SERICA

It was only following the appointment of Joshua Seufert in 2012 that I was able to devote all my time to the Bodleian Library’s so-called “special” collections of Chinese materials; before that I worked mostly on acquiring modern materials, both printed and later electronic. Our principal supplier was CIBTC (China International Book Trading Corporation 中国国际图书贸易集团公司), who hosted most of my visits to China.

I was usually looked after by Wang Tong 汪彤 and later Zhu Min 朱敏, who both developed a very good sense of what interested me, and took me to places that would have been inaccessible without their help. I can’t thank them enough for their hospitality over the years, and for showing me some of the most beautiful and impressive sights that I’ve ever seen.

A particularly memorable trip was the one I made in April 2006, which included a visit to Wenwu Chubanshe 文物出版社 in the centre of Beijing. There I saw what I was told was the last remaining printing operation within the walls, a collotype process using a rather old machine.

Here is the complete collection of the pictures that I took on the day of my visit, Tuesday 25 April 2006.

I don’t know what was being printed when I took these pictures, but clearly it is calligraphy and is nothing more than solid black ink on white paper. The same goes for a Buddhist scripture that had been printed on the press earlier in the year for a temple in Tianjin, of which I was given a copy as a memento. I subsequently gave it to the Bodleian and catalogued it as follows:

妙法蓮華經觀世音菩薩普門品 一卷 / (姚秦釋)鳩摩羅什譯
2006年北京文物出版社珂羅版印本
線裝1冊 : 圖 ; 34公分
天津大悲禪院敬印
Sinica 6004

A few more specimen pages 書影 from this edition are attached to its record in the Serica Project.

These pictures have led me to take another look at collotype printing, of which there are some classic examples in the Bodleian collection. I’m ashamed to admit that when I first catalogued them, I dismissed them as nothing more than early versions of what I was currently acquiring in spades: photolithographic reproductions of Chinese editions, many of them illustrated.

I will not pretend to understand the process of collotype printing in any detail. There is an excellent Wikipedia entry on the subject, and it is adequately summarised in the opening words of T.A. Wilson’s book The practice of collotype (1935):

“The collotype process is a photo-mechanical method of printing with ink from the plane surface of a photographic film. It is a process which is capable of producing prints of great beauty, prints that are soft in tone, continuous in gradation, and with remarkable definition of detail. The process combines the arts of photography, printing, and coloring, and provided that a suitable negative be made, any subject can be rendered in collotype. The plates may be printed in a hand press, where the manipulations are extremely variable, or in a power machine, where the dampening, inking, and printing are more or less automatic. The rate of printing of the best collotypes is slow, generally under 500 impressions an hour.” [1]

And in the short account of collotype in his book The technique of prints and art reproduction processes, Jan Poortenaar makes the point that “collotype is unequalled, save by hand-photogravure, among all the photo-mechanical processes for high-class reproduction-work.” [2]

From this it is clear that the examples being printed in Beijing at the time of my visit did not represent the full capabilities of collotype printing. And it is equally clear that when I catalogued two of the earliest Chinese collotype editions in the Bodleian Library, I completely failed to notice how remarkable they were. These two editions are treated in extensive detail by Cheng-hua Wang (Professor of Art and Archaeology at Princeton) in her article New printing technology and heritage preservation: collotype reproduction of antiquities in modern China, circa 1908-1917.

Both were published serially in Shanghai beginning in 1908.

The Bodleian only has a single issue of the first one, Shenzhou guoguang ji, published by Deng Shi 鄧實 (1877-1951):

神州國光集 : 存第四集
清光緒戊申[1908]國學保存會珂羅版印本
洋裝(原平裝)1冊 : 圖 ; 31公分
Sinica 6848

But the Library has rather more of the second one, Zhongguo minghua, published by Di Baoxian 狄葆賢 (1873-1941):

中國名畫. 第一～二十八集 / (民國)美術研究會審定
民國上海有正書局珂羅版印本
木匣1盒(線裝28冊) : 圖 ; 38公分
Sinica 3973
Backhouse 719 存第一～十集. – 線裝10冊 ; 39公分
Sinica 6370 存第二﹑八﹑十集. -線裝3冊 ; 39公分

More illustrations from this work are attached to its record in the Serica Project. And sixteen issues of Zhongguo minghua are in the possession of a French collector who has not only reproduced all the illustrations from them, but has also presented a comprehensive and detailed account of the publication and its background.

