The Huntington Library’s Volume of the Yongle Encyclopaedia (Yongle Dadian 湛樂댕듕): A Bibliographical and Historical Note

The Find

During the summer of 2014, a large book in Chinese was brought to the attention of the Huntington Library’s archivist Li Wei Yang 楊立維. The volume, it soon became apparent, had been given to the Huntington Library almost half a century earlier, on 27 December 1968, by Mabel G. Whiting but, having been accessioned, had thereafter languished in the rich obscurity of the library’s backlog. A note tipped into the front cover of the book offered provenance: the volume had been ‘picked out of the debris’ of the library of the Hanlin Academy (Hanlin yuan 翰林院) by Mabel’s father, Joseph L. Whiting (1835–1906), and used to ‘barricade a window’ during the siege of the legations by the Boxers in Peking in 1900.[1] Following the lifting of the siege, when Whiting, a long-term Presbyterian missionary to China, was repatriated to the United States, the volume had accompanied him home.[2] What first caught the archivist’s eye was the fact that rather than having been printed, the book appeared to have been hand copied. Months of detailed work followed as Li Wei Yang sought to ascertain, through research and consultation, whether or not the book was authentically a missing volume of the famous Yongle Encyclopaedia (Yongle dadian 永樂大典), as its title claimed.[3] Once this process had been undertaken, the Huntington Library was able to announce the discovery on 16 October 2014. The volume has subsequently been on display in the library and has been digitised and made available online. Initial discussions were embarked upon about the volume’s possible repatriation to an institution in the People’s Republic of China.

Any book is always at once both a physical object subject to the vicissitudes of transmission, and the vessel of intellectual or literary content produced in a specific historical context, prone forever to shifting tides of understanding and interpretation.[4] In both respects, the story to be told about the Huntington Library’s volume of the Yongle Encyclopaedia is a remarkable one: respectively, a long-lost and magnificent volume of one of the world’s most grandiose attempts to capture under a single title the entirety of useful knowledge, and a chapter from one of the longest and most demanding of a Confucian canon that has now underpinned the trajectory of Chinese civilisation for more than two millennia and which, unexpectedly perhaps, seems likely to continue to do so. In what follows, I present both a bibliographical description of this rediscovered volume and a number of reflections on the history of the encyclopaedia.

The Book

As a book, the Yongle Encyclopaedia is a magnificent object. Remarkably, more than six hundred years after the work was first commissioned and four hundred after this copy of the Huntington Library’s volume was made, its properties are such as to continue to evoke both pride and wonderment.[5] The eminent Qing scholar and official Zhang Tingyu 張廷玉 (1672–1755), chief editor of the History of the Ming (Ming shi 明史), once remarked of it that ‘A handcopy, the strokes of the calligraphy are regular and correct, and the binding is exquisite. Both the paper and the ink give off the fragrance of antiquity’ (乃寫本字畫端楷裝飾工致紙墨皆發古香).[6]

We should first consider the physical properties of the book. All the volumes of the Yongle Encyclopaedia make use of two colours (red[7] for author names and book titles, punctuation [quandian 圈點],[8] marginal lines, borderlines, ‘elephant trunks’ [xiangbi 象鼻] and ‘fish-tails’ [yuwei 魚尾];[9] black for all text) and three point sizes (full-size for the main text [baiwen 白文 in Chinese; lit. white or unadulterated text]; half-size for the commentary and annotations [zhujie 註解], and a further reduced size for comments on the commentary, such as, particularly, ‘The rest of this commentary is the same as the commentary above’ 餘同前注疏). The volumes, measuring some 40.6cm in height by 25.4cm in width, were written on finest white Xuan paper 宣紙[10] in highest quality ink and bound in coarse yellow brocade.[11] The ‘Academy Style’ (guangeti 館閣體) calligraphy employed throughout the work (both original and copy) is said to be modelled on that of the early Ming 明 dynasty court calligrapher (and Hanlin Academician) Shen Du 沈度 (1357–1434) and was also known as the ‘Chancellery Style’ (taigeti 臺閣體); the Yongle 永樂 emperor seems to have had a particular affection for this man’s hand, saying of him that he was ‘… the Wang Xizhi 王羲之 of our dynasty’ — there being no higher compliment than to liken someone’s calligraphy to that of the greatest master of the art.[12]

