Late Qing Encyclopaedias: Establishing a New Enterprise

Abstract

From the 1810s on, a variety of new instruments in media and communications began to appear in regions surrounding southern and south-eastern China, including pamphlets, books, monthly periodicals, and commercial periodicals. Up until 1895, media and communications institutions such as printing houses, new-style schools, and translation bureaus sprang up on the coasts of China and spread inward from the edges to the center, from south to north, from the concessions to the interior. As Li Renyuan 李仁淵 has argued, however, during these eight decades, even though many Chinese people came in contact with these new modes of communication and used them to gain a new understanding of Western technology, thought, and religion, these cultural flows did not make a deep impression on the core elements of the Chinese empire. Well within the bounds of their social class, the gentry simply ignored many of these new things. A fundamental change occurred after 1895, when “Western learning,” xixue 西學, became an essential new discourse among learned people. As new-style newspapers and schools sprouted up in many parts of the country, events such as the founding of the Self-Strengthening Society, Qiangxue hui 強學會, meant that new-style publications, once marginalized, had moved from cosmopolitan cities such as Shanghai and Hong Kong to the political center in Beijing, gaining the support of important government officials and functionaries.

Li Hsiao-t’i is grateful to Milena Doleželová-Velingerová and Rudolf Wagner for carefully reading through the paper and offering many valuable suggestions.

These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

A New Format for Knowledge

From the 1810s on, a variety of new instruments in media and communications began to appear in regions surrounding southern and south-eastern China, including pamphlets, books, monthly periodicals, and commercial periodicals. Up until 1895, media and communications institutions such as printing houses, new-style schools, and translation bureaus sprang up on the coasts of China and spread inward from the edges to the center, from south to north, from the concessions to the interior.¹ As Li Renyuan 李仁淵 has argued, however, during these eight decades, even though many Chinese people came in contact with these new modes of communication and used them to gain a new understanding of Western technology, thought, and religion, these cultural flows did not make a deep impression on the core elements of the Chinese empire. Well within the bounds of their social class, the gentry simply ignored many of these new things.² A fundamental change occurred after 1895, when “Western learning,” xixue 西學, became an essential new discourse among learned people.³ As new-style newspapers and schools sprouted up in many parts of the country,⁴ events such as the founding of the Self-Strengthening Society, Qiangxue hui 強學會, meant that new-style publications, once marginalized, had moved from cosmopolitan cities such as Shanghai and Hong Kong to the political center in Beijing, gaining the support of important government officials and functionaries.⁵

Beyond this process of expanding new-style periodicals, schools, and study societies, we can also observe a clear trend toward the “popularization” of Western learning. As I shall discuss in this paper, this process is seen not only in what I have called the turn-of-the-century movements to “bring knowledge to the people” and “enlighten the lower classes,” but also in the many textbooks and encyclopaedias that flooded the print market from the 1900s onward.

“Encyclopaedia” or baike quanshu 百科全書 first appeared as a new term in the Chinese language in Kang Youwei’s 1897 Notes on a Japanese Book Catalogue, Riben shumu zhi 日本書目志. In his recent book on Japanese and Chinese encyclopaedias, Zhong Shaohua has provided a clear definition and good overall survey of this new form of knowledge organization that appeared in the late Qing.⁶ Zhong’s work draws comparisons between baike quanshu and another form of large-scale publication popular at the time, the Collection of Statecraft Essays from our August Dynasty, Huangchao jingshi wenbian 皇朝經世文編, a title that immediately demonstrates the characteristics of the baike quanshu as a new form of organizing knowledge.⁷ Generally speaking, late Qing collections of statecraft essays reprinted large numbers of essays on current events, shilun 時論, memorials to and replies from the throne, and other documents. Although they covered such problems as “foreign affairs”, yangwu 洋務, and the search for wealth and power, the unwieldy length and breadth of these collections made no allowance for the readers’ wants and needs.⁸ As Andrea Janku has shown through a close examination of statecraft essays on current affairs and leading articles in newspapers published since the end of the Taiping Rebellion in 1864 until the beginning of the twentieth century, these two genres came increasingly to resemble one another, especially after 1900. Since newspaper editorials also took on statecraft problems, many statecraft collections published from the 1880s on started to include a selection of them.⁹

Despite these shifts in content and focus, however, statecraft collections remained very different from Western encyclopaedias of the period. These encyclopaedias made efforts to include more fields of learning with greater detail and timely information. They also paid close attention to readers’ concerns, using specific headings, alphabetical organization, large numbers of illustrations, and accessible language to allow readers to navigate many different fields of knowledge.¹⁰ The Chinese encyclopaedias of new knowledge set out to emulate this model.

In this essay, I shall divide the Chinese encyclopaedia compilers into four groups: (1) diplomats and gentry elites; (2) reformers; (3) students in Japan; and (4) new-style literati. Although differences exist between these groups, there are also points of overlap between them; some compilers belonged to two or three of these groups at the same time. For each type, I have chosen one or two figures for which we can find relatively complete and detailed material for in-depth discussion. Ultimately, I hope to place these encyclopaedists in a broader historical and spatial context as part of a larger analysis of the interface between the movement for Western learning and the regional networks of intellectuals.

Background and Identity of the Encyclopaedists

Diplomats and Gentry Elites

Among the encyclopaedists in the ‘diplomats and gentry’ group, Ma Jianzhong 馬建忠 (1845–1900), the compiler of the 1902 Comprehensive Compendium of Technical Learning, Yixue tongzuan 藝學通纂,¹¹ and Qian Xun 錢恂 (1854–1927), the compiler of the 1901 Examination of the Governance and Laws of the Different Countries of the World, Wuzhou geguo zhengzhi kao 五洲各國政治考 and its sequel,¹² obviously have many points in common. Both men came from prominent lineages, but were unsuccessful in the Imperial Civil Service Examinations, a situation that led them both to become involved in the Self-Strengthening or Foreign Affairs Movement, Yangwu 洋務, to study abroad, and to enter diplomatic service. Ma Jianzhong served as a private secretary to Li Hongzhang 李鴻章 (1823–1901), a leading figure in the Self-Strengthening Movement who was active in introducing Western institutions and weaponry to China. Qian Xun served as secretary to Li Hongzhang’s chief rival, Zhang Zhidong 張之洞 (1837–1909), who stressed the need to maintain “Chinese teachings as the basis” 中學為體 while accepting “Western learning for its practical aspects” 西學為用. Aside from their work in government, both men also participated in activities to introduce, compile, and edit works of new knowledge.

