The '''Yupian''' ({{zh-cpw|c=玉篇|p='''Yùpiān'''|w='''Yü-p'ien'''}}; "Jade Chapters") is a circa 543 CE Chinese_dictionary edited by Gu Yewang (顧野王; Ku Yeh-wang; 519-581) during the Liang_Dynasty. It arranges 12,158 character entries under 542 radicals, which differ somewhat from the original 540 in the ''Shuowen_Jiezi''. Each character entry gives a Fanqie pronunciation gloss and a definition, with occasional annotation.
Baxter describes the textual history:
The original ''Yùpiān'' was a large and unwieldy work of thirty ''juàn'' ["volumes; fascicles"], and during Táng and Sòng various abridgements and revisions of it were made, which often altered the original ''fănqiè'' spellings; of the original version only fragments remain (some two thousand entries out of a reported original total of 16,917), and the currently-available version of the ''Yùpiān'' is not a reliable guide to Early Middle Chinese phonology. (1992: 40-41)In 760, during the Tang_Dynasty, Sun Jiang (孫強; Sun Chiang) compiled a ''Yupian'' edition, which he noted had a total of 51,129 words, less than a third of the original 158,641. In 1013, Song_Dynasty scholar Chen Pengnian (陳彭年; Ch'en P'eng-nien) published a revised ''Daguang yihui Yupian'' (大廣益會玉篇; "Expanded and enlarged Jade Chapters"). The Japanese monk Kukai brought an original version ''Yupian'' back from China in 806, and modified it into his circa 830 ''Tenrei Banshō Meigi/Myōgi'' (篆隷萬象名義 "The sound and sense of myriad signs in Seal_script and Clerical_script"), which is the oldest surviving character dictionary from Japan. ==References== *Baxter, William H. 1992. ''A Handbook of Old Chinese Phonology''. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. ISBN 311012324 ==External links== *A Prospect for the Restoration of the Original Text of ''Yu p'ien'', Mojikyo Institute's collaborative project *A Database for Tenrei-Bansho-Meigi 篆隷万象名義データベース, Ikeda Shoju (in Japanese) Category:Chinese_dictionaries Category:Chinese_language Ja:玉篇 {{China-stub}} {{ling-stub}}