The Jizhong discovery (Chinese: 汲冢发现) was the accidental rediscovery in 279 AD of a corpus of bamboo and wooden slips, as attested in the Book of Jin.
The slips were found by a grave robber named Biao Zhun (不準)[a] who had broken into the tomb of King Xiang of Wei (r. 318–296 BC).
[1] The initial editorial work on the slips was done by Xun Xu (d. 289), who was the director of the Jin imperial library, though its quality was questioned by his successors.
Among his editions, only two have survived; the large number of quotations shows the extent of Xun Xu work's influence.
Though the majority of the collection have subsequently been lost, the restoration work, which involved identifying a great number of variant scripts as well as collating fragmented bamboo strips and finding parallels in the received literature of the time, sparked renewed interest in ancient texts and epigraphy among Xun Xu's contemporaries, such as Lü Chen (呂忱), who wrote his Zilin dictionary by extending the Shuowen Jiezi; Guo Pu, who annotated the Erya, Sancang, Fangyan, the Classic of Mountains and Seas, and the Tale of King Mu; and Zhang Hua, who wrote the encyclopedic Bowuzhi.