Ma Jianzhong was born in Dantu 丹徒 in Jiangsu province. His family converted to Catholicism when Matteo Ricci was evangelizing in Dantu. By 1860, Ma Jianzhong had suffered repeated failures in the civil examinations. Appalled by the way gentry elites refused to consider the importance of foreign affairs even in the face of the entry of the Anglo-French Joint Expedition into Beijing in 1860, Ma Jianzhong resolved to give up the Civil Service Examination and dedicate himself to working on foreign affairs.¹³

In 1877, on the recommendation of Li Hongzhang, Ma Jianzhong became a Diplomatic Attendant in the first permanent Chinese diplomatic mission to France. This mission also included the first group of students sent from the Fuzhou Naval Yard Academy, Fuzhou chuanzheng xuetang 福州船政學堂 to study in Europe.¹⁴ Among them were both Yan Fu 嚴復 (1853–1921) and Chen Jitong 陳季同 (1851–1907), who served as an interpreter. On Li Hongzhang’s request, Ma and Chen Jitong both studied “international law”, gongfa 公法, at the École Libre des Sciences Politiques in Paris.¹⁵ Ma took his law degree in 1880, and became personal secretary to Li Hongzhang upon his return to China. He devoted the next decade to work on foreign affairs, until he assumed the directorship of the Shanghai Mechanized Textile Bureau, Shanghai jiqi zhibu ju 上海機器織布局, in 1890. From 1891 until his death in 1900, Ma lived in Shanghai and, due to disappointments in his political work, took up work as a translator. In addition to Ma’s Principles of Written Chinese, Ma shi wentong 馬氏文通, he also compiled the Comprehensive Compendium of Technical Learning. According to Luo Zhenyu’s 羅振玉 (1866–1940) preface, this massive work, which was published in 1902 when the publication of encyclopaedias really took off, was the result of Ma’s “occasional jottings.”¹⁶ 平日隨手記錄之作 These “jottings” were grouped into 14 categories: astronomy, geology, topography, manufacturing, mathematics, mining, acoustics, optics, electrical engineering, chemistry, steam engines, mechanics, agriculture, and medicine. The neologism “technical learning”, yixue 藝學, received unusually heavy emphasis in most late Qing encyclopaedias.¹⁷ The emphasis on technical learning clearly relates to changes in the Civil Service Examination system following the 1898 reforms, which required that eight-legged essays and essays on policy referred to Western technical learning. The naval yards, arsenals, telegraph networks, railroads, and postal networks established by the Self-Strengthening Movement were examples of the actual practice of this technical learning.¹⁸

At this time, most people thought that “foreign affairs” corresponded directly with Western learning, but for Ma Jianzhong, who had a firsthand knowledge of what Luo called “European learning,” Ouxue 歐學, “practical learning,” shixue 實學, was not the sole property of Western exact sciences. Ma argued that the attention given to machinery and agriculture in ancient China was evidence of points of convergence between Chinese learning and Western exact sciences. A careful reading of the Comprehensive Compendium of Technical Learning shows that Ma not only had a firm grasp of Western technology, but also made many references to activities that had long since interested China’s rulers, such as land clearance, sericulture, and planting mulberry trees, as well as the specific means by which various related techniques advanced and were improved. As an official and a member of the gentry elite thoroughly familiar with Western learning and involved in the Foreign Affairs current, Ma Jianzhong demonstrated through this massive, meticulously organized work his encyclopaedic knowledge of China and the West and his interest in the practical affairs of governance.

The Comprehensive Compendium was published in a small format, similar to the pocketbook series produced in subsequent years by the Commercial Press. The first two volumes consist of general and detailed tables of content. The book is not furnished with Western punctuation marks and only blank spaces and Chinese style circle notations were used in some entries as an aid to reading. The headword for each entry is placed alone in a single column, with most entries running to about 100–300 characters in length; the longest entries run to slightly over 1,000 characters, while the shortest have fewer than 100. The volume on medicine covers such topics as “Various Modes of Exercise in England,” “The Risks of not Exercising,” “Balancing a Diet of Meat and Noodles,” and “The Benefits of Tea and Coffee”¹⁹—all items that show the influence of Western medical knowledge, health practices, and eating habits on Ma Jianzhong from his days as a student abroad.

Telegraph and railroad operations were the focus of much of Ma Jianzhong’s involvement in the Self-Strengthening Movement. In his daily observations and selections of information, he would choose materials that included technical details, a habit that revealed his lifelong interests and career goals. Moreover, the fifth juan of the Comprehensive Compendium, which deals with agriculture, reflects a lineage of traditional Chinese practical learning that corresponded to Western exact sciences. But as an authority on Western learning with firsthand experience of Western technology and industry, he clearly moves beyond traditional Chinese gentry views on sericulture and mulberry cultivation with the perspective on modern agricultural technology that informs his discussion and evaluation of “enriching people’s livelihood,” housheng 厚生, and “growing and harvesting,” jia se 稼穡. Ma’s discussion of the strengths and weaknesses of China’s sericulture and silk industries, as well as of the possibilities for their improvement, provides the best example of the way the Comprehensive Compendium placed traditional Chinese agriculture on a new intellectual level through his mastery of technical detail and global perspective.²⁰ In an entry of only 500 characters, Ma gives a broad range of timely information that fully attains the spirit and unique aspects of Western encyclopaedias.

