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was likely caused by the reading of a mutilated passage of Chin-wen Shang-shu(今文尚書), which Szǔ-ma Ch'ien accepted with credulity and passed into his own writing. He said:

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It is hardly necessary to elaborate the thesis that Yin (殷) is Yin-hsü, south of the Huan River.  But since Shih-chi's time all have taken Yin for Po(亳).  This(mistake) was first found in Chin-wen Shang-shu-shu-hsu(今文書書序), which T'ai-shih-kung(太史公 namely Szǔ-ma Ch'ien) passed into his book.  A passage in Shu-hsü reads: "P'an-keng wu ch'ien, chiang tzu Po Yin(盤庚五遷將治亳殷)" or "P'an-keng moved five times and was about to settle at Po-Yin".  Shu Hsi(束晳) [[superscript]] 8 [[/superscript]] said that the second sentence of this passage according to the text of Shang-shu from the walls of Confucius reads: "Chiang [[underline]] Shih chai [[/underline]] Yin (將始宅殷)", or "about to begin building houses in Yin"........It is important to remember that 'Po' and 'Yin' never occur together elsewhere in ancient Chinese Classics..........They are altogether two different localities....Shu Hsi identified Yin with the 'Yin-hsü' south of the Huan River, mentioned in the Biography of Hsiang Yü in Ch'ien-han Shu.  Now all the tortoise shells and the animal bones have come from this place, obviously due to the fact that it was the capital of Yin since Poan-keng's time.......(Notes on San-tai Geography: on Yin, p. 7, Hsueh-t'ang Ch'ung-k'an,雪堂叢刊,三代地理小記,說殷).
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Once the conflicting statements of Shih-chi and Chu-shu-chi-nien are made straight, most of the other confusions can be easily clarified.  For instance, the exact location of the capital founded by Hê-t'an-chia has never been made quite clear by the commentators on those references concerned with it.  Yin-hsü south of the Huan River was once considered to be the place.  On the maps in [[underline]] Chang-te fu-chih [[/underline]] as well as [[underline]] An-yang hsien chih [[/underline]], where Yin-hsü should be, has been marked as Hê-t'an-chia-ch'eng(河亶甲城).  In general, however, Hsiang(相) is located in Nei-huang(內黃).  Hu Wei(胡渭), the famous author of Yü-kung Chui-chih(禹貢錐指), marked both Hsiang of Nei-huang and Yin-hsü in An-yang as possible place where Hê-t'an-chia might have had his Capital (Map 20 in Yü-kung Chui-chih,禹贡錐指圖:鄴束故大河圖第二十). This has led to a further confusion, as in the case of Chavannes' translation of Szǔ-ma Ch'ien, to locate Yin-hsü in Nei-huang(Tome

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[[footnote]] 8.  Living circa 280 A.D., first editor and decipherer of the Bamboo Annals, or Chu-shu-chi-nien, discovered in the second year of T'ai-k'ang(281A.D.)[[/footnote]]