The set in the Fung Ping Shan Library in Hong Kong has 40 issues, and is complete. The first copy in the Bodleian (Sinica 3973) preserves a set of the first 28 issues. It is contained in a wooden box (of which there are very few examples in the Bodleian) which suggests that the vendor or owner considered it to be both complete and valuable. Print runs were rather short – Poortenaar says (p.147): “Five hundred good prints may perhaps be obtained; some people speak of a thousand, but then the question arises what are good prints, and what are not.” So to satisfy demand each issue was reprinted many times. Actually these are not strictly reprints, but re-editions, as a comparison of the Bodleian copies will confirm; and in any case, I don’t think storing gelatinous collotype plates and reprinting from them is feasible. Sinica 3973 appears to have been put together in the mid-1920s from copies which had run to as many as 12 editions – here are the details.

It’s always good to discover “landmark” editions in the Library’s collections, and I never expected these two collotype publications to fall into that category. But they do. Professor Wang explains how for the first time they showed to the general public artworks that hitherto had only been available to a privileged few, leading directly to a discussion of what constituted the Chinese national art heritage and how it might be preserved, which was precisely the intention of their publishers, Deng Shi and Di Baoxian.

It’s said that good things come in threes, and here they are.

1. The Kornicki Collection

The first is Peter Kornicki’s donation of his remarkable collection of antiquarian Japanese books to the Bodleian Library in November 2021. Peter is Emeritus Professor of Japanese at Cambridge University but is an Oxford alumnus, having taken his first degree here in 1972 and his D.Phil. in 1979.

Among them are twenty-three Japanese editions of Chinese works (kanseki wakokuhon 漢籍和刻本) and one Korean edition which I have catalogued and listed here, with links to illustrations of specimen pages (書影).

Peter has written a scholarly bibliographical description of his collection which he has made freely available, and I have made references to this at the end of each record, so that 「康仁希文庫目録, A, 19」, for example, points to the nineteenth work in section A of his catalogue.

Peter acquired all the books in the collection on numerous visits to Japan over a period of 40 years, with the exception of two which he bought from Sam Fogg Rare Books in London. These are not only the two oldest books in the collection, but are also kanseki wakokuhon, and thus fall within the remit of the Serica Project. They are both fragments of Buddhist texts and are fine examples of mediaeval Japanese temple printing.

The earlier of the two was printed in 1278 at the temple Kongōbuji 金剛峯寺 on Mt Kōya 高野山, and is thus a so-called Kōya-ban 高野版; the other was printed in the late Kamakura 鎌倉 period (14th century) possibly at Kōfukuji 興福寺 in Nara, whose editions are known as Kasuga-ban 春日版 owing to the custom of presenting copies of them to the nearby Kasuga Taisha 春日大社 (Kōfukuji was the temple of the Fujiwara family, and Kasuga Taisha was their family shrine).

These two related editions have a primal beauty which, I think, cannot fail to move anyone with an interest in East Asian bibliography. Here they are:

大毗盧遮那成佛經疏 : 殘一卷 / (唐釋)一行記
日本弘安元年[1278]高野山金剛峯寺刊本
線裝1冊 : 圖 ; 26公分
殘卷十六
有「月明莊」印記
康仁希文庫目録, A, 1

大般涅槃經 : 殘一卷 / (北涼釋)曇無讖譯
日本鎌倉後期刊本
1卷 ; 28公分
殘卷六
康仁希文庫目録, A, 2

Peter’s donation brings the total number of pre-modern kanseki wakokuhon in the Library to 87, and I have listed them all here.

2. Southern Ming calendars

In one of my earliest blog entries I discussed the calendars that were produced by the Ming loyalist regime in Taiwan to justify its imperial pretensions. At first I thought that the only surviving copies of these were in English libraries, but subsequently discovered from Yang Yongzhi’s 楊永智 book 《明清時期台南出版史》(台灣學生書局, 2007) that both the earliest and latest surviving issues (1667 and 1683) were “in the collection of the Kanda family” (p.16).