When completed in 1408, having involved the efforts of some 2169 scholars working in the then capital of Nanking, the book totalled 22,877 fascicles (juan 卷), bound into 11,095 volumes (ce 冊), and stored on the shelves ten volumes to a box (tao 套). It included, in part or in whole, text taken from around 5500 titles. There remains considerable debate over whether or not it was ever intended that a copy of the work be printed. In any event, a fine copy (commonly referred to as the zhengben 正本 in the secondary Chinese literature) was made of the drafts of the text assembled. To this day, the fate of this copy remains a mystery, and the initial drafts of the work that this copy was based upon were probably consumed by flames in the 1440s. Perhaps this first or original copy was lost when the imperial archives burnt in 1644–45 as the capitals of Peking and then Nanking fell successively to the peasant army of the rebel Li Zicheng 李自成 (1606–45) and the invading Manchus as they replaced the Ming with their own Qing dynasty (1644–1911)? We are not even certain where the original was being held at the time of these cataclysmic events. What is seemingly beyond any doubt, however, is that throughout the entirety of the Qing dynasty nobody is known to have seen this original copy and not a single page of it, let alone a whole volume, has ever surfaced since. This remarkable fact suggests that the biblioclasm was both sudden and total, and was then followed by deliberate bureaucratic obfuscation on the part of those who had been responsible for the loss.[13] Fortunately, however, after a series of fires in the Forbidden City in Peking in the mid-sixteenth century, the Jiajing 嘉靖 emperor (1507–67; r. 1521–67) — the only emperor who himself ever made any use of the book — had ordered a copy be made of the original copy (usually referred to as the fuben 副本).[14] It is a volume (one of only four hundred or so that remain, mostly held in the National Library of China)[15] of this copy that resurfaced in the holdings of the Huntington Library, having been picked up out of the ashes after the siege of the legations by the Boxers by the American missionary Joseph Whiting, given to the library in 1968 by his daughter Mabel, and recognised for what it is by the Huntington Library’s archivist Li Wei Yang. The melancholy fate of this duplicate copy of the encyclopaedia, too, remains a resonant source of debate; the convenient and nationalistic attribution of the loss of all but about four per cent of the original encyclopaedia to the depredations of aggressive foreigners seems both simplistic and far from the truth of the matter.[16]

In Endymion Wilkinson’s estimation (22,937 juan of average 40 half-folio pages a juan, average 400 characters a page) in total, the compendium comprised around three hundred and seventy million characters.[17]

The volumes of the work most proximate in sequence to that discovered at the Huntington Library are juan 10,135 and 10,136 in the Bodleian Library at Oxford (consisting of historiographical texts) and juan 10,286 and 10,287 in the National Library of China (consisting of Taoist texts). Both are within the same rhyme (er zhi 二紙). Also within this rhyme are juan 10,115 and 10,116 (held at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London) and juan 10,309 and 10,310 (held in the National Library of China). Of interest is the fact that both the volumes noted above as being held in the National Library of China were returned to the library in 1951 from the Department of East Asian Studies of Leningrad University, indirectly, by way of a gift to the Ministry of Culture of the then newly established People’s Republic of China.[18]

The most recent discoveries of volumes of the encyclopaedia before that at the Huntington Library in 2014 were made in 1983 (in Shandong province), 1997 (in the library of Aberdeen University in Scotland), and, more recently, in Canada (in private hands, since acquired by the National Library of China).

The Emperor

Of the Four Plagues of Books (Si e 四厄) traditionally much feared in China, water, insects, warfare, and fire, over time it was perhaps the last of these that proved the most destructive.[19] Book collectors in China (private and imperial) accepted as a fact of their lives a particular and dreadful moral hazard associated with assembling a large collection of books; the larger your collection, the greater the loss you would be held responsible for when fire struck, and they employed various means of staving off the inevitable: proximity to water for firefighting purposes, strict controls on access and hours of use (so as to avoid the need for dangerous sources of artificial light), word magic (how many of the libraries of China, both private and imperial, make use of the ‘water radical’ in their names?) and so on.

