The Lost Books of Medieval China

by Glen Dudbridge

For 2000 years the state-run libraries of imperial China systematically assembled standard collections of books from the past and present. Although the collections themselves were lost through warfare and fire, the classified catalogues prepared by the Privy Director of Books were often used in compiling national bibliographies for the state-sponsored dynastic histories. Through these and other catalogues we learn much about books now lost and even the contents of lost books can be sampled through quotations in medieval encyclopedias. These lectures discuss the dynamics of loss and survival; the role of the imperial state in manipulating book culture through classification and selective preservation; the significance of lost books as an index of superseded knowledge and values. An analysis of two specific cases demonstrates the insights to be gained through textual reconstruction and the inadequacies of standard classifications in times past and present. Medieval Chinese literature emerges as a richer, more problematic, less docile body of work than the orthodoxies of the last millennium would wish.

Genres: China

80 pages, Paperback

First published November 20, 2000

Reviews

[Mel]

This is a little book of three lectures he gave at the British Library in 2000. The books look at the "lost" books of China. Those that appear in Imperial bibliographies but don't survive in extant copies. In the first lecture Dudbridge examines how these books were lost, repeated destruction of the Imperial library, and what the loss of these books was blamed on by the Chinese of the Song. Zheng Qiao, a Song historian and bibliographer, blamed the books not being properly classified as responsible for their destruction. His theory was that the books that did survive survived because they were had supporters who read and cherished them. One of the things that was interesting is books were described as "lost" at this time, only if they no longer existed in the Imperial library, and many many books existed outside the library, hence the governments almost continual call for books to be sent to the library to be copied and added to the Imperial collections (and that was before their library burnt down). The next lecture looked at one specific case of a book that had not survived, Summary documents of three kingdoms, but Dudbridge showed that many of it's chapters had indeed survived being copied into part of a collected history, that had then been recopied into an encylopedia but had been left out of the standard history. He examined the material that was left out, that largely had to do with divination and an Emperor looking bad, and was able to draw conclusions about how controversial material was weeded out of the Imperial collections in the process of collation. The third lecture examined another book, The four gentleman of Liang, that due to problems of classification had been spread among several different areas of an encylopeia and was still missing many parts. This was a very interesting brief look at (unintentional?) censorship and collation procedures. It also explains the difficulties for historians today in finding texts that may be scattered through encylopedias and cut and changed throughout the centuries.

[Sarah]

I don't usually post books I read for work here, but the books for my new Tutorial on "Books" are too good to pass up listing they count as pleasure reading!