the whole work was a production of the beginning of the Yüan dynasty, with a spurious memorial and an apocryphal ascription. This is certainly right, but we may even go one step farther. The plan of the Ch'i-tan kuo chih and of the Ta-Chin kuo chih is the same. Both begin with a
memorial of presentation, a paragraph on the origin of the nation ( Aril $r ch'u-hsing pên-
mo), and a table of the Emperors; then follow the annals of the various reigns, and some biographies; at the end are various notices and diaries of envoys. Some Chinese scholar of the nineteenth century must have expressed the view that both works were in fact due to Yeh Lung-li, since this has passed into WYLIE'S Notes on Chinese Literature (1867, p. 25), and thence into GILES'S Biogr. Dict. Nos. 2457 and 2536. It seems to be a vain task to try to determine the name of the author, but I have no doubt that both works are really due to one and the same man, and that this man lived under the Yüan dynasty. In both cases his spurious compilation was made up of extracts, which accounts for the discrepancies in his attitude towards the Mongols : some of the sources from which he drew were of Sung origin, others had been written under the Mongols, and he did not take the trouble to harmonize their statements. But, in spite of many errors, the Ta-Chin kuo chih, like the Ch'i-tan kuo chih, is of value, since it preserves anonymous quotations from works which have since perished. As in the case of the Ch'i-tan kuo chih, the paragraphs of the Ta-Chin kuo chih relating to the origin and the custums of the Nü-chên
were extracted by T'ao Tsung-i and, under the title Chin chih, « Description of the Chin », they
follow the Liao chih in the 86th chapter of the original Shuo fu. From there they too have passed into the Ku-chin shuo-hai and have been translated by VASIL'EV (Trudy VOIRAO, Iv, 196215). There is no copy extant of a Yüan edition of the Ta-Chin kuo chih. although it seems to have been published together with the Ch'i-tan kuo chih (cf. T'ieh-ch'in-t'ung-chien-lou ts'angshu mu-lu, 9, 23 a-b); the work is generally quoted from the edition which Hsi Shih-ch'ên published at the Sao-yeh-shan-fang in 1797. Unfortunately this edition is based on the text adopted for the Ssû-k'u ch'üan-shu, in which the Imperial Commissioners have «changed what was objectionable »; I have not had access to a text collated on a ms. following the Yüan edition, like the one mentioned inJ m , ~â ,'f4 a--' j Chang-shih ssû-tang-chai ts'ang-shu mu, i B, 61-62.
We can now discuss the name « Lü-chên ». It occurs in the preliminary paragraph of the Ta-Chin kuo chih, entitled ch'u-hsing pên-mo, « Account of how the fortune started ». Unfortunately, the sheet containing this paragraph is missing from the only copy of the Sao-yeh-shan-fang edition I have at my disposal, and I must cite it from the text given in the Chin chih of the ancient Shuo fu (Commercial Press ed. 86, 10 a). The paragraph begins as follows (cf. also Li Wên-L'ien's commentary on the Secret History, 7, 2 a) : «The kingdom of Chin had as original
name Chu-li-chên (*Jurcen or *Jurjen), [but] the lingual sound ( II shê-yin; this is
the Chinese term for our ' palatals', i. e. and j, also and more properly called in Chinese j t fir shê-shang-yin. ' supra-lingual sounds ') of the foreign name (. vn fan-yii) became Nü-chên through corruption. Some call them Lü-chên. To avoid the personal name of the Emperor Hsing-tsung of the Ch'i-tan, they have moreover been called Nü-chih (all the editions of Li Wênt'ien's commentary, in citing this passage, print it as though it were the form Lü-chên which was due to the taboo, which is absurd). They are the remnants of the `' ' Su-shên clan (J shih),
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