I assumed that “the Kanda family” referred to that of the great bibliographer Kanda Kiichirō 神田喜一郎 whose collection is now at Otani University in Kyoto, but its published catalogue 《神田鬯盦博士寄贈図書目録》(1988) makes no mention of them. So I concluded my entry by saying that I would very much like to know where they are. Of course, I could have contacted Yang Yongzhi, but as ever, wandered off in other directions.

A few weeks ago, my prayers were answered. Zheng Cheng had read my blog entry, and put me in touch with a young Chinese scholar who had taken a Ph.D. at Kyoto University last year and is currently engaged in post-doctoral work at Fudan University in Shanghai. I now know him by his English name of Leo – his real name is Yin Minzhi 尹敏志, and he blogs as Baixian 白鹇. He is keenly interested in the Chinese books that were published, collected, and studied in Japan, and has already written a book which touches on these things: 《 东京蠹余录》(广西师范大学出版社, 2020). I must thank him for most of the following information.

The calendars were offered for sale in 2021 at the annual antiquarian book auction organised by Tōkyō Kotenkai 東京古典会 , and appeared in the catalogue 《古典籍展觀大入札會目錄》 and also on the Society’s website. It seems that they were originally owned by Kanda Kōgan 神田香巌 (that is, Kanda Nobuatsu 神田信醇, 1854-1918, the grandfather of Kanda Kiichiro 神田喜一郎). They may well have been inherited by Kiichiro, but clearly they were not among the books that went to Otani University, and I don’t know under what circumstances they came to be sold.

At the time, Leo downloaded this image of them from the Tōkyō Kotenkai website; it’s no longer there, and unfortunately it’s not very clear, but it’s all we’ve got at present and it makes the point well enough:

Leo was also able to examine the calendars, and has told me that they are printed on brittle paper, and are wrapped in a thick paper cover bearing the following information presumably written by a former Japanese collector:

永曆二十一年
永曆三十七年
台灣曆二冊

永曆十六年永明王被難十八年鄭成功入
台灣是年以疾卒三十七年鄭錦卒子
克塽年甫十二不克統領其眾眾潰降于清
見賜姓始末此曆則其末年也偶得之
故紙堆中稱中興正朔者實可哀憐也

明治七年三月中旬 吉雪齋藏

The calendars were bought by the antiquarian bookstore Tōjō Shoten 東城書店 in Jimbōchō 神保町, reportedly for the sum of JPY10,000,000 (currently GBP60,000).

Learning all these things was very timely, as I had already arranged to go Japan in the second half of April. So I contacted Tōjō Shoten to ask if I might see the calendars and perhaps get some decent illustrations of them. Both requests were refused. The most I could extract from them was an undertaking that they would let me know when they eventually offered them for sale, which Leo tells me will be for an eye-watering price.

The 1683 (永曆三十七年) issue is particularly special as in that year the Southern Ming was finally brought to an end by the Manchus, and in the following year Taiwan became a prefecture of Fujian Province. All this is given additional piquancy by the current goings-on in that part of the world, something which has surely not escaped the attention of Tōjō Shoten.

3. Fengmian 封面

I’ve always found it difficult to translate the term fengmian 封面 in a way that would enable English readers to understand immediately what it is. Against my better judgement I’ve occasionally called it a “title-page”, but that is misleading as the Chinese fengmian lacks the authority of the western title-page and serves a different purpose.

While wandering around the streets of Tokyo during my visit last month, I came across this bookshop which almost certainly will not survive its present owner. There were many similar shops in Jimbōchō when I worked there 50 years ago, but almost all of them have now been replaced by modern multi-storey buildings with offices on the upper floors and what remains of the bookshop on the ground floor. It is called Asakusa Mikuramae Shobō 浅草御蔵前書房, and is situated in the neighbourhood of the famous temple of Sensōji 浅草寺 (better known as Asakusa Kannon 浅草観音) and the chefs’ paradise of Kappabashi 合羽橋.

Here, some old books (mostly pre-Meiji popular illustrated editions) can be seen in the centre of the display, laid flat so that their titles were visible, inviting passers-by to pick them up, examine them, and hopefully buy them. The setup reminded me of a photograph I once saw of an early twentieth-century Chinese bookshop in which a display of this kind occupied its entire frontage. It was almost certainly one of Hedda Morrison’s, but now I can’t find it.

