2 the sources
t’ung-k’ao by Ma Tuan-lin (fl. 1273) builds on the T’ung-tien and has
entries down to 1224. It is especially informative on the Sung.
Finally, the Tzu-chih t’ung-chien by Ssu-ma Kuang (1019-1086) be -
comes increasingly important. It ends with the Five Dynasties, and the
closer we get to Ssu-ma Kuang’s own time the more new information
is offered, all presented with the author’s usual admirable clarity. Li
T’ao (1115-1184) wrote a continuation of Ssu-ma Kuang’s work, called
theHsü Tzu-chih t’ung-chien ch’ang-pien. It covers the period 960-
and has useful information not found elsewhere.
There are, of course, sources available in languages other than
Chinese, such as Arabic, Korean, Japanese, and perhaps Tibetan,
but the Chinese are by far the richest. I had to restrict my work to a
maneagable proportion, and therefore base it on the Chinese corpus
of information.
In Han times, foreign missions to China had been relatively rare
and the dynastic historians had every reason to record them with
pride. During the Six Dynasties, missions increased in number. But
these dynasties were brief, and their archival records consequently
limited. The dynastic historians had trouble filling their works, which
can be seen from the fact that they padded them with lengthy and
unnecessary quotations from e.g. memorials. They had no need to save
space. Under the T’ang, and Sung, the situation changed. Archival
materials became so abundant that the compilers had to be careful
to keep their dynastic histories within manageable bounds. This must
be their reason for ignoring some of the missions. Fortunately, the
other works mentioned above, especially the Ts’e-fu yüan-kuei andHsü
Tzu-chih t’ung-chien ch’ang-pien, showed a special interest in them. It will
be seen that by a pooling of all information, statistical analysis is, in
fact, possible.
The sources mention, at times, missions from obscure and otherwise
unknown states and tribes. These are disregarded by me. I only discuss
in this work foreign countries and peoples which have sections under
their own headings in the dynastic histories and encyclopaedias.
Among Western general histories, the Cambridge History of China and
Otto Franke’s Geschichte des Chinesischen Reiches are the most compre-
hensive. The latter can be uncritical and has to be used with caution.^3
For the Liao, in spite of its sociological jargon, Karl Wittfogel’s history
(^3) See my Six Dynasties, vol.I, p.8.