New Anecdotes of Social Talk.docVIP

New Anecdotes of Social Talk 　　THE Northern and Southern Dynasties (420-589) was an ideological boom time when the grip of Confucianism began to slip and the influences of Taoism and Buddhism were gathering steam in China. This shift in philosophy was captured in New Anecdotes of Social Talk, compiled and edited by a group of scholars headed by Liu Yiqing (403-444), a duke of the Song regime (420-489). This was a period of segmentation when China was split into a northern and a southern section each ruled by a series of local regimes. The extant version of the book is in three volumes, containing more than 1,200 anecdotes about celebrities from the late Han Dynasty (206 BC-AD 220) up to the contemporary time of the compilers and editors. The book reflects a growing diversity in philosophical inquiry and method. 　　All the people recorded in the book are real historical figures, but some depictions of them are naturally based on hearsay. The characters that populate the tales are from a wide spectrum of society, including emperors, military and civil officials, monks and hermits, but all prominent in their time, for reasons good or bad. 　　Though the authors never hide their admiration for some of these people and their extraordinary virtues, they usually spare judgment and reprehension for those behaving against orthodox values, just penning the events and stories as they came down. The book therefore offers people of today a largely unfiltered look into the life of China’s upper classes more than 15,00 years ago. The writing is terse, plain, by the standard of its time of course, but highly expressive. The portrayal of one person may be as brief as a couple of lines, but aptly captures the features that best define him. For instance, a man’s parsimony is illustrated in merely 16 Chinese characters: “Wang Rong had plum trees that bore exceptionally good fruit. For fear that others would use the seeds, he bored the core of every plum before selling it.” 　　For a