Who stole Zhu Di’s Yongle Ceremony?

There are 22,937 volumes of Yongle Dadian. Only more than 800 volumes can be seen now, and they are scattered around the world.

Encyclopedia Britannica Among the encyclopedia entries, the Chinese Ming Dynasty Book Yongle Dadian is the largest encyclopedia in the world.

This is the property Zhu Di left to future generations.

So, who stole this book?

The compilation of Zhu Di’s Yongle Dadian is related to Zhu Yuanzhang.

Zhu Yuanzhang was born as a farmer and rarely read, so he was very eager to learn common sense. Therefore, during Zhu Yuanzhang's period, he ordered people to compile books and discussed the compilation of hundreds of classics as Lei Yao. However, Zhu Yuanzhang died before completing it.

Zhu Di's road to the throne is not smooth, but he must show that he is the orthodox emperor at every turn, so that he can fulfill his father's last words. After Zhu Di settled down, he often talked with others about compiling a book.

Zhu Di’s thinking is very clear. This book is supposed to record the hundreds of books on subsets of the classics that have been written since its publication. As for geography, geography, yin and yang, medical divination, monks and Taoism, and martial arts, they should be compiled into one book, so don’t overdo it!

At first, Zhu Di asked the cabinet and records, and Xie Jin, the great beauty of the Ming Dynasty, took the lead in compiling them. The solution is very fast. One year later, the compilation was completed, and the first-name documents were integrated. However, as a believer in Confucianism, Jie Jin did not include books that slandered Confucianism. This angered Zhu Di, who believed that there was something wrong with the compilation.

In the third year of Yongle, Zhu Di changed generals and eliminated them. He ordered the prince Shaofu Yao to take the lead in rebuilding, and used 2169 people from the government and the public to write for him. Arrange supervisors, president, vice president, city president and other positions. and undertake various tasks.

In the fifth year of Yongle, the final draft was submitted. Emperor Chengzu of the Ming Dynasty was very satisfied with it and named it Yongle Dadian. It was copied from the Qing Dynasty to the sixth year of Yongle before it was officially written.

According to the table of the Yongle Grand Ceremony, the whole book contains 22,877 volumes, 60 volumes of content, and 11,095 volumes.

The Yongle Dadian preserves the history of China in the 14th century, including encyclopedic documents on geography, literature and art, philosophy and religion. It is more than 300 years earlier than the encyclopedia compiled by France Diderot and the British Encyclopedia Britannica. It can be said to be a cultural heritage of 3158 virtual image treasures in the world.

According to rough statistics, Yongle Dadian collected and preserved as many as seven or eight thousand kinds of modern books, five or six times the number of books in previous generations. Yuangui compiled a large series of books, with a collection of no more than 3,000 volumes.

However, this book also has many shortcomings. Experts suggest that there are many errors in Sikuquanshu, and it is better to say that it has never been good at reducing phrases. Xie Baocheng pointed out that the medical item in the Yongle Dadian volume, with rhyme 19637, quoted the Yongle Dadian, originally from Lintang Yu Volume 6, Yinhualu 00.

Only one original book, the Yubu, was revised during the Yongle period, and the existing ones are all handwritten during the Jiajing period.

Shi Zongming liked the Yongle Dadian very much. He often carried it with him and looked through it to find prescriptions. In August of the 41st year of Jiajing reign, the order was copied. Longqing Chule City was originally lent to Nanjing. A copy of it is housed in the Wenyuan Pavilion, and a copy of it is housed in the Emperor's History.

Some people suspect that the manuscript is hidden in the tomb of Emperor Jiajing. If so, then this is a bad thing and it allows the Yongle Drama to continue. However, most of the manuscripts were lost during the Jiajing period. There are more than 20,000 copies of this book, but only more than 800 copies are available now, most of which are scattered across the country.

It is said that the National Library of China has 161 volumes, the Library of Congress of the United States has 40 volumes, and the United Kingdom has 51 volumes, including the British Library, Oxford University Library, School of Western Languages, University of London, University of Cambridge, and University of Hamburg. , University of Cologne, Berlin Museum of Ethnology, 5 volumes. Japan West Library of the National Diet of Japan Kyoto University Institute of Humanities Kyoto University Library of Japan

According to Shi Cheng’s records, printing of the newly compiled Yongle Dadian was considered during the Yongle period, but due to excessive labor costs High and stopped. Thirty years after the Jiajing manuscript was re-recorded, Lu Kejiao, who toasted to Nanjing Guozi, wrote a letter proposing a publication ceremony, but for some reason it was not accepted. Li Weizhen criticized the Yongle Dadian as redundant, disgusting, and extremely lacking in ideas, thus clarifying that the Yongle Dadian still existed during the Wanli period of the Ming Dynasty. However, scholars Tan Qian and Gu in the late Ming Dynasty believed that it was destroyed by fire in the late Wanli Dynasty.

The Dadian was written by Liu Ruoyu, an eunuch who was familiar with the past in the late Ming Dynasty. He also said: Where is the old Yongle Dadian stored today? There's really no clue. From 0755 to 79000, we come to the conclusion that both the Ming Dynasty and the Nanjing Empire were destroyed in history. We have also said that when Jiajing copied, he actually copied the original and the duplicate. After recording the copy, Yongle originally lent it to Nanjing, which was destroyed by the war in the late Ming Dynasty. These claims appear to have no clear historical basis.

Yu Jiaqing said that the fire destroyed the Qing Palace.

During the Kangxi period of the Qing Dynasty, Xu Qianxue, Gao Shiqi and other scholars created the Emperor's History Chronicles, which is relatively complete. During the Yongzheng period, this manuscript was transported to the Hanlin Academy for safekeeping. Scholar Quan Wangzu speculated that the Yongle manuscript should still be in the Qing palace, hoping to use the original manuscript to supplement the lost manuscript. Miao in the late Qing Dynasty also held the opposite view and made it clear that the manuscript was burned in the palace fire during the Jiaqing period. However, there was no recorded copy when the Yongle Dadian was compiled during the Qianlong period. Moreover, when Emperor Qianlong was compiling the general purpose of the Sikuquanshu, he also looked for the lost manuscripts, but none of the officials who compiled the Yongle Dadian had ever seen the manuscripts. It is probably unreliable to say that the copy was destroyed by a fire in the Qing Palace.

The theory of martyrdom

has been adopted by many scholars. They compared the burial time of Emperor Shizong of the Ming Dynasty, who was most fond of Tianlu Linlang's book, with the recording progress of the Sikuquanshu, judging from the sudden loss of the copy of the Yongle Dadian. They speculated that the Yongle Dadian was probably buried in the tomb of Ming Shizong.

The fact that the martyrdom theory does not exist does not mean that we can still find a complete copy of the Yongle Dadian. However, the fortunes of this extremely expensive and hard-won book struck again and it received widespread attention and coverage. Luck has become a permanent knot in people's hearts, which makes every Chinese son and daughter feel nervous. This feeling is like a mother who has lost her child and has been looking forward to her child returning to me from the beginning.