Imperial book collectors over the ages in China, however, seemed somewhat less prone to such moral qualms; they understood the size of their holdings to be an important token of their power and the moral quality of their rule.[20] This seems particularly the case with the Yongle emperor (1360–1424; r. 1402–24) (his reign title means ‘Perpetual Joy’), and his age has been characterised as one of ‘… economic growth, cultural regeneration, territorial expansion, and diplomatic glory’.[21] And yet in the case of the Yongle emperor, a number of additional considerations come immediately to mind. He was an emperor who had usursped the throne on the pretext of ‘Calming a Troubled Age’ (jingnan 靖難) (the phrase could perhaps be better understood as meaning ‘suppressing dissent’), and was certainly implicated in the death of his nephew, the ‘Establishing Civility’ (Jianwen 建文) emperor (1377–1402; r. 1398–1402), when the imperial palace in Nanking was set alight[22] (Jianwen’s short reign was then expunged from the historiographical record).[23] He then engaged in a post-victory purge of extraordinary and violent dimensions,[24] of which Shih-shan Henry Tsai, in his biography of the emperor, says ‘… was among the most brutal and barbarous political acts in Chinese history’.[25] When the previous emperor’s main advisor, Fang Xiaoru 方孝孺 (1357–1402) refused to acquiesce in the usurpation he was sliced in half at the waist and further punished with the extermination of his family to ten degrees of kinship (the only man so punished in Chinese history), while some 870 of his associates were executed.[26]

In a brutal age, the Yongle emperor proved a particularly brutal and ruthless man, and one seemingly also given to outbursts of sanctimonious Confucian moralising.[27] His reign is now understood to have served to intensify a distinct trend in late imperial Chinese political culture towards absolutism;[28] in the long term, also, his removal of the capital from Nanking to Peking in 1421 (at very great expense and for his own immediate political ends) was probably a grave mistake.[29]

The Encyclopaedia

In the case of the encyclopaedia, consideration of the personality of the emperor is of relevance. First, after all, he had allowed his reign title to serve as the book’s title. There were, of course, both proximate and more distant precedents for this procedure, and subsequent ones as well, as in the case during the Qing dynasty of the Kangxi Emperor’s Dictionary (Kangxi zidian 康熙字典, commissioned by the Kangxi emperor (1654–1722; r. 1661–1722) in 1710 and completed in 1716. But all the available sources point to the emperor’s intense and particular engagement in the project. He had rejected the product of an earlier exercise he had ordered his minister Xie Jin 解縉 (1369–1415) to undertake, entitled A Grand Compendium of Literary Sources (Wenxian dacheng 文獻大成), as being ‘insufficiently exhaustive’ (suo zuan shang duo wei bei 所簒尚多未備). In the eyes of many of the emperor’s contemporaries, and in the view of much subsequent scholarship, the fact that the emperor became so quickly engaged in large-scale scholarly projects of this type soon after his enthronement in such murky circumstances demanded that these projects be understood in the light of the possible extra-literary usages of such projects in the specific political circumstances of the time. To some extent or another, Yongle’s victory over his nephew represented the victory of the eunuch faction at court over the faction of the scholar-official; that is, power at court, increasingly, was in the hands of a very particular group of functionaries who were the personal servants of the emperor and not as bound by the conventions of the imperial bureaucracy as were their scholar-official contemporaries. In this context, the encyclopaedia projects can be understood to be a means of both persuading that scholar-official faction that he was a man devoted to learning, and of keeping otherwise disaffected scholars busy at their desks — not the first nor the last time that such a ruse was employed in Chinese history. The late-Ming scholar Sun Chengze 孫承澤 (1592–1676), in his wonderfully informative Record of Dreams of the Capital (Chun ming meng yu lu 春明夢餘錄), is very explicit in his view:

When the emperor initiated his ‘Calming a Troubled Age’ campaign, dissention was rife throughout the empire and so he made use of this scholarly project in order to dissipate obstacles in his path, this being his true intension at the time (至靖難之舉不平之氣遍於海宇文皇借文墨以銷壘塊此實係當日本意也).[30]

