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Wang Huizu (1731-1807) is a Chinese scholar-official, jurist, historian and moralist and in Qing China.

Early life
Wang Huizu was born on the 21st of January 1731 in Hsiao-Shan, in Zhejiang province, which is situated in the lower-Yangzi valley. This region was marked by the presence of Jiangnan, a city which was the center of Chinese literacy and an intellectually flourishing area. Wang Huizu’s father, Wang K'ai, was the warden of a prison in Honan. Wang's mother was K'ai's concubine. Therefore, it could be said that Wang Huizu belonged to the local literati elite. However, Wang K'ai died in Canton in 1741, putting Wang and his mother into a precarious.situation. As a result, the young Wang was forced to struggle in poverty.

Life and career as a an official
In 1747, at the age of sixteen, Wang Huizu passed the local-level examination and therefore gained the status of shengyuan ("born official"). He taught at school in the wake of this success and got married in 1749. Thank to his new status, he became in 1752 the private secretary of Wang Tsung-min, his father-in-law who was a district-magistrate. Wang Huizu specialized into judicial affairs, which was the most lucrative choice for a private secretary. He continued to work as a secretary in judicial matters for thirty-four years, but served sixteen different officials in the provinces of Zhejiang and Jiangsu.

In 1768, Wang Huizu completed the Provincial-level exam which gave him the status of Juren ("recommended man") after having failed height times. After three avorted attempts, he finally passed the highest level of the Civil Service Examination in 1775, reaching the status of Jinshi ("presented scholar").

This new status allowed him to be appointed magistrate of the district of Ning-yüan in Hunan province in 1786. He was re-appointed magistrate in 1788 in the neighboring district of Hsin-t'ien, and re-appointed again in Tao-Chou in 1790, always in Hunan province. He was dismissed from his post in 1791 because of an intrigue against him. Afterward, he remained for a moment in Changsha but finally retired in his home district in 1793 where he focused on his work as a scholar.

Wang Huizu became paralized in 1795 and died on the first of May 1807.

Scholarship
Wang Huizu wrote two guides of public administration which had become paramount for Chinese administrators until the end of the Qing empire. The first one, Tso-shih yao-yen, was printed by Wang's friend, Pso T'ing Po, in 1785. The second, Hsueh-chih i-shuo was published in 1793.

Wang Huizu developped, throughout his life, a strong interest in history. His originality as an historian is that he understood the importance of practical devices, like indexes, as historical tools. His taste for history might have been originated by the Han-shu (history of former Han dynasty) he bought in 1769 in Beijing. Indeed, he certainly hadn't had the opportunity to become familiar with history before this time given his quite modest social origins. In the wake of this first purchase, Wang bought copies of all the twenty-four dynastic histories and compiled all the biographies encountered in these texts into an index in sixty-four volumes. This index called Shih-hsing yün-pien and published in 1783 became vital for the study of Chinese history during the Qing era. He also completed his most prominent piece by two other indexes called Chiu-shih t'ung hsing-ming lüeh and Liao Chin Yuan san-sih t'ung hsing-ming lu both dealing with homonyms found in the histories of the Chinese dynasties. They were respectively printed in 1790 and 1801.Between 1796 and 1800, Wang Huizu worked on Yuan shih pên-chêng, a historical criticism of the history of the early Yuan dynasty.

In 1795, Wang Huizu began to write his autobiography titled Ping-t'a meng-hen lu ("Traces of Dreams from a Sick Bed"). He first published it in 1796 but continued to enrich it regularly until 1806 and his sons even continued to fill it in after their father's death.

H Although, many literati got involved into litterature, notably into poetry, this was not the case of Wang Huizu. However, he was in contact with other Chinese scholars such as the historian Zhang Xuecheng and Zhu Yun, who originated the Complete Library of the Four Treasuries under the Qianlong emperor, Shao Chin-Han, Liu Chu-kao or the bibliophyle Pao T'ing-po.

Wang Huizu was also a moralist, he notably originated a handbook for the management of family-life called Shuang jietang yongxun ("Simple Precepts from the Hall enshrining a Pair of Chaste Widows"). Wang wrote that the two women who inspired his model of the virtuous, chaste wife were his mother and his father's second wife. The book was dedicated to educating his sons as future patriarchs. He underlines that the equilibrum of a family, especially the virtue of its women, depends on the zunzhang yueshu ("family elder's discipline").