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Fatie kanwu 法帖刊誤

Mar 18, 2012 © Ulrich Theobald

Fatie kanwu 法帖刊誤 "Correction to model calligraphies" is a critical edition of model calligraphy compiled by the Song-period 宋 (960-1279) scholar Huang Bosi 黃伯思 (1079-1118), courtesy name Changrui 長睿 or Xiaobin 霄賓, style Yulinzi 雲林子.

The 2-juan long book was written as a corrective of Mi Fu's 米芾 (1051-1107) Chunhuage tie 淳化閣帖 "(Calligraphy) model plates of the Chunhua Hall" that included a lot of errors and is written very superficially. Li Huailin's 李懷琳 calligraphy of Ms Wei's letter (Wei furen shu 衛夫人書), for instance, is a forgery, like the model Bo Ying furen zhu cao tie 伯英夫人諸草帖 that is in fact a Tang-period 唐 (618-907) product and does not date from the Jin period 晉 (265-420), as Mi Fu supposed.

Although Mi Fu himself had found out that, for instance, the Tian Chou's 田疇 assumption was false that a certain calligraphy was a handwritten product of Counsellor-in-chief Li Si 李斯 from the Qin period 秦 (221-206 BC), but did not further investigate the matter. Huang Bosi found out that the calligraphy was part of Li Yangbing's 李陽冰 (c. 750) calligraphy of the Mingzhou stone slab inscription (Mingzhou bei 明州碑). Mi Fu also attributed some models wrongly to famous authors, like a few sentences to Zhuge Liang 諸葛亮 (181-234) directly instead of an unknown Jin period author writing Zhuge's biography.

The book is very reliable and a great help for the study of the history of Chinese calligraphy. It includes two postfaces, one by Wang Zhen 王珍 and one by Xu Han 許翰 (d. 1133). It was printed in 1108 and is commonly published together with another book of Huang Bosi, the Dongguan yulun 東觀餘論. The Fatie kanwu is included in the imperial series Siku quanshu 四庫全書.

Sources:
Li Xueqin 李學勤, Lü Wenyu 呂文鬰, ed. (1996), Siku da cidian 四庫大辭典 (Changchun: Jilin daxue chubanshe), Vol. 1, 1502.
Wang Hongsheng 王宏生 (2007). "Huang Bosi Fatie kanwu kaobian 黃伯思《法帖刊誤》考辨", Lishui Xueyuan xuebao 麗水學院學報 , 2007 (12).