Yongle Encyclopedia (1403–1408): Ming China's Giant Compendium

The Yongle Encyclopedia, known in Chinese as the Yongle Dadian (“Great Canon of the Yongle Era”), was a vast compendium of knowledge compiled in Nanjing between 1403 and 1408 on the orders of the Ming emperor Yongle. Written entirely by hand, it filled 11,095 volumes and gathered texts from thousands of earlier books. It is often described as the largest general encyclopedia made before the digital age, yet almost all of it has been lost, and only about 400 volumes survive.

Background: an emperor in need of legitimacy

The Yongle Emperor, Zhu Di, came to the throne in 1402 by overthrowing his nephew in the Jingnan Campaign. The war and the purges that followed had cost the lives of many respected scholars, and the new ruler needed to win back the trust of the educated elite who staffed his government.

Sponsoring great works of scholarship was a traditional way for Chinese emperors to show that they ruled according to Confucian ideals. Earlier dynasties had produced large compilations, such as the Song-era Taiping Yulan of the late tenth century. Yongle wanted something far bigger: a single collection that would bring together all the knowledge recorded in the classics, histories, philosophy and literature, as well as technical subjects.

Compiling the encyclopedia

In 1403 the emperor commissioned the scholar Xie Jin, a member of the Hanlin Academy, the elite body of court scholars, to lead the project. Xie Jin’s team presented a first version in 1404, but Yongle judged it too limited. He enlarged the project and added his trusted adviser, the monk-official Yao Guangxiao, as a co-director.

The expanded team was enormous. Records say that more than 2,000 scholars, editors and copyists worked on the project, gathered in Nanjing and supported by the court. They drew on the imperial library, which held the book collections of earlier dynasties, and on works sought out across the empire. The finished encyclopedia was presented to the throne in 1407, and the copying of the fair manuscript was completed in 1408. The emperor wrote a preface and gave it the name Yongle Dadian.

How it was organised

Unlike a modern encyclopedia, the Yongle Dadian did not mostly consist of new articles. Instead, it copied entire works or long extracts from existing books and arranged them under headings. These headings were ordered by the rhymes of their key characters, following an official rhyme dictionary of the early Ming. A reader who wanted information on a subject looked up its character and found all the related material gathered together.

The subjects covered almost everything recorded in Chinese writing: the Confucian classics, history, government, philosophy, Buddhism and Daoism, literature and drama, medicine, astronomy, agriculture, geography and crafts. The volumes were large, carefully written in neat script with red and black ink, and bound in yellow silk covers.

By the numbers

Never printed: the original and the copy

The encyclopedia was too large to print with the woodblock methods of the time, so it existed only as a manuscript. After Yongle moved the capital to Beijing in 1421, the work was transferred there. It was consulted only by a few court scholars and remained largely unknown outside the palace.

In 1557 a fire in the Forbidden City nearly destroyed it. The Jiajing Emperor, an admirer of the work, then ordered a complete copy to be made. Between 1562 and 1567 a team of scribes produced a duplicate. Afterwards the original 1408 manuscript vanishes from the records. Some have suggested that it was placed in Jiajing’s tomb, but there is no firm evidence for this, and its fate remains a mystery.

Centuries of loss

The Jiajing copy suffered steady losses. Volumes went missing during the turmoil of the fall of the Ming in the 1640s, and by the time of the Qianlong Emperor in the eighteenth century more than 2,000 volumes were gone. Qing scholars compiling the great Siku Quanshu collection in the 1770s nonetheless used the remaining volumes to recover several hundred works that otherwise existed nowhere else.

The worst damage came in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Volumes were stolen or sold by officials and staff, and more were taken by foreign troops during the Second Opium War in 1860. In 1900, during the Boxer Uprising, the Hanlin Academy, where the copy was kept, was burned during the fighting around the foreign legations in Beijing. Most of the remaining volumes were destroyed or looted.

Today only about 400 volumes, containing some 800 chapters, are known to exist. They are spread across roughly thirty institutions and private collections in China, Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, Europe and North America, with the largest group held by the National Library of China in Beijing. Occasionally individual volumes still come to light: two volumes sold at auction in Paris in 2020 for about 8 million euros.

Value to modern scholarship

Because the compilers copied texts word for word, the surviving volumes are treasured as a source for books that no longer exist in any other form. Lost Song and Yuan dynasty local gazetteers, early vernacular plays, mathematical treatises and Song government records have been partly reconstructed from its pages. The Qing editors of the eighteenth century had already shown how valuable it was, and modern scholars continue the work of combing the fragments for lost writings.

Since the 1950s Chinese libraries have worked to gather information on every surviving volume and to publish facsimile editions so that researchers do not need to handle the fragile originals. Some volumes that had been taken abroad were returned to China during the twentieth century, including gifts from institutions in the Soviet Union and East Germany. Digitised images of many volumes are now available to researchers online.

The encyclopedia is also a valuable example of Ming book-making and calligraphy. Its uniform script, page layout and bindings show the standards of the imperial workshops at a time when the court employed large numbers of skilled scribes. Exhibitions in Beijing and elsewhere regularly display surviving volumes as national treasures, and the work has become a symbol of China’s literary heritage and of the cultural losses suffered during the wars of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Key people

• Yongle Emperor (1360–1424): commissioned the project in 1403.
• Xie Jin (1369–1415): Hanlin scholar who led the compilation.
• Yao Guangxiao (1335–1418): monk and adviser who co-directed the expanded project.
• Jiajing Emperor (1507–1567): ordered the duplicate copy of 1562–1567.

Timeline

• 1403: Yongle commissions the encyclopedia under Xie Jin.
• 1404: a first version is presented and judged inadequate.
• 1407: the expanded encyclopedia is presented to the emperor.
• 1408: copying of the final manuscript is completed.
• 1421: the work is kept in the new capital, Beijing.
• 1557: a palace fire threatens the manuscript.
• 1562–1567: a full copy is made under Jiajing.
• 1773 onward: Siku Quanshu scholars recover lost works from it.
• 1900: most surviving volumes are lost when the Hanlin Academy burns.

Why it matters

The Yongle Encyclopedia shows the ambition of early Ming rule and the immense scale of Chinese written culture in the fifteenth century, long before comparable projects in Europe such as Diderot’s Encyclopédie. Its loss is one of the great cultural tragedies of Chinese history, yet even its surviving fragments preserve texts that would otherwise have vanished.