| dc.description.abstract | Guan Yu （？－219） is a well－known warrior in the Three Kingdoms period. He died in a war in Jing Province in the 24th year of Jian An, Eastern Han Dynasty （206－220）. After his death, Guan Yu’s apparitions have been seen by many and he was worshipped by his followers. Numerous temples and shrines were built dedicated exclusively to him. He was firstly deified at the end of the Tang Dynasty and then the worship became popular throughout Sung and Yuan dynasties. His disciples reached the most prosperity during the Ming and Qing dynasties, among which many were scholars and published a large number of publications related to Guan Yu. The compilation of Guan Yu’s various anecdotes started from Hu Chi’s “The New Chronology of Emperor Guan Yu” at the end of the Yuan Dynasty.
During Ming and Qing dynasties, Guan Yu’s stories can be found in various compilations and books. However, most of them were revised based on Hu’s book before the early Qing Dynastybook. Until the reign of Kangxi Emperor, the governor of Hai Province, Wang Chu-Dan, fabricated several relics of Guan Yu, which triggered people’s interests and led to a series of research and debates on Guan Yu’s life history. This has particularly become a hot issue during the reign of Qianlong Emperor, during which textology prevailed and many important scholars dedicated themselves to it. Their work, however, was based on documentations but rarely focused on folk beliefs.
Zhou Guang-Ye, a Qing scholar, felt that his contemporaneous collections of Emperor Guan contained many factual errors. In order to correct them and to clarify some ambiguities, Zhou worked together with his cousin, Tsui Ying-Liu, on “The Emperor Guan’s History and Verification”, in which they thoroughly studied the materials they had and added their own comments to the annotations of previous scholars. Zhou Guang-Ye was an extraordinary textologist, but he lived in poverty and left no decedents. Most of his works were lost and little known to scholars today. This paper focuses on “ The Emperor Guan’s History and Verification” by researching on both Zhou Guang-Ye and Tsui Ying-Liu’s works. Based on this, I also expect to trace the origin of Emperor Guan Yus deity, with aims to determine the truth of previous annotations as well as to investigate into the different versionss of Guan Yu’s stories.
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