Yang Baozhong – The “Detective” Verifying and Explaining Obscure Chinese Characters
Yang Baozhong, born in 1956 in Gaoyang County, Hebei Province, is a professor at the College of Liberal Arts of Hebei University, a doctoral supervisor in Chinese Language and Philology, and the Director of the Modern Chinese Character Research Center. Professor Yang has taught for 43 years, making outstanding contributions in teaching, scientific research, and discipline construction. What’s more, he has dedicated himself to the study of modern Chinese characters for thirty years, enduring the solitude of academic pursuit to become a “Great Educator” and has been awarded the National May 1st Labor Medal. His research achievements won the first prize in the 9th Higher Education Institutions Scientific Research Excellent Achievements Award (Humanities and Social Sciences).
Origins at Hebei University: Spending 6 Years Reading All Pre-Qin and Han Dynasty Ancient Books in the Collection
In March 1978, Yang Baozhong was admitted to the Chinese Department of Hebei University and joined the Modern Chinese Language Study Group. Not long after, he skimmed through all the books on modern Chinese grammar in the Chinese Department Reference Room. With no more books to read, Yang Baozhong turned to ancient texts, and his interest shifted to the study of ancient Chinese. He began attempting to interpret and explain some obscure characters and words found in ancient books. Works like “A Reinterpretation of Fuguang Yuejin”, “A New Interpretation of Shimin”, and “Explaining Hui” were his practice pieces from that time.
After graduating with his bachelor’s degree in March 1982, Yang Baozhong stayed on to teach at Hebei University. During this period, he would go to the reference room every day to borrow a book, refusing to sleep until he finished it. “I often stay up all night and only eating two meals a day, using breakfast time to have a nap,” Yang said with deep emotion. “The study of characters is too fascinating; once you get into it, you can’t get out.” Maintaining this pace of reading one ancient book per day for over six years, he read all the Pre-Qin and Han Dynasty ancient books in the reference room, laying a solid foundation for his later research in exegesis and character studies. This experience also turned Yang into a “walking dictionary,” which let him know the origin and evolution of many characters as if enumerating his own family valuables.
“When the first edition of the Chinese Dictionary (8 volumes) was fully published in 1990, I bought a set at my own expense. It cost 200 yuan at that time, when my monthly salary was only a little over 50 yuan.” Due to teaching needs, he frequently consulted this dictionary. While browsing, he discovered that some characters had incomplete or incorrect phonetic notations and definitions. Through use, he found that these characters could actually be identified, which sparked his interest in verifying and explaining obscure characters from large-scale character dictionaries.
Never ended: Verifying and Explaining Over 4,000 Obscure Characters over 30 Years
“The work of verifying and explaining obscure characters is too captivating! The obscure characters in large dictionaries haven’t been recognized by people for hundreds or even thousands of years. Each obscure character can be considered an unsolved case. verify and explaining each character is like cracking a long-unsolved case.” After decades in this work, Yang ‘s passion for it remains undiminished.
Once, upon seeing the phrase “长木下而翠色移，贞璴出而云光破”(The emerald green scenery under the tall trees flows with the changes of light and shadow, like precious jade appearing in the clouds) in a Liao Dynasty stele inscription, Yang became curious about the character “璴”. Consulting the Chinese Dictionary, he found that “璴” had neither phonetic notation nor definition. To verify and explain this single character, Yang spent nearly a month reading the Liao Dynasty fully Collection of Poetry and Prose(《全辽文》) before finally determining that “璴” evolved from the character “础”, meaning stone. Thus, “贞璴” meant hard stone, and the phrase described the process of gathering timber and quarrying stone during the founding of Jing’an Temple.
“Large dictionaries play an irreplaceable role in inheriting traditional Chinese culture. Due to language development, character evolution, as well as transcription and compilation errors, large dictionaries have preserved tens of thousands of obscure characters. These obscure characters are not only stumbling blocks for compiling and revising large dictionaries, but for reading ancient books. The work of verifying and explaining obscure characters holds great value and significance for inheriting China’s excellent traditional culture.” From 1990 to the present, Yang has been engaged in verifying and explaining obscure characters from large-scale character dictionaries. Over more than thirty years, he has verified and explained over 4,000 obscure characters, the hardships of which are imaginable.
