The destruction of cultural
treasures has attracted the fascination of scholars for centuries and no more
than in modern times. Since before Alexandria, the effects of natural and human
disasters on books and libraries have received attention in lamentation, if not
in description and explanation. In instances of expropriation and theft,
cultural treasures may sometimes be returned to their pla ce of ownership; in
cases of loss to fire, flood, and other elements, there is little to be done.i
Individual incidents may include both kinds of threats. In the post-colonial
and post-Cold War era of the past quarter-century delicate questions about
cultural artifacts and books have been raised and addressed, sometimes for the
first time in a serious manner.
The destruction and dispersal of
the bibliographic contents of the Hanlin Yuan (or Hanlin Academy, imperial
center for scholarly studies) in Peking in 1900 is one such event that has
stirred the curiosity of some library historians. The 1996 IFLA Conference in Beijing
would seem to be a memorable opportunity to open and discuss the matter. Thus,
this paper seeks to outline the historical conte xt of the event, review the
actions leading to actual destruction, describe the significance of the
collection concerned, assess the extent and consequences of the loss, and in
conclusion, place the event in modern library history.
The siege of the Allied Legations
by the Boxers, known in China as the Yihetuan Movement, in the summer of 1900
was not an isolated series of events. It must be seen as one expression of
mounting tension between the Chinese people and government and the Western
powers with their commercial, military, and religious aspirations. Because the
siege involved diplomatic missions of European nations, the United States, and
Japan, it attracted worldwide attention in a way that previous incidents had
not. For the Chinese, however, the two-month episode was, in the words of one
historian, "of trivial significance," because it was eclipsed by the
aftermath of humiliating concessions and crushing reparations.ii
Nineteenth-Century China witnessed
a recurring cycle of "fragmentation and reform" as the Great Britain
and other powers resisted efforts of the Chinese to curb the opium trade,
commercial exploitation, and missionary activity.iii Far too complex to detail
here, one can recall the Opium Wars of 1839-1842 and 1857-1858 in the
southeast, the Taiping Movement of 1851-1866 in the central region and centered
in Nanjing, the Muslim Revolts of 1855-1873 in the northwest and southwest,
along with the loss of satellite states. All contributed to the effort to
strengthen the imperial government through military preparedness and limited
reforms. This program suffered setbacks later in the century in disastrous wars
with France (1880s) and Japan (1894-1895), as well as ominous threats from
Russia.
The carving up of the periphery of
the Chinese empire, and the Yangzi River with treaty ports and concession
regions brought both some adaptation of Western administrative practices and
much antipathy to reflective Chinese citizens. A brief attempt at reform by
Emperor Guangxu under the leadership of Kang Youwei in the summer of 1898 was
stifled by the empress dowager Cixi who had in effect rul ed China for the Qing
dynasty since the 1860s. The cumulative frustrations of all these factors
seemed set to break out again.
Shandong province that had seen
perhaps the greatest degree of recent encroachment by Western powers was the
source a revived popular movement against foreigners in general, missionaries
in particular, and most of all Chinese who had adopted Christianity. Beginning
in 1898--the "Fists United in Righteousness," as they called
themselves, or "Boxers," as they were known in the West--drew upon
secret-society and magical rites, reminiscent of the Small Sword Society, Red
Lantern groups, and the White Lotus sect of earlier times. Claiming to be
invulnerable to bullets and swords and believing in folk mythologies that
involved religion and street rituals, the Boxers called for the revocation of
special considerations enjoyed by Chinese and European Christians and by 1899
had begun to destroy property and kill converts as well as foreigners in
Shandong and Hebei provinces.iv At the same time a massive Yellow River flood
seemed to call for desperate measures against nature and the foreigners.
