| Abstract |
The sentence “Dear Tushan of my clan, he is a ‘Sheng’ of the respectful elder Zuo” in Fang Bao’s “The Anecdotes of the Respectful Elder Zuo Zhongyi,“ which is a frequently selected reading text in the college textbooks of Chinese literature in Taiwan, has caused two different interpretations. The questionable word ‘sheng’ in this sentence is interpreted as ‘nephew’ by some while as ‘son-in-law’ by the others. Nevertheless, by crosschecking the biographical documents of Zuo Guangdou, Shi Kofa, and Fang Tushan, we find that this ‘sheng’ is a word for ‘son-in-law’ and not for ‘nephew.’ Therefore Fang Tushan was in fact a son-in-law, not a nephew, of Zuo Guangdou.
|
