Chinese encyclopedia

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Not to be confused with Chinese Encyclopedia or Encyclopedia of China.
A page from a Qing edition of the 983 CE Taiping Yulan concerning the seasons.

Chinese encyclopedias comprise both Chinese language encyclopedias and foreign language ones about China or Chinese topics. There is a type of native Chinese reference work called leishu (lit. "categorized writings") that is sometimes translated as "encyclopedia", but although these collections of quotations from classic texts are expansively "encyclopedic", a leishu is more accurately described as a "compendium" or "anthology". The long history of Chinese encyclopedias began with the (222 CE) Huanglan ("Emperor's Mirror") leishu and continues with online encyclopedias such as the Baike Encyclopedia.

Terminology

The Chinese language has several translation equivalents for the English word encyclopedia.

Diǎn

Yongle Dadian ("Yongle Emperor
's Encyclopedia").

Lèishū 類書 (lit. "category book") "reference work arranged by category; encyclopedia" is commonly translated as "traditional Chinese encyclopedia", but they differ from modern encyclopedias in that they are compendia composed of selected and categorically arranged quotations from Chinese classics, "the name encyclopedia having been applied to them because they embrace the whole realm of knowledge" (Teng and Biggerstaff 1971: 83).

Bǎikē 百科 (lit. "hundred subjects") in the words bǎikēquánshū 百科全書 (with "comprehensive book") and bǎikēcídiǎn 百科辭典 (with "dictionary") specifically refer to Western-style "encyclopedias". Encyclopedia titles first used Bǎikēquánshū in the final decades of the 19th century.[1]

History

Main article: List of Chinese encyclopedias

Encyclopedic leishu anthologies were published in China for nearly two millennia before the first modern encyclopedia, the English-language 1917 Encyclopaedia Sinica.

While English usually differentiates between dictionary and encyclopedia, Chinese does not necessarily make the distinction. For instance, the ancient

florilegia
.

The boundaries between both are quite fluid at first; the shorter the entries and the more exclusively they are directed to the definition of the word concerned, the more the work partakes of the character of a dictionary, while a longer commentary delving into history and culture and provided with extensive quotations of sources is, conversely, more characteristic of the encyclopaedia. The dividing line between a language lexicon (such as glossaries, onomastica and rhyming dictionaries) and a factual lexicon, to which all general and special encyclopaedias belong, is only clearly drawn when, in addition to the definitions, necessarily supported by literary references, an interpretation appears which takes into consideration not only the current literary usage but also the thing itself, which not only describes the subject but also, at times, evaluates and thereby forms a true connection between the new and the old. The very characteristic of the traditional Chinese encyclopaedia as in contrast to that in the West is that these distinctions were never clearly drawn. All Chinese encyclopaedias are anthologies, upon which were grafted greatly varying forms of dictionary arrangement. They consist of (generally quite long) quotations arranged in one order or another and, although they may include an opinion on the subject, they rarely contain an original opinion.[2]

Robert L. Fowler, Professor of Greek at the University of Bristol, says that although comprehensiveness is a primary criterion in defining an "encyclopedia", there are encyclopedias of individual subjects (e.g., Encyclopaedia of Chess Openings) that defy the etymology from Greek enkyklios paideia "the circle of subjects". He says, "To call a comprehensive treatment of one subject an "encyclopaedia" is a catachresis known already in medieval China, where the term leishu, properly a collection of classical texts on many fields, came to be applied to similar treatments of one subject only, for instance the use of jade".[3]

Imperial period

Main article: Leishu

Chinese

scholar-bureaucrats compiled about 600 leishu traditional Chinese "encyclopedias" between the 3rd and 18th centuries. About 200 of these are extant today, and 10-20 are still used by historians.[4] Most were published by imperial mandate during the Tang dynasty (618-907), Song dynasty (960-1279), Ming dynasty (1368-1644), and early Qing dynasty (1644-1911). Some leishu were huge publications. For instance, the (1726) Complete Classics Collection of Ancient China contained an estimated 3 to 4 times the amount of material in the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition.[5]

Although most scholars consider the 222 CE

Needham, Lu, and Huang call the late 4th to early 2nd centuries BCE Erya the oldest Chinese encyclopedia, and consider its derivative literature (beginning with the Fangyan and Huanglan) as the main line of descent for encyclopedias in China.[7]

The c. 239 BCE Lüshi Chunqiu, which is an anthology of quotes from many Hundred Schools of Thought philosophical texts, is another text sometimes characterized as the first Chinese "encyclopedia". Although its content is "encyclopedic", the text was compiled to show rulers and ministers how to govern well, and was not intended to be a comprehensive summary of knowledge.[8]

During the Han dynasty, the 2nd century BCE Shiben ("Book of Origins") was the earliest Chinese dictionary / encyclopedia of origins. It explained imperial genealogies, the origins of surnames, and records of legendary and historical inventors. Among subsequent encyclopedias of origins, the largest was Chen Yuanlong's 1735 Gezhi Jingyuan (格致鏡元, Mirror of Scientific and Technological Origins).

