Li Ping, a\nprofessor from the Department of History, Faculty of Social Sciences,\nUniversity of Macau (UM), who is also a visiting professor at UM\u2019s Centre for\nChinese History and Culture, recently participated in field trips with his\nstudents to the National University of Singapore (NUS) Chinese Library to\nexamine a hand-written copy of Shiji <\/i>(also\nknown as \u2018Records of the Grand Historian\u2019). As a result of a research study\nthat lasted two years and a half, Prof Li discovered top-quality hand-made\nChinese letter paper used in Faxi Temple in Haiyan county, dating back more\nthan 800 years.<\/p>
According to\nProf Li, the study yielded five important discoveries. First, the manuscript\nwas written in regular script and includes more than 500,000 characters. The\nwriter was Jiang Ligang, the top calligrapher in the field of regular script\nfrom Ming dynasty. Second, the manuscript is very important in the studies of\ntextual emendation because it is different from any other existing version of Shiji<\/i>. Third, the prologue of this\nmanuscript was written by the grand chancellor Gu Dingchen during the Jiajing\nEra of Ming dynasty. Fourth, the manuscript underwent a long, winding journey,\nstarting from Beijing to the south of Jiangsu, Lingnan area, to Macao, before\narriving in Singapore where it was ultimately archived by the NUS Chinese\nLibrary. Fifth, the paper on which the manuscript\u2019s prologue was written is\ntop-quality hand-made Chinese letter paper used in Faxi Temple in Haiyan\ncounty, dating back more than 800 years.<\/p>
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The discovery\nis the result of UM\u2019s scientific research project on the various versions of\nthe Twenty-Four Histories<\/i> found\noverseas and the establishment of a related database at UM. The finding has\nbeen evaluated and recognised anonymously by experts in the fields of history, studies of historical documents, paper making, and calligraphy from the editorial team of\nthe journal Historical Research<\/i>, the\nNo 1 academic journal in the field of history in China, and was published in\nthe journal\u2019s sixth issue in 2017.<\/p> <\/p><\/div>\n \n ","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Li Ping, a professor from the Department of History, Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Macau (UM), who is also a visiting professor at UM\u2019s Centre for Chinese History and…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":46038,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[60],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-46037","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-press-release"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n