The Tang dynasty rubbings were the clearest, but they had not been passed down. Moreover, the original stones had endured for ages and were more than half damaged. As a result, later rubbings contained varying numbers of characters. By now, only two hundred characters on the Stone Drums could be identified, which was why the various rubbings of the Stone Drum Script were exceptionally valuable.
Of course, whether a rubbing was valuable depended on which rubbing it was. If it was one of the existing rubbings, or if the characters were not very clear, its value would certainly not be high. Conversely, if it was not only clear but also contained characters that had never appeared in previous versions, its value would be immeasurable.
Everyone had considerable confidence in these three volumes of rubbings. Otherwise, why would they have been preserved so secretly?
However, after reading the colophon on the folding copy, Zhao Xueyi could not stop the smile from spreading across his face.
Zhu Dafu patted Zhao Xueyi on the shoulder with a grin. "Not bad. It's actually a folding copy collected by Gu Yanwu. Old Zhao, it looks like your luck has finally turned around."
When Gu Yanwu was mentioned, some people might not know who he was. But everyone had surely heard the saying, "The rise and fall of the nation concerns every common man." Those words represented the social views of Gu Yanwu, a famous thinker of the late Ming and early Qing. They came from his Rizhilu: Zhengshi: "To preserve the realm, even the lowliest common man bears a responsibility."
Gu Yanwu was not only a thinker of the late Ming and early Qing, but also a scholar of the classics, a historian and geographer, and a phonologist. Together with Huang Zongxi and Wang Fuzhi,