Quan đế minh thánh kinh 關帝明聖經

Woodblock frontispiece, printed in red & black with hand-coloring in red, blue, & black. Woodblock-printed text throughout. 67 folding leaves (lacking the first leaf?, a title or blank?). 8vo (274 x 160 mm.), later wrappers, stapled (staples a little rusted). [Vietnam]: colophon: 1931.


First edition of this very rare, color-illustrated, scripture of the famous martial deity; it is woodblock-printed throughout in red and black, simultaneously in Chinese characters, Vietnamese chữ nôm ????喃 graphs, and the Vietnamese Latin alphabet. This publication was sponsored by the empress dowagers of the Nguyễn dynasty (1802–1945).

(truncated)
“The historical figure, Guan Yu 關羽 (d. 220), has been one of the most popular subjects of worship in the Chinese cultural realm…The Qing dynasty was the critical period during which the worship of Lord Guan soared in popularity, primarily due to the spread of morality books (shanshu 善書) in his veneration. The Guandi mingsheng jing 關帝明聖經 was one of them. Since its composition, nearly twenty editions of the Mingsheng jing have been generated under various alternative titles, such as the Taoyuan mingsheng jing 桃園明聖經. New editions and reprints are still being produced in Taiwan and Hong Kong today” (Li Shih-wei 李世偉, “Knowledge and Ritual: The Dual Nature of the Scripture Illustrating the Holiness of Emperor Guan (Guandi mingsheng jing),” in Chinese Popular Religion in Texts and Acts, ed. Shin-yi Chao, pp. 149–50).


If our understanding of the cult of Emperor Guan in Chinese popular religion is (at least until recently) at an embryonic stage, even more so is our knowledge of how this Chinese deity traveled abroad and how his worship was localized in non-Chinese cultural contexts. Our copy of the Scripture Illustrating the Holiness of Emperor Guan is visually striking: for most of the text, the Chinese original is printed in red ink, in the top half of the page with the han-viet pronunciation gloss, while a translation into Vietnamese is printed in the bottom half of the page in black ink, in the local chữ nôm script and nôm pronunciation gloss. The opening incantation remains untranslated, and the instructions for the ritual reading of the scripture (which is done kneeling, in either Chinese or Vietnamese practice) is given only in Chinese at the end.


The making of this multilingual version of the scripture, according to the postscript, involved an intervention from the Emperor Guan himself. During the Khải Định reign (1916–25), the influential scholar-official Nguyễn Văn Trình (1872–1949) printed a version of the Chinese scripture with pronunciation guides, but it was not until Bảo Đại 2 (1927) that Trần Quang Thuận translated it into chữ nôm. Trần then set up an altar, and Emperor Guan, through spirit writing, decreed that the translation was to be printed and widely disseminated. The decree is printed in red ink at the beginning of the scripture, and dates to the sixth month of 1928.


Soon after, concerns arose that monolingual editions of the scripture might lead to the view that the translated text is somehow different — in content or in efficacy — from the original. The compilation of a new edition commenced, this time collating the two languages on the same page. The project was funded by no other than the grand empress dowager Nguyễn Hữu Thị Nhàn (1870–1935), who contributed 100 Indochinese piastres, and the empress dowager Hoàng Thị Cúc (1890–1980), who contributed 20 piastres. Much smaller contributions by a host of Vietnamese officials are listed at the end of the volume.


The volume opens with a colorful full-page frontispiece illustration showing the manifestation of five deities — Emperor Guan at the center — in the evening sky on the 15th day of the ninth month of Qianlong 45, or 12 October 1780. The image, according to the instructions at the end, was to be placed on an altar during ritual readings of the scripture.


Despite the country’s long history of Buddhist and Confucian learning, woodblock-printed books published within Vietnam itself are far fewer in number today than their Chinese or Japanese counterparts. This scarcity of extant Vietnamese books is due to a variety of factors, including the cost of local printing, a humid climate that makes preservation difficult, as well as the country’s recent war-torn past. Outside Buddhist texts kept by individual temples in Vietnam, the bulk of these books are now kept at a handful of institutions such as the Institute of Sino-Nôm Studies in Hanoi and l’École française d’Extrême-Orient in Paris. The catalogue of these collections shows only one other copy of the bilingual edition, a reprint dated to the tân tỵ 辛巳 year of Bảo Đại, which is 1941 (Viện nghiên cứu Hán nôm VHv.1817; the online catalogue of Academia Sinica erroneously gives 1914, likely a typo).


Very good copy. Final seven leaves somewhat defective in upper blank margins.


❧ Yuenan Hannan wenxian ziliaoku 越南漢喃文獻資料庫, Academia Sinica. (Inventory #: 10896)