Chapter 290: The Four Treasuries

While Diderot in Paris was finishing his dictionary of everything, Ten thousand kilometres east, an emperor began a larger one. Qianlong, grandson of Kangxi, the fourth of the Manchu line, the king Of the largest empire China had ever held, in 1773, under the sun Of a long peace, ordered every book of worth in the realm to be gathered, Copied, judged, and kept: the Siku Quanshu, the *Complete Library Of the Four Treasuries*: the classics, the histories, the masters, the gathered Literature. Three and a half thousand works. The tributary Of every library in the empire flowed to Beijing. Three hundred and sixty scholars Read and edited; nearly four thousand copyists wrote it out by hand, Not printed: written, character by character, in thirty-six thousand volumes, the taels Of the treasury poured into ink. Some eight hundred million characters. The land Of the written word had never seen a thing so large, and has not since, Until the machines. The first complete set was finished in 1782, And then six more, by hand, for seven pavilions, the wince Of the copyists' wrists through fifteen years: in the Forbidden City, the true First copy; in the summer palace at Yuanmingyuan; at the hunting palace of Chengde; In the old Manchu capital at Shenyang; and three in the south, at Yangzhou, Zhenjiang and Hangzhou, where scholars could come and read. The deed Was the conqueror becoming the keeper, as an earlier chapter told: now The Manchu emperor was the guardian of the whole of Chinese learning. That was the gift. And here is the other face, which was the same act. The gathering was also a search. Every book that came in was read, the burning Kind and the keeping kind sorted: any line against the Manchus, the fact Of their conquest, the word *barbarian*, the Ming loyalists' memory, Any book that mourned the fallen dynasty, any map of the frontier That did not please: banned, burned, or quietly changed. The emery Of the editors smoothed the record. Some three thousand works, it is clear, Were destroyed or suppressed, and the passages in others altered, So that the great library of everything was also the great erasure. The literary inquisition: authors' families punished, the faltered Descendants of writers long dead exhumed in disgrace. The measure Of the gift is the measure of the loss. Hold them in one hand. Diderot's publisher cut his book in secret, for fear of the king. Qianlong was the king, and cut in the open, and planned The cutting as part of the keeping. The same register, the same thing: To gather everything is to have the power to choose what survives. The chief editor, Ji Yun, a scholar of great wit, wrote the catalogue, Ten thousand reviews of the books, the best guide to the old lives Of Chinese letters ever made. He also wrote the list of the banned. The fog Of the two tasks was one desk. And the seven copies: history took its share. In 1860 the British and French burned the summer palace, Yuanmingyuan, And its copy with it. The Taiping war took two of the southern ones. The care Of the scholars of Hangzhou gathered the scattered leaves of theirs, and when The war was over, recopied the missing volumes by hand, for decades. The first copy, from the Forbidden City, crossed the sea in 1948 With the retreating government, and sits in Taipei. The arcades Of the old empire scattered its library. The weight Of the lesson for a book that gathers the genealogy of the world: To keep everything is to hold the knife that decides what is kept. The list of the banned is the shadow of the catalogue, curled Behind it. Keep the shadow too. Write down what was cut. The adept Keeper is the one who keeps the record of the erasure Beside the record of the kept. The scholars of Hangzhou copying by lamplight, After the war, the leaves the fire had scattered: that is the measure Of what a library is. Not the emperor's order. The night Copyist, unpaid, restoring what was lost, line by line. Gather everything. Burn nothing. And where the fire has been, Copy again. The four treasuries are the world's. The sign Of the keeper is the hand that writes the lost page in. Stand.