The Zhus in Tiantang of Wu County were a literary family in times of the Qi and Liang of the Southern Dynasties, but their heirs were not recorded in history after the North Zhou Dynasty. The newlyunearthed Zhu Gan’s Epigraph in the Sui Dynasty reveals the Zhu family’s traces of political and cultural life between the North Zhou and the Sui Dynasties, and provides the missing links of the Zhu family tree. The preface and epigraph were written respectively by Ming Kerang and and Geng Xin, the two literary leaders in the Southern Dynasties, so they preserves valuable historical materials to compensate for their handed-down works and investigate the relationships of contact between scholars in the Southern Dynasties secluding in the Northern Dynasties. The epigraph also brings in the sun rich traces and cultural succession of scholars in the Southern Dynasties, which provide bases of reference for further exploring the political and cultural tendencies, especially cultural conceptions, between the North Zhou and the Sui Dynasty.

Zhu Gan’s epigraph; history of the North Zhou Dynasty; history of the Sui Dynasty; scholars in the Southern Dynasties; culture