteen Kingdoms (), less commonly the Sixteen States, was a chaotic period in Chinese history from AD 304 to 439 when northern China fragmented into a series of short-lived dynastic states. The majority of these states were founded b ...
period, which was contemporaneous with the Eastern Jin dynasty.
Compilation
Over 20 histories of the Jin had been written during the Jin era itself and the subsequent
Northern and Southern dynasties
The Northern and Southern dynasties () was a period of political division in the history of China that lasted from 420 to 589, following the tumultuous era of the Sixteen Kingdoms and the Eastern Jin dynasty. It is sometimes considered a ...
, of which
18 were still extant at the beginning of the
Tang dynasty
The Tang dynasty (, ; zh, c=唐朝), or the Tang Empire, was an Dynasties of China, imperial dynasty of China that ruled from 618 to 907, with an Wu Zhou, interregnum between 690 and 705. It was preceded by the Sui dynasty and followed ...
. Yet
Emperor Taizong deemed them all to be deficient and ordered the compilation of a new standard history for the period,
[Fang, Xuanling ''ed.''(2002). ''Jinshu'' 晋书. Beijing: Zhonghua Shuju 中华书局. Preface, p. 1] as part of a wider six-history project to fill in the gaps between the
Records of the Three Kingdoms
The ''Records of the Three Kingdoms'' is a Chinese official history written by Chen Shou in the late 3rd century CE, covering the end of the Han dynasty (220 CE) and the subsequent Three Kingdoms period (220–280 CE). It is regard ...
, the
Book of Song, the
Book of Qi, the
Book of Wei and the Emperor's own time.
As part of this ambition, its treatises cover not only the Jin but also the preceding Three Kingdoms, making up for the lack of such a section in the Records of the Three Kingdoms.
The book was hastily compiled between 646 CE and 648, by a committee of 21 people led by editor-in-chief Fang Xuanling. As some chapters were written by
Emperor Taizong of Tang, the work is sometimes given the honorific "imperially authored".
The Book of Jin had the longest gestation period of any official history, not seeing the light of day until 229 years after the end of the dynasty it describes.
Contents
Legacy
The book has been criticized for being more reflective of the court politics in the Tang dynasty that compiled it, rather than the realities of the Jin dynasty itself.
Despite Fang's team having at their disposal not only the
pre-existing Jin histories, but also a large body of actual Jin primary sources, it appears that the book was primarily based on Zang Rongxu's (臧荣绪) identically-titled ''Jinshu'' from the
Southern Qi
Qi, known in historiography as the Southern Qi ( or ) or Xiao Qi (), was a Chinese imperial dynasty and the second of the four Southern dynasties during the Northern and Southern dynasties era. It followed the Liu Song dynasty and was succee ...
, and further incorporates material from fictionalized novels. The Tang historian
Liu Zhiji (661–721) accused the editors of generally selecting the sources that had the most vivid and compelling language, rather than the ones that were the most historically reliable.
[Fang (2002). Preface p. 2]
The collaborative nature of the project coupled with the rushed production time unsurprisingly leaves the book with a number of internal contradictions and editorial errors; such as misspelled personal and place names, draft-like and unpolished language, and "cross-references" to non-existent chapters that were presumably planned but never finished in time for publication.
[Fang (2002). Preface p. 3]
In spite of these shortcomings, the Book of Jin is recognized as the most important primary source for the Jin dynasty and Sixteen Kingdoms, because the pre-existing histories and other sources it was compiled from have all been lost – save for a few stray quotations in other works.
Translations
No complete translations are known at this time. The astronomical chapters (11, 12 & 13) were translated by Ho Peng Yoke. Choo translates the biography of
Huan Wen in volume 98 and the biography of
Sun Chuo in volume 56. Knapp translates biographies of Liu Yin in volume 88 and
Huangfu Mi in volume 51.
References
External links
Book of Jin 《晉書》Chinese text with matching English vocabulary
See also
*
Twenty-Four Histories
*
Eighteen History Books of Jin
{{Wu Hu
Twenty-Four Histories
History books about the Jin dynasty (266–420)
Sixteen Kingdoms
7th-century history books
Tang dynasty literature
7th-century Chinese books