1. Lu Xuan
Lu Xuan was a native of Pinghu (modern Jiaxing) in Zhejiang, and a descendant of a prominent Ming dynasty family. A series of senior ministers of the Lu family worked for Emperor Kangxi, though Lu Xuan’s pathway into the civil bureaucracy was far from smooth. After passing the initial xiucai examinations in his late teens, he was unsuccessful in the following juren examinations. At this point, he chose to abandon his aspirations to sit the imperial exams, and instead decided to live in a retreat on Xu Mountain, near present-day Wuxi. Taking inspiration from the Jin dynasty poet Tao Yuanming, who was born in Chaisang, and the Tang dynasty’s Wang Wei, who lived in seclusion at Lantian, Lu Xuan planted numerous plum trees around his isolated residence, and so took for himself the hao soubriquet “Mei Gu,” meaning “plum valley.” There he assembled a large collection of old books. Along with his editorial work, he was a connoisseur of paintings and calligraphy; two of his particular areas of expertise were book-binding and scroll mounting.
Lu’s preface to Meanings in the Book of Documents records that the book was finished in the first lunar month of 1786, and that the copying began in 1787, taking about one year to complete. Despite the amount of work involved, the book was never published beyond the manuscript copy. As its starting point, the work takes the “New Text” format of the Book of Documents, and so is divided into the fifty-eight chapters of that tradition, while in terms of exegesis, Lu Xuan’s preference was for the older styles of the Han dynasty onwards, rather than the neo-Confucian Song dynasty school of Zhu Xi, as is exemplified by his pupil Shen Cai’s seminal commentary.
In 1916, upon reading Meanings in the Book of Documents, the distinguished literatus Ye Changzhi (1849–1917) remarked:
In terms of the scholarship of Confucian canonical texts, it has no particular scholarly lineage and is not worth discussing; however, the book’s contents have been written out by the concubine Shen Hongping in a petite kai script, and quite neatly and elegantly. Judging from whoever bound the book, and also considering its small seal, these are clearly the work of a woman and not a man, and as an example of an oft-repeated tale amongst the literati, it is a precious deposit of the innermost treasury; so, I advised Hanyi [one of Liu Chenggan’s soubriquets] to add it to his collection.” Miao Quansun echoed these views, and his bibliographical entry for Liu Chenggan’s catalogue includes the phrase: “In its copying, fine and fastidious, and most delightful, certainly worthy of preservation.”