Abstract
My interest in Song history emerged well after my initial training in pre-modern Chinese literature. When I first began to read Song historical texts, I knew nothing about historiographical theory, so I blithely used the same techniques for close reading that I had used to decipher Tang-Song poetry. Using these strategies for reading literature—nothing much beyond old school European philology—I was able to document the different chronological layers in the Song History (Songshi 宋史) biography of Qin Gui 秦檜 (1090–1155). When this article appeared in 1998, several colleagues more attuned to theoretical issues than I was told me its approach and findings were very much au courant. It seems, stumbling around in the dark, I had unwittingly taken the linguistic turn.
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