Although Qian Xun was born almost a decade after Ma Jianzhong, both men can be said to belong to the same era. Qian’s family was even more prominent than Ma’s: both his father and uncle owned the jinshi 进士 degree, his wife was the sister of Weng Tonghe 翁同龢 (1830–1904), who served as tutor to the Tongzhi and Guangxu Emperors.²¹ His junior by more than 30 years, Qian’s younger brother, Qian Xuantong 錢玄同 (1887–1939), was a famous figure in the May Fourth-era “skeptical history” group (yigupai 疑古派). Qian Xun passed the licentiate, shengyuan 生員, examinations at the age of 14, but advanced no further, which led him to give up on the Civil Service Exams and become a personal secretary to Xue Fucheng 薛福成 (1838–1894), who for nearly 20 years served in the personal secretariats of both Zeng Guofan 曾國藩 and Li Hongzhang. In 1889, Qian was appointed Imperial Envoy to Great Britain, France, Italy, and Belgium, but did not take up the position until the following year, when he took a French postal ship from Shanghai to Paris.²² It was at this time that Zou Tao 鄒弢 (1850–1931), who is discussed later in this paper, showed his manuscript of An Investigation of the Recent Policies of All Nations, Wanguo jin zheng kaolüe 萬國近政考略, to Xue Fucheng in Shanghai.²³ At this time, Qian Xun traveled with Xue’s retinue to Europe.²⁴

Xue Fucheng and Qian Xun represent the second generation of diplomats sent to Europe. In 1890, Qian Xun was stationed in Russia, becoming a Minister Consultant to the embassy in that land. In 1893, he returned home after 3 years abroad. Shortly thereafter, he was sent abroad again. Because of his extensive knowledge of Western learning, Zhang Zhidong recalled Qian Xun to China to serve in his personal secretariat, where Qian became well-acquainted with important late Qing reformers.²⁵ In 1899, Zhang sent Qian as a supervisor for students touring Japan. This tour gave him the chance to understand Japan at first hand, which would be reflected in his later writings. In 1903, Qian Xun once again entered the diplomatic service, and reached the height of his political career in 1907 when he was appointed envoy to Holland and Italy.²⁶

Qian Xun’s rise from failure in the examinations to an official position of the second rank not only set his work apart from that of Ma Jianzhong, but also shows a new career path for educated people outside the examinations. Qian’s early marginal status may be the reason why he never received much attention in histories of the Self-Strengthening Movement or in discussions of late Qing intellectual history; another reason might be that he has been overshadowed by the life and works of his wife, Shan Shili 單士厘 (1863–1945), who is widely recognized for her significance in the women’s liberation movement and the history of cultural interactions between China and the West.²⁷ When we examine late Qing encyclopaedias, however, we reach a different evaluation of the role played by Qian Xun, an intellectual who succeeded outside the “regular path”, zhengtu 正途, of the examination system, in the transmission of Western learning in turn-of-the-century China. He not only compiled Explanations of Japanese Legal Terms, Riben fagui jiezi 日本法規解字, with his son-in-law Dong Hongwei 董鴻禕, who was actively involved in revolutionary activities,²⁸ but also two encyclopaedic works of his own in 1901: the Examination of the Governance and Laws of the Different Countries of the World, and its Sequel.²⁹

What makes the Examination of the Governance and Laws so interesting is that the author’s descriptions are based on his personal understanding gained from direct experience with high-level governance in Europe and Japan. This experience makes the work quite different from many others that prattle on about “the basis of manufacturing” and the “source of national revival” without ever grasping how these issues played out in various places.³⁰ With his experience as a diplomat in Europe and Japan, Qian Xun had gained a strong knowledge of the major powers in East and West, a rare achievement among intellectuals and diplomats of his time. He combined this unique experience with strong efforts to gather information through interviews and documents so as to provide wide-ranging yet focused accounts of the political systems and social customs of different countries, which in many ways showed the basic characteristics of an encyclopaedia.

The Examination of the Governance and Laws fills eight juan, and the general table of contents, zongmu 總目, divides up its information according to six traditional areas of governance, namely officialdom, population, ritual, the military, criminal punishment, and industry. The detailed table of contents, ximu 細目, works however according to contemporary ways of organizing encyclopaedias. The section on officialdom, for example, is divided into 36 entries that give brief introductions to the political systems of 36 different countries around the globe, ranging from major powers such as Japan, the United States, and European countries, to smaller countries such as Egypt, Peru, Hungary, Uruguay, and Afghanistan. Each entry has a separate title, usually with 200–300 characters of text; shorter entries, such as the one for Vietnam, had fewer than 60 characters, while longer entries, such as the one for the Deutsches Kaiserreich, Deyizhi gaisa 德意志蓋薩 (Germany), ran to as many as 4,000 characters. Although the text was unpunctuated, the entries were written in an accessible style, with an eye toward the relationships between technology and larger political and cultural questions. The entry on “Germany” reads:

The German Republic has existed for nearly 25 years. Each state is joined together to protect one another and to make the whole strong and prosperous. Its constitution, established in April of the seventy-first year of [the nineteenth century], made the King of Prussia the emperor of all of the countries and changed the combined countries’ name to the Deutsches Kaiserreich (Kaiser means “emperor”). According to the 11th article of the constitution, any relations with other countries, defense of territories, or establishment of alliances or treaties would be overseen by the Kaiser. Dispatching troops outside of the country requires the approval of the members of the Bundesrat. This national assembly is divided into an upper and a lower house.³¹

日耳曼合衆國近存二十有五。各國連橫互相保護,冀圖強盛。七十一年四月新定章程推舉布國王縂領日耳曼各國, 改號德意志國, 名曰德意志蓋薩 (蓋薩德云皇也)。章程内第十一條凡合眾各有遇交涉外國事, 宜及出令派守地方, 立約議和諸務,均由德意志蓋薩主之。若有出師外國之擧, 則必與總醫院大臣約定然後施行。綜院議分上下二院。。

With only a 100 characters, the entry manages to give a clear sketch of the organizations and basic operations of the Kaiserreich.

