Siku Quanshu (1773): The Qianlong Emperor's Complete Library

The Siku Quanshu, or “Complete Library of the Four Treasuries”, was a vast collection of Chinese writings compiled on the orders of the Qianlong Emperor from 1773. Hundreds of scholars selected, edited and hand-copied about 3,460 works, producing the largest collection of books in Chinese history. The project was also a tool of control: the search for books fed a literary inquisition that destroyed thousands of titles.

Background

Chinese emperors had long sponsored great compilations to show their devotion to learning. The Ming produced the Yongle Encyclopedia in the early 15th century, and the Kangxi Emperor commissioned dictionaries and anthologies, including the Kangxi Dictionary.

The Qianlong Emperor wanted to surpass them. In 1772 he ordered officials across the empire to collect rare books, and in 1773 he established a special office in Beijing to build a complete library of the best writings in Chinese.

How the library was made

Provincial governors and private collectors sent in more than 10,000 titles. The editors, led by the chief compiler Ji Yun and his colleague Lu Xixiong, decided which works to copy in full, which to list only, and which to suppress. The staff included about 360 scholars and thousands of copyists. Among the scholars was Dai Zhen, a leading figure in the evidential research (kaozheng) movement, which stressed careful textual study.

The works were arranged in four divisions, the “four treasuries”:

• Jing: the Confucian classics and works on them.
• Shi: histories, geography and official documents.
• Zi: philosophers, science, medicine, art and other specialist writings.
• Ji: literary collections of poetry and prose.

The editors also recovered hundreds of lost works by extracting them from the surviving volumes of the Yongle Encyclopedia. An annotated catalogue, the Siku Quanshu Zongmu Tiyao, summarised and assessed more than 10,000 titles, including many not copied in full. It remains a key reference for scholars.

The work was organised like a government department. Copyists, many of them candidates hoping for official posts, had to produce a fixed number of characters each day in neat regular script, and errors could lead to fines or punishment. Proofreaders checked the copies, and senior editors and the emperor himself sometimes reviewed contentious entries. A smaller selection, the Siku Quanshu Huiyao, was prepared for the emperor’s personal reading.

Alongside the manuscript library, the court printed more than a hundred rare titles from the collection using wooden movable type at the Wuying Hall in the Forbidden City, so that some texts could circulate more widely.

Size and copies

The first complete set was finished in 1782. Each set ran to about 79,000 chapters (juan) in some 36,000 bound volumes, with an estimated 800 million characters.

Seven handwritten sets were made by 1787. Four were kept in northern palace libraries: the Wenyuan Pavilion in the Forbidden City, a pavilion at the Old Summer Palace (Yuanmingyuan), the Wensu Pavilion in Shenyang and the Wenjin Pavilion at the Chengde Mountain Resort. Three were placed in Jiangnan, at Yangzhou, Zhenjiang and Hangzhou, where scholars could consult them.

War destroyed several sets. The Yuanmingyuan copy burned when British and French troops sacked the palace in 1860, and the Yangzhou and Zhenjiang sets were lost during the Taiping Rebellion in the 1850s. The Hangzhou set was badly damaged but later restored by local scholars.

The literary inquisition

The book collection gave the Qing a chance to find writings they considered dangerous, especially works that criticised the Manchus, praised the fallen Ming or used terms such as “barbarian” for northern peoples. Such works were banned, censored or burned. Estimates of the number of titles destroyed or suppressed commonly range from about 2,000 to more than 3,000.

Some authors, editors and their families were punished, in a few cases with death. Other texts were quietly altered before copying. Historians debate how much the inquisition was driven by the emperor himself and how much by officials eager to show their loyalty, but it clearly cast a shadow over intellectual life.

Survival and modern editions

The Wenyuan Pavilion set from the Forbidden City was taken to Taiwan in the late 1940s and is now in the National Palace Museum in Taipei. A facsimile reproduction of it was published in Taiwan in the 1980s, and electronic, searchable versions followed, making the library accessible to researchers worldwide. Other surviving sets are held in mainland Chinese libraries, including the National Library of China in Beijing and the Gansu Provincial Library.

Timeline

• 1772: The Qianlong Emperor orders a nationwide search for books.
• 1773: The Siku Quanshu office is established in Beijing.
• 1774 onwards: Book bans and burnings intensify.
• 1782: The first complete set is finished.
• 1787: All seven sets are completed.
• 1860: The Yuanmingyuan set is destroyed by fire.

Why it matters

The Siku Quanshu preserved a huge body of Chinese learning and remains a fundamental resource for historians, now widely available in printed and digital editions. At the same time, it shows how cultural patronage and censorship went hand in hand at the height of the Qing, shaping which parts of China’s written past survived.