The fengmian was designed to attract the attention of passers-by in just this situation, and the information it contained was drafted accordingly. It could include a descriptive title, the names of any famous authors or commentators, the name of the printing house or owner of the blocks, and a date. All these elements were intended to be eye-catching rather than strictly accurate or honest. Here are two examples from the late Ming:

史記 一百三十卷 / (漢)司馬遷撰 ; (劉宋)裴駰集解 ; (唐)司馬貞索隱 ; (唐)張守節正義
明末程正揆校刊本金閶書業堂藏板
線裝32冊 ; 26公分
封面题名《史記評林》
有「書業」、「書業鼎記圖印」印記
Backhouse 292

性理大全書 七十卷 / (明)胡廣等奉敕撰 ; (明)吳勉學重校
明末刊本季秀堂唐際雲藏板
線裝32冊 ; 27公分
版心下記刻工﹑字數
封面有「本衙藏板」印記
Backhouse 402

Note that both these editions are commercial ones. Imperial editions and the editions of private scholars were of an entirely different order and were not circulated in this way, so that they seldom have fengmian.

In April 2015 the Bodleian received one of the most interesting donations of Chinese materials to have been made during my time as Curator of Chinese Collections. It was small in size, and fitted entirely into a single cardboard box. Of scrappy appearance, the materials were of the sort that many people would throw out following the death of their owner. This alone would ensure that they were rare once a few decades had elapsed.

The donor was the distinguished constitutional lawyer Anthony Bradley who was living in retirement near Oxford, and the materials were the nachlass of his maternal grandfather Arthur Bonsey (1858-1942), who was a younger contemporary of the well-known Welsh missionary Griffith John (1831-1912). Last year I was shocked to see an obituary of Professor Bradley in The Guardian, and greatly regret my failure to post an account of the donation before his death.

In 2018 Tony published a biography of Bonsey [1], whose work at the London Missionary Society’s station in Hankow extended over a period of some forty years, from his arrival there at the end of 1892 until his retirement in the spring of 1923. He spent the rest of his life in Oxford until his death on 2 December 1942, with so far as I know no contact with the Bodleian Library, much less any idea that his box of odds and ends would eventually become one of its treasures.

The following portrait of Bonsey is taken from a commemorative publication of the Griffith John College in Hankow, of which he was appointed Principal in 1913 [2]:

The College had been established in 1899 as the London Mission College 倫敦會書院, later changing its name to Boxue Shuyuan 博學書院 in Chinese and Griffith John College in English [3]. The main building with its bell tower survives as part of Wuhan No.4 Middle School 武汉市第四中学.

There are 197 printed items in Arthur Bonsey’s collection, of which 59 are single sheets. They are shelfmarked Sinica 6371-6421, 6423-6568 (Sinica 6422 is a manuscript) and they can all be found in Library catalogues except for two pieces of printed ephemera (Sinica 6552, 6553).

There are also 43 manuscripts, shelfmarked MS.Chin.a.24(1-13), MS.Chin.c.45, MS.Chin.d.77-78, MS.Chin.e.29, Sinica 6422. Some of them are single-sheet items, others are letters consisting of one or more sheets in an envelope grouped together under the same shelfmark. None of them can currently be found in Library catalogues, but they are all listed here with brief descriptions; all but three have been digitised.

Riots in the Yangtse valley

I distinctly remember the day when Tony delivered his grandfather’s nachlass to the New Library in Broad Street, Friday 27 March 2015. He opened the boot of his car to reveal a box of materials, on top of which lay a volume with a distinctive landscape orientation and grey paper covers. He was surpised when I recognised it immediately despite the fact that it was face down – Chinese books are much less varied in appearance than western ones, and I had long been familiar with two copies of the same work that were already in the Library’s collection: The cause of the riots in the Yangtse valley : a complete picture gallery (Hankow, 1891, 29 x 35cm), Sinica 5987 and (RHO) USPG 1861.

In view of the fact that the Bodleian already had two copies of this work, it was felt that a third was unnecessary, so it was kept by the family and I believe it was among the materials which Tony presented to Central China Normal University 华中师范大学 in Wuhan when he visited them a couple of months later in May 2015.

The work and its background are explained in full by Peter Perdue on the MIT Visualising cultures website, which uses the copy in Yale University Library. The copy in Princeton University Library has also been digitised.

