Siku Quanshu

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Siku Quanshu
Traditional Chinese四庫全書
Simplified Chinese四库全书
Literal meaningcomplete books of the four [imperial] repositories

The Siku Quanshu, variously translated as the Imperial Collection of Four, Emperor's Four Treasuries, Complete Library in Four Branches of Literature, or Complete Library of the Four Treasuries, is the largest collection of books in Chinese history and probably the most ambitious editorial enterprise in the history of the world.

History

During the height of the Qing Dynasty in the 18th century CE, the Qianlong Emperor commissioned the Siku quanshu, to demonstrate that the Qing could surpass the Ming Dynasty's 1403 Yongle Encyclopedia, which was the world's largest encyclopedia at the time.

The editorial board included 361 scholars, with Ji Yun (紀昀) and Lu Xixiong (陸錫熊) as chief editors. They began compilation in 1773 and completed it in 1782. The editors collected and annotated over 10,000 manuscripts from the imperial collections and other libraries, destroyed some 3,000 titles, or works, that were considered to be anti-Manchu, and selected 3,461 titles, or works, for inclusion into the Siku quanshu. They were bound in 36,381 volumes (册) with more than 79,000 chapters (卷), comprising about 2.3 million pages, and approximately 800 million Chinese characters.

Scribes copied every word by hand, and according to Wilkinson (200:274), "The copyists (of whom there were 3,826) were not paid in cash but rewarded with official posts after they had transcribed a given number of words within a set time." Four copies for the emperor were placed in specially constructed libraries in the Forbidden City, Old Summer Palace, Shenyang, and Wenjin Chamber, Chengde. Three additional copies for the public were deposited in Siku quanshu libraries in Hangzhou, Zhenjiang, and Yangzhou. All seven libraries also received copies of the 1725 imperial encyclopedia Gujin tushu jicheng.

The Siku quanshu copies kept in Zhenjiang and Yangzhou were destroyed during the Taiping Rebellion. In 1860 during the Second Opium War an Anglo-French expedition force burned most of the copy kept at the Old Summer Palace. The four remaining copies suffered some damage during World War II. Today, the four remaining copies are kept at the National Library of China in Beijing, the National Palace Museum in Taipei, the Gansu Library in Lanzhou, and the Zhejiang Library in Hangzhou.

Timeline of the books collecting

  • On the first month of the 37th year of Qianlong, the emperor issued an Imperial decree for Qing Empire, demanding the people to hand in their private book collections, in order for the compilation of Siku Quanshu. Due to the Manchu Empire's previous notorious record of Literary Inquisition such as in the case of Treason by the Book, the Chinese were too scared to hand in books, in the fear of subsequent persecution.
  • On October of that year, seeing that hardly any Chinese handed in books, Qianlong issued more Imperial Decrees, stressing the points (1) Books will be returned to owners once the compilation is finished. (2) Book owners would not be persecuted even if their books do contain Bad words. In less than three months after the issue of the decree, four to five thousands of different types of books were handed in.
  • Apart from reassuring the book owners that they will be free from persecution, Qianlong made false promises and rewards to Chinese book owners, such as he would perform personal calligraphy on their books. By this time 10,000 types of books were handed in.[1]


Using the emperor initiated movement as a form of elite political contention among themselves, the Han Chinese literati of the society gave the emperor full cooperation and participation, thus helping Qianlong to fulfill his dream of establishing cultural superiority over all past emperors.

Qianlong's intention was very clear, he wanted his Siku Quanshu compilers to create a library of classical culture that contain no anti-Manchu elements, resulting in an empire-wide movement of house-to-house searches for "evil books, tracts, poetry, and plays". The movement was directed and led by Qianlong himself; the "evil texts" that were discovered were to be sent to Peking and burned, and the respective books owners, sometimes the whole families, were either sentenced to death, or exiled to remote land.

Siku Jinshu

Siku Jinshu (Chinese: 四库禁书) is the catalogue of all the books that were rejected and banned by the order of Emperor Qianlong. The catalogue contained up to 2855 titles of books, which were then subsequently burned. The banned and destroyed 2855 titles were comparable to the 3461 titles of the catalogue of Siku Quanshu.

A famous encyclopedia, Tiangong Kaiwu (Chinese: 天工開物) had disappeared from China for 300 years, after it was banned by the Qing court. It had been discovered later that some original copies were preserved intact in Japan.[2]

Contents

The Siku quanshu collection is divided into four ku (庫; "warehouse; storehouse; treasury; repository") parts, in reference to the imperial library divisions.

The books are divided into 44 categories (類), including the Analects of Confucius, Mencius, Great Learning, Doctrine of the Mean, I Ching, Rites of Zhou, Classic of Rites, Classic of Poetry, Spring and Autumn Annals, Shuowen Jiezi, Records of the Grand Historian, Zizhi Tongjian, The Art of War, Guoyu, Stratagems of the Warring States, Compendium of Materia Medica, and other classics.

The Siku quanshu collection includes most major Chinese texts, from the ancient Zhou Dynasty to the Qing Dynasty, covering all domains of academia. It is the largest collection of books in the world and contains historically invaluable information.

See also

References

  1. ^ 吳武洲 (2008-10-30). "乾隆編"四庫全書"為引蛇出洞燒異說？". guoxue.com. Retrieved 2009-09-20.
  2. ^ needham volume 4 part 2 172
  • Guy, R. Kent, The Emperor's Four Treasuries: Scholars and the State in the Late Ch'ien-lung Era. Cambridge (Mass.): Harvard University Press, 1987 (Harvard East Asian Monographs 129), ISBN 0-674-25115-6.
  • Hong, William. "Preface to an Index to Ssu-k'u ch'üan-shu tsung-mu and Wei-shou shu-mu", in: Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, 4 (1939): pp. 47–58.
  • Wilkinson, Endymion, Chinese History. A Manual, Cambridge (Mass.): Harvard University Press, 2000 (Harvard-Yenching Institute Monograph Series, 52), ISBN 0674002474, pp. 273–277.
  • Yue, P.Y. Title Index to the Si ku chuan shu, Beiping (Standard Press) 1934.
  • Crossley, Pamela. A Translucent Mirror: History and Identity in Qing Imperial Ideology, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999, ISBN 0520215664 (or ISBN 9780520234246)
  • The Cambridge History of China by Fairbank on Literary inquisition

External links

Additional sources

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