There is no more "Wang Daoist", thank you "sweeping monk"

Friendly tips: The full text is more than 10,000 words, the knowledge density is quite high, and the harvest will be full after reading. Are you ready?

1

Let's start with an Englishman,

John Fryer was born in Scotland but has been obsessed with China since childhood. Later, he wrote in his autobiography: "In my childhood, nothing made me more enjoyable than reading the books I had tried so hard to find about China. I wanted to go to China so much that my classmates gave me the nickname 'Sinophile'. ”

In 1861, Fu Lanya was sent by the Anglican Church to serve as a principal of St. Paul's College in Hong Kong as a Protestant missionary. The school is still alive today, and many elite politicians have been taught here.

A few years later, Fu Lanya set off for Chinese mainland, where she successively taught at the Tongwenguan in Beijing, the principal of the Shanghai Yinghua Academy, and the translator of the Jiangnan Manufacturing Bureau.

At that time, China was "a major change that has not occurred in more than three thousand years."

This statement comes from Li Hongzhang. In 1872, he said in "Reconsideration of the Manufacture of Steamships That Cannot Be Abolished": "For a hundred years, the european countries that have been stealing from India to The South Sea, from the South Sea to China, have broken into the hinterland of the border. My emperor is like the degree of heaven, and he has made a covenant to trade, so as to cage it, and to unite the ninety thousand miles away from the east, west, south, and south of the earth, and gather in China, and this three-thousand-year great change is also a major change. ”

However, not all the people who break into the hinterland of China are bad people, and Fu Lanya is an example, known as "prometheus who spreads the fire of science and technology in China".

Jiangnan Manufacturing Bureau, China's first modern industrial enterprise, founded by Zeng Guofan, he specially built a translation hall in the enterprise, because "translation is the foundation of manufacturing".

Xu Shou, Hua Xiangfang, Li Shanlan and other scientists in early modern China have translated books in the museum.

Fu Lanya was very happy about the position of translator, "I am now starting to do what I want to do. I've always loved science, but I've never found the time or opportunity to study it. I should say that working as a translator of scientific and technological works in the Chinese government was the most enjoyable occupation of my life. It is revered, incomparably honorable, and useful. This is a new era in my life. ”

This is also a new era in the history of modern Chinese scientific enlightenment.

With the help of Fu Lanya's pen, astronomy, geography, machines, arithmetic, acousto-optics, electrochemistry... And other professional terms are known to the Chinese people.

In 1875, Fu Lanya co-founded Gezhi Academy (the predecessor of Gezhi Middle School), the earliest academy in China to disseminate scientific and technological knowledge, and published China's first self-funded scientific popularization journal, Gezhi Compilation.

Fu Lanya's translations and the Compilation of Gezhi have opened a door for Modernization for China. Liang Qichao called the Compilation of Gezhi "Extreme" in his Bibliography of Western Studies.

In 1896, Fu Lanya was appointed as the first Chair Professor of Oriental Languages and Literatures at the University of California, Berkeley. He stored more than 2,000 Chinese books in the university library for teachers and students to use, and was the earliest collection of Chinese books for the university, most of which were Ming and Qing dynasty periodicals.

The most important collection is more than 100 Western scientific and technological works translated by him at the Shanghai Jiangnan Manufacturing Bureau, which are precious materials for the history of modern Chinese science and technology.

2

In China's modern history, missionary-led scientific input is known as the "first phase of scientific enlightenment.". At the same time, a group of late Qing dynasty scholars were sorting out the country's past and building a library building, hoping to protect Chinese civilization.

This cannot be done without mentioning Nanxun.

Nanxun, a wonderful town in Jiangnan, China, is quaint, rich, and full of literary style. The local library is rich and famous.

It is reported that since the middle of the Qing Dynasty, Nanxun has had Liu Tong's "Mianqin Mountain Pavilion", Jiang Ruzao's "Secret Yun Building", Pang Yuanji's Yiyuan "Half Painting Pavilion" and other private library buildings. The number of ancient books and editions in Nanxun's collection is large, and the wealth of rare books is famous in Jiangsu and Zhejiang, and it is well-known in the sea.

However, the peak of Nanxun's private library had not yet arrived, until a person appeared.

In 1881, Liu Chenggan was born in Nanxun, the third generation of the rich and the second generation of officials. His grandfather Liu Yong became rich in silk business, and his father Liu Jinzao was a jinshi during the Guangxu period.