In summary, it is a reproduction of an illustrated anti-Christian tract entitled Jinzun shengyu biye quantu 謹遵聖諭辟邪全圖, translated and introduced by Griffith John. The tract is said to have been written by Zhou Han 周漢 (1842-1922), a leading anti-Christian campaigner whose works were widely circulated in the middle and lower reaches of the Yangtse valley [4]. One does not need to be a Christian to find that the tract and its illustrations are utterly repellent – such material would be shocking no matter what religion it was directed against. For this reason I used to find it very hard to believe that Griffith John had actually reproduced it, despite his disclaimer in the preface (section 8) which states:

“This reproduction of the Picture Gallery being intended for the thoughtful few, and not at all for the multitude, no attempt has been made to gloss over its extreme grossness in picture and language. It is not the production of illiterate men. The Hunan antichristian publications, almost without exception, have scholars as their authors, and there can be no doubt about this one.”

However, among the Bonsey materials are seven manuscript illustrations which look as if they were indeed produced as drafts for the final block-cutting and printing. Bonsey must have seen the work being done and collected them as he approached the end of his first posting in Hankow (from 1882-1891).

Here is the draft of the first illustration, MS.Chin.a.24(7), described in the published text as “The Devils (foreigners) Worshipping the Hog (Jesus)”:

And here is what was actually printed and published (Princeton copy):

There are two drafts relating to the third illustration, MS.Chin.a.24(8, 9), described in the published text as “Propagating Religion in the Chapels”:

Perhaps the first of these two was intended to be for a block that was to print only the black portions of the illustration – in the taoban 套版 printing technique a separate block was required for each colour. In the event, the illustration that was finally printed and published had a different colour scheme and was much simpler:

The illustration shows the faithful worshipping the crucified Saviour, depicted as a hog, while foreign missionaries engage in acts of fornication at the back of the chapel.

Other works by Griffith John

Griffith John is a towering figure in the 19th-century Protestant mission, and much has been published about him both in print and on the internet; his Wikipedia entry is a good starting point.

Here I will only draw attention to the large number of his publications that were collected by Arthur Bonsey and which are now in the Bodleian Library. One of the many things that grated during my final years of service there was the increasing use of the term “world-class” by those who run the place to describe their own institution and its collections, something that struck me as being immodest to the point of vulgarity. So I leave it to others to examine my list of Griffith John’s publications, to search for them in WorldCat and elsewhere, and to decide for themselves whether such a claim can be made for this particular corpus.

The printed single-sheet items seem to be of exceptional rarity, which could be because they were considered too trivial and ephemeral to be taken into library collections; or they may indeed be in libraries but are lying unidentified and uncatalogued. I have found no examples of any of the six “sheet tracts” by Griffith John listed in Wylie’s Memorials of Protestant missionaries (Shanghae, 1867, 237-238) – but copies of all four of the multi-leaf tracts he lists are present in the Bodleian collection – nor have I found any other examples of the 35 single-sheet tracts in Bonsey’s collection. Of these, 28 are what I have described as “folded” single sheets, which look as if they might have been designed to be bound up into pamphlets; here is one of them, Sinica 6399 :

Griffith John regarded the establishment of schools, hospitals, and training colleges as an essential part of the Christian mission, and some of the single-sheet items bear witness to this, such as Sinica 6530, which explains the rationale behind it:

And on the subject of physical as well as spiritual welfare, John was particulary active in the anti-opium and anti-footbinding movements. I have compiled lists of materials on these subjects which are found in the Bodleian collections. Most of the anti-opium publications and all the anti-footbinding publications came from Bonsey; here is one of them, Sinica 6551:

Other single-sheet printed material

Visually impressive and certainly deserving attention are five calendars in the form of posters, clearly produced to promote the missionary enterprise. They are for the years 1887 (Sinica 6564), 1889 (Sinica 6565), 1890 (Sinica 6566), 1891 (Sinica 6562), and 1910 (Sinica 6567); this last one is printed in two colours and is particularly appealing:

Bonsey also collected a number of contemporary single-sheet items that were not related to the Protestant mission. For example official handouts of one sort or another that were read and then discarded, such as the handbill (or perhaps a small poster) announcing the establishment of mathematics and western science as subjects for the official government examinations, Sinica 6534:

The most spectacular among them is Sinica 6568, an enormous poster measuring 90 x 266cm. and printed on yellow paper with a red border of imperial dragons. The text is part of an imperial edict dated 1 February 1901 (according to the western calendar) requiring local officials to suppress all anti-foreign demonstrations and punish those responsible on pain of immediate dismissal and with no prospect of being re-hired. The injunction was presumably printed repeatedly in a number of locations – there is another example in the Bavarian State Library, printed from different blocks but of similar size and appearance. I suppose these huge posters were intended to be pasted to city walls and gates, or the walls of government offices, but this is only a guess. I’d be grateful to hear if anyone has more knowledge of this.

