Complete Classics Collection of Ancient China in the context of "Chen Menglei"

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⭐ Core Definition: Complete Classics Collection of Ancient China

The Complete Classics Collection of Ancient China (or the Gujin Tushu Jicheng) is a vast encyclopedic work written in China during the reigns of the Qing dynasty emperors Kangxi and Yongzheng. It was begun in 1700 and completed in 1725. The work was headed and compiled mainly by scholar Chen Menglei (陳夢雷). Later on the Chinese painter Jiang Tingxi helped work on it as well.

The encyclopaedia contained 10,000 volumes. Sixty-four imprints were made of the first edition, known as the Wu-ying Hall edition. The encyclopaedia consisted of 6 series, 32 divisions, and 6,117 sections. It contained 800,000 pages and over 100 million Chinese characters, making it the largest leishu ever printed. Topics covered included natural phenomena, geography, history, literature and government. The work was printed in 1726 using copper movable type printing. It spanned around 10 thousand rolls (). To illustrate the huge size of the Complete Classics Collection of Ancient China, it is estimated to have contained 3 to 4 times the amount of material in the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition.

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Complete Classics Collection of Ancient China in the context of Leishu

The leishu (traditional Chinese: 類書; simplified Chinese: 类书; lit. 'category books') is a genre of reference books historically compiled in China and other East Asian countries. The term is generally translated as "encyclopedia", although the leishu are quite different from the modern notion of encyclopedia.

The leishu are composed of sometimes lengthy citations from other works, and often contain copies of entire works, not just excerpts. The works are classified by a systematic set of categories, which are further divided into subcategories. Leishu may be considered anthologies, but are encyclopedic in the sense that they may comprise the entire realm of knowledge at the time of compilation.

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