The Book of Song (simplified Chinese: 宋书; traditional Chinese: 宋書; pinyin: Sòng Shū), also called "The History of the Song," is a historical text of the Liu Song Dynasty of the Southern Dynasties of China. It covers history from 420 to 479, and is one of the Twenty-Four Histories, a traditional collection of historical records. It was authored by Shen Yue from the Liang Dynasty (502-557) and contained 100 volumes at the time that it was written. By the time of the Song Dynasty, some volumes were already missing. Later editors reconstructed those volumes by taking material from the History of the Southern Dynasties, plus a few works such as the Historiette of Gao by Gao Jun, though many of those volumes were no longer in their original condition. Modern historians believe that there are serious problems with the text; one of them being that the book is often very unclear and is biased against the surrounding ethnic groups, including the ruling elites of Northern Wei.
Famous quotes containing the words book of, book and/or song:
“O God, that one might read the book of fate,
And see the revolution of the times
Make mountains level, and the continent,
Weary of solid firmness, melt itself
Into the sea.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“Until it is kindled by a spirit as flamingly alive as the one which gave it birth a book is dead to us. Words divested of their magic are but dead hieroglyphs.”
—Henry Miller (1891–1980)
“A song is anything that can walk by itself.”
—Bob Dylan [Robert Allen Zimmerman] (b. 1941)