金石錄後序（節選）金石录后序（节选）

What are these thirty chapters of the Record of Bronze and Stone? They are the book written by my lord Zhao Defu. From the Three Dynasties down to the Five Dynasties, he took the inscriptions on bells, tripods, steamers, cauldrons, basins, ewers, wine vessels and grain bowls, and the deeds of famous and obscure men on great stelae and tablets: two thousand scrolls of everything carved on bronze and stone. In every case he corrected the errors and falsehoods, chose and rejected, praised and blamed; whatever was enough to accord with the way of the sages above, or to correct the mistakes of the historians below, he set down. It may be called a great deal.

Alas! Since the downfall of Wang Bo and Yuan Zai, calligraphy and painting have been no different from pepper; and the failings of Changyu and Yuankai, a passion for money and a passion for the Commentary, how do they differ? The names are not the same, but the folly is one.

In the xinsi year of Jianzhong I came as a bride to the Zhao family. My late father was then a vice-director in the Ministry of Rites, and the chief minister, my father-in-law, was at that time vice-minister of personnel; my lord was twenty-one and a student at the Imperial Academy. The Zhao and Li families were of modest standing and had always been poor and frugal. On the first and fifteenth of every month, when he had leave to go out, he would pawn some clothes for five hundred cash and walk to the Xiangguo Temple, and buy rubbings of inscriptions and fruit to bring home. We would sit facing each other, unrolling the rubbings and savouring them, and thought ourselves people of the age of Getian. Two years later he went out to take office, and from then on he resolved to live on vegetables and wear coarse cloth if need be, to search the farthest places and remotest regions, and to gather every ancient script and strange character in the world. Day by day and month by month the pile grew. While the chief minister was in the government, and relatives and old friends held posts in the court libraries, there were many lost poems and forgotten histories, books not seen even in the wall of Lu or the tomb at Ji; so he set to copying them with all his strength, and as he came to relish it he could not stop. Later, when he saw calligraphy or painting by famous hands old and new, or a remarkable vessel of some former age, he would take off his coat to buy it. I remember that in the Chongning years someone brought a painting of peonies by Xu Xi and asked two hundred thousand cash for it. Even for the sons of rich families in those days, how easy would it have been to find two hundred thousand? We kept it two nights, could think of no way to raise the money, and gave it back. Husband and wife sat facing each other, sorry about it, for days.

Afterwards we lived quietly in our home district for ten years, gathering what we could above and below, and had more than enough food and clothing. Then he governed two prefectures in turn and spent all his salary on lead and tablets. Whenever we got a book we collated it together, put it in order and wrote its label. When we got calligraphy, paintings or ritual bronzes we would also handle them and unroll them and point out their flaws, taking the burning of one candle as our limit for the night. So our paper was fine and our texts complete, the best of any collector's. I happen to have a good memory. After every meal we sat in the Hall of Returning and made tea; pointing at the piles of books, one of us would name a fact and say in which book, which chapter, which leaf and which line it was to be found, and whoever was right drank first. When I won I would raise my cup and laugh so hard that the tea spilled into my lap, and I got up without drinking any. I would gladly have grown old in that country; and so, though we lived through trouble and want, our spirit did not bend.

When the collection was complete we built a library in the Hall of Returning with great cupboards, numbered and listed the books, and shelved the volumes. Anyone who wanted to read had to ask for the key, enter it in the register and take out the volumes; and at the slightest damage or stain they had to make it good, wiping and correcting it. It was no longer the easy ways of before. Wanting ease, we had brought on anxiety instead. I could not bear it, so I began to do without a second dish of meat and a second colour in my clothes; I wore no bright pearls or kingfisher feathers in my hair and had no gilt or embroidery in my rooms; and whenever I came upon a book of history or of the hundred schools whose characters were neither worn nor missing and whose text was free of errors, I bought it at once and kept it as a second copy. Our families had long handed down the Book of Changes and the Zuo Commentary, so our texts in those two traditions were the most complete. Then tables were laid with books, pillows and mats lay among them; our minds met and our thoughts conferred, our eyes went out and our spirits received, and the pleasure of it was greater than music, beauty, dogs and horses.

Alas! From eighteen, two years short of the age at which Lu Ji wrote his rhapsody, to fifty-two, two years past the age at which Qu Boyu knew his faults, in thirty-four years, how many troubles, gains and losses there have been! Yet where there is having there must be lack, and where there is gathering there must be scattering: that is the constant way of things. A man lost a bow and a man found it; what more is there to say? I have set down this small account from beginning to end only so that lovers of antiquity and learning in later ages may take it as a warning.

Written in the Yi'an Studio, on the first day of the eighth month, a jiayin day, in the second year of Shaoxing, a ren year.