Meihua Library has long been in charge of Western-style Chinese printing and publishing, and has made important contributions to the dissemination of modern Chinese thought and knowledge.
Mr. Su Jing's new book "Meihua Library: Archives Say So" starts from overseas first-hand English archives and studies the 88-year history of the Meihua Library from 1844 to 1931 through small incisions of people, events and materials, covering the replacement of several directors of Meihua Library, several innovations in Chinese lead type technology, internal management and relocation, etc.
The article "Me and the Archives" in the appendix of this book reviews Mr. Su Jing's experience in using archives to conduct research on the history of printing and publishing over the past 45 years, and introduces for the first time how he became involved with the archives of Meihua Library, which is very touching to read.
I have a very close relationship with archives, and in the past 45 years I have seen many archives in Chinese and English, and my published books have made use of archives. In the 30 years since I started graduate school in 1992, I have been working with archives on a daily basis, copying, reading, and using archives for most of my daily life.
One
Bonding with Chinese archives
My relationship with archives began in 1977 when I came into contact with two archives at about the same time: the archives of the Central Library in Taipei and the diplomatic archives of the Institute of Modern History of the Academia Sinica. At that time, I was the head of the general affairs team of the "Central Library", and I often inspected the environment and facilities of the library. One day, I saw two large bamboo baskets in the utility storage room of the Special Collections Group, and when I opened them curiously, I saw that they were full of official documents from the "Central Library" in Nanjing and Chongqing, all of which were shipped to Taiwan in 1949, and they had been piled up in the bamboo cages in the corners. In 1978, when I was transferred to the secretary's office, the environment of the office was much better than the crowded and noisy general affairs team, and I remembered the two bamboo cages full of files. With the approval of the Special Collections team, I moved the bamboo cage to the secretary's room, and every day during the lunch break, I slowly arranged it according to some themes that I had set myself, and stored them in black or blue folders, and then arranged them in the office cabinet. After about a year, all the archives that have been in Taiwan for 30 years have been rediscovered, and I am also blessed to wander among the documents left by my predecessors. Among these archives, what attracted me the most was the large number of documents that were collected and purchased in the occupied areas during the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression. With the support of the Ministry of Education and the board of directors of the Sino-British Geng Fund, the director of the library, Jiang Fuxuan, went from Chongqing to Hong Kong and Shanghai to contact some scholars and experts in the occupied areas, and risked his life to secretly purchase private books that had already flowed out and those that might have flowed out in the name of the "Comrade Society for the Preservation of Documents", which were stored in Shanghai and Hong Kong. After the outbreak of the Pacific War, part of the collection in Hong Kong was transported to Tokyo by the Japanese, and it was not until after the victory of the Anti-Japanese War that they returned to the motherland after negotiations, and reunited with the ancient books in various places. The adventures and difficulties of the people involved, the twists and turns of the whole operation, and the bizarre plot like a novel or a movie, between the lines of page after page of letters, one after another is a gripping scene after scene of the real drama of rescuing the documents. I was deeply shocked by the whole operation, so I wrote these unbelievable people and events into an article entitled "The Beginning and End of the Secret Search for Ancient Books in the Occupied Areas during the Anti-Japanese War", which was published in the November 1979 issue of the monthly magazine "Biographical Literature".
Comrades Association for the Preservation of Documents (Image source: Documentary "They Survive Forever with Heaven and Earth")
On the basis of these archives, I successively wrote and published the life and deeds of bibliophiles, which were later compiled into the book "Thirty Modern Book Collectors", which was published by the "Biographical Literature" publishing house in 1983. It was mainly because of this book that my position in the library was promoted from editor to editor. I didn't expect the archives excavated from the dusty bamboo cage in the corner of the storage room to bring me such luck. While sorting out the library archives, I also pay attention to the diplomatic archives collected by the Academia Sinica for its recent history. At that time, I was very interested in the Tongwen Museum, which studied foreign Chinese languages and trained diplomatic translators in the late Qing Dynasty, and I also used my spare time to collect historical materials from the Jingshi Tongwen Museum, the Shanghai Cantonese Dialect Museum, and the Guangdong Tongwen Museum. Since the Jingshi Tongwenguan is subordinate to the Prime Minister's Yamen for National Affairs, I tried to borrow the Prime Minister's Yamen archives from the diplomatic archives of the "Academia Sinica" Institute of Modern History, but unfortunately, the Tongwenguan part of it had already been lost during the invasion of China by the Eight-Nation Alliance, so I was unable to use the archives of the Prime Minister's Yamen in the book "Qing Ji Tongwenguan" published in 1978. However, I continued to revise and expand the content, adding 10 articles on the teachers and students of the Tongwenkan, and for this reason, I repeatedly went to the Institute of Modern History to borrow diplomatic archives, and copied many documents of diplomats from the Tongwenkan from the "Records of the Embassy and the Consulate", and supplemented and revised the previous "Qingji Tongwenkan" into a book "Qingji Tongwenkan and its Teachers and Students", which was published by myself in 1985. Nowadays, I occasionally turn out about 100 (200 pages) of information cards that copy diplomats' documents, and the small characters copied on them are densely packed, and I remember that in order to be fast, I tried my best to copy them in small characters, but I did not expect that after about 40 years, the handwriting has become a little blurry and diffuse.
