This class of literature, however, does not stand upon a high level, but corresponds with the low social status of the actor; and it is a curious fact--true also of novels--that many of the best efforts are anonymous.
Plays by women are also to be found; but I have never yet come across, either on the stage or in literature, any of those remarkable dramas which are supposed to run on month after month, even into years.
Division E is a very important one for students of the Chinese language. Here we find a number of works of reference, most of which may be characterised as indispensable, and the great majority of which are easily procurable at the present day.
Beginning with dictionaries, we have the famous work of Hsü Shên, who died about A.D. 120. There was at that date no such thing as a Chinese dictionary, although the language had already been for some centuries ripe for such a production, and accordingly Hsü Shên set to work to fill the void. He collected 9353 written characters,--presumably all that were in existence at the time,--to which he added 1163 duplicates, _i.e._ various forms of writing the same character, and then arranged them in groups under those parts which, as we have already seen in the preceding Lecture, are indicators of the direction in which the sense of a character is to be looked for. Thus, all characters containing the element [CJK:72AD] "dog" were brought together; all those containing [CJK:8279] "vegetation," [chuáng] "disease," etc.
So far as we know, this system originated with him; and we are therefore not surprised to find that in his hands it was on a clumsier scale than that in vogue to-day. Hsü Shên uses no fewer than 540 of these indicators, and even when the indicator to a character is satisfactorily ascertained, it still remains to search through all the characters under that particular group. Printing from movable types would have been impossible under such a system.
In the modern standard dictionary, published in 1716, under the direction of the Emperor K'ang Hsi, there are only 214 indicators employed, and there is a further sub-arrangement of these groups according to the number of strokes in the other, the phonetic portion of the character. Thus, the indicators "hand," "wood," "fire," "water," or whatever it may be, settle the group in which a given character will be found, and the number of strokes in the remaining portion will refer it to a comparatively small sub-group, from which it can be readily picked out. For instance, [song] "a fir tree" will be found under the indicator [mù] "tree," sub-group No. 4, because the remaining portion [gong] consists of four strokes in writing.