Popular poetics refers to books of poetic rules and forms given to beginners, explaining poetry’s rules and ways, as well as collections given them to imitate through repeated recitation of poetry. These works were not valued by the cultural elites, but were very widely circulated, to enormous effect. These popular readers were what established mass poetic common sense, defined a popularized poetic canon, cultivated common tastes in the masses, and formed a common cultural mentality. They were a part of social and folk cultural dentity. This projectintends to research Ming dynasty popular poetic readers, primarily including the following goals:(1) Survey and collect relevant material, and investigate the authors of these documents, alongwith their authenticity and origins. (2) Research processes of composition, publication andtransmission of these popular readers, investigating the interaction between cultural andcommercial factors. (3) Research their theoretical content and value. (4) Investigate how theywere related to education in poetics. (5) Explore the cultural meanings of these readers.Researching Ming dynasty popular poetics makes a significant contribution to understanding theoverall system of Ming dynasty poetic culture. It makes very helpful enhancements of ourunderstanding Ming dynasty folk poetic education, and of the relation between commercialpublishing and academic culture. It further contributes some perspective on handling analogouscontemporary problems.

The study of ancient texts can be conducted from many angles, one of them being alternative characters. Alternative characters might appear under three conditions: 1) different versions of the same book; 2) multiple sources recording the same matter or event; 3) citations and the texts from which they are cited. This last condition can be further divided into three cases: 1. general citations and the cited; 2. annotations and the text being annotated; 3. leishu (encyclopaedia), excerpts from books, and their original sources. Since characters used in a text are closely linked to their meaning, past scholars would expend great effort in collating and identifying the alternative characters in an ancient text, in the hope of reconstructing its original shape. Great achievements have come out of this type of studies but few have explored the relationship between annotations and alternative characters in ancient texts.
The proposed study aims to examine the annotations by Han and Tang scholars, such as Maogong 毛公, Zheng Xuan 鄭玄, Gao You 高誘, Wang Su 王肅, Wei Zhao 韋昭, Guo Xiang 郭象, Cheng Xuanying 成玄英, and Yang Jing 楊倞. Together with relevant excavated texts and other references, the project will compare the alternative characters in ancient texts with their corresponding annotations, in order to analyse the relationship between annotations and alternative characters and offer an in-depth view into how scholars since the Han dynasty had made use of alternative characters for their annotations of ancient texts. An “Alternative Characters in Han and Pre-Han Texts Database” and an “Annotations of Han and Pre-Han Texts Database” will first be set up under the CHANT database system. The two databases will then be collated electronically to display instances of the similarities and differences between the alternative characters and annotations. Analyses will be made on the ways annotators used alternative characters in their annotation of ancient texts. The materials and findings will be compiled and published as reference volumes of alternative characters and annotations of the Han and pre-Han texts, while the two Databases will be made available for researchers’ access.