The second place in the Sui catalogue is given to the text and commentary of Wang Pi or Wang Fu-ssŭ , an extraordinary scholar who died in AD 249, at the early age of twenty-four. This work has always been much prized. It was its text which Lu Tê-ming used in his Explanation of the Terms and Phrases of the Classics , in the seventh century. Among the editions of it which I possess is that printed in 1794 with the imperial moveable metal types.

I need not speak of editions or commentaries subsequent to Wang Pi’s . They soon begin to be many, and are only not so numerous as those of the Confucian Classics.