Further, a close reading of both the edict that resulted eventually in the Yongle Encyclopaedia (as recorded in the Veritable Records of the Ming (Ming shilu 明實錄), dated first month of the first year of his reign) and the ‘Preface’ that he wrote for it once it was completed (also recorded in the Veritable Records of the Ming and dated eleventh month of the fifth year) tend to confirm the impression of an emperor with explicit and ulterior motives. He argued that

The objects and affairs, both ancient and modern, of All-under-Heaven are recorded here and there in various books, such that their bulk is overwhelming, making them difficult to consult. We desire that the objects and events recorded in these tomes be gathered together and categorised, and arranged by means of rhyming category, in order to provide for ease of consultation and examination, as if one were plucking an object from one’s bag. I’ve often taken a look at the Assembled Jades of the House of Rhyme [Yunfu qunyu 韻府群玉] and the Confluence of Historical Resonances [Huixi shiyun 回溪史韻], and although affairs are comprehensively recorded here, the sources used in the compilation of these two books were too restricted, and thus their accounts of events are too sketchy. It is expected that you will undertake your work in accordance with my intention. Phrases found in all the books, from the very beginning of writing — the classics, the histories, the Masters, the literary collections, the works of the various philosophers, books of Astrology, local gazetteers, the Yin and Yang experts, of the physician and the fortune tellers, of Buddhist monk and Taoist priest, of the artisans and the artists — should be excerpted under a single title, with no thought given to the vast bulk that will result from this procedure [wu yan hao fan 毋厭浩繁].[31]

As emperor, he believed that there was an urgent need ‘to unify confusing systems and standardise government regulations and social customs’ (bi you yi tong zhi zhi zuo suo yi qi zheng zhi er tong feng su 必有一統之制作所以齊政治而同風俗). His ‘Preface’ manifests his pleasure that his orders had been carried out:

The product of the labour of this exhaustive process of compilation is a book that can satisfy all possible inquiries, such that searching for a word by means of its rhyme and examining affairs by means of this word, any reader can trace the trajectory of something from beginning to end, as easily as shooting a swan with one’s bow [ru she zhong hu 如射中鵠]. Nothing will remain hidden once you open up the pages of this book [kai juan er wu suo yin 開卷而無所隱].[32]

Little wonder, then, that when the English-language version of Wikipedia announced in 2009 the posting of its three millionth article it did so in terms of having finally surpassed the scale of the Yongle Encyclopaedia as the world’s largest encyclopaedia.

Like all universal libraries, then, the Yongle Encyclopaedia is both slightly mad and vainglorious, and somewhat troubling of conception. Judging from the manner in which the emperor spoke about its purpose, the project of the book was not intended to generate, preserve, or disseminate knowledge, but rather to fix and consolidate existing knowledge and to make it more readily available (exclusively to the emperor personally and those closest to him) for the purposes of ruling All-under-Heaven.[33] In that sense, the usual English translation of its title employing the word ‘encyclopaedia’ seems at least doubly inappropriate; first, because it is not, in fact, an encyclopaedia as we commonly understand this term nowadays, and, second, because it would be inappropriate, through the connotations of the word ‘encyclopaedia’, to associate this work with, for instance, the European Enlightenment and the Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers.[34] The title should better be rendered Grand Compendium of Yongle or Yongle’s Grand Canon or some such.[35] In Chinese bibliographical terms, it is a ‘Book of Categories’ (leishu 類書). In essence, what the process of its composition involved was that copies were made of all the books then housed in the imperial library, the Pavilion of Literary Profundity (Wenyuan ge 文淵閣), supplemented by others acquired for the purpose of the project. These copied texts where then disaggregated, with their chapter divisions being retained but almost never whole titles being included, before being rearranged in accordance with the seventy-six rhyming categories the last (or sometime most important Chinese character) of that chapter title belonged, with a 60-fascicle index provided to give readers some idea of what had been included.

