Yongle Encyclopedia

In 1403, Emperor Yongle formed a commission of 147 scholars led by Xie Jing ( Chinese 解 縉 , 1347-1415 ) to compile a collection of all the works known at that time on all topics. The initial version of the encyclopedia was compiled 17 months later and presented to the emperor under the title "The Great Literary Code." However, almost immediately an order was given to revise the publication, and a new commission was drawn up. At the head of it, along with Xie Jing, stood Yao Guangxiao and Liu Jichi, and also included 28 well-known scientists and more than 3,000 calligraphers and ordinary scientists from all over China. They worked with materials from the Imperial Library and selected about 8,000 works created from antiquity to the fall of the Yuan Dynasty . The material of the encyclopedia was not arranged according to thematic rubrics, but in the order of hieroglyphs-rhymes of the dictionary “Correct rhymes of the years of Hongyu ” ( Hongyu zhengyun , 1375). All work was carried out in Nanjing ^[2] .

The compilation of the encyclopedia pursued political goals: the emperor came to power as a result of the civil war of 1399–1403 and faced stiff opposition from Confucian scholar-officials. With a major literary project, he tried to attract new cadres and soften the opposition ^[4] .

The final code, one table of contents of 60 juan, was presented to the sovereign in 1408, received the highest approval and modern name; the emperor wrote an introduction to the encyclopedia. ^[2] The vault was initially stored in Nanjing, and in 1421 it was transported to Beijing , and placed in the Wenlow vault. In 1557, a fire broke out in the imperial palace, after which a copy was kept from the encyclopedia, which was stored in the historical archive of Huangshicheng (which had a stone building). A copy was made in 1562-1567 by 108 calligraphers (the rate of production was set at 3 pages per day). Each volume of the copy was labeled “ re-recorded ”. Information about the third set of encyclopedias, common in Western literature, is erroneous ^[5] .

The original encyclopedia, apparently, was already lost at the end of the Ming dynasty , no trace of the original was already known in the XVII century. During the reign of Emperor Yongzheng, a copy from which a tenth of the volumes had already been lost was transferred to the Hanlin Academy ^{[5] [4]} . Since by the 18th century most of the works included in Yunle Dadyan had already been lost, philologists and publishers of the Qianlong era began to widely use the encyclopedia. During the compilation of Syku Quanshu, on the initiative of Zhu Yun, a systematic extraction of various works from the encyclopedia was undertaken, but far from everything was included. Yunle Dadyan’s losses continued: by 1875 there were about 5,000 volumes (less than half), due to uprisings and wars by 1893 a little more than 600 volumes were taken into account. Destruction was completed during the rebellion of the Etihuan ^[4] . Part of the volumes were exported to Europe, the USA and Japan. Judging by the catalogs of 1926 and 1933, 349 volumes (663 juan) were preserved, of which 285 remained in China. Chinese researchers founded an international project and by 2009 identified, collected and reprinted 797 juan of the Minsk encyclopedia ^[5] .

Tom Yongle Dadian Outside China

In the library of St. Petersburg University and the Academy of Sciences, 11 volumes of Yunle Dadyan (25 Juan) were stored, 10 of which came from the Beijing Spiritual Mission to the Asian Museum of the Academy of Sciences in 1912, and one from the Far Eastern Branch of the USSR Academy of Sciences in 1935 ^{[6] [7 ]} . The volumes are completely fragmented (with the exception of two): 16, 28, 49, 95, 231, 232, the rest have lost stickers with the volume number and one has a binding ^[8] . Their special research was undertaken in the late 1930s by VN Kazin , who noted that the safety of all volumes was excellent, the mascara did not turn pale, the volumes did not suffer from the flood of September 23, 1924 ^[9] . In 1958, by decision of the Soviet leadership, all these materials were returned to the People’s Republic of China ^[10] .

The largest collections of Yunle Dadyan volumes are stored in the Library of Congress (40 volumes), 51 volumes in different libraries in the UK, 5 volumes in different libraries in Germany, and a number of volumes in Japan. The Taiwan National Library holds 62 volumes of the encyclopedia. In total, no more than 4% of its original volume was preserved.