Persistent Effort, Overcome Difficulties, Seek Truth, Benefit descendants
At Hebei University, in a 300-square-meter studio, several experts, scholars, and students are participating in a massive project for the collation and interpretation of Chinese characters – the Chinese Character Database Project. This is a major national cultural construction project, and Hebei University independently undertakes the task of collating and interpreting characters used in Ming and Qing Dynasty books. These people work almost year-round and no weekends or holidays.
“Do you know what are the pronunciations of these two characters?” Yang wrote two characters, one on the left with the character “鼠”, but the other on the right with the character “占” and the other with the character “靈”. Seeing everyone shake their heads, Yang explained with a smile. In the “Erya,” revered as the “ancestor of dictionary,” the chapter “Shi Niao” once detailed the natural phenomenon of “birds and rats sharing the same burrow”: “When birds and rats share the same burrow, the bird is called ‘鵌’, and the rat is called ‘鼵’.” However, during the process of transcription and copying through successive dynasties, due to scribal errors, the character “鼵” was repeatedly miswritten, eventually appearing in the Qing Dynasty work “Ru Fan《儒范》” by Li Yuan. The first character, although included in large character dictionaries like the ‘Kangxi Dictionary’, ‘Chinese Dictionary’, and ‘Zhonghua Zihai’, was treated as a character used in disyllabic words, and its pronunciation was not provided. The second character is even not included in major character dictionaries at all.
For many years, Yang Baozhong’s main job has been to deal with these obscure Chinese characters that make ordinary people frown and cannot be explained or included in even large dictionaries, tracing their origins and analyzing their evolution.
“The Chinese Character Database Project we are responsible for is soon entering its final stages. Once completed, this project will address the insufficient number of characters available on computers. It could fundamentally solve the bottleneck problem affecting the process of China’s digitalization and informatization,” Yang said. “Currently, computers can output 20,902 characters. Using professional super-large character set software, over 70,000 characters can be output. After the development of the Chinese Character Database, the number of characters will reach 500,000. In theory, all the obscure characters we have verified and explained will be searchable in digital versions of documents. Once the results of the Chinese Character Database are integrated into computers and digital work becomes more widespread, those obscure characters that are currently difficult to determine due to insufficient data will be explained.” Yang said with eager eyes.
Part of the “identity information” of the obscure characters they verify and explain will ultimately be included in “the Chinese Character Database”. The information finally will be submitted to the International Organization for Standardization to encode each character in the computer region, after which manufacturers will create fonts like Song, Hei, and Li based on this, finally entering computers.
In a sense, under the tide of the information and digital age, whether common or obscure, a character only finds its “home” when included in the database. On the computer operation platform of the Chinese Character Database Project, each character submitted from the previous step has a unique number, like a person’s ID number. The studio members have to bring these Chinese characters “home” with full names, so that they can “reside” completely within the virtual grid-like mansion of the character database.
However, this path to back “home” is not easy. According to the work arrangement, the first review primarily involves master’s and doctoral students cross-checking the filled content. The second review involves professors checking the first-review content. Problems unresolved in the second review are further submitted to the third-level review, “presided over” by Yang Baozhong and Liang Chunsheng.
Generally, those that break through all barriers and reach Yang and Liang are the hard nuts that couldn’t be cracked after several rounds of interpretation – the obscure characters. Yang explains that obscure characters are a relative concept, referring to characters that common people don’t recognize or misrecognize. To the common person, these characters’ structures are astonishingly complex. In large character dictionaries, some characters have incomplete phonetic or meaning notations, marked as “pronunciation unknown,” “meaning unknown,” or “pronunciation and meaning unknown.” Some characters, although having both pronunciation and meaning noted, may still have errors in phonetic notation, definition, or the sorting of character relationships. Therefore, the verification and explanation of obscure characters is the most difficult and skill-demanding area of the Chinese Character Database Project.
In the long-term practice of verifying and explaining obscure characters, building on the predecessors’ method of “mutually seeking form, sound, and meaning,” Yang proposed the interpretive method of “mutually seeking form, usage, meaning, sound, and sequence.” He also emphasized that “among the five, form is the most important.” This made the verification and explanation of obscure characters a science with regularity and methodological guidance. Deriving clues then solving problems from a pile of “old papers” is a challenge for these scholars’ abilities. And being able to harbor doubts about these “old papers” ordeals the accumulation of knowledge and scholarly cultivation.
Professor Yang find a series of character forms, constituting rectangular associations, and forming a macro-observation – “this is the highest state pursued in linguistics and philology.”
