[
    {
        "id": 205945,
        "series_id": 26,
        "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine",
        "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊",
        "series_use_hku_proxy": false,
        "document_key": "RAS-1970",
        "page_number": 25,
        "title": "RAS-1970",
        "content_text": "20\n\nL. CARRINGTON GOODRICH\n\nthe number as 9,881 pên). In addition, the Wu-ying-tien press in the palace printed with movable type 286 works known only in manuscript in the YLTT. From this point on the story of the YLTT makes generally sad reading. The librarians of the Hanlin Academy during the next one hundred years must have been pretty careless in their custodial duties, for, by 1894, according to an entry in the diary of the statesman Wêng T'ung-ho (1830-1904), hardly more than 800 pên were left. During the siege of the legation quarter six years later, the Chinese made an attempt to storm the British legation by setting fire to the Hanlin, immediately to the north of the legation compound. Thousands of books in the library were consumed in the blaze, but many too were picked up by Europeans, Americans, and Japanese in the legation quarter, and either taken to their homelands, or, in the case of the British minister, returned to the authorities in Peking. In the troubles incident to the overturn of the Manchus (1911), others were dispersed; so that by 1912, when Aurousseau made his report, he recorded only sixty pên in the Metropolitan Library and four in the library of the Ministry of Education.\n\nToday the situation is much better, as there has been an effort to reproduce and make generally available copies of the volumes which have found their way to major collections, mostly public, such as the Library of Congress, the British Museum, the Bodley, the Toyo Bunko, the National Library of Peking, and the National Central Library. These include the volumes returned to the mainland by the authorities in the USSR in the flush of post World War II friendship: eleven volumes delivered in 1951 and fifty-three in 1954. The learned world now has available for study two facsimile editions of extant works, one brought out in Peking in 1960 in 730 chüan under the sponsorship of Kuo Mo-jo (1892-), and a second issued in Taipei in 1962 in 742 chüan, edited by Yang Chia-lo (1913-). Several lists of surviving volumes of the YLTT have been published, the latest being that of the venerable Japanese scholar, Iwai Hirosato, in a festschrift published in his honor: Tenseki ronshū (Tokyo 1964), 1-70. His census lists 799 chüan. A few others have come to light which he did not include. In September 1963 The British Museum Quarterly announced the acquisition of one volume containing chüan 6933 and 6934, a gift from the estate of Captain Francis Garden Poole, who",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1970.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/ww72j0241",
        "rank": 0
    },
    {
        "id": 205946,
        "series_id": 26,
        "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine",
        "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊",
        "series_use_hku_proxy": false,
        "document_key": "RAS-1970",
        "page_number": 26,
        "title": "RAS-1970",
        "content_text": "MORE ON THE YUNG-LO TA-TIEN\n\n21\n\nserved in the Legation Guard in Peking in 1900. The Chester Beatty Library (Dublin) has three volumes not otherwise accounted for (chüan 803/4, 805/6, and 10,110/1). The Wason Collection of Cornell University has chüan 13,853, and the National Central Library, Taipei, has chüan 7527, which Yang Chia-lo failed to reproduce. The number at present count then is 809 chüan out of the original total of 22,877 chüan (not counting the table of contents which has been separately published).\n\nWhat subjects are covered in the volumes that have been saved? Practically everything that concerned the Chinese around the year 1400, but in fragmentary fashion. Thought, morals, poetry of several kinds, frontier people (the Hsiung-nu and Hu, for example), geography, surnames, government, law, the spirits, biography, divination, architecture (gates, bridges, halls, storehouses, walls, offices), villages, capital cities, history, burial customs, astronomy, botany, grain, military matters, Buddhism, Taoism, travels, bronzes, food and drink, caves, dreams, scholars, drama, sacrifices, clothing, mathematics, images, carpentry, post stations, shamans, literary collections. Dr. Walter Swingle, writing on the YLTT in the Report of the Library of Congress (1922-23), asserted: \"It combined all existing Chinese books that were available to Yung-lo, excepting novels and possibly some plays.\" Fortunately, his remark was found to be in error when the Library of Congress acquired (1935) from the collection of Dr. H. A. Giles, professor of Chinese at Cambridge University, a copy of a \"short historical novel, Ch'ieh-fên-lu and a hsü-lu, purporting to describe the experiences of Sung Hui-tsung, made captive by the Chin in 1127.\" (The son of Dr. Giles, Lancelot, was in the British Legation during the siege in 1900, and doubtless picked it up then.) The first notice of the famous play P'i-pa chi (The Lute Song) also appears in a volume of the YLTT. Professor Pelliot has characterized as one of the most important volumes saved the sections from a great Yuan dynasty encyclopaedia (Ching-shih ta-tien, published 1331), including a part on courier stations (jamči), now in the Toyo Bunko. Among other interesting works saved, generally fragmentary, are geographical. Francis D. M. Dow of Australian National University has recently drawn attention to certain gazetteers preserved: one of the prefecture of Soochow, published in 1379, for example; and years ago (1929) the Metropolitan",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1970.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/ww72j0241",
        "rank": 0
    }
]