The Western powers were shocked by
Boxer Uprising but saw in the crisis an opportunity to extend their influence
and ensure their security. Thus, they looked to the Qing Government to employ
serious strategies to quell the Yihetuan Movement, on the one hand, while at
the same time through negotiation (28-20 May) they prepared their own forces to
take action. On 31 May more than 400 men of the Allied forces entered Beijing
to "protect the Legations."v Shortly thereafter the Boxers entered
the capital, preceded by scores of Western missionaries and thousands of
Chinese converts. On 10 June the Allied force--consisting of 2,064 men representing
Austria-Hungary, France, Great Britain, Germany, Italy, Japan, and the United
States of America under the leadership of British Admir al Seymour--landed at
Dagu, Tianjin. The next day the Boxers killed a Japanese diplomat; and the
following day the Allied force took the forts at Dagu that guarded the entrance
to Tianjin, the lifeline and railhead to Beijing. On 20 June a German minister
was killed on his way to the the ZongliYamen [Office for the Management of
Business of All Foreign Countries--or Foreign Commerce Office] in the the
capital. The next day the Qing Government felt compelled to declare war on the
Allied forces and ordered the imperial Qing soldiers and the Boxers, some
200,000 strong, to lay siege to the Legation Quarter, defended by about 450 guards.
The siege would last until relief from an expeditionary force that entered the
capital on 14 August.vi
The Siege of Peking--called by one
historian, "the episode best remembered abroad" of the Boxer
Uprising--was a dramatic event that captured worldwide attention that minor
incidents did not.vii It is not within the scope of this paper to
recount the actual siege, its lifting, or its aftermath--exciting though it may
be. Once the attacks began in earnest with the encouragement o f the Empress
Dowager, the Allied hostages and their Christian Chinese converts, prepared for
a siege of unknown duration, by consolidating their small area of control and
fortification by withdrawing from the exposed extremities and resettling nearly
3,000 people into the remaining quarters.
Not long after the first assault
when Sir Claude MacDonald emerged as commander-in-chief, on Saturday, 23 June,
the Chinese tested the perimeter of the western side of the enclave by burning
an area of native dwellings south of the British Legation. Fire became a new
frightening tactic. To the north of the Legation was situated the Hanlin Yuan,
a complex of courtyards and buildings that housed "the quintessence of
Chinese scholarship . . . the oldest and richest library in the
world."viii A late morning fire there was quelled and the compound cleared
of Chinese troops.ix The British became worried that the incendiary intentions
of the attackers might include this vulnerable site, the buildings at some point
being only an arm's length from the British building walls. On th e other hand
the Allies, knowing of the Chinese veneration for their cultural heritage, felt
that they would face no destructive threat from that direction.x
Yet, on Sunday, 24 June, when the
winds shifted to come strongly from the north, the unanticipated happened: the
buildings of Hanlin, and the Library that abutted the British building, began
burning on a bigger scale than that of the previous day. As Fleming summarizes
contemporary descriptions, "The old buildings burned like tinder with a
roar which drowned the steady rattle of musketry as Tung Fu-shiang's Moslems
fired wildly through the smoke from upper windows." Through a hole in
their own wall that was near one of the Hanlin cloisters, the British Royal
Marines hastened through the breach, followed by a motley crew of others who
formed a human bucket brigade. To quote Flemming again,
Some of the incendiaries were shot down, but the buildings
were an inferno and the old trees standing round them blazed like torches. It
seemed as if nothing could save the British Legation, on whose security the
whole defence depended. But at the last minute the wind veered to the
north-west and the worst of the danger was over.
The fire-fighters had already demolished the nearest of
Hanlin halls. The next one was the library.
An eyewitness, Lancelot Giles, son
of Herbert A. Giles, described the situation as follows: "An attempt was
made to save the famous Yung Lo Ta Tien [now spelled Yong Lo Da Dia], but heaps
of volumes had been destroyed, so the attempt was given up. I secured vol.
[section] 13,345 for myself."xi
The Chinese have suggested that
the British destroyed the library as a defensive measure; however, the British
account, noting the direction of the wind, have maintained that the
"Chinese set fire to the Hanlin, working systematically from one courtyard
to the next." Important as this issue is, it is eclipsed by the
significance of the Hanlin library itself and of its destruction to f ire and
booty collectors.
The exact contents of the Hanlin
Library is not known with certainty. No record of its collections survives.