The format of Yunle Dadyan's volume is large for the Chinese book tradition: 50 × 29.5 cm, so the volumes consisted of a hard cardboard binding, pasted over with yellow silk, which made them look like European ones. A label (27 × 6.5 cm) was glued on the spine, on which was written the title of the book and the numbers of the first and last juan that are part of this volume. Juan numbering is common to the whole composition. The volumes corresponded on thick, thick white paper, which was used for painting, not printing. The sheets were sewn with paper tows, passed through holes in the margins of the sheet at the root. Frames, rulers and columns on the sheet are marked with red ink, red ink has titles and punctuation marks, as well as the names of the authors. The size of the text on the sheet is 35 × 23 cm. Margins of 9 cm are left on the top and 5.5 cm in the bottom. Each page is divided into 8 columns, the text indent from the top frame is 2.5 cm ^[11] .

There are two fonts - large: one line in a column of 14 characters each, and small - a double line in a column of 28 characters each. One large sign takes the place of four small ones. Uppercase characters and expressions are written in large print, and other texts in small print. The entire text is equipped with punctuation marks, as well as tone indicators for characters that have multiple readings. Most often 2 juan are contained in one volume, but it happened that it is 1 or 3. At the end of each volume there is a semblance of 16-18 cm wide. The names of the main corrections of correspondence and the names of the punctuation marks were indicated there ^[12] .

The volumes were stored in cases of 10 each, there were 1,100 in all, but not one of the cases survived. The average thickness of one volume in binding is 16 cm ^[13] .

Yongle Dadyan does not have his own text; it included all the works of Chinese literature that were in the Minsk Imperial Library, including the Sung and Yuan compositions that did not reach us ^[14] . The volumes are divided into uppercase hieroglyphs, under each of them there could be articles of the following varieties:

1. The dictionary definition is very short, found in all cases without exception;
2. Samples of writing a sign in various handwritings ;
3. General preface - a discussion of the concept denoted by this hieroglyph;
4. Phraseology - names and expressions, which included this sign;
5. Poems and prose - poetic and prosaic examples of the use of this sign;
6. The encyclopedic article is the most heterogeneous category. This could include dynastic stories, entire biographies, chapters of classical books, Buddhist and Taoist treatises - entirely, geographical articles ^[15] .

The principle of the distribution of texts by articles is as follows:

1. Confucian classics with commentaries, the writings of the founders of Taoism and some other works were divided into chapters and placed under the last of the title signs;
2. Historical chronicles are divided, chronicle chapters (benji) went under the name of the dynasty, biographies - under the hieroglyphs of the corresponding surnames, reviews and legal chapters - under the signs of the corresponding institutes, etc.
3. Administrative units included chapters from geographical works under the name of each of them without a common prefix ( zhou , xian , etc.). Articles about lakes, rivers, tombs of celebrities, buildings went under the common name of each of them;
4. Dictionaries were sprayed on the first section of each article - definition;
5. Medicine - according to the main categories of diseases;
6. Mathematics - all materials on it were published under the single sign “score” ( Chinese 算 )
7. Taoist and Buddhist literature included whole treatises or even sections of canons under one of the title signs;
8. In elegant literature, not only classical was taken into account, it was partly broken down by genre (then the texts followed under the sign of the corresponding genre), partly by topic, and then the text could fall into any section of the encyclopedia ^[14] .

• Gujin Tushu Jicheng
• Complete collection of books in four sections

• Kazin V.N. “Yun-le da dian”: manuscript of the library of Leningrad State University // Works of Orientalists during the blockade of Leningrad (1941-1944). - M .: Oriental literature, 2011. - Issue. 1 . - S. 151-191 . - ISBN 978-5-02-036466-0 .
• Popova, I.F. Yun-le da dian // The Spiritual Culture of China: Encyclopedia: in 5 volumes / Ch. ed. M. L. Titarenko; Institute of the Far East, Russian Academy of Sciences. - M .: Vost. lit., 2009. - T. 4. Historical thought. Political and legal culture / ed. M. L. Titarenko and others . - S. 831-832 .

• Yongle Encyclopedia (Neopr.) (Inaccessible link) . - at the World Digital Library . Date of treatment April 26, 2009. Archived April 26, 2009.