{"id":8860,"date":"2019-11-11T22:21:23","date_gmt":"2019-11-11T22:21:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/chinesemoment.com\/chinese-reading\/the-chunqiu-chun-qiu-spring-and-autumn-annals\/"},"modified":"2019-11-11T22:21:23","modified_gmt":"2019-11-11T22:21:23","slug":"the-chunqiu-chun-qiu-spring-and-autumn-annals","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/chinesemoment.com\/de\/the-chunqiu-chun-qiu-spring-and-autumn-annals\/","title":{"rendered":"The Chunqiu \u6625\u79cb\uff1aSpring and Autumn Annals"},"content":{"rendered":"
The Chunqiu \u6625\u79cb "Spring and Autumn Annals" is the chro<\/em>nicle of the state of Lu \u9c81 between 722 and 479. It is the oldest and the o<\/em>nly surviving type of chro<\/em>nicles from the early Eastern Zhou period \u4e1c\u5468 (770-221 BC). The book gained such a high position in traditio<\/em>nal literature that the whole period covered by it was called the Spring and Autumn period \u6625\u79cb 770-5th cent. BCE). The entries do not o<\/em>nly list the reign year of the individual dukes of Lu and the mo<\/em>nths but a mid-level headline is inserted indicating the seasons, which gave the chro<\/em>nicle its title. The entries are very brief and co<\/em>ncise and not easy to understand if special knowledge of the historical background is lacking. A part of the entries is also missing.<\/p>\n

The Spring and Autumn chro<\/em>nicle does not o<\/em>nly speak of the events occurring in the state of Lu itself but it also records a lot of events which took place in other states of that period. It is therefore able to give a quite detailed picture of interstate activities during the early Eastern Zhou period, in peace and in wartime. Natural disasters and eclipses of the sun also occupy in im<\/em>portant place among the records of the annals. The records of eclipses are of im<\/em>portant means for the dating of events and the matching of the old Chinese with the Western calendar.<\/p>\n

In ancient times it was believed that Co<\/em>nfucius \u5b54\u5b50 had revised the annals of Lu and so created the Spring and Autumn Annals. Co<\/em>nfucius himself came from the state of Lu, and when Co<\/em>nfucianism was made the state doctrine of the Han dynasty \u6c49 (206 BCE-220 CE), authorship of the Annals was attributed to him. This assumption was founded by the Han period scholars Dong Zho<\/em>ngshu \u8463\u4ef2\u8212, Sima Qian \u53f8\u9a6c\u8fc1 and Huan Kuan \u6853\u5bbd. Lu was certainly not the o<\/em>nly state having the institution of a historiographical office. The existence of such an office is at least known for theof states of Jin \u664b, Qi \u9f50, Chu \u695a and Song \u5b8b. The annals of the state of Chu had been called Taowu \u68bc\u674c, that of the state of Jin Cheng \u4e58. There are no fragments preserved of those annals. Of course Co<\/em>nfucius knew the chro<\/em>nicle of Lu and its co<\/em>ntents and held it in high esteem because it provided a lot of material for his interpretation of how a good government should work and what was to be avoided. The Jin period scholar Du Yu \u675c\u9884 was the first who believed that the Chunqiu Annals included not o<\/em>nly neutral statements, but that the wording of the entries included praise and blame (bao bian \u8912\u8d2c) for political actors. This assumption was later criticized by the Song period master Zheng Qiao \u90d1\u6a35 who said that such an interpretations had o<\/em>nly distorted the original, simply historiographical co<\/em>ntent of the Chunqiu.<\/p>\n

The language of the Chunqiu is very co<\/em>ncise and often obscure. It records all im<\/em>portant political events in the state of Lu during the reign of twelve dukes, as well as inter-state relatio<\/em>nship between Lu and the other feudal states of the Zhou empire, but also events that took place in other states. The Chunqiu is therefore to be seen as a chro<\/em>nicle of the early Eastern Zhou period from the viewpoint of the state of Lu. The annals include information a<\/em>bout military campaigns, interstate alliances and meetings, rebellions, state sacrifices, natural diasters, and also eclipses of the sun and the moon. The latter are of great im<\/em>portance to show how exact the calendar of ancient China was and help to date certain events.<\/p>\n

The Chunqiu is since Du Yu’s revision during the Jin period o<\/em>nly in circulation in joint editions with the text of the Zuozhuan \u5de6\u4f20, which is a kind of commentary and narrative extension of the Chunqiu. The two most im<\/em>portant ancient proper commentaries to the Chunqiu are the Go<\/em>ngyangzhuan \u516c\u7f8a\u4f20 and the Guliangzhuan \u8c37\u6881\u4f20. Editions of the tree commentaries (sanzhuan \u4e09\u4f20) written to the Chunqiu also include the main text of the Chunqiu, sometimes with a wording that differs from the transmitted version of the Chunqiu. There are o<\/em>nly very small differences between the Chunqiu texts which proves that the text was standardized at a very early point of time.
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