What is known is that the materials housed in it were irreplaceable. Among the
collections was the noted encyclopedic collection of volumes, Yong Lo Da Dia,
commissioned by the Ming Dynasty's emperor in the early Fifteenth Century, and
the original texts of Siku Quan Shu, the Four Treas ure Library, to be
discussed below.xii One of the largest works of its kind ever produced,
the first encyclopedia was compiled between 1403 and 1407 by the Yung Lo
Emperor, Chu Ti (1403-1424), and consisted of 22,937 sections (or chuan) of
which sixty were the table of contents. Altogether the 22,937 sections (chuan)
or works in 11,095 handwritten folio volumes contained more than 370 m illion
words--or twelve times Diderot's famous encyclopedia of the Eighteenth Century.xiii
After a bloody accession and at
the suggestion of chancellor Hsieh Chin, the Emperor, a patron of literature,
authorized and implemented the collection and copying of the literary treasures
of China's past and gave his chancellor the task of oversight. Headquartered in
the imperial library at Nanjing, more than two thousand scholars and many
imperial officials participated in the compilation wo rk and some of them
scoured the countryside for texts that the had not been seen in the imperial
library nor replicated since the ancient times; ultimately some eight thousand
books from the ancient times through the early Ming Dynasties were included in
the vast compilation. They covered an array of subjects, including agriculture,
art, astronomy, drama, geology, history, literature, medicine, natural
sciences, religion, and, technology, as well as descriptions of unusual natural
events.
Because of the cost of woodblock
cutting, the encyclopedia was never printed, but existed in a single manuscript
copy in Nanjing and then moved with the capital to Beijing in 1421 and housed
in the emperor's palace in the Forbidden City. After being threatened in a fire
in 1557, a second set was produced in the 1560s and housed in the Huang Shi
Chen (the imperial Archive), and then moved to the Hanlin Library during the
period of the Emperor Yong Zheng (1723-1736). The original texts of Yong Lo Da
Dia in Nanjing possibly perished by fire in 1449, and the first manuscript copy
possibly perished in the collapse of the Ming Dynasty.xiv The remaining copy
was than housed in the Hanlin Yuan where, although venerated by scholars and
emperors, it was gradually diminished through a variety o f circumstances. Some
items were subject to theft by collectors or speculators seeking precious items
to keep or sell. Other items were lost to poor preservation and fell prey to
environmental conditions, insects, and rodents. Warfare and fire accounted for
another segment of the collection. Some calculations suggest that of the 11,095
volumes existing in 1407, only about 800 remained in 1900 --the greatest number
of losses occurring in the late Nineteenth Century.
During and after the several hours
in which the Hanlin library burned and smoldered, the British and other
Legation personnel entered the library and rescued or simply removed some of
the volumes that were left intact. Fleming relates:
A few undamaged books and
manuscripts were salvaged more or less at random by sinologues. Some of the
hand-carved wooden blocks on which works of great antiquity were preserved
found their way into the British Legation; they were used by the Marines for
shuttering up loopholes and by the children, among whom "Boxers" was
now the only fashionable game, for constructing miniature barri cades.
Otherwise, the Hanlin and its treasures, laboriously
accumulated down the centuries, perished in a few hours. Vandalism so wanton
and so decisive would have been hard to forgive if it had ben committed in a
conquered city as an act of retribution. History affords no comparable example of
cultural felo de se.xv
No doubt during the remainder of
the siege, as destruction of intervening buildings drew the lines drew closer,
both Chinese and Allied fighters obtained additional artifacts as souvenirs.xvi
A later series of classic books,
the Siku Quan Shu (the Four Treasure Library) was completed in 1782 during the
Qing (Manchu) Dynasty. It consisted of some 3,500 selected titles in 36,000
manuscript volumes and included 385 books drawn from the Yong Lo Da Dia.xvii
Several copies of this set have survived. But the bulk of the Fifteenth-Century
collection and thee original texts of Siku Quan Sh u were irretrievably lost.
