An Interpolation in Zhong Hong's Shipin‪.‬

No part of Zhong Hong's [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] (469-518) Shipin [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] (Grading of Poets) has attracted more controversy than the entry on Tao Qian [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] (365?-427). Since at least the Song dynasty, Zhong has been lambasted for placing Tao too low, merely in the middle rank and not the top where he supposedly belonged. His defenders have replied either by claiming that the received text is corrupt and that Tao originally appeared in the first rank or by rejecting the criticism as anachronistic and reflective only of later standards of taste. The first defense has proven unconvincing; despite some ambiguous evidence it seems certain that Tao was indeed in the middle rank. Both sides of the debate, indeed almost all commentators on Shipin, have shared an important assumption: that the entry represents the text as Zhong Hong wrote it. My purpose in this note is to question this assumption, in particular to claim that the final sentence of the entry is anomalous and, at least in its current form, unlikely to have been in the original text. A 1980 article by Li Wenchu [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] raised the first objections to this line, though Li's critique was soon dismissed by Cao Xu [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], editor of a now-standard edition of Shipin. (1) I will add further evidence to Li's and argue that the line, even if it is not an interpolation, at least raises interesting questions about the interpretation of Tao's entry and Shipin in general. The entry reads as follows: The notice is among the longer ones in Shipin, since in addition to recounting Tao's literary filiation and summarizing the qualities of his verse it also describes his character and quotes from his poetry. It is the last sentence that is of interest. A close examination in the context of Shipin and its time reveals a number of anomalies for which the most economical explanation is that this line was not in the original text.