Collectanea (congshu 叢書)

What are collectanea?

“Collectanea,” a Latin word meaning simply “collected writings,” is the conventional translation of the Chinese word congshu 叢書, and may be briefly defined as a set of books in which a large number of independent works by diverse authors are brought together and published as a single work.

From this short definition, it will be immediately obvious that congshu means more than just “collection.” The primary meaning of cong is the gathering of a huge number of diverse objects; while diversity is emphasized, there is also the implied sense of a connection between those objects. For example, the first thing that comes to mind when we see the word conglin 叢林 (“jungle”), is a dense gathering of many different kinds of trees. At the same time, their fundamental similarity is also underscored – that is, they are all trees in an inclusive and limited scope. Hence while congshu may roughly be defined as a combined publication of a certain number of books, it should be understood that there is something (other than string) that binds them together.

The shu 書 in congshu means "book," of course, and one of the characteristics of congshu is that each item in this gathering is a book. Otherwise, such a collection would be categorized as a wenji 文集 or wenxuan 文選 (selected essays or writings), or some other kind of publication. For that reason, we can gain some sense of what could be regarded as a “book” in China by examining the composition of congshu. The second important characteristic of congshu is that there is no expectation of common authorship of the items collected within it (such a collection would be known by a different name, i.e., quanji 全集). This in turn raises questions about “authorship” in traditional China and about the relation between author and book – one of the many ways in which congshu may be useful to the historian, apart from their most obvious value as a storehouse of texts, many of which would otherwise be lost forever.

For our purposes, it is useful to distinguish between three kinds of collectanea: the large official collectanea, of which the Siku quanshu 四庫全書 and its sequels and supplements are the best example; collectanea published in late imperial China and the early republican period; and modern collectanea.

Official collectanea: The Siku quanshu and the Yongle dadian

Siku quanshu 四庫全書 "Complete Writings of the Four Treasuries." Ji Yun, et al., eds. Beijing: Zhonghua Shujv (1997). W 9.5

The largest and most famous of all imperial compilations (three times the size of the Yongle dadian – on which see below), this anthology of some 3,500 (3,462, to be exact) works in over 36,000 juan was compiled by a team of several hundred scholars and several thousand copyists between 1773 and 1782 (copying continued until 1792). The project originally grew out of the Qianlong emperor’s desire to collect everything under the sun. His original commission reads in part:

Now, to organize the books stored in the imperial household cannot but be a good thing. Similarly, the books of past and present authors, regardless of their number, who perhaps still live in the mountains and have not ascended to the ranks of the distinguished should also be collected from time to time and sent to the capital. By such means, the unity of scholarship past and present can be made manifest. Let the provincial governors be ordered to collect all books . . . that clarify the essential methods of government or concern human nature. (quoted from R. Kent Guy, The Emperor’s Four Treasuries, p. 36)

Over time, however, the project acquired a censorial aim, lending it notoriety and leading some to dub it a wenziyu 文字獄 or “literary inquisition.” Nonetheless, it remains an extremely valuable resource for the historian.

The Siku was never published in the Qing, though the annotated catalogue was, and this work, Siku quanshu zongmu tiyao 四庫全書總目提要, remains a useful bibliographic reference for the scholar (see some cautions on this below, however). Of the original seven sets, four remain: one in the National Library in Beijing, one in the National Palace Museum, Taiwan, another in the Zhejiang Provincial Library in Hangzhou, and one more in the Gansu Provincial Library in Lanzhou (moved here from its original home in Shenyang, perhaps because of Lanzhou's moderate and dry climate, though a more likely explanation owes to a belief that it would be safer there from Russian hands). Since all are hand-copied, they differ slightly in number of volumes. Of the three lost copies, two were destroyed in the Taiping Rebellion and the third fell victim to the 1860 looting of the Yuanming yuan.

Because there were so few copies, for the first two centuries after its compilation, getting to see the Siku used to be very difficult. This is no longer true. After the 1986 publication of the set kept in the National Palace Museum, Taipei (in 1500 volumes), the Siku is now widely available in many libraries (either in print or on CD-ROM, 183 disks in the Professional Version 全文版). The published reprint was followed by several indices (author-title, category, style names) that appeared in the late 1980s. At Harvard, access to the digitized, searchable version of the Siku is also available online here. Login will only work with Internet Explorer (sorry, Safari and Firefox users!).

