Aged Book City

Author: Xu Yan / Country: Mainland China
Publisher:
Publishing Date: 1999-04-01
Features: As can be seen, readers "borrow" without "returning," collectors "borrow" but do not "lend," this is the crux of the secretive private book-collecting trend in later generations. Then, collectors finally refuse to lend books to others, and in reality, readers are also partly to blame. When the practice of "borrowing books but not returning them" (as stated in "Agreement on Circulating Ancient Books") gradually becomes prevalent in society, collectors naturally have no choice but to politely decline lending books to scholars. Under such circumstances, the heavy locks and secrecy of collectors can also be seen as a negative countermeasure of "loving books with virtue." In other words, in a society with private ownership, "loving books with virtue" must be supported by the era's atmosphere as the real environment. In ancient times, when customs were pure, "borrowing books from others required careful protection; if they were damaged first, they should be repaired" was one of the hundred actions of scholars (as recorded in "Yan's Family Precepts"). Then, collectors might not necessarily need to keep their books locked away and pass them down to their descendants before closing their eyes. For example, the book collector Lu Wen (Zigong, Baojing, 1717—1796) from Yuyao, Zhejiang, frequently borrowed books from Yuan Mei in Nanjing. Yuan wrote in a poem: "Others borrow books just to borrow, but when you borrow, I am delighted. A book borrowed will return in ten days; if it is missing, it will be repaired; if it is disorganized, it will be sorted." Such borrowers would surely be welcomed by collectors. Therefore, the conclusion is: in the history of Chinese book collecting, it was first that readers with "small cleverness" like "not returning books" appeared, followed by a social environment where "turning one into a fool" was the norm, and then collectors with "great cleverness" like "not lending books" emerged, along with a book-collecting trend of "knowing secrecy as preservation, but not broadcasting as guarding." The dialectical relationship is roughly like this. Thus, in ancient China, "publishing to the scholarly community" did not become the guiding principle for collectors. In such an agricultural nation with highly developed private ownership, the concept of private ownership of cultural products was also remarkably developed. Although each of the Song, Yuan, Ming, and Qing dynasties had touching models in this regard, the power of role models was ultimately limited. There is a very convincing example. Li Chang (Gongze, 1027—1090), a man from Jianchang, Jiangxi in the Northern Song Dynasty, studied independently at Baishi An on the Five Elders Peak of Lushan in his youth. He collected over 9,000 volumes of books, mostly hand-copied during his studies. After passing the imperial examinations, he soon entered official service. According to "Records of the Mianshui Garden," Gongze, after leaving, wanted to leave his books for future scholars and did not want to keep them to himself. He hid them in a Buddhist temple. Later, the people of the mountain named his residence "Li's Study" and Su Zhe wrote a preface for it. Su Zhe was the famous literary figure Su Dongpo of the Song Dynasty, and the "preface" was titled "Record of Li's Study." In this preface, Su wrote about Li Chang's donation of books in detail. Thus, we know that Li Chang's fame in his time was based on his hard self-study. After completing his studies, he extended this to others: "I will leave them for future generations to meet their endless needs and fulfill their respective talents, so I did not keep them at home but in the Buddhist temple where I lived." Su Zhe himself had visited Lushan and had read all the books he had not seen in a few years. Regarding this act of publishing to the scholarly community, Su pointed out that Li Chang had a "heart of benevolence." In fact, the essence of this "heart" lies in "loving others with benevolence" and "loving books with virtue." As Professor Chen Dengyuan put it, this person could be called a "virtuous person." It is said that Li Chang set a good example for collectors to publish their private collections to the scholarly community in the Northern Song Dynasty, but at the time, there was no widespread response. It was not until several hundred years later that someone called for a social agreement on book circulation. However, by then, the practice of secret book collecting had developed to an outrageous extent, so even an agreement to "not lend books" was still considered unacceptable. The old scholar Yi Feng once recorded the habits of book collectors since the Xianfeng and Tongzhi reigns of the Qing Dynasty: "Great officials in the capital regard deep concealment as their goal and exclusive