Liu Chenggan himself was born in Xiucai, and has long been in contact with famous archaeologists such as Wang Guowei and Luo Zhenyu, and loves ancient book appreciation and book collection.

In the early winter of 1920, Liu Chenggan began to build a library building, which was completed at the end of 1924. Spending 120,000 gold, covering an area of more than 20 acres, the whole building has 52 rooms, showing a cloister-style hall building, with a square patio of more than 1,000 square meters in the middle.

This library building was named Jiayetang. In 1914, Liu Chenggan donated funds to plant trees for the tomb of the Guangxu Emperor, so Puyi awarded him a "Qinruo Jiaye" imperial book plaque, and he was proud of it, so he named it "Jiaye" as the library building.

In Liu Chenggan's "Records of the Jiayetang Library", it is recorded: "Yu Shao Xi Xianfen, Xi Xiangting Jie, remembering the hometown ancestors, stealing Si Zhi ... It is back to the banks of Partridge Creek. The building is a collection of books. 120,000 gold, 20 acres of land. The winter of Gengshen is broken at the age of the koshi".

The collection of books in the heyday of jiayetang library is said to be 600,000 volumes, a total of 160,000 to 70,000 volumes, of which there are countless rare books.

For example, there are 149 exquisite works of the Song and Yuan dynasties, 42 huge volumes of precious and orphan books of the Yongle Canon, and 150 volumes of the original manuscripts of the "Four Libraries".

The most famous are the manuscripts of the Qing Shilu and the Biography of the Qing Dynasty. The manuscripts of these two books are in the National History Museum in Beijing, which have become extinct in society, but Liu Chenggan has invested tens of thousands of yuan to send special personnel to spend several years to copy them all.

It was a shock to bibliophiles. Therefore, during the Republic of China period, Nanxun Jiaye Hall and Ningbo Tianyi Pavilion were called the two major library buildings in Jiangnan.

3

While Liu Chenggan was about to build Jiaye Hall, the University of California, Berkeley, on the other side of the ocean, also ushered in a second wave of Chinese collections.

From 1914 to 1920, the Chinese scholar Jiang Kanghu succeeded Fu Lanya as a lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley Chinese.

Jiang Kanghu's ancestors had a rich collection of books, but most of them were destroyed during the Boxer Rebellion in 1900, leaving only a quarter of the original, about 13,600 copies, which were stored in a temple on the outskirts of Beijing.

In 1916, the U.S. Legation sent ships to transport the collection to the United States. Books donated by Jiang Kanghu have enriched Berkeley's collection of Chinese ancient books.

4

In the second year of Jiayetang's breaking ground, a downcast student came to Shanghai Beach and was introduced to Li Guosong's house.

Li Guosong, a bibliophile of the Republic of China, was a native of Hefei, Anhui. Guangxu twenty-three years of raising people, the trial ceremony department did not win, into the capital to Lang zhong. He was the director of the Anhui Consultative Council. After the Republic of China, he lived in Shanghai, with tens of thousands of volumes, calligraphy and paintings, and inscriptions and gold stones.

Shusheng taught at the Li family for four and a half years, studying on his own in his spare time, and in 1925 he was admitted to the Institute of Chinese Studies of Tsinghua University and became a disciple of Wang Guowei and Liang Qichao.

This scholar's name was Xu Zhongshu. Within a few years, he shined in the field of Chinese historiography and was later incarnated.

5

In 1928, Fu Lanya died in the United States shortly after sending her son to Shanghai to open a second school for blind girls. (Shanghai's first blind girls' school is personally run by Fu Lanya)

In the same year, Xu Zhongshu entered the prestigious Institute of History and Linguistics of the Academia Sinica. During this period, he completed a feat: he led the collation of more than 8,000 sacks and 60,000 kilograms of Qing Palace cabinet archives. He was one of the first historians to conduct a specialized study of the Cabinet Archives and wrote the pioneering work of the Cabinet Archives.

A few idle words, the "discovery" of the Qing Palace Cabinet Archives is a famous public case in China's academic history.

Lu Xun's essay "On the So-Called "Great Inner Archives"" contains these sentences: "China's public things are really not easy to preserve. If the authorities are laymen, he will spoil the things, and if he is an insider, he will steal them."

It was precisely the "Eight Thousand Sacks of Inner Archives" incident that was making a lot of noise at that time.