Shortly after the fall of the Han dynasty, the first true Chinese leishu encyclopedia appeared. The 222 Huanglan ("Imperial Mirror"), which is now a lost work, was compiled for Cao Pi, the first emperor of the Three Kingdoms Cao Wei state (r. 220-226), in order to provide rulers and ministers with conveniently arranged summaries of current knowledge (like the Lüshi Chunqiu above).

An important new type of leishu encyclopedia appeared in the early

Kaiyuan era
(713-741).

The Golden Age of encyclopedia writing began with the

Southern Song dynasty
scholar Zheng Qiao 鄭樵, became a model for later encyclopedias.

The

Jesuit Johann Schreck and the scholar Wang Zheng 王徵. Song Yingxing's (1637) Tiangong Kaiwu ("Exploitation of the Works of Nature") was an illustrated encyclopedia of science and technology, and notable for breaking from Chinese tradition by rarely quoting earlier works. In Ming China, with the spreading of written knowledge to strata outside the literati, household riyong leishu 日用類書 ("Encyclopedias for daily use") began to be compiled, "summarizing practical information for townsfolk and others not primarily concerned with mastering the Confucian heritage."[11]

The last great leishu encyclopedias were published during the

Chinese-language Vietnamese encyclopedia compiled by the scholar Lê Quý Đôn
.

Modern period

Present-day Chinese encyclopedias—in the common Western sense of "comprehensive reference work covering a wide range of subjects"—include both printed editions and

online encyclopedias
.

Among printed encyclopedias, the earliest was the (1917)

Concise Encyclopædia Britannica
or Jianming Buliedian Baike Quanshu is an 11-volume translation based on the Micropædia portion of the 1987 15th edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica.

Among major online Chinese encyclopedias, for

Gan Wikipedias
, as well as the Classical Chinese Wikipedia (zh-classical:). Lastly, there are modern English-language encyclopedias of China. For example, the 1991 2nd edition of the Cambridge Encyclopedia of China, the 2009 Brill's Encyclopedia of China, and the 5-volume 2009 Berkshire Encyclopedia of China.

See also

References

  1. ^ Lehner, Georg (2011), "China in European Encyclopedias, 1700–1850", in George Bryan Souza ed., European Expansion and Indigenous Response, Brill, vol. 9, p. 48.
  2. ^ Bauer, Wolfgang (1966), "The Encyclopaedia in China", Cahiers d'Histoire Mondiale 9.1: 665-691.
  3. ^ Fowler, Robert L. (1997), "Encyclopaedias: Definitions and Theoretical Problems", in P. Binkley, Pre-Modern Encyclopaedic Texts, Brill, p. 9.
  4. ^ Wilkinson, Endymion (2000), Chinese History: A New Manual, Harvard University Press, p. 602-603.
  5. ^ Fowler, Robert L. (1997), "Encyclopaedias: Definitions and Theoretical Problems", in P. Binkley, Pre-Modern Encyclopaedic Texts, Brill, p. 9; citing Diény, Jean-Pierre (1991), "Les encyclopédies chinoises," in Actes du colloque de Caen 12-16 janvier 1987, Paris, p. 198.
  6. ^ Teng, Ssu-yü and Biggerstaff, Knight (1971), An Annotated Bibliography of Selected Chinese Reference Works, 3rd ed., Harvard University Press, p. 83.
  7. ^ Needham, Joseph, Lu Gwei-djen, and Huang Hsing-Tsing (1986), Science and Civilisation in China, Volume 6 Biology and Biological Technology, Part 1 Botany, Cambridge University Press, p. 192.
  8. ^ Carson, Michael and Loewe, Michael (1993), "Lü shih ch'un ch'iu 呂氏春秋", in Loewe, Michael, Early Chinese Texts: A Bibliographical Guide, Society for the Study of Early China; Institute of East Asian Studies, p. 325.
  9. ^ Bauer (1966), p. 678.
  10. ^ Bauer (1966), p. 680.
  11. ^ Wilkinson (2000), p. 602.

External links

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