Such is the true story of the three famous scholars of the eighteenth century and their works on the Shui-ching chu. What follows is a different story, a tragic story of conscious deception and forgery, and of unconscious prejudice and uncritical judgment.
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A quarter of a century after Tuan's death the controversy was revived, and this time it took a course diametrically opposite to the one which Tuan maintained in 1809. Critics now openly accused Tai Chên of having plagiarized the researches of Ch'üan Tsa-wang and Chao I-ch'ing; they suspected him of having seen and utilized the latter's manuscripts prior to their publication.
Two events contributed to the revival of the controversy. The first relates to the fact that in 1841 two scholars, Chang Mu and Wei Yüan [qq. v.], had an opportunity to inspect the manuscript copy of the Shui-ching chu as transcribed in the years 1403–08 in the Yung-lo ta-tien. Chang Mu asserted that he "copied all of its variations on a current text, including even those which are easily recognized as errors". He did nothing of the kind, for we know that he was not even aware that the Yung-lo text contained considerable passages—in one instance over 400 characters in length—which were missing from all printed editions. Wei Yüan made an equally untrue statement, namely, that "the text in the Yung-lo ta-tien is the same as the one used by Chu Mou-wei and others, except that it has preserved Li Tao-yüan's preface, which is missing from all others". On the basis of an apparently casual perusal of the Yung-lo text, both Chang Mu and Wei Yüan leaped to the conclusion that Tai Chên made no use of it, and that whatever he claimed to have taken from it was in fact purloined from the unpublished manuscripts of his senior contemporaries.
The second event was the sudden appearance in 1844 of a manuscript copy of the first ten chüan of the Shui-ching chu which was alleged to have been copied in turn from the original manuscripts of Ch'üan Tsu-wang. This text, prefaced by 5,000-word introduction and an annotated table of contents of the entire forty chapters, was made known to Chang Mu by a Ningpo scholar named Wang Tzŭ-ts'ai (1792–1851, see I, p. 354). Chang Mu immediately proclaimed its genuineness and welcomed it as important documentary evidence in his accusations against Tai Chên. In a long article, entitled "On the Injustice Done to Ch'üan Tsu-wang's Shui-ching chu", he propounded the theory that Ch'üan's text was the primary source of the efforts of both Chao and Tai. On the basis of the alleged copy of Ch'üan's work, particularly of the "Introduction", he concluded that Tai Chên must have pilfered everything from Ch'üan, including the principles which guided him in separating the intermingled passages of the ching from the chu. He related moreover a story—based entirely on hearsay—to the effect that the sons of Chao I-ch'ing had bought the original manuscript from Ch'üan and had engaged editors to incorporate it into their father's Shui-ching chiu shih.
The whole case was summed up by Wang Tzŭ-ts'ai in one sentence: "Tai pilfered it during his life time; Chao pilfered it after his death".
Encouraged by the credulity of Chang Mu, Wang Tzŭ-ts'ai produced, four years later (1848), an alleged text of Ch'üan's Shui-ching chu complete in 40 chüan. This text he took to Peking in order that Chang Mu might include it in the Lien-yün i