The so-called "Great Inner Archives" refers to the archives stored in the Cabinet Treasury of the Forbidden City, including some archives of the late Ming Dynasty, which are precious materials for the study of the history of the Ming and Qing dynasties.

In 1898, the warehouse where the archives were stored fell into disrepair and leaked badly, and the Interior Ministry of the Qing Dynasty decided to repair it. Later, the Eight-Power Alliance invaded, and the matter came to a standstill. In 1909, the warehouse collapsed and millions of archives were moved out. The more recent archives were moved to the Mandarin Palace, while the older archives were considered useless and prepared to be burned.

This matter was learned by Luo Zhenyu, a Manchu Qing widow and archaeologist, who quickly asked Zhang Zhidong to coordinate in the center.

Zhang Zhidong had great power in his hands, spoke well, said hello, and the archives that were ready to be burned were all disposed of by Luo Zhenyu. Lao Luo picked and chose, packed 8,000 sacks, and moved them to Guozijian.

After the outbreak of the Xinhai Revolution, the Beiyang government placed the 8,000 sacks of archives at random, and the guards did not know that the archives were precious, poured out the archives, and stole the sacks to sell for money.

Hu Yujin, then director of the Preparatory Department of the Historical Museum, knew about it and rushed to the Ministry of Education to report to the Ministry of Education and ask for instructions on how to handle the archives.

However, the Ministry of Education did not take it seriously, procrastinating, and delayed for several years. Until 1918, Lu Xun, the head of the small section of the Ministry of Education, was ordered to deal with the matter.

In 1921, the Beiyang government was financially embarrassed, and the Ministry of Education, which could not pay its salary, sold the sacks as waste paper, about 150,000 catties, to a paper shop in Xidan for 4,000 yuan.

This matter was also known to Luo Zhenyu, who bought the archives for twice the price, and in 1924, Luo sold it to Li Shengduo, who had been the president of the Senate and was also the collector of the Great Tibet, for 60,000 yuan, about 120,000 catties.

Li Shengduo fished out a lot of rare things and gave 60,000 of them to Puyi.

In 1928, Li Shengduo sold the remaining sacks to the Institute of History and Linguistics of the Academia Sinica for 18,000 yuan, and the archives at this time were about 100,000 catties.

Xu Zhongshu and others selected, edited and published the "Historical Materials Series" and 40 volumes of Ming and Qing historical materials.

On the eve of the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, the Institute of History and Languages brought some of its archives to Nanjing, and after several twists and turns, moved to Taiwan. The remaining archives are about 50,000 pounds, about 1700 sacks, lying until the founding of New China.

That's another story. I will not dwell on this.

6

When the eight thousand sacks of the Inner Archives were moved around, an Oriental man cast a covetous gaze.

He is Nagasawa Noriko, "the first person in modern Japanese philology".

In the face of Chinese classics, this person is not at all unruly.

From 1927 to 1932, Nagasawa was also sponsored by the Ministry of Culture of the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs and came to China seven times to purchase Chinese rare books for institutions such as the Shizukado Bunko, the Oriental Culture Institute, and Okura Foreign Company.

Jia Ye Tang was his number one target.

It is not surprising that Jiayetang was the "punch card" of the first-class literati and scholars at that time.

Lu Xun had visited the door twice to buy books, but he was rejected because he did not report his name, so he had to buy 21 kinds of books through acquaintances.

To this end, Lu Xun did not forget to count a few sentences: "I am very grateful for such a bibliophile, because the knowledge he has imparted to me--although it seems to the elegant person to be only vulgar knowledge, he is not a figure of no benefit." ”

However, Zheng Zhenduo was very satisfied after identifying the entire Ming Dynasty: "The good book is colorful, such as on the mountain vagina, it is overwhelming, and it is advisable." ”

Although Zheng Zhenduo is not as famous as Lu Xun, his contribution to Chinese culture is actually even greater.

7

After the outbreak of the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression in 1937, Xu Zhongshu arrived in Chengdu and became a professor in the History Department of Sichuan University at the request of Sino-British Geng and Sichuan University. Since then, the branches have spread out.

8

After the "July 7 Incident," Nagasawa's ties with his Chinese counterparts were also broken. But he remains closely following the turmoil of China's cultural scene.

At that time, Jiangnan bibliophiles sold their books one after another.

In mid-November 1937, the Japanese army invaded and occupied the town of Nanxun, and the whereabouts of the ancient books of Jiayetang became the focus, and various forces began to compete.