One limitation of the Siku is chronological, in that it includes material only up through the middle of the 1700s. A continuing series was begun in 1994, the Xuxiu siku quanshu 續修四庫全書, which includes all the works mentioned in the Siku catalogue but not reprinted in its pages, together with a large selection of works produced after the compilation of the anthology up until 1912. Published in 2002, this overlaps to some degree with the Siku quanshu cunmu congshu, which includes works mentioned in the catalogue (but not material from after 1782). For researchers investigating the period after the late 18th c., the Xuxiu siku quanshu is thus a vital resource. Even larger than the Siku itself, this huge collectanea brings together 5,123 titles, many of which were never published or widely distributed before. These two collectanea, together with other supplementary collectanea, Siku weishoushu jikan 四庫未收書集刊, Siku jinhuishu congkan 四庫禁燬書叢刊 and Siku quanshu cunmu congshu 四庫全書存目叢刊 (all published during the late 1990s), constitute the most prominent collection of fine books circulated among literati during the Qing period. These are all indexed in the Guoxue baodian database, along with the Zongmu tiyao (see the next paragraph).

Scholarship on the Siku is flourishing, and has become something of a field itself, called Sikuxue 四庫學, just like the study of Hongloumeng (Hongxue 紅學), the study of manuscripts from the Dunhuang caves (Dunhuangxue 敦煌學), and the study of local documents from Huizhou (Huixue 徽學). It could be said that this branch of study began as early as the Qianlong reign. The annotated catalogue of the Siku quanshu, the Siku quanshu zongmu tiyao 四庫全書總目提要 , was written by a group of prominent scholars in the Qianlong period and offers a survey of literary production in the high Qing period. The two-volume facsimile version published by Zhonghua is a reliable and inexpensive edition, or you can access it via the Guoxue baodian site (on which see more below). Bear in mind that this catalogue should not be regarded as the true reflection (if such a thing exists) of intellectual activities during the 18th c., as it is notorious for its political/academic stance and careless mistakes. Among all the corrections, Yu Jiaxi’s余嘉錫 Siku tiyao bianzheng 四庫提要辯證, a fine edition just published in 2004, is still the most valuable supplement.

There are dozens of works that aim to make a more comprehensive annotated catalogue of the Siku, its excluded books and the sequential works. Although the huge Xuxiu siku quanshu referred to earlier lacks an official annotated catalogue, scholars can consult the Xuxiu siku quanshu tiyao 續修四庫全書提要, which was created in the 1920s and 1930s as part of a Japanese-sponsored project publish the entire Xuxiu Siku. Although this project was not finished and most of the books they collected were destroyed during the war, it did create a very useful catalogue, written by a group of 85 prominent Chinese scholars, including Ke Shaomin 柯紹忞, Jiang Han 江瀚, Xiang Da 向達, Xie Guozhen 謝國楨, Fu Zengxiang 傅增湘 and others. It is said that more than 20,000 titles had been summarized, and 10,070 of them, according to the mimeographed draft preserved in Kyoto University, were published by Taiwan Commercial Press during 1960-61 in 12 volumes, with a one-volume index. Although this would be one of the most useful annotated catalogues of the Qing publication related to all the different Siku projects, this catalogue has not been well utilized by researchers.

A digital version of the Siku Quanshu can be accessed through Harvard's subscription to a number of full-text databases.

Yongle da dian 永樂大典. 1408. Modern editions include Beijing: Zhonghua shuju (1959); and Taibei: Shijie shuju (1962), 100 vols. W 31.1 ar

The only work to rival the Siku quanshu, this anthology was initially completed in 1404 at the order of the Yongle emperor. It was revised and completed in final form in 1408. A century later, after a palace fire nearly destroyed the single original copy, a second copy was ordered made by the Jiajing Emperor, but there was no money to print it. The arrangement is by rhyme. The original work contained 22,877 juan (almost twenty times the length of all the standard histories), of which barely 800 (3.5%) are extant. The whole story is in Wilkinson. The Harvard-Yenching Library owns two volumes of this exceedingly rare work.

Late Imperial and Republican-era collectanea

Although the earliest collectanea can be traced to the Northern Song dynasty (12th c.), it was during the late Ming that congshu publication started to boom, and in the latter half of the Qing dynasty, especially the mid-nineteenth century onwards, the publication of collectanea reached its heyday, which lasted into the early 20th century.