To us now, arranging an encyclopaedia by means of rhyming categories might seem an odd thing to do. This was not an innovation in the case of this encyclopaedia, however, and made perfect sense.[36] Chinese is not an alphabetic language, and in the traditional Chinese literary and intellectual world, the ability to write a good poem or effective prose was vital, rhyme being critical to both genres. A textual architecture arranged according to rhyme category provided readers of a book so arranged with the most effective search engine, and the rhyming dictionary was thus China’s true memory palace. The rhyming dictionary employed in this case, appropriately, was that compiled by the scholar Yue Shaofeng 樂紹鳳 (fl. 1355–80) and completed in 1375 on the orders of Yongle’s father, and which had been named after his reign title The Correct Rhymes of the Hongwu Era (Hongwu zhengyun 洪武正韻).[37]

What lends the encyclopaedia an element of distinction is the extent to which it cast its net widely, beyond the constricting definitions of the orthodox classical Chinese Confucian textual corpus to include items of popular and dramatic literature written in the vernacular. And neither is there any evidence that the emperor had his compilers engage in systematic censorship of the content of the encyclopaedia, for whatever reason.[38] Otherwise, the encyclopaedia seems a somewhat intellectually conservative and reductive project, to the extent to which it serves to reduce knowledge to information, text to extract, the philosophic (or religious) to the simply practical.[39] It was certainly immensely labour-intensive, involving the energies of many compilers over the course of the years 1405–07. Nominally under the general editorship of Yao Guangxiao 姚廣孝 (1335–1418) (also known by his clerical name Daoyan 道衍),[40] and Xie Jin, the bulk of the scholarly work was probably undertaken by men such as Hu Yan 胡儼 (1361–1443), Liu Jichi 劉季箎 (1363–1423), and, especially, Chen Ji 陳濟 (1363–1423). What is remarkable (and yet another element of mystery in the tale of the encyclopaedia) is that none of the official biographies of the scholars most involved in its compilation (all of which biographies were written after the dynasty had fallen) make any mention of their engagement in the project. A number of them were either executed (Xie Jin) or imprisoned (Chen Ji) soon after the completion of the encyclopaedia. From a twenty-first century perspective, perhaps, we can think about the Yongle Encyclopaedia as yet another instance of the frequently fatal embrace in China between knowledge and power.[41]

The Rites

The Huntington Library’s volume comprises juan 10,270 (28 folio pages) and 10,271 (21 folio pages) of the encyclopaedia, and contains the partial text of Chapter Six of the Li ji 禮記 — one of the five books that now constitute the Confucian canon.[42] Since its compilation in the Han dynasty (206 BCE–220CE), making use of text said to date from much earlier, the book had become an increasingly critical one in the context of orthodox Confucian state ideology. As Michael Nylan has argued,

Ritual was of inestimable importance to premodern society in China, for the single term ‘rites’ or ‘ritual’ (li 禮) denoted the full panoply of appropriate and thus mutually satisfying behaviors built upon emotional insights. These behaviors, expressed in dress, countenance, bodily posture, and verbal phrasing, where designed to strengthen communal bonds among the living, between the living and the dead, and with the gods.[43]

As Nylan also makes clear (p.171), this text (along with the other two texts that deal with the rites, the Rites of Zhou [Zhou li 周禮] and the Prescription [Yi li 儀禮]), ‘… more than any other of the Five Classics, inspired dramatic attempts to rethink and reorder Chinese social and political realities’. The particular chapter copied into the encyclopaedia, entitled ‘King Wen as Son and Heir’ (Wen wang shizi 文王世子), deals with the ritualistically complicated status of a child who was both son to the ruling emperor and his heir apparent, and thus, sometime in the future to be both emperor himself and ‘Son of Heaven’ (Tianzi 天子).