Moving beyond basic information about political organizations and systems, Qian Xun also provides timely and succinct accounts of the various countries’ infrastructures, such as railroads and telegraph networks. One can surmise that because Qian had spent time in Japan, he also saw the larger importance of infrastructure for national development:

Japan built its railroads for two reasons. First, for purposes of defense, the eastern and western parts of the country are closely linked, and every major port and important city is brought into one web. Second, to aid the people, every part of the country was made accessible to other parts, which in turn reduced travel and shipping expenses tenfold. Vital commodities became cheaper, which benefited both merchants and the common people. As of last year, over 3,300 li of railroad had been built by the government.³²

In reading these succinct, direct, and thorough narratives, it is easy to understand how in his forties, Qian Xun moved beyond his position as a member of the lower-status gentry elite to become a favorite of Zhang Zhidong. In the “guaranteed recommendations,” baoju 保舉, for Qian that Zhang wrote in a memorial, he described Qian as follows:

This servant [Qian] is thoroughly versed in both Chinese and Western learning, highly insightful, and possessed of a sensitive talent and knowledge. He has served high officials abroad many times as Diplomatic Attendant and Minister Consultant, and traveled to Russia, Germany, England, France, Austria, Holland, Italy, Egypt, and Turkey, gathering information about these places and thinking deeply about them. He has inquired into problems of government, law, schools, military organizations, commerce, and railroads, and learned many of their advantages and pitfalls. He truly is the highest and most useful talent among those engaged in foreign affairs.³³

When describing for instance gender and family relationships in Japan and the West, Qian’s outlook differed greatly from the usual Confucian view that men deserve greater respect than women, and that sons should show filial respect towards their parents.

Japanese men’s desire for self-strengthening is not as strong as women’s. Women work and buy and sell in the markets and out on the streets, while men drink and make merry with their friends and cronies from their hometown. Everywhere we see them eating up women’s strength.³⁴

In the West, people choose their husband or wife freely. The women are adventurous, and the men are chaste. If a woman takes a liking to a man, she will ask whether he is married. If he is not, then they will court one another, but the man will not make the first move. If she likes him, she will go to his house, where they hide themselves away and chat with one another. If they wish to go out of the home with one another, their parents will not object. If, after enough time, they are both willing, they tell their parents [of their intention to marry].

People in the West are not concerned with passing on inheritances. After they have assembled great wealth, at the end of their lives they will give their fortune away to free schools and homes for the old and the poor. Once they have given their fortune away, they say they have no regrets in life. When asked about honoring their ancestors … they say, “My grandfather took care of me, and I used his wealth to take care of thousands of people—this is a great act of filial piety!”³⁵

These views move in the same direction as the more radical calls made by Chen Duxiu, Hu Shi, and others in the vernacular journals of the second decade of the twentieth century for equality between the sexes and attacks on filial piety, and can be seen as part of the larger field of new culture and new tides of thought. Indeed, it seems that the many radical statements and ideas put forth by Qian Xun’s brother Qian Xuantong were part of a tradition already established in his family lineage. From this perspective, Qian Xun’s descriptions and discussions of politics, systems, and social customs show that, as a whole, the Examination of the Governance and Laws possesses a consistent line of thought in both form and content that allows this encyclopaedic work to show the new face of modernism to the full.

Reformers

Chen Shoupeng 陳壽彭 (1855–?) was the translator of the third volume of the British Admiralty’s The China Sea Directory, which was specifically devoted to descriptions of the Chinese coast.³⁶

Chen Shoupeng’s background is similar in many ways to that of Ma Jianzhong and Qian Xun. Chen’s older brother, Chen Jitong, was a famous late Qing diplomat and writer of novels in French. Under his brother’s guidance, Chen Shoupeng attended the Naval Yard Academy established in Fujian in 1866 during the Self-Strengthening Movement. In 1886, following his graduation from the Academy, he went to England to study for 3 years.³⁷ Chen’s experience studying for 2 years at the Royal Naval College, Greenwich, was one reason that he later decided to translate the Directory.

In the year before the 1898 reforms, Chen Jitong and Chen Shoupeng founded the newspaper Qiushi bao 求是報 [parallel title: International Review].³⁸ The International Review was one of the many journals supported by the important reform newspaper Shiwu bao 時務報 [parallel title: The China Progress].³⁹ It is because of these connections to reform institutions that I include Chen Shoupeng in the category of “reformers.”

In 1901, the Society for Statecraft Essays, Jingshi wen she 經世文社, printed 2,000 copies of the Atlas of Strategic Locations of Rivers and Seas of China (in 27 juan) in lithograph form. The book circulated widely, and “men of learning all praised its usefulness.” Praise from officials followed.⁴⁰ The first printing of 2,000 copies sold out quickly. Chen then submitted the book to the Official Publishing House of Guangdong for reprint.

The editions of the book reprinted by the official publishing house were of relatively high quality: the characters were clearly printed and were larger than in most traditional “category books”, leishu 類書, with much wider spacing between characters. In addition to the table of contents in the first juan, Chen Shoupeng added a table of contents to the beginning of each juan, and placed the title of each entry in a separate line, making searches in the work much easier than in the traditional leishu. Most entries ranged from 200 to 300 characters, all entries were furnished with punctuation marks. Even more interestingly, while the entries did not separate passages or paragraphs, a blank space would be left every few lines to separate sections of the text from one another—a very clear sign of the efforts made on the readers’ behalf. In his preface to the book, Chen Jitong places the work in the tradition of geographical works such as the Annotated Book of Waterways, Shuijing zhu 水經注, of the sixth century. In assessing its qualities and value, he argued that it took the best aspects of the efforts directed by Lin Zexu to selectively translate works of Western geography while avoiding the many errors, poorly selected materials, and lack of maps found in works such as the Illustrated Record of Overseas Countries, Haiguo tuzhi 海國圖志, by Wei Yuan 魏源 (1794–1857),⁴¹ Lin Zexu’s good friend, who coined the famous slogan: “controlling the barbarians by following the techniques that the barbarians are good at” (師夷長技以制夷). All in all, although the book is filled with specialized information related to fog signals, tides, bearings, and compass directions, its descriptions of Chinese cities and ports also combine a Westerners’ fresh and inquisitive perspective with Chen Shoupeng’s elegant prose.

