Previously, when I read the Record of Daily Knowledge, I was surprised that Gu Yanwu, who had served the Ming as a young man, would refer to it as Ming in his work, no differently from any other dynasty. I suspected that some later person had tampered with the work. Also, the essay titled “Su Yidi Xing Hu Yidi” had been completely removed from the work.1 This, too, could be something taken out as being offensive to the Qianlong emperor. Later I acquired a copy of Pan Cigeng’s first edition2 and found this to be no different, so I assumed it had already become Gu Yanwu’s “true record,” and for a long time I had been unhappy with this subterfuge. Last year I heard that a friend, Zhang Ji, had found a lost manuscript dating from the Yongzheng reign period of the Qing dynasty [1723–1735]; no loss was recorded, therefore the work still existed. Also, there was an additional essay, “Hu Fu,”3 which consisted of more than a thousand characters. Instead of writing ming 明, he wrote ben chao 本朝. If taboos involving ming existed, then he used these two characters, therefore I believed this to be Gu’s true work. So my former doubts on this matter were at once confirmed. Gu’s writing in red and yellow ink in various places couldn’t be photographed to show scholars. In the spring of that year, my student Huang Kan, during his time of working on the Jiaoji, made a comprehensive comparison [to show] what the present edition lacked, recording this completely in notes and writing it out for every character and sentence. His achievement was both reliable and diligent. It seems rather strange that Cigeng, an outstanding student of both Master Gu and Xu Zhaofa, and a man who received very personal teaching from them, would not be expected to differ from other, ordinary people. And yet, in editing his teacher’s book, he could turn around and make its true appearance impossible to see with one’s own eyes! How ungrateful would this be to his teacher! It could, however, be the case that he was mindful of the warnings from history and did so against his will. Now, the Jiaoji has already come out, and everyone can read it carefully and assess its genuineness, so Master Gu’s “thousand autumn will” cannot but be appreciated, and Kan’s achievement makes it so that he can be joined together with the wise men of former times. This comes at a time when there is military misfortune, chaos, and appropriation—a year when Emperor Puyi’s northern retreat [Jehol] was seized by the Japanese [and made part of Manchuria].