Mr. Chen Yuan's Contributions to Textual Criticism

Mr. Chen Yuan, in his Annotation to Textual Criticism over Institutions of Yuan Dynasty, divides the methods of proofreading into four types: textual, comparative, target-oriented and rational based on his integration of his personal experience with that of the predecessor's. He is the first to have made such systematic generalization theoretically, and contributes tremendously to textual criticism, which has, began at the ending years of West Han Dynasty, become a mature discipline of study since the 1930s.