Two
Affiliation with English files
When I came into contact with archives again in 1992, I was no longer a librarian, and I no longer came into contact with Chinese archives. At the age of 46, I quit my job as head of the Special Collections section of the library to become a student and went to the English Department of the University of Leeds in the United Kingdom to pursue a master's degree in bibliography, publishing history and proofreading. When writing his dissertation, A Study of the Shanghai Mohai Library, it was necessary to use the archives of the London Missionary Society, which belonged to the Mohai Library, but the archives of the London Society were kept in the library of the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. I travelled from Leeds twice to London, about 300 kilometres away, and the first day was spent almost exclusively on transport transfers and hotels, the second day I could concentrate on transcribing the archives, and on the third afternoon I had to rush back to Leeds for classes the next day, so I didn't get much out of transcribing. Later, I moved to the British Library Document Supply Centre in the Walton countryside, about 30 kilometres northeast of Leeds, to see microfiche of the London Missionary Society's archives, and to go back and forth that day. However, after reading the microfilm all day, I was always tired and dizzy, and I had only just been faced with the English manuscript at that time, and even though the handwriting of Walter H. Medhurst, the missionary who presided over the Mohai Library, was not difficult to read, I was still a little like reading a book in heaven, but fortunately I finally completed my dissertation. To this day, I have never forgotten the sight of leaving the Documentation Supply Center at dusk, the setting sun fading, the birds hovering over the fields or the roof of the fallen farmhouse, waiting alone on the side of the road, looking around, really feeling the world and independent, tired and desolate, wishing that the bus would appear at the end of the road sooner.
Professor Su Jing presents the English manuscripts in the archives at the lecture
Despite the inconveniences and difficulties, the experience in Leeds has opened the door to my thirty years of research in the archives of the Missionary Society, but I could not have imagined that there was more difficult things to come. When I returned to Taiwan after completing my master's degree, I was greeted by the librarian in a letter that I was welcome back to the library, and told me in person that there was nothing I could do. I couldn't find other suitable jobs, and in the dilemma of being unemployed and in a dilemma, I desperately sold my only house and went to London to study for a doctorate, and took "The Chinese Printing Business of the London Society" as the title of my doctoral dissertation, which was far more breadth, depth and difficulty than the master's thesis, and the number of archives to see alone increased significantly. Luckily, the University College London was located next to SOAS, and the dormitory was on the outskirts of London, so I started a three-year life with the London Society archives in early 1994. Since I didn't have to attend classes for my Ph.D., I spent most of my time copying archives in the SOAS library, and some people thought I was a student at SOAS. Having tasted the bitterness of archival manuscripts in Leeds not long ago, why would it not be self-defeating or self-inflicted to go to London and choose a more difficult dissertation topic of the same nature? Originally, since I wrote about modern bibliophiles, I would inevitably encounter the problem of the rise of Western-style movable type printing in China in the late nineteenth century, which led to the decline of woodblock printing, but after reading the relevant records and treatises, I could not clearly understand how Western-style Chinese movable type printing rose and replaced woodcuts, and only vaguely knew that it was the result of Christian missionaries, so I had expectations in my heart and would find out for myself if I had the opportunity. Going to Leeds to study Western bibliography, publishing history, and proofreading laid the foundation for this idea, and writing a master's thesis at Mohai Library was a tentative action, and then going to London to study, and further focusing on the London Society, which is closely related to Western-style Chinese movable type printing, as the research object. It's easy to say, but it's hard to get started. Having a first-hand source is certainly the beginning of research, and the missionary archives that replaced woodcut printing with Western-style movable type are already in sight, but how to translate the contents of English manuscripts is a major challenge. In Leeds, it was really difficult to lift the word at first, and I asked readers in nearby seats for some illegible words, but none of them could help. I also realized that I could only rely on myself, so I slowly identified and copied word by word, and the unrecognizable words were temporarily put aside, and then I went back to identify them after a while or the next day or even two or three days, and if I really couldn't recognize them, I could only give up in blank. After arriving in London, after a period of exploration, I gradually became familiar with the habits or patterns of the missionary writing, and it took about a year before I became more proficient. Looking back, I always think of myself in the blink of an eye, with no way out, and trying to read every word of the missionary's letters alone in a library in a foreign land, which is an indelible memory of this life. In three years, from the London Society's decision to start a missionary work in China in 1804 to the end of Chinese printing in 1873, I copied the Society's board of directors and secretariat, Morrison, the first missionary to China, and the relevant correspondence documents of missionaries in Hong Kong and Shanghai after the Opium War, about 1.5 million words. In addition, Morrison worked as a translator at the British East India Company's Canton Merchant House