顏氏家訓

A scholar-official who had served four dynasties in a century of civil war sets down, for his sons, what he has learned about surviving it. He writes on how to bring up children and why indulgence ruins them, on marriage and on brothers, on the management of a household and its money, on study — with a famous insistence that a family's only portable property is learning — on the writing of Chinese and the traps of provincial pronunciation, on Buddhism, on conduct in office, on funerals, and on how to behave when the dynasty you serve is falling, which he had done more than once.

Yan Zhitui (531–591) lived through the collapse of the Liang, captivity in the north, and service under three more regimes. The Family Instructions is the earliest surviving work of its kind in Chinese, and was read for the next fourteen centuries as the model of the genre.

This Bibliomancer edition presents the complete text in its twenty chapters.