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.
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 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 (2000: 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 collection of books
In the first month of the 37th year of the Qianlong Emperor, people were requested by Imperial Decree to hand in their private book collections for use in the compilation of the Siku Quanshu. However, only a small number of people actually did so at this time, partly in fear of possible persecutions due to Literary Inquisition such as in the case of Treason by the Book.
In October of the same year, seeing that only a limited number of people actually handed in books, the Qianlong Emperor issued further Imperial Decrees stressing that (1) Books would be returned to their owners once the compilation was finished. (2) Book owners would not be persecuted even if their books contained Bad words. Less than three months after the issue of this decree four to five thousand different books were handed in.
Apart from reassuring the book owners that they would be free from persecution, the Qianlong Emperor also made promises and gave rewards to Chinese book owners, such as that he would perform personal calligraphy on their books. By this time 10,000 books had been handed in.
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 the Siku Quanshu.
According to some sources, a famous encyclopedia Tiangong Kaiwu (Chinese: 天工開物) was banned by the Qing court, resulting in its disappearance from China for 300 years, and was discovered later that some original copies were preserved intact in Japan.
Many Siku series including the Siku Jinshu were published as books or CD.
Contents
The Siku quanshu collection is divided into four kù (库); "warehouse; storehouse; treasury; repository") parts, in reference to the imperial library divisions.
Jīng (经 "Classics") Chinese classic texts
Shǐ (史 "Histories") histories and geographies from Chinese history
Zĭ (子 "Masters") philosophy, arts, sciences from Chinese philosophy
Jí (集 "Collections") anthologies from Chinese literature
The books are divided into 44 categories or lèi (simplified Chinese: 类; traditional Chinese: 類) and include 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.
Authors in the Siku Quanshu
Two of Zhao Yiguang's works are housed in the Wang Qishu, they were the Jiuhuan Shitu (九圜史圖) and the Liuhe Mantu (六匌曼圖). They were part of the Siku Quanshu Cunmu Congshu (四庫全書存目叢書).
Size Comparisons
In her book Too Much To Know, historian Ann M. Blair has discussed the size of the Siku Quanshu:
The Siku Quanshu comprised 79,000 chapters in 36,000 volumes and was produced in seven manuscript copies between 1773 and 1782 (by more than 3,800 copyists); of these, one copy survived intact in the Forbidden City, from which the work was photolithographically reprinted in the 1980s and is now available online. At 800 million words it has been only recently surpassed by the English Wikipedia (over 1 billion words as of June 2010), but in the eighteenth century it far surpassed the 40 million words in the fifteenth edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica.
