Bibliophile Yan Yanfeng and his library
Wang Wenchao
Yan Yanfeng, born in 1855, was originally named Yan Zuxin, zi deyu, nicknamed Benyuan resident, a native of Xiaoyi Lane, Weinan County, Qing Dynasty (now Yan Lane, Xiaoyi Town, Linwei District, Weinan City) in the Qing Dynasty.
The Yan family has been in business for generations, and since the time of his great-grandfather, the Yan family has become a famous salt merchant in Sichuan. His grandfather and father consolidated and expanded the scale of their business, and had a great influence in Shuzhong, becoming a prominent salt merchant for a while. The three generations of the Yan family were all named "doctors" for actively giving back to the society and the imperial court.
In 1857, his father, who was an official in Chengdu, sent someone to take Yan Yanfeng and his mother to Sichuan. Unfortunately, he had just turned four years old when his father died of illness. Yan Yanfeng and his family escorted his father's coffin back to his hometown of Weinan again. Unexpectedly, when he was 8 years old, turmoil broke out in the northwest, the safety of people's lives and property was greatly threatened, and the situation in the Weinan area was particularly severe, and Yan Yanfeng and his mother Zeng had to go to the Yanjia Business in Chengdu, Sichuan Province, to escape the war.
The Yan family has always attached great importance to cultural education, so Yan Yanfeng began to receive education very early. Yan Yanfeng read angrily, read through the Thirteen Classics for several years, and was particularly proficient in the "Chinese", "Warring States Policy", "Historical Records", "Book of Han", etc., at the same time, he also dabbled in the "Zizhi Tongjian", "Selected Texts of Zhaoming" and ancient texts of the Tang and Song Dynasties, which can be described as a very extensive knowledge. Yan Yanfeng was successful in his studies, and his life was filled with poetry for pleasure, and he wrote many poems. Before the age of 20, his poems expressed his feelings for entering the world, and his poems were collected into the "Collection of Putsui".
After the age of 20, there are many voices of resistance in his poems. It seems to reflect a certain dissatisfaction with his fate. His poems are collected in the "Crown Collection". In 1877, when there was a severe drought in Guanzhong and a serious famine, he passionately wrote two memorabilia poems, "Former Lamentation Guanzuo" and "Later Lamenting Guanzuo", in which "it was difficult to lash out at Kowloon, and there was no spike in the fire in Guanlong", and "Hundreds of millions of people screamed in autumn and winter, and bit yizi to weep and feed each other", which truly reflected the disaster situation and the scene of refugees at that time. Since then, he has completed the collection of poems "The Return of Taihua", which contains a total of 108 poems. In the poem, he criticized historical figures such as Qin Shi Huang and Liu Bang, and he admired Zhuge Liang, who was good at scheming. He believes that the absence of talent is the root cause of various social ills.
After that, he went to Chengdu Zunjing Academy to study. At that time, the head of the Zunjing Academy (the headmaster) was the famous literary scholar Wang Renqiu. At the Zunjing Academy, he met Yang Rui, one of the six gentlemen of Wushu, Liao Jiping, a scholar, and Song Yuren, the first reporter in Shuzhong. Under Wang Renqiu's teaching, Yan Yanfeng's ideological realm was further enhanced.
Like all readers, he embarked on the road of scientific expeditions. However, since he was admitted to Xiucai, he has failed in the three subsequent township examinations. The failure of three scientific expeditions changed his thinking a lot. From then on, he abandoned the scientific expedition road, abandoned the Eight Strands of Literature, began to search for different books, and engraved the writings of the ancients to pass the time. He drank and chanted with his friends every day. He also crisscrossed the north and south, climbed Mount Tai, lined the East China Sea, crossed the Huai River, crossed the Hangou Valley, watched the Tide of the Qiantang River, and viewed the ruins of Jinling, which lasted for two years, and while appreciating the rivers and mountains of the motherland, he got to know many social celebrities.
In 1894, Yan Yanfeng's mother did not want him to live a life of mediocrity, so she donated funds to find an opportunity for Yan Yanfeng, who was already 39 years old, to make a county. So he went to Beijing to wait for him to see the official. At this time, in the midst of the Sino-Japanese War, he witnessed the magnates fainting and could not save the crisis, so he gave up his career and returned to Sichuan without being introduced. Then there was a coup d'état, and his classmate Yang Rui and friend Liu Guangdi were martyred, so he did not speak about the current politics and closed the door to thank guests.
