Featured texts 2: popular collections by Tang and Song-dynasty poets

After mastering the first entry-level texts, learners moved on to the poetry collections of notable Tang and Song-dynasty poets. Like other texts, these works were available in the original Chinese edition, the local Gozan-ban edition, as well as handwritten versions, and were read with the aid of commentaries. Those are all Dongpo xiansheng shi (Master Dongpo’s Collected Poems). The original printed version(1) and Gozan-ban edtion(2). It is the poetry collection of the Song-dynasty poet Su Shi. As you can see this book, in order to make space for the glosses, the original pages were remounted on larger sheets. This pale brown color paper part is the original size, printed in China.

You can see the larger sheets are appended and annotations are written by Japanese learners even on the appended part. The resulting book is an interesting amalgam of printed book and manuscript.