Matsuzaki Tsuruo, an advisor to the Mantetsu Dalian Library, entrusted Major General Makijiro, the commander of the Japanese army's Jiaxing area, to take over The House.

Due to the family's fall, Liu Chenggan sold a batch of precious ancient books to maintain the family's expenses.

In March 1938, after the 44 volumes of the Yongle Canon in Jiayetang's collection were bought by the puppet Manchurian Railway Dalian Library, Matsuzaki Tsuruo coveted all the ancient books of Jiayetang.

In order to avoid the scattering of ancient books in foreign lands, in January 1940, Zheng Zhenduo and others organized a literature preservation comrades' association to search for rare books and documents in Shanghai. During this period, Zheng Zhenduo was twice on the blacklist of cultural rescuers planned by the Japanese side.

At that time, many cultural circles had left Shanghai, but Zheng Zhenduo said: "But I can't go, I can't escape my responsibility." "National documents and national classics are the inheritance of the descendants and grandchildren, and are sent by the ancestors and spirits of thousands of generations." If, in my lifetime, I witness his loss and do not help him, how will future generations complain?"

In February 1940, the Kyoto Research Institute of the Oriental Culture Institute and the Shanghai East Asia Tongwen Academy, which had a Background in the Japanese Military Department, suddenly attacked.

At the same time, the General Committee of Oriental Cultural Undertakings of the puppet Peking government also planned to acquire the Collection of Kayedo through the Japanese scholar Hashikawa Toshio in China.

In the face of hunting from all sides, Zheng Zhenduo strongly felt that "the survival of chengjiangnan culture in these months is also the moment of life and death".

In December 1940, Xu Senyu, then director of the Palace Museum's antiquities, sneaked back to Shanghai from Chongqing to assist Zheng Zhenduo, and the two of them went to Liu's library to read for nearly half a month, "picking gold from the sand" from more than 2,700 ancient books. At that time, Liu Chenggan was compiling and printing a catalog and wanted to sell it to the United States, but was "blocked by Zheng Zhenduo".

In April 1941, the Literature Protection Comrades Association secretly purchased the jinghua of Jiayetang's collection of books for 250,000 yuan - more than 1,200 kinds of Ming periodicals and more than 30 kinds of banknote school books.

In the summer of 1941, the situation in Shanghai became more and more severe, and the rescued documents were transported to Hong Kong in two batches, a total of 111 boxes, which were stored in the Feng Pingshan Library of the University of Hong Kong under the name of "Central Library".

In the autumn of 1941, the Nationalist government decided to transport the ancient books to the Consulate General in the United States. "Because I did not dare to collect the seal in the name of the library in the occupied area of Shanghai, before I packed the boxes in Hong Kong and sent to the United States, this part of the books were supplemented with zhu Wenfang seal of the 'National Central Library Examination Collection' to identify them, which took three months and repeatedly missed two voyages."

By the time all the ancient books were replenished and sealed, it was too late to transport them away. On December 8, 1941, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, and on the same day, they attacked Hong Kong. The "President Gran" cruise ship, which was scheduled to carry ancient books, only docked in Hong Kong for two or three hours, and it was obviously too late to load books. (The books also escaped the disaster, and the "President Gran" sailed to the port of Manila and was sunk by Japanese aircraft.)

On December 25, 1941, Hong Kong fell. On the 28th, the Japanese military police found the boxes in the Feng Pingshan Library.

In early February 1942, the Japanese army removed all the books of various units in Hong Kong. It includes a British officer's 627 volumes Chinese collection.

Thanks to him, china later retrieved the collection of books in the Central Library.

9

In March 1942, the Japanese army transported nearly 50,000 "captured books" stolen from Hong Kong to Tokyo.

Nagasawa also presided over the sorting out of affairs.

In the autumn of 1944, when U.S. aircraft bombed Tokyo, the Japanese evacuated 133,000 books 300 kilometers away, including 20,000 Chinese rare books.

In 1945, after Japan's surrender, 113,000 books were transferred back to Tokyo, and only 20,000 ancient Chinese books were secretly transferred to the deep mountains and old forests. The person who came up with this idea was Nagasawa Yukiya.

In August 1945, the rare books were evacuated again and hidden in a cellar. Nagasawa also selected 10,000 copies to be classified as "B-book books", which are planned to be used to deal with the Chinese side's recourse.

