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Article published In:
Historiographia Linguistica
Vol. 40:1/2 (2013) ► pp.3–37

“Preferring Omission over Falsity”

The politics of compilation in the Kangxi Classic of Characters 康熙字典

| Harvard University

Neglected in the current scholarship on Qing dynasty court compilations, the dictionary commissioned by the Kangxi emperor in 1710 is an important source for understanding the nature of court-commissioned reference works in the early Qing. The Kangxi Classic of Characters, although typically believed to have improved on Ming and early Qing dictionaries by virtue of its greater inclusion of source materials, in fact had a more complicated relationship with its predecessors. In the process of delegitimizing earlier, privately compiled works, the editors of the Kangxi Classic of Characters actively promoted the exclusive authority of the court in their composition of dictionary definitions. Further, their manipulation of definitions in earlier dictionaries was not a straightforward process of greater inclusion and deletion of redundancy, but rather a reflection of contemporary intellectual developments. This can be seen in the compilers’ attempts to bring the definitions in line with a number of trends in Confucian thought, which were taking form at the court during this period.

Published online: 8 March 2013
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https://doi.org/10.1075/hl.40.1-2.02ved
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