possession as extraordinary, leaving no room for others to see or write annotations." In the late autumn of the Bingshen year (1896), he wrote in the preface to "Agreement on Circulating Ancient Books" with deep emotion about a story: A certain official in the capital had a manuscript left by his deceased father, which he kept in a treasure chest. Whenever someone asked about its whereabouts, he replied that the manuscript was preserved intact and was eager to be published. If someone asked to copy it, he offered to give it to them to avoid the trouble of copying. If someone asked to have it printed, the official refused, claiming it was his duty to do so. After his death, the manuscript was lost to the world because it was never published. Therefore, when modern scholar Yuan Tongli pointed out that the prospect of organizing the "Yongle Dadian" lay in borrowing complete copies from collectors and publishing them in order to circulate them widely, he could not help but comment on the book-collecting customs of the past: Our country's collectors often boast of possessing secret manuscripts and are unwilling to share them with the world. Once lost or destroyed, they are gone forever, and how much they hinder scholarship! Private book collections were born from scholarship and were collected for the sake of study. As the collector Pan Zongtong of Wucheng, Zhejiang in the Ming Dynasty said: "Antiquity feared that their books would not be recognized, so they wrote them. If they were not passed down, why write? We love books, but we hold them without letting them be passed down—how can this be true love?" By the later generations, it had become "to regard deep concealment as the goal," becoming an obstacle to academic progress, truly living up to the old saying: "A small error can lead to a great loss!" And this "small error" and "small difference" were ultimately due to the lack of a spirit of "loving books with virtue" among the Chinese people, so it is no wonder that Li Zonglian praised the ability of Lü Songlou to circulate its "imprints after the Ming Dynasty and ordinary manuscripts" to the scholarly community with such high praise.
The cultural street of Liulichang is the pride of Beijing. Since the rise of Liulichang bookstores, they have almost monopolized the cultural heritage of the capital for hundreds of years. In just two hundred years, there have been as many as five specialized records by scholars (Li's "Record of Liulichang Bookstores," Mou's "Postscript," "Supplementary Record," Sun's "Third Record," and Lei's "Fourth Record"). Later, there were formally published works such as Sun Jianqi's "Brief Record of Liulichang" (Beijing Publishing House, first edition in 1962) and Wang Yiqiu's "Story of Liulichang" (Beijing Joint Publishing House, first edition in 1963), as well as Zhou Zhaoxiang's "Random Notes on Liulichang" (Beijing Yanshan Publishing House, first edition in 1995). These three monographs are enough to show the extent of their monopoly: Liulichang cultural street is also the pride of the Chinese people. The reconstruction project of Liulichang cultural street, decided in 1978, finally came to fruition after two or three years of stagnation in recent years, with the completion of a batch of imitation ancient and restoration buildings. Before last Spring Festival, 14 new and old stores had successively opened. Now, passing by, it is enough to evoke feelings of national pride and cultural honor. "Will there still be a few bookstores left from the east gate to the west gate of the factory?" Unfortunately, like the concerns of the late Mr. Zhou Shu'tao, issues such as supply, staff, atmosphere, and environment have now indeed become "problems." According to the disclosure of the older book friends in the area, whether it is retail business or internal work, "problems" are so numerous that many are "unacceptable to outsiders." Hearing such news, while feeling pleased, there is also a hidden sense of worry. Thus, it suddenly brings to mind Li Ge's "Record of Famous Gardens in Luoyang" from the Song Dynasty and the sentence from Fang Xiaorong's "Record of Yellow Crane Tower" in the Ming Dynasty: "A magnificent and extraordinary view is indeed unrelated to human affairs. However, its decline and rise can reveal the state of governance." Yet, we are living in a rare era of peace and stability in this century. "The capital shines with gold and silver, and Beijing is like the sea in spring" (Ji Bo's "Random Poems of Liulichang"). If the book friends of Liulichang, who have worked hard, truly live up to their slogan "not to disappoint the ancients in informing the later generations," then we should certainly invest in certain aspects, such as the material foundation of national spirit, to build vivid cultural entities to carry forward the past, encourage the present, and announce to the future.
