As many as thousands of Fang Zhi were completed in response to the Monarch's Edict of Cultivation, such as the Holy Will of the Yongle Emperor in 1418 and the Holy Will of the Jingtai Emperor in 1454. These Fang Zhi were often hand-copied copies when they were presented to the imperial court, and the original manuscripts or other hand-copied copies produced at the same time were kept locally. In addition, at the request of the province or the province, the state and county will also complete some manuscripts of fangzhi.
The compilation of the Chronicle of Yanzhou Fu in Zhejiang was in response to the holy will of the Jingtai Emperor in 1454. A manuscript of the Journal was presented to the Hanlin Academy, and the other was kept in the Fuxue School. In the records, "transcripts" and "copies" are used to distinguish them from the "original" or "base" of the original manuscript. Because the Yan prefecture government received orders from its superiors to compile the Fang Zhi, it was likely that it would store the original in the Yamen. Placing manuscripts in local yamen and Confucianism was a common practice at the time. The 1557 edition of the Guangdong Wengyuan County Chronicle also made two manuscripts, one in Yamen and the other in The County School. In 1434, Song Ji went to Xuzhou, which was directly subordinate to the south, and became the governor of the prefecture. He asked the students to show him the fangzhi compiled in response to the 1418 holy decree, but the school could not find it, and finally found a copy of the hastily compiled fangzhi in the yamen. This example suggests that people would naturally think that they could read copies of Fang Zhi in Confucianism, but this is not the case. The reason for this was that after the local officials submitted the manuscript to the imperial court, they often hoped to supplement and print the Fang Zhi with the help of copies, so copies of Fang Zhi's manuscripts were not always stored in schools. Of course, many Fang Zhi were not printed in the end, but were quickly lost. From the end of the 15th century to the 16th century, Fang Zhi editors often mentioned that the old editions of the Zhishu in the early years were no longer available. Some of them never even knew the old fangzhi of the Hongwu and Yongle periods that appeared in the bibliography of this book.
The local government repeatedly submitted the zhi manuscript, and the result was that the imperial court collected a large number of Fang Zhi. The size of this collection can be seen in the catalog of the collection. As mentioned in the third chapter of the previous article, the Bibliography of Wenyuange in 1441 divides Fang Zhi into two parts: "Old Zhi" and "New Zhi", the former listing 600 and the latter listing 568. The collection of Wenyuan Pavilion was destroyed by a fire in 1449. By the Wanli period, the total number of Fang Zhi listed in the Cabinet Book Catalogue was about 880. Depending on the number of local administrative units, it may be felt that the imperial court should have a larger collection of Fang Zhi, but the local compilation of Fang Zhi will not be submitted to the imperial court on a regular basis, and the library collection may be stolen by some officials. In addition, the Fang Zhi submitted to the imperial court for the sake of the national revision project may not be preserved in these libraries, because the national revision records of 1418 and 1454 were actually presided over by the Household Department, the Ceremonial Department, and the Hanlin Academy.
In addition to the above-mentioned presiding departments, there is at least one central agency collecting local chronicles, that is, the Pedestrian Division. When officers of the Division are sent throughout the country, they also collect books. They included a "geography class" in the bibliography of 1602, which listed 270 works, the vast majority of which were prefectural chronicles. The Pedestrian Division is specifically responsible for conveying unconventional messages to high-ranking dignitaries, and it is beneficial for them to be informed of the details of the place.
The audience of Fang Zhi in the imperial court collection was undoubtedly the emperor and officials. As discussed in the first chapter, the Zhengde Emperor wanted to read Fang Zhi on his journey to Nanjing; the Jingtai Emperor wanted to read the local chronicles at his leisure and issued edicts to cultivate the zhi; none of this was for the benefit of local, ordinary readers. Many of the fangzhi manuscripts of the early Ming Dynasty are included in copies of the Yongle Canon, which was first compiled in 1403 and completed in 1408, when only manuscripts were available. As Frederick Mote and Chu Hung-lam argue, the fact that the Yongle Canon is only a manuscript is determined by the nature of the series and its target audience, not by avoiding the cost of printing. This great project was initially initiated neither for the dissemination of culture nor to improve the level of knowledge of the educated class, but to provide a reference library for the emperor and his close associates.
Fang Zhi's editors felt strongly that the collection of books located in the palace would be unattainable to the vast majority of readers, which led many of them to quickly put them into print after handing over the manuscript Fang Zhi. In 1418, Zhu Hui published fang zhi in his hometown of Xincheng County, Jiangxi, in order to spread it among the people, because after the manuscript was submitted, it was "not easy for the people to see". In 1454, after the Hanlin Academy issued the rules for the cultivation of zhi, the jingzhou prefect of Huguanghang Province compiled a Fang Zhi, first producing a manuscript and presenting it to the imperial court, and then quickly making carved plates in the mansion and printing it into a book to expand the readership. He hoped that people, even those who had come from afar, would be able to read this Fang Zhi, because in his opinion, it was difficult for people to see the books in the imperial court. The 1457 edition of the Huizhou Fuzhi of Guangdong was an expanded edition of the manuscript submitted to the imperial court in 1455. Editors also do this because there are so few people who have access to manuscripts.
