The wang 王 (king) mentioned in the Chunqiu 春秋 (Spring and Autumn Annals), on which the Lu 魯 chronicles are supposedly based, all refer to wang of the Zhou 周 dynasty who reigned at the same time as the monarch of Lu, and no other wang are mentioned. For Lu historians, it was self-evident that simply writing the word wang meant the king of Zhou, and this was established as a historical record of Lu. We have examined wang in the Zuozhuan 左伝 on the assumption that the original source material of the Zuozhuan was written in this way, and also with reference to the classification of the Zuozhuan by Yoshihiko Ogura. As a result, it became clear that in the case of the Zuozhuan, wang is always used to refer to the king of Zhou, and conversely, when the king of Chu 楚, Wu 呉 or Yue 越 is referred to as wang, the state’s name is always mentioned somewhere in the relevant entry.
However, for lords who were enfeoffed by the Zhou dynasty, wang refers to the king of Zhou, and it is not possible to specify which state is being recorded. Therefore, we analyzed the state names in the entries where wang is mentioned, and found that Lu is a state whose name is almost never mentioned. From this, it is thought that at least the entries containing the word wang are based on the records of Lu.
If Lu’s records are used in the Zuozhuan, then, as with the entries in the Chunqiu 春秋, there is a possibility that they are contemporaneous sources. If the original sources include contemporaneous materials, the Zuozhuan could be a useful source for the study of the history of the Spring and Autumn period.
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