The streams of knowledge: Organising the Siku Quanshu 四庫全書
This thesis is about the order of knowledge in the Siku Quanshu, the Complete Writings of the Four Repositories, the largest ‘encyclopaedic’ compilation of texts in pre-modern China. While contemporary scholarship has concentrated on what was included in the compilation, the question of how it was o...
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| Format: | Thesis |
| Language: | Chinese English |
| Published: |
2020
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| Summary: | This thesis is about the order of knowledge in the Siku Quanshu, the Complete
Writings of the Four Repositories, the largest ‘encyclopaedic’ compilation of texts
in pre-modern China. While contemporary scholarship has concentrated on what
was included in the compilation, the question of how it was organised remains
largely unexplored. Divided in five chapters, this thesis explores the understanding
of knowledge and its organisation in the Qianlong era (1736–1796 CE). In the
Introduction, I interrogate the methodological viability of a cross-cultural
investigation and argue for a new conceptual framework to undertake such line of
inquiry in the Chinese context. In Chapter 1, I show how the antecedent poetic
understanding of knowledge as water determined the order of the Complete
Writings. I provide an account of its impact on classification and briefly sketch its
historical origins and development. By way of comparison to the western notion of
knowledge as tree, I tease out the properties and cultural specificity of each system.
In Chapter 2, I explore the intellectual, non-political purposes behind the collection.
I provide a short overview of past bibliographic classifications and their impact on
the editors’ scholarly objectives and show how the order of the Complete Writings
was envisioned as an advising guide to scholarship. In Chapter 3, I identify the
ascribed socio-scholarly function of texts as the fundamental principle of order and
investigate the different ways in which it was expressed. I also show how the
Qianlong-era conception of order differs from Aristotelian and Wittgensteinian
notions of classification. In the Conclusion, I summarise the main findings of this
thesis and offer some reflections on the nature of bibliographic divisions, imperial
scholarship, and the Complete Writings. |
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