**Li Lin-ts'an's "The Earliest Extant Version of a Moso Classic Text": A Discussion**
In the 1950s, Li Lin-can, then deputy director of the National Palace Museum in Taipei, spent months cataloguing the Naxi Dongba manuscripts held at the U.S. Library of Congress. Among roughly 3,000 volumes, he found 116 with dated colophons spanning the Kangxi to Republican eras. In one manuscript (No. 105), he identified a "Kangxi" reign-name colophon and, after correcting an initial misreading, concluded it dated to Kangxi 7 (1668), proclaiming it "the earliest known Naxi classic," a claim widely cited by scholars. This article re-examines and re-decodes the pictographic colophon, arguing that Li's reading is mistaken: the original text does not indicate "Kangxi 7" but rather corresponds to the first year of the Xianfeng reign (1851). The author reviews Li's original investigative process, including his consultation with Dong Zuobin and Shi Zhangru on calendrical (ganzhi) verification, and presents philological evidence for the revised dating, inviting scholarly discussion and correction.
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