Chinese classic texts or canonical texts or simply dianji (典籍) refers to the Chinese texts which originated before the imperial unification by the Qin dynasty in 221 BC, particularly the "Four Books and Five Classics" of the Neo-Confucian tradition, themselves a customary abridgment of the "Thirteen Classics". All of these pre-Qin texts were written in classical Chinese. All three canons are collectively known as the classics.
The Tao Te Ching is a Chinese classic text written around 400 BC and traditionally credited to the sage Laozi. The text's authorship, date of composition and date of compilation are debated. The oldest excavated portion dates back to the late 4th century BC, but modern scholarship dates other parts of the text as having been written—or at least compiled—later than the earliest portions of the Zhuangzi.
Laozi also rendered as Lao Tzu, and Lao-Tze, was an ancient Chinese philosopher and writer. He is the reputed author of the Tao Te Ching, the founder of philosophical Taoism, and a deity in religious Taoism and traditional Chinese religions.
John DeFrancis was an American linguist, sinologist, author of Chinese language textbooks, lexicographer of Chinese dictionaries, and Professor Emeritus of Chinese Studies at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa.
The Liezi is a Taoist text attributed to Lie Yukou, a c. 5th century BC Hundred Schools of Thought philosopher, but Chinese and Western scholars believe it was compiled around the 4th century CE.
The Three Treasures or Three Jewels are basic virtues in Taoism. Although the Tao Te Ching originally used sanbao to mean "compassion", "frugality", and "humility", the term was later used to translate the Three Jewels in Chinese Buddhism, and to mean the Three Treasures in Traditional Chinese Medicine.
Ge Hong was a Chinese linguist, philosopher, physician, politician, and writer during the Eastern Jin Dynasty. He was the author of Essays on Chinese Characters, the Baopuzi, the Emergency Formulae at an Elbow's Length, among others. He is the originator of First Aid in Traditional Chinese Medicine and influenced later generations.
Liu E, courtesy name Tieyun, was a Chinese writer, archaeologist and politician of the late Qing Dynasty.
Victor Henry Mair is an American sinologist. He is a professor of Chinese at the University of Pennsylvania. Among other accomplishments, Mair has edited the standard Columbia History of Chinese Literature and the Columbia Anthology of Traditional Chinese Literature. Mair is the series editor of the Cambria Sinophone World Series, and his book coauthored with Miriam Robbins Dexter, Sacred Display: Divine and Magical Female Figures of Eurasia, won the Sarasvati Award for the Best Nonfiction Book in Women and Mythology.
The Huainanzi is an ancient Chinese text that consists of a collection of essays that resulted from a series of scholarly debates held at the court of Liu An, Prince of Huainan, sometime before 139 BC. The Huainanzi blends Daoist, Confucianist, and Legalist concepts, including theories such as yin and yang and Wu Xing theories.
The Huahujing is a Taoist work, traditionally attributed to Laozi.
Carmelo Elorduy, S.J. was a Spanish Sinologist. Elorduy was born in Mungia and his first trip to China was in 1926, where he worked at the Jesuit mission located in Wuhu City, Anhui. He returned to Spain in 1932 to finish his degree in Theology and Philosophy and to become a priest with the Society of Jesus. He returned to China in 1934 and remained there until 1951 when he moved to Macao and the following year to Taichung. For health reasons he moved back to Spain in 1959 and while resting in Oña and encouraged by his brother Eleuterio, he began translating some of the Chinese Classics. Most of his translations of the Chinese Classics became the first to be done directly from Classical Chinese into the Spanish language.
The Baopuzi, written by the Jin dynasty scholar Ge Hong 葛洪 in 283–343, is divided into esoteric Neipian 內篇 "Inner Chapters" and equally exoteric Waipian 外篇 "Outer Chapters". The Taoist Inner Chapters discuss topics such as techniques to achieve "hsien" 仙, Chinese alchemy, elixirs, and demonology. The Confucian Outer Chapters discuss Chinese literature, Legalism, politics, and society.
The Travels of Lao Can (simplified Chinese: 老残游记; traditional Chinese: 老殘遊記; pinyin: Lǎo Cán Yóujì) is a novel by Liu E (1857-1909), written between 1903 and 1904 and published in 1907 to wide acclaim. Thinly disguising his own views in those of Lao Can, the physician hero, Liu describes the rise of the Boxers in the countryside, the decay of the Yellow River control system, and the hypocritical incompetence of the bureaucracy. Its social satire showed the limits of the old elite and officialdom and gave an in-depth look into everyday life in the countryside in the late Qing period.
The Chinese Novel at the Turn of the Century is a 1980 book edited by Milena Doleželová-Velingerová, published by the University of Toronto Press. It was the first book that had been written in a Western language that chronicled fiction published in the final 15 years of the Qing Dynasty, from 1897 to 1910.
Patrick Dewes Hanan was a New Zealand scholar of Chinese literature who was the Victor S. Thomas Professor of Chinese Literature at Harvard University. A Sinologist, he specialised in pre-20th-century vernacular fiction.
A Brief History of Chinese Fiction is a book written by Lu Xun as a survey of traditional Chinese fiction. It was first published in Chinese in 1930, translated into Japanese, Korean, German, and then into English in 1959 by Gladys Yang and Yang Xianyi. It was the first survey of Chinese fiction to be published in China, and has been influential in shaping later scholarship.
Heshang Gong is the reputed author of one of the earliest commentaries on the Tao Te Ching of Laozi to survive to modern times, which is dated to the latter part of the Han dynasty. He was reputedly a reclusive Chinese hermit from the 1st century CE. Other early commentaries include the Xiang'er written between AD 190 and 220, and one written by the philosopher Wang Bi.
Thomas Watters was born on 9 February 1840, and died on 10 January, 1901 at Ealing, London, England. He was a respected Oriental scholar.
Fin-de-Siècle Splendor: Repressed Modernities of Late Qing Fiction, 1848-1911 is a 1997 non-fiction book by David Der-Wei Wang, published by Stanford University Press. David Wang's thesis is that modernity was already beginning to appear in fiction published in the late Qing Dynasty of China, defined by Wang as beginning in 1849, around the start of the Taiping rebellion, rather than only appearing after the Qing Dynasty concluded in 1912. This is the first English-language full-length book written by a single author that surveyed late Qing Dynasty fiction.
