* The line appears in the Prologue, The Legend of Good Women, c.1386.
* Ian Johnson of the University of St Andrews.
* The Structure of the Canterbury Tales (Duckworth, London, 1983). As if to repay the compliment, Vincent of Beauvais includes a collection of fables in his Speculum Doctrinale, attempting to impose a coherence on them.
D
DAMASK SILK
The book you are reading now is a work of fact and opinion. Better than that, it is a collection of facts and opinions about books about facts and opinions. But now I want you to use your imagination. You need to imagine an encyclopaedia in an unfamiliar language from a distant land more than 600 years ago. It is the biggest and most exacting encyclopaedia ever made, too big to be printed. It is created, in fairy-tale fashion, for one megalomaniacal man, and it is named after him, the whole running to 22,937 sections within 11,095 manuscript volumes, each between 1 and 2 inches thick, all bound in the finest yellow damask silk.
Now open your eyes, for such a thing did exist. It exists still, in a recklessly truncated and scattered form, a mere speck of the original. It is mentioned in hushed tones by scholars of Chinese history and literature, as if its power is still a virulent force. And it has a wonderful name, the Yongle Dadian.
It is also known as Yongle Dadian Vast Documents of the Yongle Era and Grand Canon of Yongle, and, in an earlier form, Wenxian Dacheng. When an analysis of the work was published in the Journal of Library and Information Science in 2010, its name was proving impossible to spell, as if it was jinxing readers from beyond the grave: occasionally it was the Yonle Dadian, once the Yonele Dadian and once even the Yung Lo Da Dian. Either way, it was the culmination of all Chinese knowledge – which, by immodest extension, meant all the knowledge in the world.
It was commissioned by the Yongle Emperor Zhu Di, the third emperor of the Ming Dynasty, known also as Ming Chengzu, known also as the progenitor of the Age of Perpetual Happiness, additionally known as the fiercest of warlords. According to Pi-ching Hsu of San Francisco State University, the Ming Emperor Yongle was a man of contradictions. He has been portrayed as both a sage-king concerned primarily with the everlasting well-being of his subjects and empire, but also as someone associated with quite a few ‘less happy’ events, ‘including political scheming and mass murder’.
The emperor was clearly an educated man, which explains his encyclopaedia, but also an insatiable self-aggrandiser, which explains the size of it, and also his creation of the Forbidden City of Beijing. As an empire builder he was unsurpassed, extending Chinese influence during his rule (1402–24) to Vietnam, Korea and Japan, expending much energy fighting the Mongols, while also reinvigorating domestic agricultural prosperity. And then there were the other things: killing his enemies, establishing a large spying network staffed by eunuchs, purging anyone who might question his legitimacy or expose his sexual appetites and scandals. But as Professor Hsu attests, the tyranny was punctuated with outward displays of being very kind to animals, not least wild horses and cats, and he showed particular affection towards an imported giraffe, believing it to be some sort of unicorn.*
And so it is with some relief that we return to his reference work. The Yongle Dadian was composed with an extraordinary sense of urgency between 1403 and 1408. Written by thousands of travelling scholars scooping up everything in their path, the contents were quantified in 1901 by the historian Luther Carrington Goodrich as
thought, morals, poetry, frontier people (the Xiongnu and Hu for example), geography, surnames, government, law, the spirits, biography, divination, architecture (gates, bridges, halls, store-houses, 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, carpentry, post stations, shamans, literary collections.
*
The compilers submitted their first draft to the emperor after seventeen months, but he disapproved, deeming it insufficient for his needs. No doubt happy to escape with their lives, the anxious scholars went back to plunder a further 8000 ancient texts, emerging with a much bigger encyclopaedia of 3.7 million characters on 917,000 pages. This time the tyrant appeared content.
But one may reasonably ask the question: what was he so worried about? Why did his megalomania, his harvesting of everything, become so important to him? Powerful men and women are inevitably concerned with their legacies. It would be unusual if they amassed their immense power and wealth without simultaneously amassing cavernous amounts of guilt. It would be understandable, therefore, if they wished to leave something good behind, a reputation not wholly damning, something that may prompt future generations (their hand-washing descendants, say, or historians) to think better of them. A foundation, a grant or prize, the naming of a library; a benefactor ‘putting something back’. Emperor Yongle had more to put back than most. But in this case I think he may just have been being an emperor; he wanted the best, the most, the ultimate. It wasn’t knowledge for dissemination, or even knowledge for knowledge’s sake – it was knowledge that no one else could have, a gift to himself wrapped in yellow damask silk. And of course the emperor’s own entry in the encyclopaedia would be a glorious textual shrine. But even if he had been persuaded to spread the knowledge around, the almost impossible size of the enterprise ensured that no one could afford to reproduce it and that no one got to read it.
The problem with having 3.7 million characters was that one needed an awful lot of wood carvers and a very large forest to turn it into something that could be printed and distributed. Scribes made a few copies of some of it, but the master copy was the only complete proof that such a thing ever existed. By logical extension, all that knowledge in the hands of one individual – wasn’t that the perfect definition of intellectual tyranny? Wasn’t that the exact opposite of what an encyclopaedia was supposed to be?
The Chinese had been making encyclopaedias – leishu – since the ‘Warring States’ era between 474 and 221 BCE; even then, the historian Harriet Zurndorfer notes, there was ‘a dream of writing the world into a single text’. In the dynasties that followed, the shape and intention of these manuscripts fell into several categories – the compendiums of everything known, the natural and philosophical histories, the factual texts designed for civil service examinations, and all manner of specialist volumes. Then there were the riyong leishu, or collections of everyday practical information for those with limited literacy.
Unlike the Yongle Dadian, almost all of them were printed. For a snapshot of the vast range on offer one may consult the unique Siku quanshu (Complete Collection of the Four Treasuries), an imperial library catalogue compiled in the eighteenth century. The catalogue gave way to a physical library, combining 3461 separate works into a new masterwork of 2.3 million pages in 36,000 large folio volumes. Seven duplicates were made and distributed throughout the empire. It incorporated sixty-five leishu from a total of 217 consulted by the editors. These included volumes dating as far back as the Liang Dynasty (502–57), with ten from Tang (618–907) and twelve from Ming (1368–1644).