It is impossible to list all the collectanea in late imperial China. They are in different scales, collected by different subjects and published for different purposes. The most useful catalogue of collectanea, Zhongguo congshu zonglu 中國叢書綜錄, edited by Shanghai Library and first published in 1959 by Zhonghua shuju, includes 2,797 kinds of collectanea preserved in libraries of China during this period. Classified by the main subject of collectanea, this catalogue provides the information of the editor, extant editions and the titles included in each collectanea. An index for checking the single title in collectanea is also attached. Besides a catalogue for the collectanea preserved in Taiwan (Taiwan ge tushuguan xiancun congshu zimu suoyin 台灣各圖書館現存叢書子目索引), at least four catalogues have been compiled as supplements, including Zhongguo congshu zonglu: Congshu zongmu xubian 叢書總目續編 (Taipei, 1974), Zhongguo jindai xiandai congshu mulu 中國近代現代叢書目錄 (Shanghai, 1979), Zhongguo congshu guanglu 中國叢書廣錄 (Wuhan, 1999) and Zhongguo congshu zonglu xubian 中國叢書綜錄續編(Beijing, 2003), and a correction of it published in 1984 (Zhongguo congshu zonglu buzheng 中國叢書綜錄補正). Among them, Zhongguo congshu guanglu is the most recommended one, not only for the 3,279 kinds of collectanea not included in Zhongguo congshu zonglu, but also for the recently published collectanea in China, Taiwan and Hong Kong.

One of the main reasons for publishing collectanea was to preserve rare texts and circulate them more widely. It is somewhat ironic, then, that many collectanea published in late imperial China are hard to access now. Some of them are stored in rare book collections, and some of them have been destroyed. For this reason, in 1937, Commercial Press began a project (never completed) to reprint one hundred kinds of collectanea, mostly those first published in the Ming and the Qing period. This “collectanea of collectanea,” Congshu jicheng 叢書集成 includes more than 4,100 titles of books, classified and punctuated, and was reprinted in 1983 under the title Congshu jicheng chubian 叢書集成初編. In 1994, another similar collection appeared, the 180-volume Congshu jicheng xubian 叢書集成續編, including 100 kinds of congshu, with an emphasis on rare local collectanea. Prior to that, in the 1970s, a Taiwan-based publisher, Xinwenfeng chubanshe 新文豐出版社, succeeded not only in completing the unfinished Commercial Press project, publishing the 120-volume Congshu jicheng xinbian 叢書集成新編, but went on to publish another 280-volume set, the Congshu jicheng xubian 叢書集成續編 (of 148 kinds of collectanea) and the 100-volume Congshu jicheng sanbian 叢書集成三編 (of more than 100 kinds of collectanea). With these massive compendia, most any late imperial collectanea can now be found in the library. In some (most?) cases, the contents of these congshu are listed individually in HOLLIS, greatly facilitating searching.

Modern collectanea

The main reason to distinguish “modern collectanea” from those published in late imperial China and during the early Republic is that, though they are called congshu, compilers tend to approach the task with rather different ideas of what should go into a collectanea, so that these works do not fit the same definition as earlier works described above. Moreover, there is no proper catalogue for the ongoing publication of modern collectanea. Zhongguo congshu guanglu includes many collectanea published after 1912, but not those published in the 1990s, a period that saw a boom in publishing generally and the appearance of a huge number of new congshu (or works calling themselves congshu).

One of the most distinguished collectanea in the Republican period is Minguo congshu 民國叢書, which is useful for the study of the first half of the twentieth century. For the study of the Qing period, Shen Yunlong’s 沈雲龍 extensive Jindai Zhongguo shilao congkan 近代中國史料叢刊 is particularly useful for the study of the middle and the late Qing period. This collectanea, published from 1960’s to 1980’s, includes hundreds of different materials – collected essays, dairies, autobiographies, periodicals, and some rare manuscripts never published before. For different specific topics, there are always thematic collectanea to look up. For examples, for studying local administration and the role of magistrate, Guanzhenshu jicheng 官箴書集成, a collection of manual books for local officials, is definitely a precious reference (see under . For research on non-Han peoples and frontier areas, many materials are included in the multi-volume Zhongguo shaoshu minzu guji jicheng 中國少數民族古籍集成.

Online collectanea

Guoxue baodian 國學寶典

Overlapping to some extent with the Scripta Sinica at AS, the Guoxue baodian is a valuable collection of many useful texts from all periods of Chinese history. For the Qing, the most valuable resources to be found here are the Siku quanshu zongmu tiyao and other indexed lists of Siku-related texts (look on the 四庫大系 tab); an extensive collection of Qing biji; the entire Kangxi Diaries of Activity and Repose (digitized and searchable!); and a variety of 18th, 19th, and early 20th-century texts such as Haiguo tuzhi 海國圖志, Qingchao rouyuan ji 清朝柔遠記, etc. For the complete list of texts, click on 目錄瀏覽 and they will display. Searches can be narrowed (chronologically and generically) using the advanced search function. The site also has a handy reference tool for dates and names (click the 常用工具 tab).