It is this batch of "B books" that provides clues for the Chinese side to recover. This has to be said of the British officer mentioned above.

10

Bossar, whose main business is the British military major stationed in Hong Kong, and his side job is a researcher of Chinese historical relics, purchasing many Chinese classics.

After the fall of Hong Kong in 1941, Bossar was captured and the books in his home were washed away by the Japanese army.

After Japan's surrender in 1945, Bosar arrived in Tokyo as a British official in the Far East, found his own 627 volumes in the basement of the Ueno Imperial Library, and found "books from the Chinese government that had been transferred from Hong Kong."

Bossar immediately informed the Chinese delegation in Tokyo. China quickly launched a recourse operation.

It is worth mentioning that the Nationalist government in Chongqing learned of the looting of Shan Ben in Hong Kong through Chen Yinke, who left Hong Kong in June 1942, but Zheng Zhenduo, who was in the occupied area of Shanghai, was not aware of it. He "went through several inquiries and visits, but there was still no trace", and until November 1945, he was still sad: "No trace of them has been found so far, and their existence is unknown, which is my most regrettable and uneasy thing!" ”

With the clues provided by Bossar, on April 8, 1946, Li Ji, Zhang Fengju, and others, as advisers to the Chinese representatives of the Allied Committee on Japan, went to Japan to negotiate the robbery of China.

Nagasawa also said later: "According to the british briefing, the members of the delegation of the Republic of China in Japan wrote to inquire about the books I had sorted out and sent someone to the museum to inspect it.

11

Weak countries have no diplomacy.

The process of the Chinese delegation's recovery of looted books is full of hardships and is constrained by the harsh provisions of the United Nations: "The provisions of the United Nations on claiming compensation for cultural relics state that the cultural relics claimed for reimbursement must be proved to be robbed or stolen during the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, and it is required to list the name, production age, shape, size, weight, etc. of the lost cultural relics, preferably with photographs; for the looted cultural relics, it is required to list the original person, where it was originally, when it was robbed, etc.; if it was robbed by the Japanese army, it is required to say the number, etc., so that the materials can be considered complete. Only the United Nations can supervise Japan. ”

It is precisely under these harsh conditions that "our country lost no less than three million books in wartime, but only fifteen eight hundred and seventy-three copies were returned in total." Among them, except for some good books in the Central Library, which have been returned to foreign countries by air and ship twice, the rest are mostly ordinary books. “

The reason why the rare books of the Central Library can be completely returned to Zhao is that it relies entirely on the "Hong Kong Packing Catalog" provided by Zheng Zhenduo, which records specific information such as editions and inscriptions, which has become the most direct and effective basis for recovering the robbery.

12

A large number of rare books that were not returned to China were auctioned off by Japan.

In 1948, the University of California, Berkeley purchased more than 100,000 rare books in the Japanese-Japanese Korean Library. Among them are the old collections of Jiaye Hall and Tianyi Pavilion, which are precious and rare.

13

On May 2, 1949, Nanxun was liberated.

Earlier, when the People's Liberation Army went south, Zhou Enlai specifically told Chen Yi to focus on protecting Jiayetang and Tianyi Pavilion.

In November 1951, Liu Chenggan wrote to the Zhejiang Library, "I would like to donate the library to the surrounding vacant land and collect books, and the book plates together with various equipment will be donated to your library for permanent preservation."

Zhejiang Library and Jiaxing District Library sent people to receive it. At the time of receipt, there were about 110,000 books, more than 3,000 magazines, and more than 30,000 red pear wood book editions.

In 1963, Liu Chenggan died.

14

The flowers bloom in two, one on each side.

In 1958, the National Leading Group for the Collation and Publication of Ancient Books was established, which consisted of three groups of literature, history and philosophy (Zheng Zhengduo and He Qifang, conveners of the literature group, Zhai Bozan, convener of the history group, and Pan Zinian and Feng Youlan, conveners of the philosophy group).

Xu Zhongshu was elected as a member of the history group. Under his leadership, the academic standards of Sichuan University's ancient book collation major have always been in the domestic first grade.

To say a few more words, although Zheng Zhenduo is the convener of the literary group, his identity is the vice minister of culture and the director of the cultural relics administration, and he is interested in the protection of cultural relics.

In October 1955, Guo Moruo, Shen Yanbing, Wu Han, Deng Tuo, Fan Wenlan, and Zhang Suming sent a report to the Central Committee to excavate the Changling Tomb of the Ming Tombs, where the Yongle Emperor of the Ming Dynasty was buried.

