Musical Terms in a Chinese Dictionary of the First Century

The dictionary to which the title refers is the Explanation of the Written Characters (Shuo Wên Chieh Tzŭ) , compiled by Hsü Shên of the Later Han Dynasty, and dating from about 100 A.D. It would be wrong to suppose that this dictionary mirrors the Chinese spoken language of the first century, for one of the author's objects was to provide ready access to archaic words. Nevertheless, the dictionary presents us with a vocabulary, albeit a literary vocabulary, at a point in time; and it seemed profitable to work through it in search of terms relating to music, musical instruments, and dance. In the course of this search, a fourth category of entries relevant to the field of interest was discovered, that of sounds. At the end of the search, more than two hundred items had been noted, many of which were interrelated. They could be re-classified in various ways; and from the collection as a whole there emerges not only a picture of the world of music of a Chinese scholar of the first century, but a more general picture of the world of natural sounds, of the classification of sounds, and of the place of musical sounds in this classification.