{"id":2414,"date":"2014-10-17T17:11:01","date_gmt":"2014-10-17T17:11:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/libnews.binghamton.edu\/news\/specialcollections\/?p=2414"},"modified":"2014-10-17T17:11:01","modified_gmt":"2014-10-17T17:11:01","slug":"huntington-archivist-finds-historic-piece-of-chinas-largest-book","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/libnews.binghamton.edu\/specialcollections\/2014\/10\/17\/huntington-archivist-finds-historic-piece-of-chinas-largest-book\/","title":{"rendered":"Huntington archivist finds historic piece of China&#8217;s largest book"},"content":{"rendered":"<figure id=\"attachment_2415\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-2415\" style=\"width: 450px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><a href=\"http:\/\/libnews.binghamton.edu\/news\/specialcollections\/files\/2014\/10\/la-et-cm-the-huntington-library-unearths-extre-001.jpg\"><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-2415\" alt=\"Pages from section 10,270 of the Yongle Encyclopedia, 1562-1567, recently discovered among the stacks at the Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens in San Marino. (The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens).\" src=\"http:\/\/libnews.binghamton.edu\/news\/specialcollections\/files\/2014\/10\/la-et-cm-the-huntington-library-unearths-extre-001.jpg\" width=\"450\" height=\"450\" \/><\/a><figcaption id=\"caption-attachment-2415\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Pages from section 10,270 of the Yongle Encyclopedia, 1562-1567, recently discovered among the stacks at the Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens in San Marino. (The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens).<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens announced Thursday that it has portions of a rare and important Chinese manuscript called the Yongle Encyclopedia &#8212; with 11,095 volumes, the largest book ever written in China.<strong><br \/>\n<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>The book was commissioned by the Yongle Emperor of the Ming Dynasty in 1403 in an attempt to gather in one place a broad range of Chinese knowledge, including astronomy, geography, medicine, religion, technology and art.<\/p>\n<aside>\n<div>\n<figure><\/figure>\n<div><span style=\"font-size: 16px\">The resulting document, which Huntington archivist Li Wei Yang said is more like a compendium or a canon rather than an encyclopedia in the traditional sense, consisted of 22,877 sections in thousands of volumes.<\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/aside>\n<p>In 1562, years after the Yongle Emperor&#8217;s death, the Jiajing Emperor commissioned 109 scribes to transcribe the entire encyclopedia as a backup copy. It took them five years to complete the work.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;That was the only copy made,&#8221; Yang said. &#8220;Eventually the original copy disappeared, and there is lots of speculation about what happened.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>No conclusive evidence of its fate ever emerged.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.latimes.com\/entertainment\/arts\/culture\/la-et-cm-huntington-library-chinese-yongle-encyclopedia-20141015-story.html\">Read more here<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens announced Thursday that it has portions of a rare and important Chinese manuscript called the Yongle Encyclopedia &#8212; with 11,095 volumes, the largest book ever written in China. The book was commissioned by the Yongle Emperor of the Ming Dynasty in 1403 in an attempt to gather [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":16,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,6],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-2414","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-archives-in-the-news","7":"category-cool-site-of-the-month"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/libnews.binghamton.edu\/specialcollections\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2414","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/libnews.binghamton.edu\/specialcollections\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/libnews.binghamton.edu\/specialcollections\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/libnews.binghamton.edu\/specialcollections\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/16"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/libnews.binghamton.edu\/specialcollections\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2414"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/libnews.binghamton.edu\/specialcollections\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2414\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/libnews.binghamton.edu\/specialcollections\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2414"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/libnews.binghamton.edu\/specialcollections\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2414"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/libnews.binghamton.edu\/specialcollections\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2414"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}