Zheng Zhenduo objected, "He was in a hurry, destroying cultural relics, he was in a hurry, very anxious, he said that this is absolutely not OK." “

Communication was fruitless.

In 1957, the Ming Ding Mausoleum was opened, and due to the lack of mature cultural relics protection technology and scientific and technological conditions, many exquisite silks and brocades in the underground palace were not long gone.

On October 17, 1958, a Tu-104 aircraft taking off from the airport of the capital crashed in the territory of the Chuvash Autonomous Soviet Republic of the former Soviet Union. None of the dozens of cultural and sports personalities on board the plane survived, including Zheng Zhenduo.

Seven years after Zheng Zhenduo's death, in 1965, when someone again proposed to excavate the Changling Tomb, Zhou Enlai resolutely vetoed it, saying: "The imperial tomb will not be opened within ten years." ”

15

In 1966, the movement began. outline.

16

In 1978, Chinese universities welcomed their first batch of students after the resumption of the college entrance examination.

Chen Li is a freshman in the History Department of Sichuan University. He grew up in a family of readers, his parents were teachers, influenced by the family, and loved books from an early age. And because my father was a history teacher, I love history the most.

After graduating from the undergraduate, Chen Li was admitted to Mr. Xu Zhongshu's master's and doctoral students, and became Mr. Xu's "closed disciple".

His graduate thesis was on the study of ancient books, so he went into the library to study ancient books.

In order to protect ancient books, the lights in the library are usually relatively dark, and Chen Li has been reading books for many years, and his eyes are damaged. He was 1.5 when he was in graduate school and only a few tenths when he graduated.

In 1988, Dr. Chen Li graduated, he wanted to become a historian, but he was assigned to work in the library of Sichuan University and became a librarian.

17

Chen Li was flipping through ancient books in the dim light of the library when at Wuhan University, a young man in the middle of nowhere was teaching a foreign language.

His name is Zhou Xinping, he graduated from the Department of Foreign Languages of Wuhan University in 1981 with a master's degree in English Chinese And Chinese, and stayed on to teach.

In 1985, Zhou Xinping went to the United States to study. In 1991, he received his Ph.D. in Linguistics and a Master of Library Science and Information Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Compared with Chen Li, Zhou Xinping's professional experience is much more logical. From 1991 to 1995, Zhou Xinping was director of the East Asian Library at the University of Iowa and from 1995 to 2000, he was the director of the East Asian Library at the University of Pittsburgh.

The world is so magical. In 1997, the two librarians met.

18

In 1997, Chen Li, as the director of the library of Sichuan University, received a visiting Zhou Xinping and his party, and the two have known each other ever since.

The two of them also planned to collaborate on an online multilingual dictionary, but due to various conditions, they did not go down.

In 2000, Zhou became Deputy Director of the Library at the University of California, Berkeley and Director of the East Asian Library.

There are many East Asian libraries in the United States, and the East Asian Library at the University of California, Berkeley ranks third, after the Library of Congress and the Harvard Yenching Library.

Chen Li's position has also changed. In February 2001, he became the deputy director of the National Library of China, and in 2015, he was promoted to executive deputy director.

19

At the end of 2017, Gao Xiaosong visited the Yenching Society of Harvard University.

At that time, there was a little noise on the Internet, and Gao Xiaosong posted a microblog in which he was criticized by the good deeds, believing that he was just an ordinary researcher, not a full-time official at Harvard University.

Right or wrong is no longer important. Because Gao Xiaosong did something more meaningful.

20

Witnessing the rich Chinese classics of Harvard University's Yenching Library, Gao Xiaosong had an idea.

At noon one day, he called Hu Xiaoming, president of Alibaba Cloud, and asked if he could provide technical support to digitize the Chinese classics in the Yanjing Library and open them up to more Chinese use.

Hu Xiaoming agreed.

Coincidentally, Hu Xiaoming is a native of Huzhou, Zhejiang. He would not have imagined that this promise would bring the old collection of the Jiayetang Library in his hometown back to China from the distant United States, nearly a hundred years later.

21

Although Alibaba Cloud programmers are well versed in technology, they do not understand ancient scripts and ancient books, so they have to seek academic partners.

The news was learned by Wang Guo, deputy dean of the School of History and Culture at Sichuan University, who informed Chen Li of connecting with Alibaba through various connections.