The first third of the chapter is missing from the Huntington Library’s volume. Missing also is the last short section of the text, consisting of between three and five folio pages. We may, therefore, conjecture that (a) this first section of the text (with its commentaries) was included in the no-longer-extant juan 10,269; and (b) that although for the bulk of the encyclopaedia the binding is two juan 卷 or fascicles to each ce 冊 or volume, examples do exist of volumes that have either one or three fascicles, and the extent of this text would suggest that this volume might well be an instance of the latter format. This second conjecture might explain why the volume had to rebound at some point in time once it had arrived in the US, as stated in L.J. Whiting’s letter pasted into the volume (‘The cover was put on in this country’); when he picked it up off the ground in 1900, both the front and back covers of this volume had been destroyed, it seems, during course of the siege of the legations, thus exposing to depredation both the first fascicle and the final pages of the volume.[44]

Item # 13 of the ‘Principles of Compilation’ (Fanli 凡例) for the encyclopaedia as a whole deals with the Confucian canon and its commentaries, as given below, in my translation:

The Book of Changes (Yijing 易經), the Book of Songs (Shijing 詩經), the Book of Documents (Shujing 書經, the Spring and Autumn Annals (Chunqiu< 春秋), the Rites of Zhou (Zhou li 周禮), and the Book of Rites (Li ji 禮記) all have attached to them prefaces, lists of contents, explanations of the filiation of the text through the various Confucian scholars, along with discussions of the overall meaning of work at hand. For present purposes, these have all be included under the character of the title of the particular classic (so that, for instance, such text attached to the Book of Changes is given under the character ‘I’ 易). The complete text of the various sections of these books is to be found, however, either under the first character of the section title or the most important character (…). As for the various commentaries to these texts, the choice has been to include, first, those written by the famous scholars of the Han, Tang, and Song dynasties (…), with later commentaries appended, included in chronological order. Occasionally the matters discussed in these texts involve famous objects that are of particular relevance to the maintenance of good order, and so these, too, have been included in the compendium in accordance with the rhyming category of their name. Of the Four Books, only in the case of the Great Learning (Daxue 大學) and the Mean (Zhongyong 中庸)has it proven difficult to disaggregate the text, and so they have been included in complete form (so that, for instance, the Great Learning is to be found under the character ‘learning’ (xue 學). The procedure adopted with both the Analects and the Book of Master Mencius (Mengzi 孟子) has followed this rule, and it has been also applied in the case of both the Five Classics and all the other books by the various philosophical masters.

易詩書春秋周禮禮記有序文編目有諸儒傳授源流及論一經大旨者今皆薈萃於各經之下（如易經入易字之類）其諸篇全文或以篇名或從所重字收（知乾字收乾卦禮字收曲禮喪字收曾子問）若傳注則取漢唐宋以來名家為首（如易程傳朱本義壽傳會異蔡傳禮記古注疏陳澔集說之類）餘依世次各附其後其間有事關制度名物者亦分采入韻四書惟大學中庸難以分載全篇收入（如大學學字下收之）論孟例同五經諸子書亦倣此[45]

The sections of the encyclopaedia covering the various canonical works dealing with the rites and ritual usages were the especial responsibility of the Hangzhou scholar Gao Deyang 高得暘 (1352–1420), one of the contributing editors of the overall project. In the estimation of the Qing dynasty scholar Dai Zhen 戴震 (1724–77), his work was done ‘… with particular care accorded the criteria of selection’ 去取尚為精審.

The Commentaries

The text of the chapter of the Book of Rites found in the Huntington Library’s volume is equipped with (overwhelmed by, perhaps one should say) commentary by a total of thirteen separate and named commentators.[46] These commentators can be grouped into three categories (and here I am particularly indebted to the preliminary analysis done of the text by Liu Bo of the National Library of China):

A. Eight commentaries (dating from the Han, Tang, and Song dynasties) that one would expect to see represented in most editions of the work, cited chronologically, as follows: Zheng Xuan 鄭玄 (127–200), Book of Rites Annotated (Li ji zhu 禮記注); (ii) Lu Deming 陸德明 (550?–630), An Explication of the Texts of the Confucian Classics: Phonetic and Semantic Glosses to the Book of Rites (Jingdian shiwen: Li ji yinyi 經典釋文·禮記音義); (iii) Kong Yingda 孔穎達 (574–648), Book of Rites: Correct Glosses (Li ji zhengyi 禮記正義); (iv) Zhu Xi 朱熹 (1130–1200), Classified Conversations of Master Zhu (Zhuzi yulei 朱子語類); (v) Wei Liaoweng 魏了翁 (1178–1237), Book of Rites: Essential Glosses (Li ji yaoyi 禮記要義); (vi) Wei Shi 衛湜 (fl. 1226), Book of Rites: Collected Explanations (Li ji jishuo 禮記集說); (vii) Chen Hao 陳澔 (1261–1341), Book of Rites: Collected Explanations (Li ji jishuo 禮記集說); (viii) Huang Zhen 黃震 (1213–81), Master Huang’s Daily Notes (Huangshi richao 黃氏日抄).