After the death of his mother Zeng, Yan Yanfeng began to take care of housekeeping and business. He reorganized his ancestral business legacy, so that the family business became prosperous. With the support of abundant funds, he spent huge sums of money to collect more than 50,000 volumes of fine books at home and abroad, and built a "Benyuan Library" to collect. Since then, he has successively acquired books and added to the library. According to Zhang Senkai's "Catalogue of the Benyuan Library", his collection of books amounts to 45,982 volumes. In terms of the style of the collection, the divisions, classes, species, homes, volumes, and volumes are not mixed and not crossed, and the silk is not chaotic. Some of his collections are more than the four libraries. Among them, the Mencius bibliography is more than 3 times more than the bibliography of the Four Libraries. The seasonal bibliography is 26 more than the four libraries. His collection of history and medical books is the richest. At that time, the famous doctor Jiping said: "In the medical department, it is particularly detailed, and all the books in Japan, such as the Tanbatsu Shudo series, the Northern Song Dynasty's "General Records of The Holy Ji" and the Ming Dynasty's "The True Pulse of Medical System", are all rare books. Yan Yanfeng also "read orally wrote the Ten Giants of Medicine." He not only collected medical books, but also "aimed at medical treatment, refuting the chaotic ancient methods of the Difficult Classics." ”
He searched for a large number of ancient books, and in order to facilitate the preservation of these rare books, he spent a lot of money to build a library building, named the Benyuan Library. Benyuan Library is a stone library-like building, about 20 meters long and about 10 meters wide, the style of the whole building is a combination of Chinese and Western, and the atmosphere is thick. The gate in the middle of the library is a full moon-shaped doorway with stretched vines wrapped around it. The second floor is a small balcony featuring Western-style architecture, with a plaque at the top and the word "library" inscribed with a book. The walls of the Benyuan Library are about half a meter thick, and there are waist eaves under the eaves. There are small and exquisite square windows around the library, all windows are equipped with water barriers, and there are air windows on the second floor windows to prevent moisture and sunscreen, which shows the good intentions of the designers. When the Benyuan Library was completed, he also asked the teacher Mr. Wang Renqiu to write a couplet: Tianjue self-respect, not official and noble; different books are full of rooms, and its wealth is Mojing. When Mr. Wang Renqiu left Chengdu, thousands of students and local officials, scholars, and celebrities from Chengdu sent them to the East Gate, and Mr. Wang took out a manuscript of the Xiangjun Chronicle and the volume of The Words of the Yuanmingyuan and presented it to Yan Yanfeng, two orphan books that he treasured in his Benyuan Library.
Ben Garden Library
It is worth mentioning that the library also employs several book turners for many years, sitting in the library, turning books full-time all year round to avoid insect moths, water, moisture infiltration, and even in each book, it is necessary to clip moisture-proof special paper. Whenever the weather is sunny, many ancient books are also moved to the courtyard for ventilation and drying, in order to reduce the humidity of the paper. In order to avoid mistakes, these book turners are illiterate.
Yan Yanfeng also opened a traditional Chinese medicine shop to practice medicine and deliver medicine to patients who had difficulties, and did not receive any money. In his later years, he actively prepared to return to his hometown of Weinan Xingxue to build a shrine, and compiled the Weinan Yan clan Xiaoyi Family Academy series of books engraved and printed. But at the beginning of his career, in 1918, Yan Yanfeng, who was only 63 years old, died suddenly. After Yan Yanfeng's death, his son Yan Shijie compiled his posthumous works into the "Poetry notes of the Ben garden". Many scholars praised Yan Yanfeng as "the first poet in the Qin Dynasty in the past hundred years".
After that, his son Yan Shijie inherited his father's business and continued to enrich the collection, and by 1949, the collection of books in the garden reached more than 300,000 volumes. Among them, there are more than 50,000 rare books, more than 30,000 pieces of self-carved books and wooden boards, the most complete collection of Fang Zhi in more than 2,800 counties in the country, and there are many secret books in ancient Chinese medicine books, ranking the top of the domestic private collection at that time, and the scale of the collection is the first in the west, which is comparable to the Tianyi Pavilion Library in Ningbo, Zhejiang. It was more than three times larger than during the Yanyan Peak period. There were a small number of Surviving Chinese classics in the library, including the classics, histories, zi, collections, and treasury editions, and even rare books (including orphan books and manuscripts), such as the Song editions of Huainanzi, Yanzi Chunqiu, Mengxi Pen Talks, Chunhua Pavilion Double Hook Character Posters, Gu Yanwu's manuscripts, Zeng Guofan's correspondence, celebrity calligraphy and paintings, and maps of mountains and rivers used by soldiers in previous dynasties, etc., and the ancient books in the collection are more than 100,000 volumes perennial.
The Yan family's Benyuan Library opens the door for scholars to open the door to zhixue. Liao Jipingzhi studied the classics, Zhang Senkai studied the "History of History", Lin Si continued to study the "Huayang Guozhi", and Xiang Xianqiao wrote the "Sichuan Tongzhi", all of whom borrowed books and read books here. On the eve of the liberation of Sichuan in 1949, the Yenching Society of Harvard University in the United States, through Zhang Linggao, president of West University, wanted to buy the local history hidden by Yan Shi at a high price, but Yan Shizhi was not blinded by generous profits and refused to sell. The leaders of the Communist Party of China, through Shao Lizi and others, paid tribute to him and urged him to protect the collection and its cultural relics.
Yan Shizhi is enthusiastic about receiving friends from the same village. The famous painter Zhang Daqian, the Kuomintang elder Yu Youren and others all lived in Chengdu Yan's family. In 1942, Yu Youren resigned as president of the Control Yuan of the Nationalist Government because of his dissatisfaction with Chiang Kai-shek, and left Chongqing to move to the Yan family. Later, Qu Wu reported the situation to Zhou Enlai, who asked Qu Wu to go to Chengdu Yan's house to accompany Yu Youren.
In 1950, Yan Shijie donated the Library building and all the books in the Benyuan Library to the state. Later, the Benyuan Library was set aside as the Sichuan Provincial Rare Book Library, which still functions as a library dormitory.