Xu Shen compiled Shuowen Jiezi, organizing characters by radicals and explaining their forms, pronunciations, and meanings. It became an important classic in the study of Chinese writing. The book reflects Eastern Han understandings of writing. Excavated evidence and modern research can supplement or correct some explanations, and the dictionary has its own historical limitations.
Historical background
The Shuowen Jiezi is a Chinese dictionary compiled by Xu Shen c. 100 CE, during the Eastern Han dynasty (25–220 CE). While prefigured by earlier reference works for Chinese characters like the Erya (c. 3rd century BCE), the Shuowen Jiezi contains the first comprehensive analysis of characters in terms of their structure, where Xu attempted to provide rationales for their construction. It was also the first to organize its entries into sections according to shared components called radicals.
Xu Shen was a scholar of the Five Classics during the Han dynasty. He finished compiling the Shuowen Jiezi in 100 CE. However, due to an unfavorable imperial attitude towards scholarship, he waited until 121 before his son Xu Chong presented it to Emperor An of Han, along with a memorial.
In analyzing the structure of characters and defining the words represented by them, Xu strove to clarify the meaning of the pre-Han classics, so as to ensure order and render their use in governance unquestioned. Xu's motives also included a pragmatic and political dimension: according to Boltz, the compilation of the Shuowen "cannot be held to have arisen from a purely linguistic or lexicographical drive". During the Han era, the prevalent theory of language was the Confucian Rectification of Names, a line of thinking revolving around the use of correct names to ensure proper governance.
Now, as for writing systems and their offspring characters, these are the root of the classics, the origin of kingly government, what former men used to hand down to posterity, and what later men use to remember antiquity.
Structure
Xu wrote the Shuowen Jiezi to analyze seal script characters that evolved slowly and organically throughout the mid-to-late Zhou dynasty in the state of Qin, and which were then standardized during the Qin dynasty and promulgated empire-wide. Thus, Needham et al. (1986: 217) describe the Shuowen Jiezi as "a paleographic handbook as well as a dictionary".
The dictionary includes a preface and 15 chapters. The first 14 chapters are character entries; the 15th and final chapter is divided into two parts: a postface and an index of section headers. Xu Shen states in his postface that the dictionary has 9,353 character entries, plus 1,163 graphic variants, with a total length of 133,441 characters. The transmitted texts vary slightly in content, owing to the omissions and emendations of later commentators. Modern editions have 9,831 characters and 1,279 variants.
Entries
Individual entries can also include graphical variants, secondary definitions, information regarding their regional use, citations from pre-Han texts, and further phonetic information, typically provided in a dúruò ( 'read as if') notation.
In addition to the seal script form, two other variant styles were included if they differed in form—called 'ancient script' (gǔwén ) and 'Zhou script' (Zhòuwén ), not to be confused with the Zhou dynasty. The Zhou characters were taken from the no-longer extant Shizhoupian, an early copybook traditionally attributed to "Historian Zhou", from the court of King Xuan of Zhou (r. 827–782 BCE). Wang Guowei and Tang Lan argued that the structure and style of these characters suggested a later date, but some modern scholars such as Qiu Xigui argue for the original dating.
The ancient characters were based on the characters used in pre-Qin copies of the classics recovered from the walls of houses where they had been hidden to escape the burning of books ordered by Qin Shihuang. Xu believed that these were the most ancient characters available, since Confucius would have used the oldest characters to best convey the meaning of the texts. However, Wang Guowei and other scholars have shown that they were regional variant forms in the eastern areas during the Warring States period, from only slightly earlier than the Qin seal script.