The Jiangsu Cultural Context Collation Research and Dissemination Project is a large-scale cultural project launched by the Jiangsu Provincial Party Committee and the Jiangsu Provincial Government in 2016, and was included in the "13th Five-Year Plan" cultural development plan of the Provincial Party Committee and the Provincial Government, and the final result was presented as the "Jiangsu Wenku". The "Jiangsu Library" is divided into six parts, including bibliography, literature and historical materials, and the "Fang Zhi Compilation" is one of the six parts, which is compiled by the Office of the Jiangsu Provincial Local History Compilation Committee. According to the requirements of the compilation plan and overall layout of the "Jiangsu Wenku", the "Fang Zhi Bian" plans to select about 250 kinds of photocopies and publishes from all kinds of chronicles at all levels in the province, especially the provincial chronicles, the prefectural and county chronicles, as well as the official revision books such as Yancao and Ya Bureau, with a total scale of about 300 volumes. The whole compilation is divided into four parts: provincial department, prefecture and county department, special department and appendix, and was originally planned to be completed in about 10 years.
In the past 5 years, the selection and compilation of "Jiangsu Wenku Fangzhi Compilation" has been highly valued by the provincial party committee and the provincial government, and the provincial government has listed the selection and compilation of "Jiangsu Wenku Fangzhi Compilation" as one of the top ten major tasks and hundreds of key tasks of the year. According to the arrangements of the provincial party committee and the provincial government, the successive leaders of the provincial volunteer office have personally taken command, organized elite troops and strong generals, and carried out work. In 2016, the task was strictly formulated in the year of selection, in 2017, the old chronicles were extensively collected, the first batch of publication results was published in 2018, and the second, third and fourth batches of old chronicles were published in 2019, 2020 and 2021, respectively. Five years and five big steps, and now it has achieved phased results. It has published five parts of the Provincial Ministry, Jiangning Prefecture, Suzhou Prefecture, Changzhou Prefecture, Zhenjiang Prefecture, and one part of Yangzhou Prefecture, with a total of 115 kinds of old chronicles and 214 volumes of publications.
There are many difficulties in the selection and compilation of "Fang Zhi". For example, Jiangsu is a large province of Fangzhi in the whole country, with a long history of revision and many books passed down from generation to generation, and it is difficult to select photocopies; most of the chronicles of Fuzhou and county are integrated with ancient and modern, thousands of years up and down, and across the whole territory, and the objects of collection include nature, economy, politics, culture, society, characters, and other aspects, and there are general histories of ancient and modern times, the encyclopedia of one party, and the difficulty of writing summaries. But the biggest problem is the lack of old books.
First, as the name suggests, the Old Fangzhi refers to the zhishu that was written before the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949. The Jiangsu Provincial Local History Office was established in 1986, and most of the city and county (city, district) revision institutions in the province were also established in the 1980s. As far as the province's revision institutions are concerned, decades before the establishment of the unit, the old Fangzhi has already withdrawn from the historical stage of publication, so no revision institution in the province has the original old zhi. Second, the old Fangzhi belongs to ancient books, and the collection units are mainly concentrated in the national and provincial large libraries of famous universities, as well as the medium-sized libraries at the municipal level in some culturally developed areas, and the county (city, district) level libraries, cultural centers and other grass-roots units rarely have local zhishu. Third, as far as large and medium-sized libraries are concerned, the collection of old history is also extremely scattered. According to our statistics on the collection units of the "Joint Catalogue of Chinese Local History", the existing old Fangzhi in the country is mainly scattered in more than 200 libraries and museums across the country. Some of them have also been lost overseas, and are stored in the Library of The Diet of Japan, the Cabinet Library, the Zunkeige Library, the Jingjiado Library, the Toyo Library, the Ueno Library, the Library of Congress, the Yenching Library of Harvard University, the East Asian Library of Columbia University, and the British Museum in London. Fourth, there are many orphan and rare books of the old zhi, and collectors regard them as arches and refuse to show them easily. Among the surviving old records of Jiangsu in the Joint Catalogue of Chinese Local History, nearly 1/4 of the orphan books are written, and there are a large number of rare Fang zhi with fewer than three or four surviving species. For example, Jingjiang is one of the youngest counties in Jiangsu, founded in the seventh year of Chenghua in the Ming Dynasty (1471), and compiled and revised the county chronicle 11 times in more than 400 years from the eighth year of the Republic of China (1919). Among them, there are 4 kinds of zhishu that have been extinct, and 7 kinds of existing books. Among the extant chronicles, there are 4 kinds of Jiajing, Chongzhen, Kangxi, and the Republic of China; 1 kind of rare book, that is, Xianfeng's "Jingjiang County Chronicle"; the real Puben is actually only 1 kind of Guangxu's "Jingjiang County Chronicle".
