Xuxiu Siku Quanshu - 續修四庫全書

With over 5000 titles the 'Sequel to the Siku quanshu', is a worthy continuation of emperor Qianlong's library collecting (and censuring) project of the late 18th century. Following up on earlier ideas, the Xuxiu Siku quanshu project ran from the 1920ies on and had various aims. It planned to collect titles produced after the finishing of the Siku quanshu collection (SKQS) in 1782 and especially after 1840, to reproduce editions better and less corrupted than those included in the SKQS, to recover titles forbidden in Qianlong times or excluded because they belonged to the Daoist or Buddhis canon, and to include novels and other literary styles considered too lowly by the SKQS editors asf. But, of course, also the editorial team of the Xuxiu SKQS had their "standards" and excluded what they considered "meaningless and useless books" ( 空疏無用之書) like almanacs, genealogies, lists of officials etc. Nevertheless, the Xuxiu SKQS was much broader in scope and larger in size than any other existing collection of Chinese historical books. It also benefitted from the libraries of important intellectuals of late Qing, early Republican times which catered to the project. In 1942 the project came to a full stop with over 30 thousand book abstracts written. In 1949 the drafts of these abstracts went into the possession of the library of the Chinese academy of science (中科院) in Beijing; finally in 1996 these abstracts were published in 37 volumes under the title 续修四库全书总目提要 ( 稿本 ); between 1995 and 2002 facsimiles of over 5213 titles of the Xuxiu SKQS were published in 1800 volumes by Shanghai guji chubanshe. The publishing of a fulltext database of all titles from the Shanghai edition (and 100 additional titles) can be considered another milestone for everyone working in one or the other way on historical China - following the milestones of SKQS fulltext database (http://erf.sbb.spk-berlin.de/han/SikuQuanshu) and the ten thousand titles of the Erudition database Chinese Ancient Books 基本古籍库 (http://erf.sbb.spk-berlin.de/han/AncientBook). The Xuxiu SKQS is one of three databases available via CrossAsia from the Diaolong 彫龍 database portal and allows browsing according to the sibu 四部 classes and searches in the fulltext, by author, title and confined to the commentary parts ( 附註) of texts. The fulltext can be easily compared with a scan of the original page and texts can be downloaded in txt format page by page. The "paper version" of the database can be accessed via the shelfmarks 5 B 30000-1/1800; the facsimile volumes of the abstracts (not included in the database) can be found under the shelfmarks 5 B 14451-1/37.