Siku Quanshu

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Siku Quanshu
Traditional Chinese: 四庫全書
Simplified Chinese: 四库全书
Literal meaning: complete 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.

Contents

[edit] History

During the height of the Qing Dynasty, the Qianlong Emperor commissioned the Siku quanshu, presumably to demonstrate that the Manchus could surpass the Chinese Ming Dynasty's 1407 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 that were considered to be anti-Manchu, and selected 3,461 books 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.

Two of the Siku quanshu copies were destroyed during the Taiping Rebellion, and the British army burned most of the other during the Second Opium War. The four remaining copies suffered some damage during the World War II, but the Forbidden City copy (known as the Wenyuan ge 文淵閣) is well-preserved in the National Palace Museum. It was photo-lithographically reprinted in 1,500 volumes during the 1980's, and is currently available on CD-ROM and online.

[edit] 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.

[edit] See also

[edit] References

  • Hong, William. "Preface to an Index to Ssu-k'u ch'üan-shu tsung-mu and Wei-shou shu-mu." Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 4 (1939): 47-58.
  • Kent, Guy, R. The Emperor's Four Treasuries: Scholars and the State in the Late Ch'ien-lung Era. Harvard: Harvard University Press, 1987.
  • Wilkinson, Endymion. Chinese History: a manual. Revised and enlarged ed. 2000. Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Center.

[edit] External links