TheYupian (Chinese:玉篇;pinyin:Yùpiān;Wade–Giles:Yü-p'ien; "Jade Chapters") is a c. 543Chinese dictionary edited by Gu Yewang (顧野王; Ku Yeh-wang; 519–581) during theLiang dynasty. It arranges 12,158 character entries under 542radicals, which differ somewhat from the original 540 in theShuowen Jiezi. Each character entry gives afanqie pronunciation gloss and a definition, with occasional annotation.
TheYupian is a significant work in the history ofWritten Chinese. It is the first major extant dictionary in the four centuries since the completion ofShuowen and records thousands of new characters that had been introduced into the language in the interim. It is also important for documenting nonstandardsúzì (俗字, "popular written forms of characters"), many of which were adopted in the 20th century as officialsimplified Chinese characters. For instance, theYupian records thatwàn (traditional萬, "ten thousand, myriad") had a popular form of (simplified万), which is much easier to write with threestrokes versus thirteen.[1]
Baxter describes the textual history:
The originalYùpiān was a large and unwieldy work of thirtyjuàn ["volumes; fascicles"], and during Táng and Sòng various abridgements and revisions of it were made, which often altered the originalfănqiè spellings; of the original version only fragments remain (some two thousand entries out of a reported original total of 16,917), and the currently-available version of theYùpiān is not a reliable guide to Early Middle Chinese phonology.[2]
In 760, during theTang dynasty, Sun Jiang (孫強; Sun Chiang) compiled aYupian edition, which he noted had a total of 51,129 words, less than a third of the original 158,641. In 1013,Song dynasty scholar Chen Pengnian (陳彭年; Ch'en P'eng-nien) published a revisedDaguang yihui Yupian (大廣益會玉篇; "Expanded and enlarged Jade Chapters"). The Japanese monkKūkai brought an original versionYupian back from China in 806, and modified it into his c. 830Tenrei Banshō Meigi, which is the oldest extantJapanese dictionary.
Kūkai's dictionary, when combined with other fragments of the uneditedYupian extant in Japan, has been used to reconstruct the original phonology of theYupian. This reconstruction reveals that theYupian had a phonology similar to the laterQieyun but did not make certain phonological distinctions found there, reflecting the variety of spoken language in theSouthern Dynasties.[3]