At this time, Chen Li had been rehired back to Sichuan University. He said: "My main work experience in this life has been spent in the library, in fact, for librarians, the digitization of ancient books has another meaning, it is not only to make it more convenient for readers to use ancient books, there is another meaning, that is, it can better protect ancient books." ”

Digitization of ancient books involves the processing of a large number of Chinese characters. The editor-in-chief of the largest Chinese dictionary in China is Xu Zhongshu. He also presided over the compilation of the Oracle Bone Dictionary and trained a large number of paleographers for Sichuan University.

Although Mr. Xu Zhongshu died in 1991, relying on Chen Li's torch, Sichuan University has enough confidence in the field of ancient book collation.

Alibaba and Sichuan University hit it off, and they named the project: Handian Chongguang.

22

In 2019, Hu Xiaoming stepped down as president of Alibaba Cloud, Zhang Jianfeng took over, and he also served as the president of Dharma Academy.

Dharma Academy, founded in October 2017, has a mission to "explore the position of science and technology, with the human vision as the driving force, to carry out basic science and disruptive technological innovation research." ”

Inside the circle, the unconscious engineers of the Dharma Academy are called "sweeping monks."

Eleven "sweeping monks" participated in the Handian Chongguang Project.

23

Changes are steep.

For various reasons, the Yenching Library of Harvard University, which was originally involved, withdrew from the cooperation.

Chen Li played a key role, using his personal resources to contact Zhou Xinping. Zhou Xinping was very happy, Chen Li and Wang Guo went to Berkeley to communicate face-to-face and reach a consensus.

Zhou Xinping said: "I personally decided to take the best collection of books in our library to participate in the Handian Chongguang Project at the first time. ”

This includes 81 kinds of old collections of Jiayetang.

In 2020, the epidemic raged, and the three parties involved in the Handian Chongguang remote exchange and coordination completed all the work.

In May 2021, the Han Dian Chongguang Platform was officially launched in Beijing and opened to the public, which can be used by all Chinese ancient book researchers and enthusiasts.

24

In the history of Chinese books, there are so-called "five ers" and "ten ers", and in modern times, the burning and looting of Chinese national literature has been even more shocking.

In the yellow sand, the exhausted "Wang Daoist" dazedly witnessed the ancient books of Dunhuang being swept away by the Westerners. Since then, "Dunhuang is in China, and Dunhuang is studying in foreign countries." ”

Chinese, represented by Zheng Zhenduo, fought hard, vowed to continue the cultural context of China, and wrote a "history of cultural resistance" that can be sung and wept.

However, at that time, the national strength was weak, and a large number of Chinese were exiled overseas.

Zheng Zhenduo once sighed in many articles: "After the great catastrophe of private thoughts, the literature is replaced, and if my generation does not pay attention to the visit, there will be a substitute for the conspirator." Shi Ta Bang, Wen returned overseas, strange shame and great humiliation, a hundred worlds of Undiven. ”

Subsequently, there were also groups of people who launched the "rescue plan".

The years are long, the vicissitudes of the mulberry field.

As China's national strength grew stronger, overseas literature gradually returned to China, but the inflow of authentic books was after all a dime a dozen. Digitalization is a good idea. National culture, the hope of return.

The robbery, hardship and light of ancient Chinese books have gone through a cycle in this way.

As Zhou Xinping said: "Today we use digital means to let them return to the original place, that is, Chinese mainland." It's an interesting road map that reflects the fate of wars and nations over the past century, and the new landscape of the world as a whole today. ”

Hats off to all those who have preserved their culture for the country!

Resources

1, "Fu Lanya and China Science Popularization", Liu Gang, China Science News(2012-08-31 A3)

2, "The Spread of Ancient Chinese Books in the World and Its Significance", Liu Yuejin, Phoenix Publishing House, 2011

3, "Preserving Culture for the Country: A Collection of Letters and Diaries of Zheng Zhenduo's Rescue of Rare Documents", Zhonghua Bookstore, 2016 edition

4, "A Treatise on the Visit of Modern Japanese Scholars to China", Qian Wanyue, Zhonghua Bookstore, 2006 edition.

5, "Zheng Zhenduo and Wartime Literature Rescue and Post-War Recourse", Wu Zhen, Literary Review, No. 6, 2018

6, "Zheng Zhenduo and the Protection of Cultural Relics", Journal of Literature and History, No. 6, 2006

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