Only some officials could read the Fang Zhi collected by the imperial court, most of whom were officials of the Hanlin Academy or other high-ranking officials. There is evidence that lower-ranking officials also have ways to read these notes directly or by others. Some officials used the rarer old chronicles kept by the imperial court when compiling the new edition of the Fang Zhi. Other officials need to use Fang Zhi as a reference book, and even be able to read it at will. In 1493, Li Dongyang, a sutra lecturer from the Hanlin Academy, mentioned: "To read the secretary of the middle school, see the world's map Zhi Jian Shu Shan Ji, take it and read it." At the beginning of the Ming Dynasty, yang Shiqi (1365-1444), the first assistant of the cabinet, was invited to write a preface when he went to the museum to consult the Fang Zhi of Raozhou, Jiangxi. Crown Prince Fu Li (1521 Zhishi), a native of Zhangde, Henan, borrowed fangzhi from his hometown in the Song and Yuan dynasties from the imperial court collection in 1519 and sent it to Zhangde for the use of the authors who compiled the new zhi.
The above discussion is of higher status officials who have direct access to fangzhi in the state collection. For lower-ranking officials, this is a different story. Yizhou, which is located 100 kilometers south of Beijing, provides a typical example of this. When he began to compile the 1502 edition of Fang Zhi, he first asked a local to write a draft, and then wrote a letter to his brother, who was then a soldier to the Hanlin Yuan Shu Ji Shi Dai Milling. He asked his brother for help in reviewing the old journal and polishing the draft. Dai Milling accepted the request, and after reading the draft, compared the entries with the imperial court collection. After he finished revising it, Dai Min went to the Beijing Division and retrieved the manuscript from his brother.
Manuscripts that remain at the local level are intended for people to read during the transition period between completion and publication, and may be preserved locally or circulated to other places. For example, according to the preface to the 1084 edition of the Wu County Atlas, the 1011 map was very brief, and by the 11770s it was outdated. Around 1078, the prefect of Suzhou asked Zhu Changwen to add the old Tujing, and he accepted this request. When Zhu Changwen finished, the original prefect had been moved to another place, and Zhu Changwen stored the supplementary Fang Zhi at home and did not publish it publicly. Three years later, at the request of the new prefect, Zhu Changwen edited his manuscript and copied a copy and placed it in the yamen for the reference of officials. In addition, he copied a copy and placed it in his home for others to read. In 1098, the newly arrived official decided to print the manuscript. He believed that even though there were manuscripts in Yamen, few people read them, so in 1100 it was decided to make carved tablets in Yamen's storehouse. In this way, for about 20 years after the completion of the Zhu Zhi manuscript, it was only in the form of a manuscript for people to read. Another similar case occurred in the Yuan Dynasty. A Shandong man named Yu Qin (1284-1333), who had served as a tax collector on Yidu Road, compiled a local chronicle, Qi Cheng. He collected the materials and completed the manuscript, which he stored at home. On his deathbed in 1333, he confessed to his son Yu Qian: "I may be the first to reveal myself, and ru qi to carve it." Yu Qian was also an official at the time, and it was not until 1351 that he fulfilled his father's last wish and published the book. According to him, he had been busy with official duties before and it was difficult to get out. In the 18 years from Yu Qin's death to Fang Zhi's publication, Qi Cheng was always circulated in the form of manuscripts. In 1339, the famous minister Su Tianjue mentioned in the preface that he first read the Qi Cheng in Yangzhou and recommended the book to officials in Shandong. Similar situations were not uncommon during the Song, Yuan, and Ming dynasties.
Some sporadic records show that borrowing and hand-copying are also important ways for Fang Zhi to circulate. The famous scholar Fang Xiaoru (1357-1402) mentioned in a letter to a friend that he was writing a book about the unknown deeds of local historical figures, hoping to set an example for the local people. To this end, he returned to his hometown in Ninghai, Zhejiang Province, went to Taizhou Fuxue, 80 kilometers south, to borrow the local history, and returned it after hand copying. Another example is the prefect of Fuzhou, Sichuan, who in 1511 obtained a manuscript of Fang Zhi from a student of the prefecture. In 1531, Gui Youguang (1507-1571) took part in the provincial examination in Nanjing, and he borrowed from Wu Zhongying the old zhi of the late 14th century in the Nanjing area. 29 years later, Gui Youguang read a local history of Nanjing in the Yuan Dynasty, and he began to think about the changes in history, so he borrowed the former zhi from the Wu family, re-read it and wrote a postscript. In the 1610s and 1620s, a student in Renhe County, Zhejiang Province, had a handwritten copy of the 1549 edition of Fang Zhi compiled by Shen Chaoxuan in his home, which was not returned after zhixian borrowed it. In 1657, Shen Fu, who may have been a relative of Shen Chaoxuan, lent Fang Zhi from his home in Zhixian County, asked a county man to copy it and publish it.
Excerpt from [American] Dai Sizhe, "Writing, Publishing and Reading the Fang Zhi of the Chinese Empire: 1100-1700", Shanghai People's Publishing House, 2022.1
