Abstract: The “Four Rules of Textual Criticism”, Dui Jiao, Ben Jiao, Ta Jiao, and Li Jiao have been
used for emendating ancient works of either printed books or manuscripts. Dui Jiao is to identify the
authoritative edition and copy for collating the variants; Ben Jiao is to emendate within the book and
manuscript itself, or related subjects in other books and manuscripts, known as Ta Jiao; Li Jiao is to exercise
scholarship of critical and logical analysis when the other three methods are not applicable. However, an
authoritative edition often does not exist even for the works of the Ming and Qing Dynasties. Furthermore,
during the transmission of texts, variants in intermediate copies were inevitably mixed together, such that
the Stemmatics method cannot rebuild the family tree. As a result, corrupted texts cannot be restored by the
“Four Rules of Textual Criticism”. To address such problem, this paper proposes a new method based on
statistical analysis with application to Tou Bi Ji as a case study. The new method is referred as Statistical
Textual Criticism by the authors.

Key words: Textual criticism, Stemmatics, Statistical textual criticism, Tou Bi Ji, Pareto Chart, Qian
Qianyi