《永乐大典》 / Yongle Dadian

Overview

《永乐大典》 / Yongle Dadian is the Ming imperial classified compilation at the center of 244. 书写给过去、未来的人与神明——中国文明中的书写传统与长期主义. The episode reads it as both a spectacular state knowledge project and a warning that accumulation without sustained access and use does not secure survival.

Current Profile

The source describes a hand-copied work of 22,877 juan in 11,095 volumes and roughly 370 million characters, organized by rhyme and character rather than by preserving whole books in shelf order. That method made it a paper-era retrieval system and preserved excerpts from works later lost, but its physical scale, imperial audience, limited consultation, incomplete duplication, and subsequent dispersal made the project fragile.

Its afterlife joins preservation and loss. A carefully produced Jiajing-era duplicate survived in part while the original disappeared under unresolved circumstances; Qing scholars later mined surviving content during the 《四库全书》 project, and modern institutions recovered only a small fraction from looting, private survival, purchase, and international return.

Key Characteristics

• A massive Ming state compilation assembled by extracting and reorganizing material from many books.
• Uses rhyme and character as a manual indexing system, giving it database-like retrieval logic without modern cross-search.
• Combines textual preservation with political scale, court prestige, and costly scribal craftsmanship.
• Had an extremely narrow initial readership, weakening the feedback between preservation, copying, and ordinary use.
• Preserved recoverable fragments of later-lost texts even as most of the compilation itself disappeared.

Evidence

• Scale and form - 244. 书写给过去、未来的人与神明——中国文明中的书写传统与长期主义 describes thousands of compilers, more than eleven thousand volumes, hundreds of millions of characters, large physical pages, and hand-copied decoration.
• Retrieval logic - 244. 书写给过去、未来的人与神明——中国文明中的书写传统与长期主义 explains “以韵系字、以字系事” as an index for disaggregated textual material.
• Duplication and disappearance - 244. 书写给过去、未来的人与神明——中国文明中的书写传统与长期主义 reports Jiajing’s six-year copying project and leaves the original copy’s fate unresolved.
• Later use - 244. 书写给过去、未来的人与神明——中国文明中的书写传统与长期主义 connects the compilation to Qing textual recovery and the reconstruction of works such as Old History of the Five Dynasties.
• Dispersal and recovery - 244. 书写给过去、未来的人与神明——中国文明中的书写传统与长期主义 traces losses through theft, war, household reuse, purchase, and international return.

Qualifications

The episode is a museum-based podcast synthesis rather than a specialist catalogue history. Exact totals and present survival counts vary by whether juan, volumes, or physical books are counted. The original’s disappearance has several proposed explanations, none of which the source establishes.

What Changed

• Created the entity as a case where enormous collection ambition coexists with narrow access and severe survival risk.
• Distinguished its extracted, rhyme-indexed classified-book structure from the whole-book collection model of 《四库全书》.
• Connected later textual recovery to the principle that partial survival can preserve works lost in their original form.

Relationships

• Long-Horizon Knowledge Stewardship / 长时段知识托管 - preservation framework for evaluating the compilation’s custody and afterlife.
• Textual Survival Through Recopying - duplication mechanism that saved part of the work but did not secure the whole.
• 《四库全书》 - later imperial collection that mined the compilation for lost texts.
• Ancient Chinese Book Materiality / 中国古籍物质性 - physical scale, manuscript labor, layout, and storage conditions shaping the work.
• Knowledge Monopoly - narrow court access that limited readership and distributed custodianship.