Taiping yulan

Excerpt from an edition of the Taiping yulan from the Qing Dynasty .

Taiping yulan ( Chinese  太平御覽  /  太平御览 , Pinyin taiping yùlǎn , Jyutping Taai ³ ping ⁴ jyu ⁶ laam ⁵  - "Imperial reading the reign taiping") is the title of an under the direction of the learned in the Chinese Imperial College and Finance Li Fang (李 昉, 925–996) compiled leishu , a multi-volume compendium from the Song dynasty comparable to a Western encyclopedia . The compilation contains excerpts from many older sources that are important for Chinese cultural history and reflect the stock of knowledge that a civil scholar of the Song era could fall back on. Its 4,558 lemmas are divided into 55 sections in 1,000 volumes.

History of origin

The history of the origins of Taiping yulan is passed down by the compiler Wang Yinglin (王 應 麟, 1223–1296) in his leishu with the title Yu Hai ( 玉海  - "Jade Sea or Sea of ​​Precious Stones"). Wang Yinglin had excerpted the statutes of the Song Dynasty in his compendium and also adopted the report on the origin of the Taiping yulan .

The Taiping yulan originated in the reign of the second ruler of the Song dynasty Zhao Guangyi (趙光義, 939–997), who became known under his temple name Taizong , from 976 to 997 . In the first year of his reign, Taizong proclaimed the term of office called taiping xingguo ( time of great peace and prosperity in the country ) and only one year later appointed a fourteen-member commission headed by Li Fang to create two leishu . For the later Taiping yulan , Taizong specified a volume of exactly 1,000 partial volumes. Today's research interprets the requirement to compile a work with a size that was fabulous for the time as "a clear sign that the taizong emperor was interested in a demonstration of his power or a legitimation of his rule." (Winter )

As early as 983, the compilation teams supervised by Li Fang and his co-editors delivered the finished work to the court. Wang Yinglin tells the story that the emperor wanted to read the Taiping yulan himself over the course of a year and therefore made it his task to master three volumes every day.

Organization of the content

In contrast to today's Chinese dictionaries, the Taiping yulan lemmas are organized according to content rather than graphic aspects. Winter summarizes this principle , which was used for most of the leishu , as follows: “The things described are based on basic units, and become increasingly more finely branched, according to the conception of their position in the cosmos.” The idea of ​​a naturally given order of the Things are thus represented in the chapters and sub-chapters of the leishu . Accordingly, the contents of Taiping yulan are divided into the three spheres of heaven ( yang principle), earth ( yin principle) and the human world between the two. Special rules apply within this order: for example, what is morally superior comes before what is morally inferior, and action that is positively valued comes before what is negatively valued.

The 4,558 lemmas organized in a total of 55 departments ( lei ) of Taiping yulan are distributed numerically as follows after winter:

Department	content	Lemmas
1.	sky	39
2.	Year sign and calendar	39
3.	earth	155
4th	Emperors and kings	223
5.	Unjust and tyrannical rulers	107
6th	Imperial relatives	257
7th	Provinces and Prefectures	20th
8th.	Human abodes and elements thereof	96
9.	feudalism	29
10.	Official title	414
11.	Military	171
12.	Human	234
13.	Hermits and Hermits	2
14th	Degrees of relationship	25th
15th	Ritual	82
16.	music	35
17th	literature	64
18th	learning	28
19th	political order	10
20th	Penalties and Laws	46
21st	Buddhism	10
22nd	Daoism	53
23.	Official seals and insignia	20th
24.	Formal headgear and clothing	79
25th	Clothing and utensils	81
26th	Forecasting, fortune telling and healing arts	25th
27.	Diseases and epidemics	57
28.	Artistry	35
29	Vessels, containers, tools	106
30th	Different products	23
31.	Watercraft and their elements	27
32.	Land vehicles and their elements	50
33.	Embassies	1
34.	The four foreign peoples	390
35.	Valuable	44
36.	Fabrics	34
37.	Agriculture	94
38.	Field crops	15th
39.	to eat and drink	63
40.	Fire	8th
41.	Auspicious Omina	16
42.	Unlucky grandmas	83
43.	Ghosts and ghosts	2
44.	Supernatural	5
45.	Earthbound wildlife	122
46.	Feathered animals	118
47.	Scaly animals	207
48.	Insects, spiders and reptiles	82
49.	Tree-like plants	127
50.	Bamboo-like plants	40
51.	Fruit-bearing plants	76
52.	Plants used in the kitchen	37
53.	Plants used as incense	42
54.	Medicinal plants	203
55.	Grassy plants	107

Lore history

After its completion, the Taiping yulan was initially forgotten for a long time. Winter explains this by the fact that "Wang Yinglin's Yu Hai gave the work a qualitatively superior competition." A new edition did not take place until the Qing Dynasty , when interest in ancient texts increased again. The work became known in the West when the Austrian orientalist August Pfizmaier (1808–1897) translated selected chapters of Taiping yulan in whole or in part between 1867 and 1875 . In 1934 the renowned Harvard-Yenching Institute published a detailed index on the work. Most recently, in 1960, the Chinese publishing house Zhonghua shuju in Beijing published a reproduction of a print from the Song era.

Remarks

1. ↑ Winter, Encyclopedias in the Chinese Cultural Area , p. 22.
2. ↑ Winter, Encyclopedias in the Chinese Cultural Area , p. 16.
3. ↑ Winter, Encyclopedias in the Chinese Cultural Area , pp. 17–20.
4. ↑ Winter, Encyclopedias in the Chinese Cultural Area , p. 24.

literature

• Marc Winter: Encyclopedias in the Chinese cultural area - the leishu. Gigantism and materially manifested claim to power in the Chinese tradition , in: Paul Michel / Madeleine Herren (eds.), General Knowledge and Society. Files from the international congress on knowledge transfer and encyclopedic classification systems, from September 18 to 21, 2003 in Prangins, available online as a PDF file.
• Johannes L. Kurz: The Compilation Project Song Taizongs (reg. 976–997) , Bern 2003.
• Johannes L. Kurz: The Compilation and Publication of the Taiping yulan and the Cefu yuangui , in Florence Bretelle-Establet and Karine Chemla (eds.), Qu'est-ce qu'écrire une encyclopédie en Chine ?. Extreme Orient-Extreme Occident Hors série (2007), 39-76. (on-line version)
• Herbert Franke: Chinese Encyclopedias , in: Günther Debon / Wolfgang Bauer (eds.), Ostasiatische Literaturen, Wiesbaden 1984, pp. 91–98.
• John Winthrop Haeger: The Significance of Confusion: The Origins of the T'ai-p'ing yü-lan , in: Journal of the American Oriental Society 88.1 (1968), pp. 401-410.