Yuan shi

"Yuan Shi" contains a statement of the events of the reign of emperors of the previous dynasty (that is, Yuan) in chronological order, descriptions of rites and customs, the state of administration, military affairs, economics and trade, geography, calendar, sciences and arts from Genghis Khan to the last emperor of Yuan , as well as information about other peoples with whom the dynasty had contacts. Following the Shi Ji tradition (1st century BC) and subsequent chronicles, the material is framed in four classical sections:

• “Benji” 本 紀 - “Main Records”, the annals of the reign of the Mongol khans ;
• "Biao" 表 - "Tables": chronological and genealogical tables;
• "Zhi" 志 - "Treatises" or monographic works on different areas of life and state administration in a given dynasty;
• “Lechzhuan” 列傳 - “Biographies of the famous”: biographies of all the prominent figures of that time.

The compilers of Yuan Shi wrote quite a bit on their own, mostly they edited and compiled texts in Chinese created during the Yuan period. Moreover, their editorial work was sometimes minimized - a lot of original documents from the Yuan era (decrees of emperors, reports of government bodies, tombstones on the graves of prominent statesmen of the Yuan, etc.) were preserved in the text “Yuan Shi”.

The text of Yuan Shi was compiled by a large team of authors, editors, and compilers, under the general guidance of Song Liang and Wang Wei zh: 王 禕 (1321–1372). The work was started in March 1369, that is, only a few months after the expulsion of the Mongols from the capital Dadu ( Beijing ). Six months later, the text of the dynastic history of 159 juan was presented to the emperor . However, this work was recognized as insufficient and incomplete, so the compilation of Yuan Shi was continued - new juan were added in almost all sections, compiled with the old and editorial work was carried out to combine all this, total in the final, second, edition of Yuan Shi it turned out 210 juan. In July 1370, the work was completed and approved by the emperor. The haste of writing Yuan Shi was the subject of late criticism: for example, Qian Daxin錢 大 昕 (1728–1804, ep. Qing) noted that among the dynastic stories of all times, Yuan Shi is the worst in quality.

The rush to compile, then the need for new additional work and new editing of Yuan Shi, led to the fact that in the text there are frequent errors-errors, omissions and distortions, as well as duplication of entire sections. However, in Yuan Shi reports, often with distorted transcriptions of foreign and barbaric names of places and places for the Chinese, with frequent rearrangements of events and a distorted chronology, they still see real documents from the era of Genghis Khan and his successors, which hardworking compilers of the chronicle managed to get where only You can - including during a risky expedition to hostile Mongolia.

This emphasis on documents led to another feature - the information in the biographies section of famous personalities is more informative and reliable (of course, with the necessary correction for the well-known stamps of the Chinese epitaph genre to “virtuous officials”) than in the “Basic Records”. This is partly due to the fact that the scale of nation-wide events that were recorded in the official state chronicle department overshadowed private events in life, even among prominent, but individual people. But there is another explanation - the national archives of Yuan were mostly inaccessible to the creators of Yuan Shi, who used only officially published information from the codes of laws - such as the collection "Yuan Dian-Zhang (Establishment of the Yuan Dynasty)" (survived to this day), " Da Yuan tun-chi (Universal Laws of the Great Yuan) ”(a part of it called“ Tong-chi tyoge (Codified Provisions of the Universal Laws) ”has survived to this day) and the huge compilation“ Jing-shi Dadian (General Collection of Laws Governing the World) "(Was finished in spring 1 331, consisted of 894 juan, some of its parts, as well as the preface to each of its sections have survived to our time). But private archives and private documents were better preserved than state ones. Therefore, the compilers of Yuan Shi took a step unusual for the Chinese tradition of compiling chronicles — they introduced extracts from the materials for the biographies of those who lived in that period into the “Master Records”.

