The General's Garden

[1] The Ming editions of the text comprise fifty sections, but the last four sections, relating to the "barbarians" of the north (Beidi), south (Nanman), east (Dongyi) and west (Xirong), are omitted from most Qing dynasty editions.

This omission is thought to have been made in order to avoid offending the Manchu rulers of the Qing dynasty.

[2] Although the earliest surviving editions of the General's Garden only date back to the Ming dynasty, a unique manuscript of a translation of the text into the Tangut language was collected from the abandoned fortress city of Khara-Khoto by Aurel Stein in 1914, and is currently held at the British Library in London.

[5] It is not certain whether this difference is due to the Song dynasty source for the translation having fewer sections than the later version of the text, or whether the Tangut translator deliberately omitted sections that were not considered relevant to the situation of the Western Xia.

[6] The other major difference is the treatment of the final four sections of the text, relating to the "barbarians" of the four directions, which is reduced to a single section describing only the barbarians of the north, called the "Lords of the Steppes" in the Tangut translation.