National Treasures & Important Cultural Properties
of National Institutes for Cultural Heritage, Japan

Chinese literary scholar Liu Yiqing (403–444) compiled this collection of anecdotes about military class daily life and society from the Later Han to the Eastern Jin dynasty (1st–5th c.). This is a fragment of the oldest extant manuscript of this work. The red marks, aids for reading the Chinese into Japanese, tell us that this has been in Japan since the mid-Heian period (794–1185).