Jilin leishi
12th-century Chinese work on Korean language and culture
The Jilin leishi was a Chinese book about Korea written in 1103–1104 by Sūn Mù (孫穆), an officer of the Chinese Song dynasty embassy to Goryeo.
The original work is lost, but fragments reproduced in later Chinese works provide vital information about Early Middle Korean.
The original work is believed to have consisted of three volumes covering the customs, government and language of Korea, with various historical documents as appendices.
All that survives is excerpts quoted in two Chinese encyclopedias, the Shuō fú (說郛) from the Ming dynasty and the Gujin Tushu Jicheng (1726).
The original Ming Shuō fú was itself lost, and survives in editions from 1647 and 1925, whose compilers had access to the original.
The surviving fragment of the Jilin leishi consists of a brief introduction dealing with Korean customs and government, and a glossary of over 350 Korean words and phrases, grouped in 18 semantic categories.
For example, the first entry is
天曰漢捺
This indicates that the Korean word for 'sky, heaven' (Chinese 天) has a pronunciation similar to the Chinese characters 漢捺.
The sounds of Song Chinese are poorly understood, but are approximated by the Late Middle Chinese of Chinese rhyme tables, in which these characters may be read as han-nat.
The Late Middle Korean form of this word is hanólh.
The Chinese transcription is imprecise, because the Chinese coda -t was used for several Korean dental consonants.
“Jilin leishi” enters the record as 12th-century Chinese work on Korean language and culture. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Jilin, leishi and 12th-century can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 25, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q12583976. The first chronological checks are 1103, 1104, 1726 and 1647.
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This entry incorporates text from “Jilin leishi” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.