The picture above shows a typical shelf of my library holding Chinese and Japanese books, in this case books on the oldest Chinese dictionary still completely intact, the Shuowen Jiezi 說文解字 of around 100 AD in the middle, flanked on the left by several Japanese reference books on kanji etymology and on the right by two Japanese volumes containing important quotations from Chinese classical literature. The literary essence of Kanji Culture can probably be found within either one of these anthologies of quotations. If we add to this little library one of the big dictionaries of Chinese words (in contrast to the single characters discussed in the books on kanji etymology shown here), such as the Hanyu Da Cidian or Morohashi’s Dai Kanwa Jiten, we would have a small tool set good for a lifetime of studying the classics of Kanji Culture.
The short fat volume third from the right is the Kangxi Zidian 康熙字典 originally compiled under the famous Kangxi emperor, second emperor of the Qing, China’s last dynasty. It appeared in 1712 AD. The Kangxi Dictionary contains a main entry for each of more than 47,000 individual characters, arranged under 214 classifiers (often called ‘radicals’). I recall Professor Helmut Wilhelm in a course on Chinese Bibliography at the University of Washington say that the Kangxi Zidian was still (in the early 1960s) the best dictionary for classical Chinese. He was referring to zidian 字典, single ‘character dictionaries’, not cidian 辭典, bisyllabic word dictionaries.) The edition on my shelf above is a high quality photo copy of a Japanese woodblock edition published by Kodansha, Tokyo, 1977. A copy of the woodblock edition Kodansha used (訂正康熙字典) was for sale in a Kanda bookstore in the 80s. I knew then, as I carefully leafed through the soft, strong and supple pages, that it was cheap at $600, but couldn’t spare the money. Its large woodblock characters were so clear you could read them in moonlight. My memory is shaky, but I believe it was printed in the late Qing. Along with a few memorable women, it was an opportunity I regret not taking.
