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I 2
THE SHỦ KING.
CHAPTER II. THE CREDIBILITY OF THE RECORDS IN THE SH0.
1. Accepting the conclusion which I have stated immediately above, I now go on to enquire whether the docuWhether the ments in the Shû can be relied on as genuine records in narratives of the transactions which they pro
the Sha are reliable fess to relate. And it may be said at once,
or not. in reference to the greater number of them, that there is no reasonable ground to call their credibility in question. Allowance must be made, indeed, for the colouring with which the founders of one dynasty set forth the misdeeds of the closing reigns of that which they were superseding, and for the way in which the failures of a favourite hero may be glossed over. But the documents of the Shù are quite as much entitled to credit as the memorials and edicts which are published at the present day in the Peking Gazette.
The more recent the documents are, the more, of course, are they to be relied on. And provision was made, we have seen, by the statutes of Kâu, for the preservation of the records of previous dynasties. But it was not to be expected that many of those should not perish in the lapse of time, and others suffer mutilations and corruptions. And this, we find, was the case. Of the eighty-one documents that the Shů at one time contained, only one belonged to the period of Yão; seven to the period of Shun; four to the dynasty of Hsià, much the larger one of which narrates what was done in the time of Yao; thirty-one to the dynasty of Shang; and thirty-eight to the first 500 years of that of Kâu. All this seems to bear on the surface of it the stamp of verisimilitude. 2. The Books of Kâu were contemporaneous with the The Books events which they describe, and became public
of Kâu. property not long after their composition. They are to be received without hesitation.
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