In the waning years of the Qing
Dynasty established a national library that developed further with the coming
of the Republic in 1912. That institution, known by various names, initiated an
effort to recover as many volumes from the collection as possible. Throughout
this century, more than 370 volumes, or about 810 sections (chuan) were
accounted for in China and elsewhere. In the early 1950 s the Soviet Union
returned 64 volumes from various repositories; East Germany returned three
volumes in 1955. By 1959 the Peking Library possessed 216 volumes. There are
currently 41 volumes in the United States at the Library of Congress. Chinese
authorities have photocopied all known exemplars of the collection that were
not in China, Two projects have begun publishing the extant works. Z hong Hua
Shu Ju (Chinese Press) has published 797 sections (chuan) since 1959; the
Taiwanese published 742 sections (chuan) of the collection in 100 volumes in
1962.xviii How many more volumes from this unique collection exist in European
and Japanese research libraries or are in private hands is a matter of
speculation. How many souvenir volumes, carried home by persons in the Allied
Legation s in 1900 and hidden away in attic trunks, is unknown. Some could yet
appear.
The destruction of what remained
of the Hanlin library in 1900 through fire and pillage is more than just an
interesting story. It has symbolic significance. First, it portrays the fragile
nature of a civilization's written heritage. Vast compilations seem to devalue
the originals on which they were based; that is, what was not chosen to be
copied and passed on was most often lost. Second, in the case of China, it
illustrates the threat of a modernity that causes antiquarian interests to
suffer when practical relevance is unknown or at least unclear; that is, when a
society seems to be moving ahead to a new era, the artifactual legacies of the
ancient or even recent past seem of little interest except as curiosities.
Third, in times of national upheaval, such as the Boxer Uprising, cultural
treasures can fall prey to popular mass movements that do not appreciate them
and even view their destruction as a positive thing; that is, unlettered groups
destroy or allow to be destroyed, books that represent to them the
accoutrements of oppression. Finally, this event, albeit a minor episode in
national and world history for many, contains in microcosm the elements of the
conflict of national cultures and the industrial powers of Nineteenth Century;
that is, indigenous culture tends to suffer for a variety of reasons when other
interests with greater power seriously threaten it.
In summary, this episode
illustrates one of the results of a great nation's disintegrating cultural
structure--a system that had governed it for centuries--that encountered the
modern world. It contains all the explosive drama of the East-West encounter;
elements of commercial exploitation, missionary zeal, and diplomatic interests;
and military history combined with the emergence of new techno logies. In
short, the loss of the Hanlin library symbolizes more than can be suggested in
this short paper.
i. Jeannette Greenfield, The Return of Cultural Treasures
(Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
ii. Henry McAleavy, The Modern
History of China (New York: Praeger, 1967), p. 166. Chapter 11 concerns
"The Boxer Rising." A contemporary, historical perspective is the
chronological treatment of Edwin Emerson, Jr., A History of The Nineteenth
Century Year by Year, 3 vols. (New York: P.F. Collier and Son, 1901), vol. 3,
pp. 1882-1895.
iii. Jonathan D. Spence, The
Search for Modern China (New York: W.W. Norton, 1990) provides thorough current
treatment and perspective of this period in Section II, "Fragmentation and
Reform," pp. 137-268. This supplements earlier standard works, such as
Immanuel C. Y. Hsu, The Rise of Modern China, 2d ed. (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1975), Part III, "Self-Strengthening in an Age of A
ccelerated Foreign Imperialism, 1861-95," and Part IV, "Reform and
Revolution, 1898-1912."
iv. The standard treatments of the
subject in English are Joseph Esherick, The Origins of the Boxer Uprising
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987); Victor Purcell, The Boxer
Uprising: A Background Study (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963); and
Chester C. Tan, The Boxer Catastrophe (New York: W. W. Norton, 1955). A source from
contemporary Chinese sources is The Boxer Ri sing: A History of the Boxer
Trouble in China, "Reprinted from the 'Shanghai Mercury,'" (New York:
Paragon Book Reprint Corp., 1967) in which there is a reference to official
engagement in "plunder and incendiarism" that included the Hanlin (p.
