In Bushido, Nitobe Inazō wrote that the word of a samurai, bushi no ichigon, was a sufficient guarantee of the truth of what he said. Many stories were handed down, he wrote, of men who atoned with their death for having spoken with a double tongue.
books
Hagakure
Hagakure collects the sayings of the samurai Yamamoto Tsunetomo, as recorded by Tashiro Tsuramoto. Some manuscripts date its completion to 1716. Its best-known line reads: Bushidō to iu wa shinu koto to mitsuketari. The way of the samurai, I have found, is dying.
The Mustard Seed Garden Manual
The Mustard Seed Garden Manual of Painting, named after Li Yu’s villa in Nanjing, first appeared in 1679. It sets out in detail the techniques for painting landscapes, plum, orchid, bamboo and chrysanthemum, and flowers, birds and insects. The bibliographer Zhao Wanli called it “a bridge to the study of painting, used by most beginners.” Huang Binhong, Qi Baishi, Pan Tianshou and Fu Baoshi all used it as a model to learn from.
Before his travels, Qi Baishi’s landscapes followed mainly the manual and the style of the Four Wangs. On learning from others, he said: “I learn from others. I do not imitate them. What I learn is the spirit of brush and ink, whether the outward form looks alike or not.”
Movable Type
In the Mengxi bitan, the Dream Pool Essays, Shen Kuo describes how a commoner named Bi Sheng made movable type in the Qingli era (1041 to 1048). Each character was carved in clay and fired hard. Common characters such as zhi and ye had more than twenty copies each, in case one page needed them several times.
Type not in use was wrapped in paper, sorted by rhyme and stored in wooden cases. A rare character was carved on the spot. Two iron plates were used in turn. While one printed, the other was set. After printing, the plate was heated, and the type fell out for the next page.
Shen Kuo adds a condition. For two or three copies, the method was not simpler. For dozens, hundreds or thousands, it was extremely fast.
Grain Before Jewels
Song Yingxing wrote the preface to Tiangong kaiwu, his book on crafts and production, in 1637. He explains the order of its chapters: “The chapters run from front to back in the sense of valuing the five grains and despising gold and jade.” The first chapter is on grain.
Among all things, he notes, “half are useless to human life and half are useful.” He ends the preface: “This book has nothing at all to do with seeking office.”
Quotations From Chairman Mao
The Quotations from Chairman Mao were compiled by the reference office of the Liberation Army Daily and first printed in January 1964 as a draft for comments. From May 1964, the army issued the book internally, one copy for every officer and one for every squad. The revised edition held 427 quotations in 33 sections, in a red plastic cover.
Counted only from official state publishers, the print run came to more than 1.055 billion copies. Other counts differ. Publication stopped in 1979.
Hidden Rules
In January 2001, Yunnan People’s Publishing House brought out a book by the writer Wu Si: Qian guize (潜规则), “Hidden Rules: The Real Game in Chinese History.” Wu describes rules that “are not necessarily written down, but are very binding.” “I could not find a suitable word,” he wrote, “so for now I call them hidden rules.”
Chinese writers credit Wu with inventing the term.
Research Groups as Authors
Chinese research reports are often credited to a ketizu (课题组), a research group, instead of to individuals. The report on China’s macroeconomy for 2023, published in the journal Economic Theory and Business Management in 2024, is credited to “the China Macroeconomic Analysis and Forecasting Research Group of Renmin University of China.”
Foreknowledge
The Art of War closes with a chapter on the use of spies. “What enables the wise ruler and the good general to move and conquer, and to achieve more than the many, is foreknowledge. Foreknowledge cannot be drawn from spirits, cannot be inferred from past events and cannot be tested by calculation. It must come from people who know the enemy’s situation.”
The chapter counts the cost of a war in thousands of gold a day. A general who grudges “ranks, salaries and a hundred pieces of gold” and so does not know the enemy “is the height of inhumanity.” “In the affairs of the army, none is closer than the spy, no reward is richer than the spy’s, and no matter is more secret than spying.”
Random Thoughts
From December 1978 to July 1986, the writer Ba Jin wrote Random Thoughts (随想录), five volumes and more than 400,000 characters. One of its essays is titled The Future (Speaking the Truth, No. 5). In 2005, China News Service called the work “a great book of ‘speaking the truth’ for this era.”