 The name Xunzi means Master Xun and refers to Xun Kuang 荀況, who was renowned in his day as “the most revered of teachers” (zui wei laoshi 最爲老師). His precise dates are unknown, and extant sources contradict one another: in particular, there is disagreement as to whether he journeyed to the philosophical center of Qi 齊 at the age of fifteen sui 歲 (i.e. thirteen or fourteen years of age) or fifty sui (forty-eight or forty-nine). The former figure is more plausible (Goldin 1999: 110n.13; Knoblock 1982–83: 33–34), and would indicate a year of birth sometime around 310 BCE All we can surmise of his death is that it must have been after 238 BCE, because he was alive when his patron, Lord Chunshen 春申君, was assassinated in that year. Virtually all available information about his life comes either from internal references in Xunzi, the posthumously edited collection of his works, or from his biography in Records of the Historian 史記, by Sima Qian 司馬遷 (145?–86? BCE), which is known to contain serious distortions, especially in its treatment of famous philosophers (Kern 2015). Hence modern attempts to piece together Xun Kuang’s life (such as Knoblock 1988–94: I, 3–35; and Liao Mingchun 2005: 535–46) are necessarily tentative.