And finally, there is Sinica 6559, a delightful New Year print of the “Woosung Railway” 吳淞鐵路, China’s first passenger railway which opened in 1876 and ran from Shanghai to Wusong; its chequered history is the subject of a Wikipedia article. There are several iterations of this print, as an internet search will reveal.

Hymnal

Bonsey himself appears to have written and published very little indeed. In fact I have only been able to find a single copy (in SOAS Library) of a four-page pamphlet entitled The loving doctor Chow Chi Kwan (London Missionary Society, c.1900).

At the Griffith John College, as well as being Principal, Bonsey also taught history, English, and music, and there is a large musical score entitled The tune book of the C.C.R.T.S. Union hymn book (Hankow: Central China Religious Tract Society, 1905) in Rolvaag Memorial Library, St. Olaf College Northfield, MN (USA); again, this is the only copy I have found.

Although it was not published under his name, for many years Bonsey chaired the editorial team that compiled The R.T.S. hymnal with tunes, which was published by the Religious Tract Society of North & Central China in Shanghai in 1922. It has a preface signed G.A.C., who I presume is the Methodist missionary George Alfred Clayton.

There is a copy in the London Missionary Society Collection in the National Library of Australia, but apart from that the only other copy I know of is the presentation copy given to Bonsey in commemoration of his forty years’ service in Hankow, the front fly leaf of which bears a beautifully drawn dedicatory inscription. The volume is in the possession of the Bradley family, and Tony showed it to me in his son’s garden on 26 June 2020. That was the last time I saw him, and the pictures of it which he allowed me to take for my blog are an appropriate place to conclude this entry.

At the forty-second EASL conference in Ghent at the beginning of September, I gave a short talk which was simply called “Lists”.

Increasingly, especially during the later years of my employment, scholars – mostly Chinese – were not asking to see specific books which could easily be found in our online catalogue without reference to me or any other librarian. They were asking the question “what have you got”. It would have been pointless, and even unhelpful, for me to tell them to go and have a look in the online catalogue, as online catalogues are not designed to answer this question.

Online catalogues are designed to limit what is being looked for, not to show everything. And the more they limit it, the better most readers are pleased. The ideal is to find exactly the book or books you’re looking for, and nothing more, in the first hit.

And so I designed the Serica website as an attempt to give an overview of all the “special” Chinese books in Oxford, not just a few of them. It is nothing more than a collection of lists, some of them very long. The data is arranged in a modified version of the Sibu 四部 classification, which can be seen and understood at a glance. Each category gives access to a list that can be viewed, printed out, or downloaded as required. Each list can be structured in a way that best suits the data it contains rather than a way that has to conform to a particular set of rules.

I had actually started to make lists at a very early stage of my career, well over forty years ago. Shortly after I was first appointed to the Bodleian in 1976, I started to visit Piet van der Loon at his house on Boar’s Hill to learn the facts of Chinese bibliography. He quickly infected me with his enthusiasm for the popular editions that had arrived in Europe in the seventeenth century, and I started to make a list of them. I then expanded the list to include the seventeenth-century Chinese acquisitions in other British libraries.

As soon as the internet appeared, and the Library staff were given space on which to mount their own pages, which we were encouraged to produce, I mounted my list and further expanded it to include the seventeenth-century acquisitions of all other European libraries. When scholars interested in these matters saw it, they started to help me, so that little by little, maybe only once or twice a year, the list continues to grow, a process which is regularly documented in this blog.

The list is expressed in the simplest HTML – it’s little more than a textfile – and is not a work of scholarship. But it led directly to the discovery of one of the most important Chinese historical documents in existence, the Selden Map. Robert Bachelor had noticed that there was a Ming dynasty map on my list, and asked to see it when he visited the Bodleian at the beginning of January, 2008.

