Yesterday I mentioned Frank H. Chalfant who possibly invented the term ”oracle bones”, a designation that may have influenced the Chinese expression 甲骨 jiagu. Today we present an early modern Chinese book on exactly this topic, Zhu Fangpu’s (1895-1973) Jiaguxue wenzibian 甲骨學文字編 from 1933. Our two volumes are the original edition and in traditional stitched binding 線裝 xian zhuang. Zhu Fangpu 朱芳圃 was from Hunan, possibly a school mate of Mao Zedong, but later studied for Wang Guowei 王國維 (1877-1927) at Tsinghua University 清華大學 and its famed School for National Studies 國學研究院.
Zhu Fangpu was a historian and palaeographer, and starting with today’s book 甲骨學文字編 (“Edition of oracle bone characters”) Zhu pioneered the use of 甲骨 jiagu in scholarly works, and he published a number of important books on characters, texts and also ancient history. The last ten years of his life he returned to his native Hunan after developing cataracts, but continued to work hard and left much unpublished material when he passed away, only a fraction of which have been published posthumously.