The New Book of Tang (simplified Chinese: 新唐书; traditional Chinese: 新唐書; pinyin: Xīn Tángshū; Wade–Giles: Hsin T'angshu), generally translated as “New History of the Tang,” or “New Tang History,” is a work of official history covering the Tang Dynasty in ten volumes. The work compiled by Ouyang Xiu and Song Qi (宋祁) and other official scholars of the Song Dynasty, following the custom that each new dynasty should write the history of its predecessor. The emperor called for a revision of the Book of Tang in 1044 and the New History was presented to the throne in 1060. It was called Tangshu until the 18th century, when it was included in the official palace edition of the Twenty-Four Histories.
Ouyang Xiu edited the work to make clear the moral shortcomings which he felt led to the decline of the Tang. He bragged that it “covers more events than the previous work, but it does so in fewer words.” The New History contained 1.4 million characters compared to 1.9 million in the Old Tang History. The New History included the first treatise on military affairs to appear in the dynastic histories and 240 biographies. However in the reduction, the direct use of Tang court records was lost, some reduced passages were unclear, and many errors were introduced.
Famous quotes containing the words book and/or tang:
“When the landscape buckles and jerks around, when a dust column of debris rises from the collapse of a block of buildings on bodies that could have been your own, when the staves of history fall awry and the barrel of time bursts apart, some turn to prayer, some to poetry: words in the memory, a stained book carried close to the body, the notebook scribbled by hand—a center of gravity.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“The art of cursing people seems to have lost its tang since the old days when a good malediction took four deep breaths to deliver and sent the outfielders scurrying toward the fence to field.”
—Robert Benchley (1889–1945)