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Xu Shen, courtesy name 叔重 Shuzhong (traditional Chinese: 許慎; simplified Chinese: 许慎, pinyin: Xŭ Shèn, IPA: [ɕy ʂən], 58 - 148 CE) was a Chinese scholar and philologist during the Eastern Han Dynasty (25-189). He was born in the Ru'nan district of Henan Province (today the Shaoling District of Luohe). In his own lifetime, he was recognized as an eminent scholar of the Four Books and Five Classics 四书五经. He is best known for compiling the comprehensive Shuowen Jiezi 说文解字, or Explaining Simple Graphs; Analyzing Compound Characters, an etymological dictionary of Chinese characters, which he composed over the last two decades of his life. This dictionary has provided ample information about the development of Chinese writing, and enabled scholars to decipher seal scripts and from the Shang and Qin dynasties.

Life and career before the Shuowen
Xu was a student of the Jia Kui 贾逵 (30-101). Under Jia, he established himself as a master in his own right and enjoyed a positive reputation. In 114 under the patronage of Emperor An of Han (94-125), Xu and some 50 other scholars worked with the prominent Ma Rong 马融 (79-166) to annotate and edit the most important literature of the Spring and Autumn, and Waring States periods. During this time, Xu gathered indispensable experience in textual criticism which certainly prepared him to undertake the Shuowen. More immediately, this project led Xu write the Wujing Yiyi 五经异义, or Differing Interpretations of the Five Classics. Since then the work has been lost.

The Shuowen Jiezi
The Shuowen, begun in 100 CE, encompasses 15 volumes and over 9,000 small seal script entries, and has both a preface and an epilogue. It also makes reference to graphs of the Waring States period and Zhou-era bronze inscriptions. It is among the first character dictionaries which examined the evolution of characters in detail, and streamlined the "six category" approach to analyzing Chinese writing. It also created a system of semantically organized 540 radicals.

Historical Background and Motivation of the Shuowen
From the reign Emperor Wu of Han in 140 BCE, knowledge of the Confucian classics became the primary qualification for official careers. This greatly increased the demand for copies of the classics and related commentaries. This increase in study over a broad geographical area naturally led to a divergence in interpretive schools and even versions of the texts. Books copied during the Han dynasty generally used a contemporary clerical script and represented the bulk of text in circulation. Older texts presumably closer to the originals remained unused or forgotten. This changed when old seal script texts were rediscovered in imperial archives during the reign of Emperor Cheng of Han (51-7 BC). Further texts were discovered in the in the walls of the Kong Family Mansion, the residence of Confucius' ancestors. Besides the orthographic differences, the old and new texts diverged in length and content. Because Han jurisprudence relied on the classics, these differences could lead to concrete legislative results. Eventually scholars formed two opposing schools, one which supported using the more recent versions, the so called New Text school, and those that favored the more ancient versions, the so-called Old Text school. Xu Shen himself belonged to the Old Text school, and as such saw a need for a dictionary that examined the historical meaning of characters. This lack of a comprehensive reference work primary motivation for the Shuowen. To this philological goal, Xu further added philosophical undertones which lend the work even greater depth.

Structure of the Shuowen Jiezi
Firstly, Xu Shen established 540 radicals, and ordered them from least to greatest complexity. Each radical then headed its own group, to which all entries in the Shuowen were assigned. The number and organization of the radicals is not without meaning. The total number 540 can be derived from the product of 6, 9, and 10. 6 and 9 are the numbers of Yin and Yang, and 10 a number signifying completion.

Central to the Shuowen is the contrast between wen (文, patterns) and zi (字, characters). Wen, according to Xu Shen, are graphic depictions of real-world things (waec208-9). Zi result from the combination of Wen, resulting in compound characters (ibid). In his prologue, Xu Shen delineated for the first time formally the six categories (六书) of Chinese characters from this original binary contrast.
 * Indicators of Function (指事), such as 上 and 下, indicating up and down respectively.


 * Form Imaging or Pictographs (象形), such as 山, meaning mountain.


 * Form and Sound (形声), which consist of a semantic element and an element indicating pronunciation.


 * Combining Meaning (会意), which unite two semantic elements. 明, for example contains the sun and the moon, and carries the meaning 'bright'.


 * Reciprocally Glossing (转注), which arose from a divergence of one character into two separate characters still linked in sound and meaning, such as 老 and 考.

Within the dictionary itself, each entry first gives the character's meaning, and alternate orthographies. It also accounts for a character's meaning, pronunciation, and cites examples of its use.
 * Loaning Characters (假借鉴), which essentially indicates one character whose meaning has been broadened to contain multiple definitions. This is seen in the meanings of 长, which originally meant 'leader', but came to mean 'long'.

Cultural impact of the Shuowen
The Shuowen is credited with founding the study of characters. It provided a way for scholars to trace a character's meaning to its earliest usage, which enabled clarification of obscure usages. Because Xu Shen not only listed characters written of his time, but also antiquated antiquated styles from previous dynasties, his dictionary preserved scripts from the Qin dynasty, which in turn can be used to decipher even earlier writing styles (ibid). In the Tang Dynasty, the Shuowen became a part of the general curriculum. By the time of the Qing Dynasty (1644-1912) it had been studied, edited, and commentated on by many different scholars. It remains an important resource for studies of Chinese language and writing.