Hanji quanwen ziliaoku 漢藉全文資料庫

Scripta Sinica database initiated in 1984. According to the introduction of the database, up till now there are  more than 1349 titles and 754,200,198 characters of materials pertaining to the traditional Chinese classics have been digitized. It contains almost all of the important Chinese classics, especially those related to Chinese history.  

China-US Million-book Digital Library Project (CADAL) 高等学校中英图书数字化国际合作计划

Initiated in Dec. 2000, this project was constructed and supported by computer scientists from both the U.S. and China. Until 2012, more than 2.5 million books were digitized. This is an ambitious project for digitization of a wide range of texts, including many of interest to the historian of late imperial China. It does not work with all browsers, and not all texts listed are available.

Taiwan Documents Collectanea & Compendium of Taiwan Documents: containing two databases that cover most of the available Taiwan-related historical resources, 900-odd documents

Taiwan Documents Collectanea 臺灣文獻叢刊資料庫

This database is an online edition of a collectanea published by Economic Research Office of Bank of Taiwan from 1957 to 1972. It contains 310 (309 originally printed + 1 added in database + 1 synopsis/contents of the database) historical books and documents related to every aspect of the history of Taiwan from East Asian sources up to the end of the Qing. Each item has an introduction that gives an overview of the work, and the last item (no. 311) gives a synopsis and contents of all 309 books and documents.

This database gives convenient access to many otherwise unavailable materials, though cautions should be taken when using it. First, all texts have been punctuated by the editors and may (most likely) not be present in the original document. Second, there is no in-text search function, and you have to return to the main page and qualify the search boxes to find desired content. Third, only one document can be open at one time, i.e. if you click on a document while another one is open, the current one will be closed and replaced by the new one. Lastly, do not save the document with its hyperlink, as it will expire the next time the hyperlink is pasted; instead, write down the document number and the next time you try to use it, you need to go to the main page again and repeat the steps in order to find your document. 

Compendium of Taiwan Documents 臺灣文獻彙刊

In addition to the online access, the print version is also available at HYL. In contrast to Taiwan Documents Collectanea, which includes resources from Taiwan, this compendium comprises of 600-odd documents from mainland China. Images of the original documents are also available. It has more variety of documents than Taiwan Documents Collectanea, e.g. deeds, genealogies, personal writings, local documents, that complements the lack of such resources in Taiwan Documents Collectanea.

Catalogues and indexes for collectanea

Zhongguo congshu guanglu 中國叢書廣錄. Yang Haiqing, ed. Wuhan: Hubei Renmin Press (1999).

The most comprehensive catalogue of congshu, including many 20th-c. titles, this item references 3,279 collectanea.

Zhongguo congshu zonglu 中國叢書綜錄. 3 Vols. Compiled by the Shanghai Library. Shanghai: Zhonghua shuju (1982-83). W 9.6 and T&B 67-68

A very valuable index to nearly 39,000 titles contained in over 2,000 congshu. A basic item in many a historian’s library, even now. Should be used in conjunction with Zhongguo congshu mulu ji zimu suoyin huibian (which includes almost 1,000 titles omitted in the Zonglu), and Zhongguo congshu zonglu buzheng 中國叢書綜錄補正 (Beijing, 1984) and Zhongguo congshu zonglu xubian 中國叢書綜錄續編 (Beijing, 2003) which provides corrections and updates, including recent reprint editions.

Taiwan ge tushuguan xiancun congshu zimu suoyin 台灣各圖書館現存叢書子目索引. 2 vols. Wang Baoxian, comp. San Francisco: Chinese Material Center (1975-). W 9.6

Monumental title and author index to more than 1,500 congshu, containing more than 40,000 pieces of writing in Taiwan. Entries in the title index are arranged by a combination of the total stroke count and the radical and residual stroke count orders. There is a supplementary finding index in which the same system is employed. Each listing of a congshu includes the following information: number of juan, period of compilation, name of compiler, and brief details on the nature of the contents. There is also an index to congshu tables of contents in Taiwan libraries; entries in this index are arranged by the same classification used in the title index, and for each listing information is given concerning the number of titles included, period of compilation, compiler, edition, and present library location. Part II, the author's index, is based on the title index and is arranged by total stroke count of the congshu compiler's surname. Each listing includes the page number and position in the title index of each appearance of the compiler's name. Also included is a surname finding table arranged by total stroke count.

Bibliography

• Ronald Egan, “Reflections on Uses of the Electronic Siku quanshu,” Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews 23 (2001), pp. 103-113.