Faced with the dilemma of difficulty in photocopying and selection, difficulty in collecting the original books, and difficulty in writing summaries, the editors of the "Fang Zhi Compilation" adhered to the original intention of "preserving history for the country," strengthened their cultural self-confidence, and with the strong perseverance of never turning back, the calm and pragmatic work spirit, and the scientific and rigorous attitude of studying, they rose to the occasion and overcame difficulties, and achieved gratifying results. By the end of 2021, Jiangsu Wenku has published a total of 740 volumes, of which Fang Zhibian accounts for 28.9%, which has the largest number of achievements among the six editions.
Establish new thinking and open up new horizons. More than half of the old zhidi (scanned copy, the same below) were collected from the National Library of China, the Shanghai Library, the Nanjing Library, the Nanjing Institute of Geography and Limnology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and other units. At the same time, some remote areas are often in the "blind zone" of ancient books searching, and the ancient books collected are rarely asked, and the quality of zhishu is the opposite and better, and some even have some little-known rare books and orphan books. In people's cognition, archives are the place where contemporary archives are collected, so when the Joint Catalogue of Chinese Local History surveyed the old history collection units, the national archive system was only included in the national archives. However, from the provincial archives and the provincial archives system, we have collected more than 100 kinds of old records of Jiangsu Dynasty. This has become an important supplement to the old records of Jiangsu held by major libraries, and has greatly enriched the accumulation of our old records.
Strive to consolidate the foundation and adhere to the quality first. The selection and publication of "Jiangsu Wenku" is in the contemporary era and beneficial in the thousands of autumns. We must firmly establish a sense of quality, strive to create high-quality works, and must be able to withstand the "erosion of time" and withstand the test of history. In order to ensure the quality of the "Fang Zhi Compilation", the Provincial Zhi Office planned ahead and actively engaged in the compilation of the "Jiangsu Chronicles of Fang Zhi Quanshu". The "Complete Book of Fang Zhi of Jiangsu Dynasties" has been photocopied and published from 500 or 600 kinds of old zhi from the existing chronicles in the province, and has basically been published so far, with a total of 530 books. One or the other. Second, carefully selected books. The number of chronicles compiled in the history of the same prefecture and county is huge, and it is necessary to select the bibliography. The criteria for selecting the first is that the book is written earlier, so as to better highlight the long history of Fang Zhi; the second is that the book is written late to ensure that the material accumulated in the zhi book is the richest; the third is that the quality is better to ensure that the selected zhi book represents the high local standard; the fourth is that the quality is better, and strive to strive for the completeness of the zhishu volume and the clear page. Third, carefully selected versions. Most of the old zhi have different versions, there are missing words, missing pages, missing volumes and other phenomena, we try to find the same version of the same kind of zhi book in different collection units, and make up for the missing parts.
Respond to the "context project" and amplify the "spillover effect". While doing a good job in selecting and compiling the "Fang Zhi Zhi", we also actively responded to the "Cultural Context Project", successively selecting and publishing the "Historical Atlas of the Yangtze River" and the "Historical Atlas of the Grand Canal in Jiangnan", organizing the "Jiangnan Tongzhi" and revising the "Jiangsu YiwenZhi", and opening up the "Jiangsu Wenmei" column in the "Jiangsu Local History" journal. Among them, the school-based "Jiangnan Tongzhi" was included in the "13th Five-Year Plan" National Key Book Publishing Planning Project, and won the first prize of the 16th Outstanding Achievements in Philosophy and Social Sciences of Jiangsu Province and the first prize of the 3rd Jiangsu Press and Publication Government Award; the revised "Jiangsu Yiwenzhi" also won the first prize of the 3rd Jiangsu Press and Publication Government Award; and the "Historical Atlas of the Yangtze River" was rated as the "2020 Suzhou Edition Good Book".
The old Fang Zhi was written before the founding of the People's Republic of China, and due to the influence of successive wars, natural disasters, natural aging and other factors, many old Zhi have become fragments. "Jiangsu Wenmei Fang Zhi Compilation" has realized the "resurrection" of literature through the "cloning" of old zhi. This is not only a cultural rescue project and a literature reconstruction project, but also a cultural inheritance project and a civilization continuation project. Prior to this, these old zhi were stored in the whole country and even around the world, and now through the scanning and photocopying of the original scattered zhishu in one place, after publication, distributed throughout the province, thus realizing fang zhi's "return to hometown".
Through the selection and publication of the "Fang Zhi Compilation", a number of "new" old zhi, "new" old zhi versions, and "new" old zhi collection units have been discovered one after another, and miracles such as the rebirth of old zhi and the "lonely book" are not alone. For example, in the process of compilation, we found that Wanli's "Illustrations of Yangzhou Capital" was written for Ming and stored in the Library of Congress of the United States; Chongzhen's "Wu Jiangzhi" was a Qing manuscript, which was stored in the Nanjing Library; and Daoguang's "Sizhou New and Old Chronicles" was a Qing manuscript and was stored in the Library of Peking University. Through supplementation, many of the original few volumes, missing pages, and dilapidated old records have become complete in one fell swoop, and their historical value and documentary value are often higher than those of the original old records.
Draft: Zuo Jianwei, director of the Provincial Zhi Office, and Zhang Naige, director of the Old Zhi Sorting Center
Review, Release: Zhang Yizhe