Han shu — “Treatise on Pitch Pipes and the Calendar”

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Overview

Key data

Pitch pipes and calendar joined

The Han shu joins music and the calendar in one treatise, the “lü-li zhi.” The ancients took pitch pipes to await the seasons and pitch numbers to match calendrical ones, holding the two to be one in origin — hence the name.

The practice of joining the calendar and astronomy in one treatise began with the Shiji and took its fixed form here; thereafter the histories kept to it.

The calendar it preserves

Ban Gu based the treatise on Liu Xin’s Santong calendar, gathering the methods and exposition from the Taichu reform on. It is the only complete source for the Taichu and Santong calendars alike.

Its eighty-one-part method, grand epoch and arrangement of new moons and intercalations are found nowhere else.

Other contents

The treatise also treats weights and measures, the lengths of pitch pipes and the method of awaiting the seasons, binding pitch, measure and calendar into one system — a sign of Han learning’s sense of wholeness.

It also preserves pre-Qin calendrical debates, essential for tracing the calendar before the Han.

A quotation

On the Taichu reform it says:

Full text

Simplified Chinese (TXT)　｜　Traditional Chinese (TXT)

The reader shows the text section by section, with the original tables preserved; the first few lines give source and licence. If scripts are disabled, use the TXT links above.

The title, date, summary and index structure compiled here are offered under CC BY 4.0 (attribution: Chujia Kuang · kuangchujia.com).
The full electronic text (about 22,134 characters: only the 1 juan listed on this page, not the complete history) is taken from the Chinese Wikisource text of Han shu — “Treatise on Pitch Pipes and the Calendar”; that part is offered under CC BY-SA 4.0 (attribution — share alike); source: zh.wikisource.org.
The electronic text has not been collated by us; please check the original before citing.

Compiled and arranged by Chujia Kuang.