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BOOK REVIEWS
dilettante until the Kang-hsi period scholar Ho Cho (*) made known his annotated manuscript copy of the book. Thus the KKYL comes down to the Ching period with the great prestige it acquired during the Ming period, through no merit of its own but through the obscurity of other early work. It may be said that the T'u-hui Pao-chien, composed not long before the KKYL, also suffered the same good fortune. The value of the KKYL for study today lies not in the originality of the material; rather, it deserves study for what it indirectly reveals of early Ming tastes and popular beliefs regarding works of art. More importantly, it serves as a record of the confusion that resulted from the very great cultural and social upheavals which took place in China as a result of the Mongol conquest. The Yuan and early Ming periods saw the "popularisation" of a class of knowledge which had hitherto been confined to a very small élite. Ts'ao Chao was a man who stood mid-way between the old élite and the newly literate, and helped to propagate such knowledge. When Ming society settled down to a new pattern, a new class of literate élite grew up in the Chiang-nan area (mainly Chiangsu and Chekiang provinces) with their own canons of taste which have been recorded in books such as Kao Lien's Tsun-shêng Pa-chien but nowhere more elegantly than in Wên Chên-hêng's Ch'ang-wu-chih.
We now turn to the additions made by subsequent editors incorporated in the Wang Tso edition. These additions occupy several times more space than the original three chapters. Wang Tso, despite the peculiarity of his tastes (which were not so for his age), at least had the honesty to quote his own sources (often not the original sources of the passages). He, like many dilettantes of his time, had a great predilection for calligraphy, especially "ancient" calligraphy as transmitted in the form of old rubbings and, in particular, rubbings of the Lan-t'ing Preface supposedly written in 353 by Wang Hsi-chih, the most revered of Chinese calligraphers of all times. Quite one fifth of Wang Tso's book is devoted to calligraphy and rubbings (sixty pages in a translation text of about three hundred pages), and a large portion of this section is devoted to the not always consistent myths and legends which had grown round the holy script through the centuries. Now, Chinese connoisseurship, even without the benefit of western analytical methods, is usually highly sensitive and astute. But when it came to the Lan-t'ing Preface, all the enlightened perception of nearly all scholars throughout