During the turmoil of the Boxer Uprising in Tianjin and Dagu in 1900, which forced Chen Shoupeng to hide the manuscript, the detailed British calculations about and records on these same cities came in handy because of their strategic importance. The entry on Dagu, which began with a discussion of the port’s naval defenses and ended with accounts of agriculture in the city, omitted no details. Immediately following the entry on Dagu came an entry on Tianjin, for which the British surveyors provided descriptions based on the city’s overall geography, its new industrial bases, but also the prevailing diseases (see Illustration 1).

Illustration 1

Entry on Tianjin by Chen Shoupeng, Zhongguo jianghai xianyao tuzhi, juan 21: 15b–16a (1900) (Guangdong: Guangya shuju, 1907). Fu Sinian Library, Taibei

Tianjin

Tien tsin is a treaty port, and stands, as before mentioned, at the confluence of the Grand Canal with the North River. Suburbs extend down towards the river and about two miles down along either side. This area is larger than the city itself. Here all the trade is carried out. Many people die from cholera, typhus, and smallpox. It is said that Tianjin has water thoroughfares equal to those of Shanghai or Canton. The foreign settlement is about 2 miles below the city.

The imperial government has two arsenals at Tianjin, both under the superintendence of foreigners. One arsenal, on the left bank of the river, manufactures gunpowder and artillery shells, while the other is the Torpedo School, which is run by an English scholar of electricity and where fourteen students undergo constant training.⁴²

天津。Tientsin

乃商埠也, 已詳於上, 在運河北河匯合處。…郭外向河之處, 較城尤寬廣。其兩向沿河者, 約長二迷當,是為商務薈萃之區。 霍亂痞瘧、痘症等,每年死者甚夥。據云天津水中之消息,足與上海、廣東等也。 外國領界,約在其城之下節二迷當處。

中國政府於天津設軍械廠二, 皆外洋人課之, 一在於河之左岸,乃製火葯及砲彈鋼殼等,其一則為魚雷書院, 有英國電學家一人董其事,生徒十四人, 恒為訓練。

In subsequent passages, the editors discuss the numbers of ships involved in Tianjin’s exports and imports in 1892 (a total of 649 ships), as well as the volumes of imports of cotton, satin, and opium from abroad, plus Chinese goods brought in from Shanghai.⁴³ They also provided very useful information about Tianjin’s weather and its postal service.

In these endlessly detailed entries, we can see that this massive work, despite its emphasis on military and defense issues, is filled with fresh observations about cities, waterways, and everyday life. If we look past some of the more specialized entries, throughout the book we find clear, easily understood, and thorough descriptions of each city, island, and harbor. Although it is China and not (as in Qian Xun’s case) Japan and Europe that is being described, Chen Shoupeng’s text nonetheless brings a new perspective to Chinese readers that represents the spirit of the encyclopaedia in both form and content.

Students in Japan

Only 176 pages long, the The New Erya, Xin erya 新爾雅 (1903), was completely different in scale from the works by Ma Jianzhong, Qian Xun, and Chen Shoupeng discussed above. In terms of form and content, the book was structured closely along the lines of an encyclopaedia. For this reason, Zhong Shaohua includes the book in the category of “encyclopaedic dictionaries” along with works such as the Terminological Dictionary of Natural History, Bowu da cidian 博物大辭典 (1907), the New Encyclopaedic Dictionary of General Knowledge, Putong baike xin da cidian 普通百科新大辭典 (1911), and the Encyclopaedic Dictionary of the Names of Foreign Places and Personalities, Waiguo diming renming cidian 外國地名人名辭典(1904).⁴⁴

The New Erya was edited by Wang Rongbao 汪榮寶 (1878–1933) and Ye Lan 葉瀾 (1875–?). No systematic research on Ye Lan has been undertaken to date; I have put together a brief sketch based on the material available to me. Born in 1875, Ye Lan was from Renhe 仁和 in Zhejiang; he studied with his elder brother Ye Han 葉瀚 at the Shanghai Polytechnic Institute, Gezhi shuyuan 格致書院. Founded in 1876, this Institute was a key site for nurturing new-style intellectuals in China and made tremendous efforts to popularize Western scientific knowledge.⁴⁵ While Wang Tao 王韜 was head of this institute between 1886 to 1894, over 300 young intellectuals were associated with it. According to Liu Shilong, “some of them had graduated from the Shanghai Polytechnic Institute or the Cantonese Language School, Guang fangyan guan 廣方言館, others had passed lower levels of the Imperial Examinations; most were government students (shengyuan) from the prefectural, departmental, or district levels.”⁴⁶ Ye Han was a Tribute Student by Purchase, Second Class, zenggongsheng 增貢生, in the Renhe district school, and Ye Lan was a Tribute Student by Purchase, Third Class, fugongsheng 附貢生, in the Hangzhou Prefecture⁴⁷; both were local elites during a transitional period.⁴⁸

After graduating from the Shanghai Polytechnic Institute, Ye Han and Ye Lan played active roles in the 1898 reform movement. In 1901, Ye Lan went to Japan, where he took up studies at Waseda University 早稲田大学.⁴⁹ During his time in Japan, his political thinking became increasingly radical, and he transformed into a diehard revolutionary. In 1902, he founded a “Youth Society,” Qingnian hui 青年會, in Tokyo together with other revolutionaries. Most of the members of this Society—the earliest of the revolutionary organizations among Chinese students in Japan—were from Waseda University.⁵⁰ So The New Erya (1903) had clear links to the Waseda students and revolutionaries in Japan.

