Songci sanbai shou 宋詞三百首

Songci sanbai shou 宋詞三百首 is an anthology of about 300 exemplary lyric-metre-style (ci 詞) poems from the Song period 宋 (960-1279). The anthology was compiled by Zhu Zumou 朱祖謀 (1857-1931), courtesy name Xiaozang 孝臧, Xiaowei 古微 or Huosheng 藿生, style Ouyin 謳尹 or Shangqiang Cunmin 上彊村民 (or Qiangcun 強村), a name under which the Songci sanbai shou was published. He hailed from Huzhou 湖州, Zhejiang, and served as Vice Minister of Rites (libu shilang 禮部侍郎) before he retired to a private life in Suzhou 蘇州, Jiangsu. Zhu loved to write poems and compiled many collections of poems, like Qiangcun yucong 強村語叢 (also written 彊邨語業) or Qiangcun congshu 強村叢書, in which he assembled ci-style poems from the Tang 唐 (618-907), Five Dynasties 五代 (907-960), Song, Jin 金 (1115-1234), and Yuan 元 (1279-1368) periods.

His Songci sanbai shou includes actually only 283 poems of 79 writers (81 with the anonymi). The collection was inspired by a similar anthology of 300 regular poems (shi 詩) of the Tang period, Tangshi sanbai shou 唐詩三百首 by Sun Zhu 孫洙 (1711-1778). Zhu Zumou's collection was intended to present the most prestigious and typical poems of that period of time and neglected poems with vernacular senses. The collection is rated better than the Cizong 詞綜 of Zhu Yizun 朱彝尊 (1629-1709) because of the quality of the selected poems, and because the 300-poems collection presents a wider range of authors and themes than the collection Cixuan 詞選 by Zhang Huiyan 張惠言 (1761-1802) and Zhang Qi 張琦.

Some critics say that the anthology includes too many poems of Wu Wenying 吳文英 (c. 1200年-c. 1260) and Zhou Bangchang 周邦彥 (1056-1121), two poems which Zhu Zumou highly estimated, while other important authors like Su Shi 蘇軾 (1037-1101) or Xin Qiji 辛棄疾 (1140-1207) have been neglected. Some attributions are wrong: Yi wang sun 憶王孫 by was written by Li Chongyuan 李重元 (fl. 1122), not Li Jia 李甲, and the anonymous poem Qingyu'an 青玉案 was in fact written by Huang Gongshao 黃公紹 (jinshi degree 1265).

The collection begins with poems written by rulers - Zhao Jie 趙佶 (i.e. Emperor Huizong 宋徽宗, r. 1100-1125) and Qian Weiyan 錢惟演 (977-1034, a son of the last ruler of Wu-Yue 吳越, 907-978) - and then goes on to poems of normal persons, and ends with the female writer Li Qingzhao 李清照 (1084-1155). For the largest part, the anthology is arranged chronologically.

The book was finished in 1924 and printed at that time. Tang Guizhang 唐圭璋 (1901-1990) later added a commentary that is included in the 1931 edition by the Shenzhou Guoguang Press 神州國光社. In 1958 the Xinmin Press 新民出版社出 and the Zhonghua Press 中華書局 published the first modern editions. The Shanghai Guji Press 上海古籍出版社 published a modern edition in 1979.

There were two new anthologies selecting different poems than Zhu Zumou had done, namely Songci sanbai shou xinbian 宋詞三百首新編 by Liu Naichang 劉乃昌 (Yuelu Shushe 岳麓書社, 1994), and Xinbian Songci sanbai shou 新編宋詞三百首 by Diao Yi 习毅, Ren Wenjing 任文京, and Zhang Guolan 張國嵐 (Hebei Daxue Chubanshe 河北大學出版社, 1995).