"Original copy of the Yongle Encyclopedia, 1403-1408, by Xie Jin."
After several consecutive appraisals, the Holy Ring gave such an answer, which made Yang Jing so happy that he almost died!
The status of the Yongle Encyclopedia in the inheritance of Chinese culture is definitely one of the small handful of books at the top, and there are definitely only a handful of books that can be compared with it.
Yang Jing had once seen a copy of the Jiajing edition of the Yongle Encyclopedia in the National Library, but the Yongle Encyclopedia in front of him looked slightly different from the copies Yang Jing had seen before.
These copies of the Yongle Encyclopedia are slightly larger than the Jiajing edition copies. Yang Jing measured them with his palm and found that they were about 30 centimeters wide and almost half a meter long.
As for the cover color and format, it is similar to the copy of the Jiajing edition.
With a trembling hand, Yang Jing opened the cover of one of the books, revealing the contents inside. Yang Jing dared to swear on his head that the contents were definitely not printed, but were handwritten carefully!
In fact, all 370 million characters in the Yongle Encyclopedia were copied by calligraphers using the Ming Dynasty official script. The mountains, rivers, and objects depicted in the Encyclopedia were all drawn in line drawing, which was exquisite and delicate. There were 21,600 court officials, scholars, and old scholars who participated in the copying.
In July 1403, the year Zhu Di ascended the throne, he ordered the compilation of the Yongle Encyclopedia. He said to ministers such as Xie Jin and Hu Guang: "All things in the world, ancient and modern, are scattered in various books, which are voluminous and difficult to search. I want to collect things from various books and use rhymes to organize them for easy research. In this way, searching for things will be as easy as taking things out of a bag. Although the previous books such as Yunfu Qunyu and Huixi Shiyun were also organized by rhymes, they did not collect a wide range of books and were brief. I hope you will follow my idea and collect all the books of classics, history, and hundreds of schools of thought since the beginning of writing, as well as the materials on astronomy, geography, yin and yang, medicine, calculation, monks, and skills, and put them in one book. Don't think it's too voluminous."
As soon as the emperor spoke, his ministers would naturally work hard. Xie Jin and others followed the emperor's instructions and spent six years to compile this great book with 22,937 volumes, divided into 11,095 books, which collected seven or eight thousand books from ancient and modern times.
When the book was first completed, Emperor Chengzu of the Ming Dynasty considered printing it, that is, publishing it by woodblock printing, but gave up because of the huge cost. He only copied a copy by hand, which is called the "Yongle Original Copy".
Needless to say, the "Yongle Encyclopedia" in the five boxes in front of us are naturally the original copies of the "Yongle Encyclopedia" that were hand-copied according to the order of Ming Chengzu Zhu Di!
In the 14th year of the Zhengtong period of the Ming Dynasty, that is, in 1449, there was a fire in the Wenyuan Pavilion in Nanjing, and the original manuscript of the Yongle Encyclopedia was burned. Fortunately, the original copy had been moved to Yanjing and did not encounter this disaster.
In April 1557, the 36th year of the Jiajing reign, a fire broke out in the palace, and the Fengtian Gate and the three main halls were burned down, and the original copy of the Yongle Encyclopedia was almost destroyed. After this false alarm, Emperor Jiajing decided to organize manpower to copy a copy.
At the beginning of the re-recording, Minister Xu Jie thought that copying tens of thousands of volumes of the Great Code was a huge project and there was no need to stick to the original style and calligraphy. However, after a thorough review of the Great Code, he found that if the format was changed, the size of the characters and the graphics on it would also change, so it would be more convenient to copy it as it was. In the end, he decided to re-record the original copy of the Yongle version without any changes.
Therefore, in the 41st year of the Jiajing reign, that is, in 1562, Emperor Jiajing selected 109 students of calligraphy and painting to formally copy the work. It took six years and was completed in April of the first year of the Longqing reign. It was called the "Jiajing copy".
The original copy was lost later. Some said that the original copy of the Yongle Encyclopedia was destroyed in a fire during the Wanli reign, while others said that the original copy was buried with the Ming Emperor Wanli. However, when the Dingling Mausoleum was opened in the 1960s, no trace of the original copy of the Yongle Encyclopedia was found inside.
Obviously, the original copy of the Yongle Encyclopedia was not buried with Emperor Wanli.
But the original has indeed disappeared without a trace.
Even the Jiajing copy was not taken seriously when it was circulated in the Qing Dynasty. It was not until the Yongle and Qianlong periods that the Jiajing copy of the Yongle Encyclopedia was taken seriously. The Siku Quanshu compiled during the Qianlong period borrowed a lot of content from the Yongle Encyclopedia copy.
But by that time, even the copies had been lost in large numbers.
Later, in the late Qing Dynasty, the foreign powers invaded China, and the Jiajing copy was looted by them. Until modern times, there are only more than 800 volumes of the Jiajing copy left in the world.
Even the Jiajing copy is a rare treasure in the world, not to mention the originals that have disappeared for hundreds of years!
If these originals were brought back to their original time and space, it would definitely cause a huge storm!
What Yang Jing found a bit regrettable was that these five large boxes only contained 6,000 volumes, totaling 14,688 volumes, which was a little more than half of the original copy of the Yongle Encyclopedia.
However, although it is a bit regrettable that the "Yongle Encyclopedia" here is incomplete, but to be able to obtain so many "Yongle Encyclopedia", and they are authentic copies, this is already a blessing from God!
It is unclear why the original copy of the Yongle Encyclopedia, which had disappeared at the end of the Ming Dynasty and the beginning of the Qing Dynasty, appeared here. Could it have been brought here by Emperor Yongli Zhu Youlang?
This is the only reason to explain why most of the original copy of the Yongle Encyclopedia appeared here. Other reasons cannot explain this at all, and there are also many gold, silver, jewelry, and precious calligraphy and paintings to prove this. In the turbulent era of the late Ming and early Qing dynasties, only the royal family had the ability to gather so many precious things together.
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