5-Part Series
What the 1915 推背圖 actually prints — and how later annotation made some passages look more precise.
In this 1915 witness, the printed text is substantially less specific than modern retellings suggest. Its own commentary marks a transition from retrospective identification to speculation, and this particular copy subsequently acquired handwritten identifications that make some passages look much more precise.
Those retellings are web sources, not scholarship — the reference works make no leaf-level identification at all. The survey behind that statement is recorded in the corpus.
Part 1
A typical leaf of the Tui Bei Tu holds a hexagram, a four-line 讖, a four-line 頌, and a commentary. Only one of those layers is the prophecy, and its verse names no historical person anywhere in the sixty leaves.
Part 2
Halfway through the sixty leaves the commentator stops and says so: verifying the past is easy, inferring the future is hard, and he hopes his predictions of disorder miss. Everything after that leaf is his inference, by his own statement.
Part 3
象39 says the trouble lasts until a 酉 year. 酉 is one of twelve branches, so it returns about eight times a century. Choosing which one requires already knowing the answer.
Part 4
The 1915 edition says a woman may settle the Central Plain. A name was later written beside it in blue ink. Four other columns carry handwriting or marks in the same ink range.
Part 5
One leaf's commentary fits a late-Qing or post-Qing Han-nationalist register particularly naturally. Another fails to identify an apparently Taiping-shaped verse. A transmitted text has no single date, and 1915 is the age of the printing, not of what it prints.