LANGUAGES AND LITERATURES 55.

When the Manchu Emperors K'ang Hsi (imperdbat A.D. 1662-1722) and
Ch'ien Lung (imperabat A.D. 1736-96) emulated their Ming predecessor
Yung Lo's achievement, they endowed their own collection of the Sinic
classical literature with better expectations of life. K'ang Hsi's K'in
Ting Ku Chin Tu Shu Chi Ch'Sng ('Compendium of Literature and
Illustrations, Ancient and Modern, drawn up under Imperial Authority')1
was more fortunate than Yung Lo's Ta Tien in duly finding its way into
print, thanks to the comparative modesty of its compass of 10,000 books
in 5,000 volumes (not including a table of contents running to 40 books
in 20 volumes) and to the adoption of a suggestion, made by the Jesuit
mission in Peking, that a fount of movable metal type should be cast
for it as a cheaper alternative method of printing than the cutting of
wooden blocks. K'ang Hsi's collection was eventually printed—in a
hundred sets according to one account, and in thirty according to an-
other—in A.D. 1726 under the auspices of his successor Yung Chang
(imperabat A.D. I723-35).2

The printing in extenso of Ch'ien Lung's Ssu-Ku GKuan Shu3 was out
of the question, for this was a collection, not of extracts, like Yung Lo's
and K'ang Hsi's, but of complete works4 of all genres, which were col-
lected by the imperial officials throughout the Empire in pursuance of a
decree issued by Ch'ien Lung in A.D. 1772, and were collated with the
materials already assembled in Yung Lo's and K'ang Hsi's collections
by an editorial commission appointed in A.D. 1773.5 The commission
eventually incorporated in the collection, according to one account,
3,511 works in 78,731 books, or, according to another account, 3,460
works in 75,854 books.6 The commission also produced an analytical

writing (A.D. 1877-8), this copy was still extant in the Hanlin College at Peking, in a
building erected there for the housing of imperial collections of literature (see Mayers,
ibid., p. 217).

1 See Mayers, ibid., pp. 218-23.

a 'The editors of the famous encyclopaedia Ku Chin T'u Shu Chi Ch'Sng, whom his
father had pardoned for political offences, were put in danger of their lives in order that
he might enjoy the cheap satisfaction of having the work brought out under editors of
his own choosing, though it was probably already complete' (Goodrich, L. C.: The
Literary Inquisition of Ch*ien-lung (Baltimore 1935, Waverley Press), p. 21).

3 See Mayers, ibia., pp. 291-9. Goodrich, op. cit, pp. 31 and 36, cites an unprinted
essay, on deposit in the library of Columbia University, by Wen-yu Yen, entitled
'Ssu-k'u Ch'ilan Shu, "The Four Treasuries Library" and its Influence upon Chinese
Culture* (dated June 1932).

* See Goodrich, pp. cit., p. 30; Mayers, op. cit., p. 293.

* 'The same officials who were appointed to invite book-collectors to lend or sell rare
texts to the Emperor were likewise required to search out and demand volumes and
manuscripts thought inimical to dynastic interests; and... for nearly ten years the same
officials in Peking who made the selections of books to be copied into The Four Treasuries
also made note of censorable items and reported them to the Throne.

'Ch'ien Lung ... for all the munificence of his gifts to literature ... stands accused
before the bar of public opinion for his open interference with the independence of the
scholars of his day, for his deliberate falsification of history, for his malice towards a
score of authors (several deceased long before) and their descendants, and for his
repeated burning of hundreds of books, wood blocks of many of them included . . .
a destruction of literary matter which one modern Chinese writer [Wang Kuang-wei in
the Bulletin de I'Institut de rUniversite" Nationals (Peking) for the 3rd February, 1926.
17] haa no hesitation in classing as second only to the holocaust under Ts'in Shih Hwang
—Goodrich, L. C.: The Literary Inquisition of Ch'ien-lung (Baltimore 1935, Waverley
Press), pp. 31 and 36.

6 See Mayers, ibid., pp. 297-8 and 295. Mayers considers the larger of these two
alternative sets of figures to be the more authoritative. The material taken from the
Yung Lo Ta Tien consisted of 85 complete works and 284 fragmentary works (Mayers,
ibid., p. 298), running to 4,946 books (Mayers, ibid., p. 217),