Huan Kuan

Huan Kuan

Huan Kuan (the year of birth and death is unknown), the word Duke, was born in Runan County of Han Dynasty (now in the southwest of Shangcai County in Henan Province), who ruled Gongyang spring and Autumn Annals. When Emperor Xuan was appointed as Lang, later he was appointed as the prefect of Lujiang.

He has extensive knowledge and is good at writing. He has written 60 articles on salt and iron.

Main works

On salt and iron

On salt and iron is a collection of political essays based on the documents of the salt and iron conference held in the sixth year of the first Yuan Dynasty (81 BC). It vividly records the debates between sang Hongyang, the imperial historian, and the "virtuous" and "literati" gathered from all over the country, preserves a lot of historical data of economic thoughts and customs in the middle of the Western Han Dynasty, and exposes some social problems and contradictions at that time. In writing, through a certain concentration and generalization, it describes several characters with their own characteristics. Some characters' language and description words are more vivid and emotional; especially in the form of dialogue, and each article is related to each other, which is rare in prose works. But on the whole, its writing is a little rigid.

On salt and iron is the first monograph on salt and iron in Chinese history. It objectively records sang Hongyang and his subordinates' cross examination with "Xianliang" and "Literature" in the form of dialogue. It not only shows the tit for tat views of both sides, but also shows the class positions of both sides in the war of words.

The language of the work is simple and clear, to the point. It is a unique style in the political papers of the Western Han Dynasty, with its magnificent writing, layer upon layer of presentation, metaphor, multiple parallelism and antithesis, neat and changeable sentence patterns. At the same time, it also preserved rich historical materials for the study of social contradictions and sang Hongyang's thoughts at that time.

The book is divided into ten volumes and sixty chapters, each with its own title, but the contents are coherent with each other. Wang Chong, a great writer of the Eastern Han Dynasty, praised in his famous book Lun Heng · an Shu that it embodied the characteristics of "the two blades are carved together, the interests are known; the two theories are related, the right and the wrong are seen". Now handed down to the world are Guo Moruo's edition of the reading book on salt and iron, and Professor Wang Liqi's Annotation on salt and iron.

Huan Kuan's aphorism "filial piety lies in substance, not in appearance." It appears in the sixth unit of the fifth volume of the compulsory education curriculum standard experimental textbook of the people's education press. intend:

Filial piety to the elders needs simple and real actions, real respect and love, rather than pursuing some ostensible fancy forms. At present, what parents really need is the company and love of their children. If they only do well in the etiquette, and lack of respect and love in their heart, they can't really show filial piety to their parents.