51). Chinese treatments include the Historical Society of China, The Yihetuan
[Movement], 4 vols. (Shanghai: Shanghai People Press, 1957); Ming and Ch ing
Archive, The Archival Data of Yihetuan, 2 vols. (Beijing: Chinese Press, 1959)
with Supplement, 2 vols. (1990); and The Historical Data of the Yihetuan,
edited by the Institute for the History in the Modern Times, the Social Science
Academy of China (Beijing: China Social Science Press, 1982).
v. The eleven legations included
those of Austria-Hungary, Belgium, Great Britain, France, Germany, Italy,
Japan, The Netherlands, Russia, Spain, and the United States of America.
vi. Yuan Yishu, A New Compilation
of the History of China in the Modern Times, 3 vols. ((Beijing: People Press,
1986), vol. 2, pp. 638-655.
vii. Although commercial and
missionary enterprises and their personnel had been in serious risk for some
time, the danger of the diplomatic community brought the focus of the emerging
global press. Though many participants wrote their memoirs of the event,
perhaps the most engaging single volume in English is Peter Fleming, The Siege
at Peking (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1959), reissued with introduction by
David Bonavia (Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 1983) and in several
printings since that time. It is the major English account used in this paper.
viii. Fleming, Siege, pp. 121-122.
Unless otherwise noted, the direct quotations describing the Hanlin Yuan
destruction come from this source. ix. Lancelot Giles, The Siege of the Peking
Legations: A Diary (Nedlands, Aust.: University of Western Australia Press,
1970), pp. 125-127. This authentic account is one of the best British
first-person narratives. Another informative narrative in the form of letters
is B. L. Putnam Weale [pseudonym for Bertram Lenox Simpson], Indiscreet Letters
from Peking: Being the Notes of an Eye-Witness . . . 1900, the Great Year of
Tribulation (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1907, pp. 136-143, pt. 2, chapt. 3,
"Fires and Food;" a Chinese translation of part 2 by Chen Yi Xiang
and Chen Li Tai appears in The Yihetuan [Movement], vol. 2, pp. 199-394, and an
ed ition published by Taibei: Wen Hai Publishing Company, 1970.
x. Richard O'Connor, The Spirit
Soldiers: A Historical Narrative of the Boxer Rebellion (New York: G.P.
Putnam's Sons, 1973), p. 134, emphasizes the incredulity that the Chinese would
allow "use the Hanlin Library--which was not only a library but the
premier academy of the empire, the Chinese Oxford/Heidelberg/ Sorbonne--as an
instrument of military operations." The point is supported by Hen ry
Keown-Boyd, The Fists of Righteous Harmony: A History of the Boxer Uprising in
China in the Year 1900 (London: Lee Cooper, 1991), p.106-107.
xi. Herbert A. Giles, History of
Chinese Literature (New York: Appleton-Century Company. 1937), p. XX. Giles, L.
Siege, between pp. 128-129, has some of the few contemporary, printed
photographs of the Hanlin building exteriors and a interior shot of the
library.
xii. Brief mentions occur in
survey articles by K. T. Wu, "China, Libraries in the People's Republic
of," in Encyclopedia of Library and Information Science 4: (1974): 630;
and Sharon Seymour, "China, People's Republic of," in Encyclopedia of
Library History (New York: Garland Publishing, 1994), p. 134. I am indebted to
a research paper by Hua Li, "The Story of Yung Lo Ta Tien," prepared
for a graduate seminar, Library and Information Science Since 1500, GSLIS,
University of Texas at Austin, Spring 1989, which is the source of otherwise
undocumented information. See also Huang Aiping, A Study on the Compilation of
Siku Quan Shu (Beijing: Chinese People University Press, 1989), pp. 280-282.
xiii. Zhang Chensi, A History of
the Yong Lo Da Dia [Yung Lo Ta Tien] (Beijing: Chinese Press, 1986), pp. 3-4.
xiv. Zhang Chensi, Yong Lo Da Dia,
pp. 12-13.xv. Fleming, Siege, pp. 122-123.
xvi. O'Connor, Spirit Soldiers, p.
135, relates the eyewitness account of Bertram Simpson, whose colleagues
apparently did not appreciate his candor. Simpson describes an occasional
"sinologue" who would select an armful of rarities and dash back
through the flames only to be met by marines "with stern order to stop
such literary looting." However, he thought that some copies must have
found t heir way out of the library and "may be someday resurrected in
strange lands."
xvii. These included 66 from the
Confucian canon, 41 of history, 103 of philosophy, and 175 of poetry, according
to Hua Li.
xviii. The University of Texas at
Austin, among many other research libraries, has a copy of this set.