“Yuan shi” was compiled mainly by compiling quotes from official codes of laws and orders of the yuan authorities (based on them, sections of “Tables” and “Treatises” were compiled, as well as annals of boards); shilu, that is, daily records of the court historiographers (on the basis of the shila, “Basic records” were compiled, that is, annals of reigns); and texts from collections of so-called “exemplary compositions”, which included texts of tombstones on graves and lechuan of famous figures of the era; as well as other Yuan shi documents available to authors. So, the Yuan Shi vaulters used the Yuan collections of “exemplary writings” and lechuang — the works of Su Tien-jue “Gochao Wenlei (Exemplary compositions created by the ruling dynasty)” and “Gochao ming-chen shilue (Brief information about famous officials of the ruling dynasty ) ”, A collection of“ Hou-fei gong-chen lechuang (Biographies of empresses, emperor’s wives and honored dignitaries) ”and some other similar collections of the Yuan time.

The sources of information for such works were, as a rule, official track records and family archives, which were processed by professional writers, authors of gravestone inscriptions on graves and lechuan, which they ordered either by relatives or official bodies. The compilers of these works used the original sources dating back to the 13th century, preserved both in the families of customers and in the archives contemporary to them. Such compositions also fell into collections of the indicated type — exemplary works, lechuan, collections of various unofficial stories and notes.

Russian scholars early paid attention to the meaning of Yuan Shi for the history of the Mongols: in 1829, the first translation into Russian (and generally the first time into European) of fragments of its first three juan was made and published under the title “The History of the First Four Khans from the House Chingisova »an outstanding Russian Sinologist about. Iakinf (Bichurin) . For that time, it was a colossal achievement, far ahead of European sinology.

However, the Bichurin translation of “Yuan Shi” was a combination of retellings of passages of “Yuan Shi” with translations of parts of the later, Qing, chronicle of “Tongjian ganma”, which together constituted “The History of the First Four Khans from the House of Genghisov”.

In addition, translated about. Iakinfa uncritically used non-Chinese words and names that were distorted by the Qing Commission on "correcting names in Liao Shi, Jin Shi, Yuan Shi." This commission under Emperor Qianlong (1736-1795) issued a mandatory list of Qin-ding Yuan Shi Yu-jie (the Highest Approved Explanations of Words in Yanshi), in accordance with which, huge changes were made to the text of the Yuan Shi Qing editions, completely distorted her original text. For this reason, the nomenclature of proper names in the translation of Bichurin should be revised and corrected. Moreover, the Qing printed copy of Yuan Shi, which was used by Fr. Iakinf, was very faulty - more than once in the text of the translation it is reported that this place could not be read. In view of this, the Bichurin translation did not contain not only certain words and phrases, but also entire sentences and paragraphs.

Later, at the beginning of the 20th century, A. I. Ivanov made translations of part of the Yuan Shi fragments, in which there were mentions of the Mongol campaigns in Russia and information about the Alans. These translations to some extent complemented the work of. Iakinfa, but only on these topics.

Subsequently, individual juan and fragments from the Yuan Shi were translated into Russian by such researchers as E. I. Kychanov (fragments containing information about the Kirghiz and Kipchaks) and N. Ts. Munkuev (juan 149 with a biography of Yeluy Chutsaya and some other fragments) .

In the publication “The Golden Horde in the sources. Volume Three Chinese and Mongolian sources ”, M. 2009, R.P. Khrapachevsky made a complete commentary on the translation of the annals of the reigns of Genghis Khan, Ugedei, Guyuk and Mengu-kaan (juan 1, 2 and 3), as well as the biographies of Juchi (juan 117), Subedei ( Juan 121 and 122), Ismail (Ju 120) and Mengusara (Ju 124). In the same place, in the translations of extracts from such sections of the Yuan Shi as Tables, Treatises and Biographies of Famous, various information about Russia, Eastern Europe, their peoples and related events is given.

• Yuan-shi // Encyclopedic Dictionary of Brockhaus and Efron : in 86 volumes (82 volumes and 4 additional). - SPb. , 1890-1907.
• In compiling the material, an article was used - R. P. Khrapachevsky “On Chinese and Mongolian sources on the history of Eastern Europe in the XIII-XIV centuries.” // “Golden Horde in the sources. Volume Three Chinese and Mongolian sources ”, M. 2009

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