Spring and Autumn Annals

The Spring and Autumn Annals is a terse year-by-year chronicle of the state of Lǔ covering 722–481 BCE. Tradition holds that Confucius himself edited and compiled the work, encoding subtle moral judgements in his choice of words — the so-called "praise and blame" (褒貶) that later commentators laboured to decode. Modern scholars treat it rather as the official court annals of Lǔ that Confucius may have transmitted, but the attribution remains central to its canonical authority.

On its own the Annals is almost telegraphic, often a single line per event. It was transmitted with three classical commentaries — the Gongyang, the Guliang, and above all the Zuo Commentary (左傳, Zuozhuan). The Zuozhuan supplies the rich narrative, speeches, and historical detail that the bare chronicle omits, and is itself one of the masterpieces of early Chinese prose. For most readers the Annals is inseparable from the Zuozhuan.

The Annals is one of the Five Classics, the core canon of the Ruist tradition. It was elevated to scripture during Han Confucianism, the age in which the Five Classics were established as the basis of state learning. The Han scholar Dong Zhongshu drew directly on it in his Luxuriant Dew of the Spring and Autumn, reading the chronicle as a repository of cosmological and political principles. See the rest of the canon in the Ruist library.

The standard complete English rendering is James Legge's translation (1872), published together with the Zuozhuan in The Chinese Classics, Vol. V. Because the Annals is so closely bound to its commentaries, modern English-language study usually proceeds through translations of the Zuo Commentary — most notably the complete scholarly translation by Stephen Durrant, Wai-yee Li, and David Schaberg (2016).