Ch'üan one day [about 1751] suddenly discovered that, in a number of chapters of the Shui-ching chu dealing with some of the major rivers, the text of the Shui-ching had often been mixed with that of Li Tao-yüan's Commentary [chu]. He took the trouble to send a letter across 3,000 li to Peking to inform me of his great discovery. When I first read it, I spent a whole night studying it, and his theory becarne quite clear to me. Ther. I took my text and made all the corrections in the light of this new discovery. This autumn [1754] Mr. Ch'üan came to stay in my garden [in Hangchow]. We showed each other, our corrections for mutual confirmation, and we found that we had reached exactly the same results. We raised our cups to each other and laughed heartily. He then wrote a preface to my book."
Ch'üan Tsu-wang died in August, 1755, less than a year after that memorable meeting. He had seven times collated the Shui-ching chu (see I, p. 205), and his seventh and final text was to contain all the important corrections resulting from his great discovery. But he had been dangerously ill during the years when he was working hard on it and so never had the time or energy to complete it. Some thirty short studies of the Shui-ching chu have been preserved in the two series of his collected short works. One of these has a footnote bearing a date only two months before his death. He seemed to have given up hope of finishing his great work and was now content simply to work over these short studies. His original manuscripts on the Shui-ching chu; which were described by a witness as "very difficult to edit", remained in the possession of a disciple named Chiang Hsüeh-yung (1725–c.1800, see I, p. 204) who apparently did nothing with them. It seems that these manú- scripts were lost not long after Chiang's death.
These are the essential facts concerning the history of the three works on the Shui-ching chu, namely, the two texts by Tai Chên and the one by Chao I-ch'ing. Ch'üan Tsu-wang never completed his work, and his manuscripts are reported to have been "very difficult to edit" about fifty years after his death. Tai Chên's private edition, which consists only of the emended text without a single annotation, has not been much used. All later controversy revolves around his Palace edition and Chao I-ch'ing's printed text.
The extraordinary similarity of Tai's end Chao's texts soon began to attract the attention of scholars. The above-mentioned Tuan Yü-ts'ai, a disciple of Tai and a great scholar in his own right, fired the first shot in 1809, when he wrote a long letter to Liang Yü-shêng [q. v.] in which he gave high praise to Chao I-ch'ing's Shu-ching chu shih, but pointed out that he could not understand why the ching and the chu, as separated by Chao, should correspond so closely to the work of Tai Chên. Nor could he understand why Chao I-ch'ing, who always took the utmost pains to explain each minor textual reconstruction, should have neglected entirely to state the grounds for the many important instances in which he had differentiated the later Commentary from the earlier Book. Tuan then calls attention to a remark by his old friend, Lu Wên-ch'ao [q. v.], to the effect that Liang Yü-shêng and his deceased brother, Liang Li-shêng (1748–1793, see I, p. 506), had helped to edit Chao's text for publication, and had used Tai Chên's text to improve upon it. "Probably," said Tuan, "you and your brother, though faithful to the Chao text in everything else, found it necessary to follow Tai in all cases where the earlier Book and the Commentary had to be differentiated in order to make the text intelligible."
