Kuaizi 蒯子

Kuaizi 蒯子 "Master Kuai" was a political treatise written during the early Han period 漢 (206 BCE-220 CE) by Kuai Tong 蒯通. His actual name was Kuai Che 蒯徹, but historians changed his name because Emperor Wu 漢武帝 (r. 141-87 BCE) had the same personal name, Liu Che 劉徹 (see taboo names). Kuai Tong might have hailed from the region of Yan 燕 (modern Hebei), but he was also known as a dialectician and coalition advisor from the state of Qi 齊. Sources say that he wrote 81 essays assembled in a book called Juanyong 雋永. The imperial bibliography Yiwen zhi 藝文志 in the official dynastic history Hanshu 漢書 mentions the 5-chapters-long book Kuaizi, but not the Juanyong. It might be that both were the same book. The Kuaizi was already lost during the Tang period 唐 (618-907).

The Qing-period 清 (1644-1911) scholar Ma Guohan 馬國翰 (1794-1857) collected statements about Kuai Tong from various historiographical sources and so compiled a short collection of (non-original) fragments that he published in his series Yuhan shanfang yiji shu 玉函山房輯佚書 under the title Kuaizi.