Family Instructions of Master Yan
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A man who served four short-lived dynasties writes his sons a candid manual on how a family keeps its learning and its footing when states do not last.
- learning as portable property when office and dynasty are not
- education begun early and enforced without indulgence
- scepticism toward alchemy, omens and fashionable metaphysics
- the author's own errors used as instruction
Yan Zhitui served the Liang, the Northern Qi, the Northern Zhou and the Sui, surviving each collapse, and wrote for his sons a book about how a family preserves itself when the state will not. It covers the education of children, marriage, household economy, conduct toward relatives, the value of a trade over an office, correct pronunciation and orthography, and the emptiness of alchemical and prognostic claims. The tone is unillusioned and often self-critical, drawing lessons from his own misjudgements, and it founded the genre of family instruction that later Chinese writers worked in for a thousand years.
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