Spring and Autumn Annals

Abstract

Abstract The Spring and Autumn Annals ( Chunqiu 春秋, hereafter the Annals ) is a historical chronicle that represents one of two major ancient Chinese traditions of historiography: one presents information in the form of the official annals; the other, in the form of narrative or exposition. Belonging to the former tradition, the Annals records mainly political events that occurred from 722 to 479 bce . Despite or perhaps because of the extremely compressed style of language used in the Annals , written exegesis has been generated since the formation of the text to explicate the significance of the restricted word choices employed. Associated with the Annals , three major exegetical traditions have survived today as written texts, the Zuo Tradition 左傳 (compiled ca. fourth century bce ), Gongyang Tradition 公羊傳 (compiled ca. fourth–second century bce ), and Guliang Tradition 穀梁傳 (compiled ca. third–first century bce ). All of these traditions approach the Annals with the assumption that certain implicit scribal rules governed the original composition of the text, norms that determined the types of information, honorific titles, vocabulary, and even word order that ought to be employed by the scribe making the records. But whereas the direct commentary in the Zuo Tradition focuses on explicating these rules in terms of ritual, rank, and hierarchy, the Gongyang and Guliang traditions ascribe weighty moral judgments to terminology in the Annals that appear to exegetes to have departed from the expected scribal rules.