I’ve recently started to produce other lists, the latest being a list of the official publications of the Chinese government when it was based at Chungking in the 1940s. The Bodleian received a gift of 151 of these from what was then called the “National Library of Peiping” in February, 1946. The original list that accompanied this donation is in English, and is preserved in the Library Records (Library Records c.1734):

A scan of the complete document can be found here.

All of these publications are valuable, and some are now very rare indeed, for example this work on Tojo and Koiso:

Before he left for Princeton, Joshua Seufert had located them and extracted them from the modern collection. I don’t know why or how he did this, but it has enabled the Library to incorporate them into its special collections, and I have subsequently made a list of them. The list has been produced automatically from the allegro catalogue and follows the order of the National Library of Peiping original, with its numbering given at the head of each record:

The complete list can be seen here.

My first list gives access to materials that could never be found in online catalogues – I don’t know what search-term would lead the reader to materials that came to Europe in the seventeenth century. And my latest list could only be produced from most online catalogues with much time and difficulty, and only by readers who really know what they’re doing and can cope with the sheer awfulness of the systems currently in use.

The more I work on the Bodleian’s special collections, the more my enthusiasm for lists increases. When I’ve been unable to find texts in online databases, I’ve resorted to Google searches, and these have often led to lists of books which Chinese scholars have mounted on their websites or reproduced in their blogs just as I do myself. Not only do you find what you’re after, but occasionally you notice things in the list which turn out to be even more interesting than what you were originally looking for.

Since ceasing to be employed by the Bodleian some four and a half years ago, I’ve been trying my best to complete the cataloguing of the Library’s pre-modern and so-called “special” Chinese collections as a private scholar. Inevitably I’ve left the most difficult things until last.

These are some very down-market works of popular literature made by Piet van der Loon. I remember seeing some of them in his study in his house on Boars Hill on my frequent visits there, but never paid much attention to them. I think that he, too, had put them aside for dealing with one day in the future, which of course never came. There are several hundred of them, and I wouldn’t even have known what they were if he hadn’t tied them in bundles and labelled them.

They are extremely difficult to catalogue because they challenge the rules, which were drawn up for cataloguing regular publications, not casually produced ephemera. Again and again one is faced with the choice of either following the rules, or cataloguing the works in such a way as to show the reader what they are and to give access to them. The ideologues in our cataloguing departments often forget this, and would do well to conduct research using their own catalogues from time to time and see for themselves how difficult it often is to find things in them unless the rules are bent.

In these popular and very localised works, occasionaly rather strange alternative or dialect characters are used, and they are often difficult to identify and locate in the character set. My thanks to Andrew West for giving me much help in this area.

The three biggest collections, which I catalogued some time ago, are:

1. 閩南歌曲 (Fujian folk songs), Sinica 4028-4500
2. 廣州木魚書 (Cantonese “wooden fish books”), Sinica 4911-5234
3. 粵劇劇本 (Canton opera scripts), Sinica 5241-5700

A further hundred or so Cantonese “wooden fish books” were transferred from the Chinese Studies Library in 2014 (Sinica 6194-6295), and another two dozen came from Glen Dubridge in 2017 (Sinica 6751-6774), so that the total size of these three collections is currently:

閩南歌曲 – 480 editions
廣州木魚書 – 487 editions
粵劇劇本 – 461 editions

These are sizeable holdings by any standards.

I’m writing the present blog entry because I’ve recently catalogued three further groups of materials that Piet labelled, and which I’ve attempted to fit into my classification scheme, which is the Sibu 四部 system modified so that it will accept everything in our collection, at least after a fashion. They are (to use his terminolgy):

1.
“Canton dramas, genre unidentified”, Sinica 5806-5854, 57 editions.

Catalogued here.

2.
客家歌冊 (Hakka song books), Sinica 5855-5875, 25 editions.

Catalogued here.

When I first posted this blog entry I wondered why the term 廣東語 was set against each title if these are indeed Hakka song books. But Justin Leung posted a comment noting that all these editions were published in Taiwan during the Japanese colonial period, when Hakka was known as 廣東語.

3.
福州評話 (Fuzhou stories), Sinica 5876-5899, 26 editions.

Catalogued here.

If anyone with a knowledge of these things could tell me a better way of classifying this type of popular literature, I’d be extremely grateful.