Siku Quanshu

By March 1773, an editorial board composed of hundreds of editors, collators, and copyists had been created in Beijing to gather and review books brought to them.^[4] This board included more than 361 scholars, with Ji Yun and Lu Xixiong (陸錫熊) as chief editors.^[3] Around 3,826 scribes copied every word by hand. They were not paid in cash, but each was given a government position after he had transcribed a set number of sections of the encyclopedia.^[5] Following its ten-year-long compilation, seven copies were produced of the completed encyclopedia, which were distributed throughout the empire.

By 1782, the Siku Quanshu Zongmu Tiyao ('Annotated Bibliography of the Four Treasuries'), a guide to the Siku Quanshu, had also been completed. It contains bibliographical information about the 3,593 titles in the Siku Quanshu and about 6,793 other books that were not included in it. The Annotated Bibliography of the Four Treasuries, which was published in 1793, became the largest Chinese book catalog of the time.

Compilation

The initial compilation of the Siku Quanshu started with the Siku Quanshu Zongmu Tiyao bibliography, which was completed by 1773. The first workable drafts were completed in 1781. These included bibliographical information on all the works included in the Siku Quanshu in full as well as a large number of works that are mentioned only by title.^[6]

As indicated by its title, the work is structured in four categories, which reference the divisions of the imperial library:

• "
  Classics" (經; jīng), the canon ramified by Confucius and traditional since the Han dynasty
  (202 BC – 220 AD)
• "Histories" (史; shǐ)
• "Letters" (集; jí), containing literature such as poetry and personal letters, and writings meant for the masses
• "Masters" (子; zǐ), whose texts focus on philosophy, arts, and sciences.

In the course of editing, a large number of corrections were made to local records. Personal documents, often describing the actions of noteworthy local people, were often included in the Annotated Bibliography of the Four Treasuries if their contents could be verified through central government records. In the Siku Quanshu itself, documents that could not be verified were often included by title only. Even officially sponsored writings, such as local gazetteers, were not safe from the scrutiny of the compilers.^[6]

Medical knowledge was often documented through case studies, on the model of twenty-five instances in Sima Qian's Records of the Grand Historian, which blended narrative with analysis.^[7] Similarly, works on philosophy took Huang Zongxi's writings as their model, though they came to be divided into two types: "archival", meaning scholarly articles, and "cultural", meaning Buddhist koans. Because authors and previous compilers had not considered philosophical works to form part of historical records, the compilers of the Siku Quanshu redefined the classifications in several compilations and set boundaries based on authors' biographies and the purposes of their writings.^[7]

The Qianlong Emperor reviewed many of the works that were being compiled, and his opinions were conveyed through direct comments or imperial edicts. These colored the compilers' criteria for works suitable for inclusion in the Siku Quanshu, especially in relation to works expressing

The Qianlong Emperor commissioned seven copies of the Siku Quanshu. The first four copies were for the emperor himself and were kept in the north, in specially constructed libraries in the Forbidden City, Old Summer Palace, Shenyang, and Chengde. The remaining three copies were sent to the south, where they deposited in libraries in the cities of Hangzhou, Zhenjiang, and Yangzhou.^[4] All seven libraries also received copies of the imperial encyclopedia Complete Classics Collection of Ancient China, completed in 1725.

The copy kept in the Old Summer Palace was destroyed during the Second Opium War in 1860. The two copies kept in Zhenjiang and Yangzhou were also completely destroyed, while the copy kept in Hangzhou was only about 70 to 80 percent destroyed during the Taiping Rebellion. The four remaining copies suffered some damage during the Second Sino-Japanese War. Today, those copies are located in the National Library of China in Beijing, the National Palace Museum in Taipei, the Gansu Provincial Library in Lanzhou, and the Zhejiang Library in Hangzhou.^[3]

Censorship

It is said^[

]

Contents

Each copy of the Siku Quanshu was bound into 36,381 volumes (册; cè), with more than 79,000 volumes (卷; juàn). In total, each copy is around 2.3 million pages, and has approximately 800 million

Chinese characters

.

Catalogue

Main article: Siku Quanshu Zongmu Tiyao

The scholars working on the Siku Quanshu wrote a descriptive note for each book, detailing the author's name along with place and year of birth. Next, after they determined what parts of the author's work would go into the compilation, they analyzed the main points of the author's argument. This short annotation, which reflected their own opinions, was put at the beginning of the Siku Quanshu and formed the Complete Catalogue. The catalogue divided the Siku Quanshu into its four sections (庫; kù; 'repository').^[3]

Subcategories

The books are divided into 44 subcategories (类; 類; lèi). The Siku Quanshu includes most major Chinese texts, from pre-Classical

Compendium of Materia Medica

See also

• Libraries in China
• Four Great Books of Song
• Literary inquisition

References

Citations

Works cited

• Fairbank, John K., ed. (1978). The Cambridge History of China: The Ch'ing Empire to 1800. Vol. 9. Cambridge University Press.
  ISBN 9780521243346
  .
• Han, Seunghyun (2016). "After the Prosperous Age". After the Prosperous Age: State and Elites in Early Nineteenth-Century Suzhou. Vol. 101 (1 ed.). Harvard University Asia Center.
  JSTOR j.ctt1dnn8ht
  .
• Furth, Charlotte (2007). "Thinking with Cases". Thinking with Cases: Specialist Knowledge in Chinese Cultural History. University of Hawai'i Press.
  JSTOR j.ctt6wr1vg
  .
• Guy, R. Kent (1987). The Emperor's Four Treasuries: Scholars and the State in the Late Chʻien-lung Era. Cambridge, MA: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University.
  OCLC 15133087
  .
• Hung, William (1939). "Preface to an Index to Ssu-k'u ch'uan-shu tsung-mu and Wei-shou shu-mu". Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies. 4 (1): 47–58.
  JSTOR 2717904
  .

Further reading

• (in Chinese) http://bbs.i56i.com/archiver/tid-50680.html Archived 19 September 2018 at the Wayback Machine
• (in Chinese) http://www.peopledaily.com.cn/GB/paper39/4099/481459.html Archived 18 December 2018 at the Wayback Machine
• (in Chinese) 炮轟《四庫全書》和紀曉嵐有何不可？
• (in Chinese) 乾隆編"四庫全書"為引蛇出洞燒異說？
• Yue, Ping-yao (1934). Title Index to the Ssŭ K'u Ch'üan Shu. Beijing: Standard Press.
  OCLC 250671091
  .
• Crossley, Pamela (1999). A Translucent Mirror: History and Identity in Qing Imperial Ideology. Berkeley: University of California Press.
  ISBN 9780520234246
  .

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Special:Search/Siku Quanshu.

Chinese Wikisource has original text related to this article:

Complete text of the Complete Library of the Four Treasuries

• Complete Library of the Four Treasuries scanned texts at Chinese Text Project (Chinese)
• Si ku quan shu (Complete Library of the Four Treasuries) at World Digital Library
• Ssu-k'u ch'uan-shu (Complete Library of the Four Treasuries) Archived 28 March 2018 at the Wayback Machine, National Palace Museum webpage
• All That Is Worth to Know Under Heaven, Studiolum: the Library of the Humanist article
• "Destruction of Chinese Books in the Peking Siege of 1900" by Donald G. Davis, Jr. (of the University of Texas at Austin) and Cheng Huanwen (of Zhongshan University)