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BOOK REVIEWS
When Sir Percival David undertook to translate the KKYL, he avoided one of the pitfalls of working with Ming books, and Ming editions of earlier work, by making sure he had a reliable edition. This he did in 1940 in Shanghai, when he acquired the earliest known edition of the book which is most probably the first edition of 1388. It would have been a relatively simple task to translate this original ("original" in the sense that it was the first book published in this name by Ts'ao Chao) work of three chapters. But later he also had the good fortune to acquire an equally rare 1462 printing of the enlarged edition of 1459 which had been swelled to thirteen chapters with additions made mainly by Wang Tso who brought out the 1459 edition. Sir Percival decided, bravely but perhaps not so wisely, to translate the enlarged edition. But then he failed to avoid the other pitfalls mentioned at the beginning of this review.
First, there is the original three chapter edition. The copy acquired by Sir Percival, called "O" in the translation, is reproduced in full at the end of the book. Sir Percival thought it was "the result of Ts'ao's study of actual specimens and ancient texts concerning them". This is not so. For, with the exception of a few very brief entries on Sung porcelain and on lacquer, the whole book is a collection of mutilated passages extracted from similar works of the Sung and Yuan periods, such as Chao Hsi-ku's Tung-t'ien-ch'ing-lu-tsi (hereafter referred to as the TTCLT) and Hsia Wen-yen's T'u-hui Pao-chien. The latter is itself a notorious work of plagiarism.1 It should be noted here that the "erudite" manuscript notes in "O" written by a Ming reader consist mainly of sentences from the TTCLT which Ts'ao Chao omitted in his copying. Indeed Ts'ao was such a poor plagiarist that he made nonsense out of some of the most important passages in the TTCLT. For example, the detailed and accurate description of the cire perdue process of bronze casting in the TTCLT, incidentally one of the earliest Chinese accounts of this method of bronze casting, appears in the KKYL as (David's translation): "Ancient moulds (reviewer's italics) for casting bronzes were made of wax. The patterns were finely and neatly carved as finely as a hair, and the strokes of their inscriptions were even and clear. They were inverted like roof-tiles, though not very deep.... "The mistranslation of the word mo, meaning the original wax model of the bronze, into English "mould" is of course at least partly due to the brutal précis-ing of two long