Forty-three years before Huang and Lü bought the remaining books of Qi, the owner of Shansheng Hall, Qi Chengxie, proudly called himself a "family of literature and documents" in a family letter and proposed two key elements for the long-term preservation of books: "in good grandchildren, second in good houses." He thought this way and acted accordingly. The small booklet "Record of Shansheng Hall Book Collection," which is famous in the history of Chinese book collecting, is the first comprehensive and systematic record of book collectors' experiences and insights on reading, collecting, and preserving books. In addition to the preface describing his experience of being friends with books, the main text is divided into three parts: "Readings and Collecting Lessons from the Ancients" (Reading Lessons), "Collecting Lessons," and "Brief Lessons on Buying and Identifying Books" (Collecting Lessons). The purpose of all this was to educate the younger generation to become "good grandchildren" of the Qi family: "Later generations should only remember the old man's hobby, and the grandchildren should not lose the water." (Inscription in the "Record of Shansheng Hall"). But this was not enough. Qi the old man also worked hard on "good houses." He wanted to find a good place to store his life's collection of 100,000 volumes of books, which led to the construction of the "Shansheng Hall" or "Dongshu Hall" book collection. Modern scholar and book collector Huang Chang recorded in the letters he once found that this old man of Mi Yuan had made unremitting efforts to build a book tower. It is said that the construction cost alone was as high as 1,200 to 1,300 taels of silver, which was not a small amount for a middle-level official family. However, from this perspective, it can also be seen that Qi the old man was determined to build "good houses" to preserve his books. Yet, how tragic it was for the old man of Mi Yuan, who loved books as his life, and "made a promise to his children: to increase the collection monthly during his lifetime, and to increase it annually for his children, and to edit the catalog every five years" (Qi Chengxie's "Record of Book Organization in the Gengshen Year," 1620)!
The reason why the argument that the owner of the above fragments was Lü Liuyang is completely valid is that, perhaps to express his determination to preserve books for his father, the "great fire" mentioned in the former poem refers to the bookplate "Rare few generations of book lovers" that Lü's eldest son Gongzhong had specially engraved on the books in his family. This shows that Gongzhong understood his father's good intentions in showing him these two seven-line poems and was clear about the special responsibility and great mission of a book-collecting family like "buying books is not easy, and descendants must not abandon it." He was interested and determined to preserve the Lü family's books for generations to come. However, the baseless "literary cases" under the feudal autocracy destroyed them, "destroyed almost completely," tragically and horrifyingly. Although the private book collections of Qi, Lü, and Huang, among others, eventually disappeared due to various factors (such as the fall of the country or family hardships) and became touching stories, their fate also exposed the ruthless nature of the feudal autocracy in a profound and moving way. Even today, we can still feel the urgency of eliminating the remnants of feudalism.
Lü Liuyang (1629—1683) was a famous figure in the early Qing literary scene. He revered the Confucianism of Cheng and Zhu and fiercely criticized the "Lu and Tu" school, believing that "the way to correct must start with Zhu Xi." Although he held this ideological view, in terms of scholarship, he was broad-minded and had his own insights. In addition to academic matters, his attitude toward overthrowing the Qing and restoring the Ming was also resolute; he was ultimately persecuted for this. In the fragments, he received a family letter in Nanjing and was told that he had a new grandson, so he named him "Jing Hui," meaning "to mark my travels." It can be seen that in his mind, the concept of the "old capital of the south" was deeply rooted. So, to which book does the Lü Liuyang letter fragments belong? Checking "Brief Records of Famous People in Zhejiang" (Zhejiang People's Publishing House, 1986, 3-volume edition) in the middle volume, we know that Lü wrote "Collected Works of Mr. Lü Wangcun" in 8 volumes, with the first four volumes being letters and the last four volumes being miscellaneous works such as prefaces, discourses, debates, records, and inscriptions, with an appendix of one volume written by Gongzhong. Checking the "Brief Dictionary of Chinese Ancient Books" (Jilin Literature and History Publishing House, 1987) under the entry "Collected Works of Lü Wangcun," we also know that the book is also called "Collected Works of Lü Yonghui," with a Qing Yongzheng 3rd year (1725) edition.