Abstract
Abstract Collecting and hoarding are distinguished by order. An agglomeration of objects is defined by chaos while a collection comes into being through its organization. The largest collection of texts undertaken in Chinese dynastic history, the Complete Writings of the Four Repositories (Siku quanshu 四庫全書), is the high point of late imperial compilation projects (congshu 叢書). While much scholarship has been devoted to explaining the criteria of inclusion, the question of order remains largely unexplored. In this article, I investigate the link between the collection of knowledge and its organization in the high Qing. Specifically, I explore the poetic understanding of knowledge, the intellectual, non-political purposes behind the collection and its fundamental principle of order. I end this essay offering some remarks on the nature of the Complete Writings, high Qing scholarship, and contemporary attitudes towards classification.
Highlights
The largest collection of texts undertaken in Chinese dynastic history, the Complete Writings of the Four Repositories (Siku quanshu 四庫全書), is the high point of late imperial compilation projects
This article explores the link between the collection of knowledge and its organization in the high Qing by working through the sociocultural and intellectual factors that informed the order of the Complete Writings
The question of order within the Complete Writings opens up a new way of exploring the nature of collecting in late imperial China
Summary
The Complete Writings of the Four Repositories (Siku quanshu 四庫全書) towers as the largest and most complex text collection project (congshu 叢書) in Chinese dynastic history. This article explores the link between the collection of knowledge and its organization in the high Qing by working through the sociocultural and intellectual (non-political) factors that informed the order of the Complete Writings. Scholars at the highest levels of imperial institutions and beyond deliberated on the fundamental aspects of the project Their shared notion of knowledge and its order were the precondition which allowed for the production of such a collection. The compilation was organized on the basis of the long-standing fourfold (sibu 四部) order of knowledge which divided texts into four main divisions: Classics ( jing 經), Records (shi 史), Masters (zi 子), and Collections ( ji 集).
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