Wang Rongbao (1878–1933), born in Wu County, Jiangsu, was 2 years younger than Ye Lan and also went to Japan in 1901. Wang studied politics, law, and history at the Tokyo Accelerated School for Politics and Law, Tōkyō seihō sokusei gakkō 東京政法速成學校, Waseda University, and Keio University 慶應義塾大學. After his return to China, Wang devoted himself to translation and law revision. During the Xuantong era (1909–1912), he was highly visible on the political scene as an advocate of constitutional monarchy,⁵¹ serving as the main author of the Qing court’s Imperial Draft Constitution. From the 1910s to the 1930s, he served as Minister to Switzerland and Japan successively.⁵²

Despite its brevity, The New Erya manages to cover many major areas of government, law, and science. The book was printed with moveable type in Japan. Although the simple design reveals the author’s limited budget, the book still resembles those printed today, and is completely different in its material form and design from the thread-bound books produced by Qian Xun and Chen Shoupeng. The table of contents at the beginning of the book does not list all of the chapters and subsections, but gives rather a simple listing of the book’s major contents. These 14 categories were “Government,” “Law,” “Economics,” “Education,” “Society,” “Logic,” “Geometry,” “Heaven,” “Earth,” “Science,” “Chemistry,” “Physiology,” “Animals,” and “Plants.” “Government” was divided into three sections: “The Nation,” “Forms of Government,” and “Institutions”; each section included relevant entries. Under “Forms of Government,” such entries included “Constitutional Monarchy in Germany,” “Constitutional Democracy in England,” “Constitutional Monarchy in Japan,” and “Constitutional Democracy in France.” While each entry ran to only 200–300 characters, they were still able to lay out the main aspects of each form of government:

Although England is a country ruled by a hereditary monarchy, it was also the earliest to develop democratic governance. All constitutional systems draw on England’s example. Thus what is unique about England’s government is that the greatest power lies with parliament.

Japan, however, is a pure monarchy. All of the power lies with the Emperor; apart from its constitution and sessions held for the national assembly, it is no different from a monarchical autocracy.⁵³

In the process of compiling The New Erya, it is quite possible that Wang and Ye made use of encyclopaedias, textbooks, and dictionaries available in Tokyo. In any case, given their young age, the ability of Wang Rongbao and Ye Lan to drill down into the core of the issues in such brief entries revealed their remarkable experience and training.

New-Style Literati

If we take the Civil Service Examinations as the standard, we will find that the great majority of encyclopaedists were low-level licentiates. This was true of Ma Jianzhong and Qian Xun, as well as of Ding Fubao 丁福保 (1874–1952), who translated a large number of modern Japanese medical texts and systematically introduced Japanese-style medical knowledge and systems to China.⁵⁴ Qian Xun, however, succeeded in becoming an official, and Ma Jianzhong received a wide-ranging Western-style education that enabled him to make good use of his talents when he returned to China. The same was true of Ding Fubao, who, after practicing medicine in Shanghai for 23 years and serving in such positions as Chairman of the Board for the Hongkew Clinic 虹橋療養院 in Shanghai,⁵⁵ looked more like a modern professional-expert than an ‘unsuccessful’ literatus. If we look elsewhere, we see that figures like Huang Moxi (1866–1933), author of the New Encyclopaedic Dictionary of General Knowledge, Xu Nianci 徐念慈(1875—1908 ), one of the editors of the Terminological Dictionary of Natural History, and Zou Tao (1850–1931), the compiler of An Investigation of the Recent Policies of All Nations, fit more closely to our image of this type of new-style literatus. In his discussion of Bao Tianxiao 包天笑(1876—1973), a representative figure among literati from Southern China in this period, Li Renyuan gives an excellent description of their career paths:

Between 1900 and 1906, Bao Tianxiao moved from Suzhou to Nanjing, from Nanjing to Shanghai, from Shanghai to Qingzhou, and finally settled back in Shanghai. At each stop along the way, he was involved in transmitting “Western learning.” He taught at new-style academies, started up newspapers and magazines, translated works from the Japanese, organized study societies and attended lectures, wrote fiction, and worked as editor and reporter for newspapers. Only a decade before then, he was still struggling with the examinations—he entered a private academy at the age of four, passed the first level examination in 1890, and in 1893 became a licentiate at the age of 18…. But after only a few years, Bao Tianxiao completely changed his course to “new learning,” becoming a leading regional figure in the field, while relatives from his mother’s side who had been successful in the examinations had no real success in their careers. In his path from a poor Suzhou scholar to a position as a renowned novelist, editor, and educator (and his later renown as a “founder” of the “Mandarin Ducks and Butterfly School”), Bao Tianxiao’s experience in these years can be considered a classic example of a certain segment of the educated elites in Southern China.⁵⁶

In terms of career models, both Zou Tao and Bao Tianxiao can be considered part of the same group of Jiangnan educated elites who worked as new-style literati. Zou Tao, however, was some years older than the late Qing scholars born in the 1860s–1870s; in fact, he belonged to the same generation as Ma Jianzhong (b. 1845) and Qian Xun (b. 1854). However, even though Zou Tao won the patronage of Xue Fucheng for his An Investigation of the Recent Policies of All Nations—which would place him in the same group of authorities on Western learning as Ma and Qian—his knowledge of Western learning did nothing to help him advance his official career, raise his social status, or boost his income. Even more interestingly, the image of Zou Tao that emerges from his extant writings as well as from secondary scholarship is one of an old-style literatus still wrapped up in writing romantic fiction and crafting ornate parallel prose. Zou Tao was born in the same era as Ma Jianzhong and Qian Xun, but lived long enough to see what he saw as the disarray caused by the May Fourth Movement. Of this period, one of Zou’s friends wrote that “the national essence has fallen into deep decline, and unlearned youths swoon under the spell of the vernacular … it is nauseating, but scholars now see it as the wave of the future”⁵⁷—a statement that only reinforced Zou’s image as an old-style literatus. The Collection from the Thrice-Loaned Hut, San jie lu ji 三借廬集, a collection of parallel prose published by Zou’s friends after his death, may make Zou appear to be even more of a traditionalist and reactionary, but if we place him in the context of the late Qing, we see that An Investigation of the Recent Policies of All Nations contains many ideas that at the time were considered “progressive.” Beyond this, we also see that Zou’s autobiographical novel, Glimpses of Heaven and Earth in Shanghai, Haishang chen tian ying 海上塵天影, written in a traditional framework with a typical late Qing plot, could in part be considered a supplement to An Investigation of the Recent Policies of All Nations, and even read as one “entry” within that larger work.⁵⁸