B. One commentary (dating from the Song dynasty) that is very rare: (i) Zhu Shen 朱申 (fl. 1050), Sentence by Sentence Interpretations of Every Section of the Book of Rites: Punctuated with Phonetic Glosses (Yindian li ji xiangjie jujie 音點禮記詳節句解).[47]

C. And four commentaries (also dating from the Song dynasty) that are unique to this volume: (i) Lü Zuqian 呂祖謙 (1137–81), Lü Bogong’s Accompanying Annotations: Punctuated with Phonetic Glosses (Lü Bogong yindian pangzhu 呂伯恭音點旁註) (juan 10270, 12a, 16a; juan 10271, 6a, 20a);[48] (ii) Chen Li 陳櫟 (1252–1334), Book of Rites: Collected Glosses and Detailed Explanations (Li ji jiyi xiangjie 禮記集義詳解) (juan 10270, 2a, 4b–5b, 12a, 13a, 16a–16b, 17a, 21a, 22b, 25b–26a; juan 10271, 1a–1b, 2a, 6a–6b, 7b, 9b–10a, 12b, 20a–21a);[49] (iii) Peng shi 彭氏 (?), Master Peng’s Illustrated Glosses and Annotations (Pengshi cuantu zhuyi 彭氏簒圖註義) (juan 10270, 3a, 9a–10a, 12b, 18a–18b, 23a, 26b; juan 10271, 1b–2a, 7b, 13a); (iv) Shi Jiongsun 史駉孫 (fl. 1324), Glosses to the Canon (Jing yi 經義) (juan 10270, 10a–11a).

In the case of this third category of commentary, that is text unique to this volume, the most important of the commentators was that of Lü Zuqian. Sadly, his four interventions recorded in this volume of the encyclopaedia are all simply (if importantly) phonetic glosses for the reading of particular characters.

Coda

Upon the Yongle emperor’s death in 1423, at Yumuchuan 榆木川 in the remote desert and on campaign against the Mongols one last time, the news was kept secret until the succession of his son could be ensured.[50] Encased in a tin coffin in an attempt to slow the rate of decomposition, food continued to be served to him in death as it had in life, as had been the case with the First Emperor of Qin. The emperor was later given both the temple name Grand Progenitor (Taizong 太宗) usually reserved for second emperors (in 1537 this was changed to Completing Emperor [Chengzu 成祖]), and the (outrageously exaggerated) posthumous name: The Literary Emperor who Opened up Heaven and Enlarged the Way, who was High-Minded and Brilliant and who Initiated our Present Good Fortune, who had both Sagely Martial Prowess and Divine Merit, and who was Purely Benevolent and Completely Filial (Qitian hongdao gaoming zhaoming shengwu shengong chunren zhixiao wen huangdi 啟天弘道高明肇運聖武神功純仁至孝文皇帝). His tomb in the hills just north of Peking, named Everlasting Tomb (Changling 長陵), is the largest of the thirteen imperial Ming tombs. A total of thirty palace women (including sixteen concubines) hung themselves in preparation for accompanying him to his grave. It is said that once his magnificent encyclopaedia was completed in 1408, the sixth year of his twenty-two-year-long reign, he never once consulted it. And yet, over the course of time since the end of the Ming dynasty, the various volumes of the copy of the compendium that were available to scholars (and of course access to it by scholars particularly after it’s relocation to the Hanlin Academy during the reign of the Yongzheng emperor (1678–1735; r. 1722–35)[51] much accelerated the disappearance of the encyclopaedia) has resulted in the ‘recovery’ (jiyi 輯佚) of between 500 and 600 books that had been otherwise lost to us and posterity. The legacy of the Yongle emperor has been a complex one; the Huntington Library may now lay a permanent and far-flung claim to a place within the textual dimensions of this legacy.