Book of History

Classic of History (simplified Chinese: 书经; traditional Chinese: 書經; pinyin: Shūjīng; Wade–Giles: Shu-ching) is a compilation of documentary records related to events in ancient history of China. It is also commonly known as the Shàngshū (simplified Chinese: 尚书; traditional Chinese: 尚書, literally: Esteemed Documents), or simply Shū (simplified Chinese: 书; traditional Chinese: 書, colloquially: Documents). The title is translated in western texts variously as "Classic of History", "Classic of Documents", "Book of History", "Book of Documents".

In the transmission of the book, there are three main variations: the New Text version, the Old Text version, and the forged Old Text version.

The first, transmitted by Fu Sheng after the fall of the Qin Dynasty, was a New Text version in 33 chapters (originally 29 or 28, but some chapters have been divided by Du Lin during the 1st century), which had lost more than 72 chapters of the original.

The second version was an Old Text version found by Prince Liu Yu and transmitted by Kong Anguo during the last half of the 2nd century BC, which added some 16 new chapters and were part of the Old Text Classics later championed by the scholar Liu Xin during the beginning of 1st century, the chapters were lost during the later times.

The third, was a forged version of the Old Text with 26 chapters (including one preface), which had been allegedly rediscovered by the scholar Mei Ze during the 4th century, and presented to the imperial court of the Eastern Jin. His version consists of 59 chapters which stemmed from both 33 extended chapters (originally Fu Sheng's 29 chapters, if including The Great Speech) and the final 26 chapters added. By then most of the versions of Old Text had been lost.

Since the Song Dynasty, starting from Zhu Xi, many doubts had been expressed concerning the provenance of the existing Old Text chapters of the book, but it was not until Yan Ruoju's research and the definitive conclusions he drew in his unpublished but widely distributed manuscript entitled Evidential analysis of the Old Text Documents that the question was considered settled by the 17th century.