Zou Tao was born in Wuxi, Jiangsu in 1850. He attained the level of licentiate in the examinations in 1875, but failed at higher-level examinations for another decade. Around 1870–1871 he moved to Shanghai, where he started to work as a writer and editor for the Shenbao 申報. In 1892, he fell in love with the courtesan Wang Yuan 汪瑗. Shortly after, he turned the romance between the two into the aforementioned novel. In 1895, he returned to Shanghai with Wang Yuan after a few years of service as private secretary in Shandong and Hunan, and took up residence in the Xujiahui 徐家匯 section of the city.⁵⁹ In 1900, Zou converted to Christianity. In 1905, he took up a teaching position at the Qiming (“Enlightenment”) Girls School, Qiming nü shu 啟明女塾.⁶⁰

Zou Tao taught at this school for 17 years. His work included editing textbooks, and advanced classes in writing—labors that were linked with the demands of the era and reflected the part of his life as a new-style literatus. Much like the Promotion of Writing House, Hong wen guan 宏文館, founded by Xu Nianci, these reform and enlightenment activities not only failed to provide a guaranteed income, they also incurred great financial losses for the men-of-letters who ventured into this market. This was also true of the Golden Grain Studio, Jin su zhai 金粟齋, Ye Han’s Enlightenment Bookstore, Qi zhi shuju 啟智書局,⁶¹ and the Qiming School.

When compared with some of the other massive works of the time, An Investigation of the Recent Policies of All Nations, which consisted of four volumes and 150 double-sided pages (i.e. 300 pages in contemporary pagination), was not a large-scale text. The Investigation, however, was published earlier than many similar works, and its contents were very concise and well-researched, so it is no wonder that it earned Xue Fucheng’s high praise and enjoyed strong sales on the book market.

At roughly twice the length of Lin Zexu’s Record of the Four Continents, Sizhou zhi 四洲志, the Investigation of the Recent Policies of All Nations included subjects such as astronomy, social customs, religion, geography, historical developments, and military affairs. The Investigation basically adopted the format used in earlier works that divided information according to continents and countries within them.⁶² Its main text is unpunctuated, but heading titles are clearly indicated. Each entry runs to between 200 and 300 characters.

If we compare Zou Tao’s narrative with Qian Xun’s detailed discussion of Japanese railroads, we see clear differences between these two encyclopaedists. Compared with Qian Xun’s overall understanding of Western learning and foreign affairs, Zou Tao positioned himself as an evidential scholar of foreign affairs, refusing to advance personal opinions on Western learning—clearly an enlightened decision. In his choice of sources and structuring of narrative, however, Zou Tao had something more in mind than simply boiling down complicated information or paying attention to specific details.

Taking Japan as an example, although the lengthy narrative of historical developments in Japan extended beyond the chronological range set for the book to include China’s defeat in the First Sino-Japanese War, the ultimate goal of Zou Tao’s selective discussion of the Meiji reforms was to arrive at a particular conclusion for the entire entry on Japan: “From the time when Japan began to implement Western methods, it sought truth from facts and was filled with great resolve. In the future, Japan and Russia will be the two great powers in Asia!”⁶³

In this 4,000-character entry, Zou Tao almost shows the novelist’s touch, using a number of interesting details to create a highly readable narrative of Japanese history from earliest times through the Meiji era. Even more interesting, however, is that Zou Tao, perhaps because he became so absorbed in the material for the book and hoped it could be put to greater use, chose an entirely different route to disseminate it. In 1894–1895, when he was making plans to publish the Investigations, Zou Tao, writing in vernacular, worked similar and sometimes identical material into his autobiographical novel, Glimpses of Heaven and Earth in Shanghai. In this case, the interactions and overlap between fiction and encyclopaedias demonstrate the openness and flexibility of the boundaries between the late Qing encyclopaedia and other literary genres, as well as the universal presence of the forms of Western learning that so occupied the author of Glimpses.

Conclusions

From the preceding discussion and the material laid out in Zhong Shaohua’s New Tools of Knowledge, it may be seen that the appearance of the encyclopaedia as a new means of organizing knowledge was closely related to the political environment around the year 1895. From 1900 on, the publication of encyclopaedias began to flourish. If we look more closely, however, it becomes clear that although the appearance of the encyclopaedia was indeed related to the events surrounding the First Sino-Japanese War of 1895, it was not a completely new development that suddenly came into being after the war. In fact, the form also had distant links to early efforts on the part of elite gentry after the Opium Wars to understand and make use of Western learning. Based on an initial assessment of a database of encyclopaedias assembled at the University of Heidelberg, Rudolf Wagner has argued that a number of works that could be considered encyclopaedic began to appear in China in 1872.⁶⁴ The works I have analyzed in this essay also show that a number of authors’ and editors’ experiences in foreign affairs from the 1870s to the 1890s were closely related to their publishing activities after the turn of the twentieth century.

Zou Tao’s Investigation of the Recent Policies of All Nations makes an even stronger case for establishing a genealogy between post-1895 encyclopaedias and the first generation of works on Western learning from the 1840s by Lin Zexu, Wei Yuan, Xu Jiyu 徐繼畬, and others. Like Chen Jitong and Kang Youwei, Zou Tao clearly used Wei Yuan’s Illustrated Record of Overseas Countries and Xu Jiyu’s (1795–1873) Short Survey of the Maritime Circuits, Yinghuan zhilüe 瀛寰志略,⁶⁵ as reference points for his narrative.

