Shang Shu, the historical document in Chinese history, complied many aspects of academic problems which derived from history, geography, philology and phonology, etc. There are four main aspects: firstly, how to appraise pseudograph correctly; secondly, the contents of Jiwen and Guwen should be discriminated carefully; thirdly, explanations or interpretations of scholaships varied a lot; fourthly, textual critisim could be too complicated. Thus, from such a long academic tradition, scholars have viewed the second and third aspects as the key parts, while the philology study played the vital role. In short, as the explanations presented by scholars on 19 parts of Zhou Shu varied a lot, the paper held the case study based on 13 main parts of this book to research the variant characters.

The purpose of this study is to analyze the aspects of social developments and cultural lives of early China reflected in The Book of Documents(Shangshu) which is a collection of China’s ancient literature and served as the basic data of Chinese political, historical, geographical, ideological aspects in the pre-Qin period. But there are many different copies of the text which include a lot of “scribal errors” and orthographic variants, because the Book of Documents was passed down for thousands of years. Jin teng(gold box) is also important for our understanding of the historical context at the beginning of the Zhou and Tsinghua Jane(清華簡) can provide different text articles for scholars. The text is not only helpful in reading words and understanding their meanings, but also beneficial for combining the edition. This thesis focuses on the different words, sentences, and a detailed explanation.