History | Professor discovers manuscript dated centuries old

Li during a field trip to Singapore

A professor from the Department of History, Faculty of Social Sciences of University of Macau (UM), Li Ping, discovered a hand- made Chinese letter paper used in the Faxi Temple in Haiyan county, which has been dated to be more than 800 years old.

Li recently undertook field trips with his students to the National University of Singapore’s (NUS) Chinese Library to examine a hand- written copy of Shiji (also known as ‘Records of the Grand Historian’).

The scholar, who is also a visiting professor at UM’s Centre for Chinese History and Culture, conducted a research study on the manuscript which lasted two and a half years, as cited in a press release issued by the university.

According to the professor, the manuscript was written in regular script and includes more than 500,000 characters.

The manuscript was written by Jiang Ligang, the top calligrapher in regular script during Ming dynasty.

Li considers the manuscript important in the study of textual revision because it is different from any other existing version of Shiji, also noting that the prologue of this manuscript was written by the grand chancellor Gu Dingchen during the Jiajing Era of Ming dynasty.

The expert said that the manuscript underwent a long journey, starting from Beijing to the south of Jiangsu, Lingnan area, to Macau, before arriving in Singapore where it was ultimately archived by the NUS Chinese Library.

The finding has been evaluated and recognized by experts in the fields of history, documentation science, paper making, and calligraphy from the editorial team of the journal Historical Research, and was published in the journal’s sixth issue in 2017.