Apart from the family of works on Western learning comprised by the Record of the Four Continents, Illustrated Record of Overseas Countries, and Zou Tao’s Investigations, the schools, newspapers, periodicals, and “mixed-blood institutions” formed by missionaries and the Qing government—such as the London Missionary Press, (founded in 1843), the Jiangnan Arsenal (founded 1865), and the Shanghai Polytechnic Institute—had a very strong influence on the transmission and popularization of Western learning in China before 1895.⁶⁶ Zou Tao, Ye Han, and Ye Lan all serve as clear examples of this influence. Since Zou Tao was Wang Tao’s student and was familiar with missionaries’ translated writings, we can reasonably assume that his Compendium of Recent Western Affairs drew some of its material from the translations of articles from the Western press,⁶⁷ which were published by the Translation Bureau of the Jiangnan Arsenal, and from The Chinese Scientific Magazine, Gezhi huibian 格致匯編, which was published by the Shanghai Polytechnic Institute.⁶⁸ The experiences and writings of Ye Han and Ye Lan offer very specific evidence of the influence that the Shanghai Polytechnic exerted on intellectuals in the transitional period leading up to the First Sino-Japanese War.

Another part of this half-century of knowledge on Western learning that was built up before 1895 can be found in the many diaries and journals of travels in the West that were published from the 1860s onward. These works also made a strong impression on late Qing encyclopaedias. They range from the earliest work, Jottings on Travels by Raft, Cheng cha biji 乘槎筆記, by Bin Chun 斌椿,⁶⁹ who was sent to Europe in 1860, to Maritime Adventures, Hanghai shu qi 航海述奇, and its sequel Travels in Europe and America, Oumei huanyouji 歐美環游記, both by Zhang Deyi 張德彝 (1847–1918), a product of the Tongwenguan 同文館, who also made the first of many trips abroad in 1860.⁷⁰ Although most of these works were arranged as diaries and often contained subject matter very different from later encyclopaedias, their remarks on geography, interesting events, social customs, institutions, and daily life have many similarities with later encyclopaedias.

Among the many works from the travel journal genre that began in the 1860s, two texts, A Record of Sea Travels, Tan ying lu 談瀛錄, by Yuan Zuzhi 袁祖志,⁷¹ and Jottings on Carefree Travels, Manyou suilu 漫遊隨錄, by Wang Tao,⁷² are of particular interest for their resemblance to Zou Tao’s later writings in the way they bring together the experiences of South China literati and transitional intellectuals. Both Yuan and Wang worked primarily in Shanghai and had been not only Zou Tao’s teachers but also friends with him.

At times these texts take on the form of a travelogue, while at other times they offer the reader a thorough explanation of cultural and political developments in the West—often resembling Zou Tao’s combination of literature and Western learning. It is no wonder, then, that Wang Tao made such extensive comments on the themes of Glimpses of Heaven and Earth in Shanghai in his preface to that book. Based on the timeframe in which the book was published and the teacher–student relationship between the two men, we not only can see Wang Tao’s influence on Zou Tao, but also can imagine the extent of the influence of Western learning from the 1860s and 1870s—as embodied by Wang Tao—on the compilation of encyclopaedias in the 1890s and 1900s. Viewed in this light, literary accounts of travels to the West and their relationship to encyclopaedias of the 1890s and 1900s cannot be ignored in our discussions of genealogies of Western learning in the latter half of the nineteenth century.

In temporal terms, the widespread appearance of encyclopaedias was a continuation of previous discourses on Western learning. In spatial terms, my initial analysis shows that the majority of the encyclopaedias’ authors and compilers were from Jiangsu (Ma Jianzhong, Jiang Rongbao, Zou Tao, Ding Fubao, Ding Zuyin, Xu Nianci, etc.) and Zhejiang (Qian Xun, Dong Hongyi, Ye Lan), while a minority came from Fujian (Chen Shoupeng). This list is not complete, but it fits well with the analysis Natascha Vittinghoff conducted of the birthplaces of over 100 scientists (broadly defined), translators, and participants in the newspaper industry from 1860–1911. Most of these individuals, whom Vittinghoff refers to as progressive or influential transmitters of new learning, were from the coastal provinces such as Zhejiang, Jiangsu, Hubei, and Hunan. Due to the many treaty ports in these areas, these people were far more likely to be influenced by new-style thinking and learning.⁷³ Encyclopaedists from these regions often knew one another and engaged in similar cultural activities, forming networks in Shanghai or in their hometowns. Some, such as Qian Xun and Dong Hongwei, came to work in “enlightenment” enterprises through their family connections. Others, such as Ye Lan, Dong Hongwei, and Wang Rongbao, established a base for radical revolutionary thinking in Japan during the time they spent studying abroad.

What virtually all these encyclopaedia editors have in common in contrast to men like Lin Zexu and Wei Yuan, is that they were forced to abandon the traditional path to advancement through the civil examination system. Once they had taken the lowest-level Civil Service Examination degrees, they were forced to make a living through Western learning and current affairs, fields which at that time were filled with promise. Unlike literati before the Opium Wars who had failed to advance through the examination system, this group did not need to depend for their living on work as schoolteachers, ritual specialists, private secretaries, or entertainment writers. By working in the early foreign services, studying abroad, or engaging in enlightenment enterprises in Shanghai and elsewhere, they found ways to conduct their lives that showed essential differences from those of earlier, traditional literati.

Although these encyclopaedists varied widely in their political positions, professional training and career choices, together they opened a new area of inquiry and activity for late Qing intellectuals, and the new form of works they produced established another path to enlightenment in modern China. With a thorough grasp of social trends and market demands, they brought together the Western learning of the past and established a deep, lasting, and ultimately invisible basis for the May Fourth era’s wave of new thinking on science, democracy, equality between men and women, and the superiority of Western material culture.