The Yongle Encyclopedia (simplified Chinese: 永乐大典; traditional Chinese: 永樂大典; pinyin: Yǒnglè Dàdiǎn; literally The Great Canon or Vast Documents of the Yongle Era) was a Chinese compilation of information commissioned by the Chinese Ming Dynasty emperor Yongle in 1403 and completed by 1408. It was the world's largest known general encyclopedia at its time.
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Two thousand scholars worked on the project under the directions of the Yongle Emperor (reigned 1402–1424), incorporating eight thousand texts from ancient times up to the early Ming Dynasty. 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. The encyclopedia, which was completed in 1408[1] at Nanjing Guozijian (南京國子監; Imperial University in Nanking), comprised 22,877 or 22,937[1] manuscript rolls, or chapters, in 11,095 volumes, occupying roughly 40 cubic meters (1400 ft³), and using 370 million Chinese characters.[2] It was designed to include all that had ever been written on the Confucian canon, on history, on philosophy, and on the arts and sciences. It was a massive collation of excerpts and works from the mass of Chinese literature and knowledge.
Because of the vastness of the work, it could not be block-printed, and it is thought that only one other manuscript copy was made. In 1557, under the supervision of the Emperor Jiajing, the encyclopedia was narrowly saved from being destroyed by a fire that burnt down three palaces in the Forbidden City. Afterwards, Emperor Jiajing ordered the transcription of a third copy of the encyclopedia.
Fewer than 400 volumes of the three manuscript copies of the set survived into modern times. The original copy has disappeared from the historical record. The second copy was gradually dissipated and lost from the late 18th century onwards, until the roughly 800 volumes remaining were burnt in a fire started by Chinese forces attacking the neighboring British legation, or were looted by the Eight-Nation Alliance forces during the Boxer Rebellion in 1900. The surviving volumes are in libraries and private collections around the world. Today, the most complete of these surviving later Ming Dynasty copies of the Yongle Encyclopedia is kept at the National Library of China in Beijing.[3] The National Library of China also holds the most overall copies, a total of 221 books of the Yongle Encyclopedia. Further, there are 41 books of the encyclopedia at the Library of Congress, and the United Kingdom and Germany hold 51 and 5 books respectively.[4]
What happened to the original is not known. There are several hypotheses:
A 100-volume portion was published in Chinese in 1962.