Feng Dao and the printed classics
Four dynasties, ten rulers, a thousand years of blame — and the printed classics: Feng Dao’s story forces every age to redefine loyalty.
The four-dynasty “Ever-Content Old Man”
Feng Dao is one of the most cursed ministers in Chinese history: he served four dynasties — Later Tang, Jin, Han, Zhou — and ten emperors (paying court besides to the Khitan’s Taizong), styled himself the “Ever-Content Old Man,” and wrote a memoir enumerating his honors.
Ouyang Xiu, compiling the New History of the Five Dynasties, thundered: propriety, righteousness, integrity and shame are the state’s four cables… to read Feng Dao’s memoir of glory is to see a man without shame. Sima Guang called him the worst of traitors.
Yet in his own lifetime his repute was immense: he lived frugally, tilled fields in mourning for his parents, relieved his county from his salary; when soldiers looted women, he bought them back and sent them home; as envoy to the Khitan he carried himself so well that the Liao emperor’s grand reception redounded to China’s credit. In an age when “the Son of Heaven is whoever has the strongest horses,” men like Feng Dao kept civilization running by their own means.
Printing the Nine Classics: official printing begins
His immortal deed came in 932. As chancellor of Later Tang, seeing the classics in textual chaos — hand copies swarming with errors, students without a standard text — he proposed cutting printing blocks of the Nine Classics after the stone-classic readings.
The Directorate of Education gathered scholars to collate against the stone classics of the western capital, raised funds widely, and hired carvers to print. The project began in 932 and crossed four dynasties, completing only in the sixth month of 953 under Later Zhou — twenty-two years.
This was the first state printing of the Confucian classics at scale. Before it, printing lived on sutras, calendars and primers; after it, the classics had a unified, authoritative, replicable text — the standard editions that prepared Song classical learning. The directorate copies even traveled to Korea and Japan.
One question, two answers
How to judge Feng Dao is really the question: in chaos, what is a scholar’s duty?
One answer comes from the loyalist tradition: one woman does not wed two husbands; one minister does not serve two masters — Feng Dao’s service under ten emperors is moral failure. The other answer weighs his actual legacy: dynastic change was beyond his control, but the integrity of the classic texts, the lives of famine victims, the dignity of an embassy — those were within it.
Interestingly, both verdicts have flowed down together. Feng Dao himself took the long view: “Keep no evil in the square inch of your heart, and you may stand upright amid wolves and tigers.” That couplet is his self-defense — and the best footnote to the philosophy of survival in dark times.
A turning point in book history
For the history of the book, Feng Dao’s printing is a watershed: before it, books were copied — one manuscript was one book; after it, books could be replicated, and the cost curve of knowledge began its long fall. Song’s flourishing official, commercial and family printing, and the invention of movable type, all stood on this first year of official printing.
A “shameless” man cursed for a thousand years may be among the chief reasons the classics survived whole and standard. The split in his verdict is itself his most valuable legacy: it forces every age to answer anew — what is true loyalty?
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