The Absence of Public Libraries in Imperial China: An Alternative Interpretation of Chinese Writing

ABSTRACT

The purpose of this article is to explore Chinese writing and its connection with libraries in Imperial China. From the perspective of analysing Chinese writing and its cultural, social, and political impact, this article attempts to deliver a tentative and speculative exploration concerning why public libraries did not automatically emerge from Chinese civilization. This article discusses how Chinese writing, characterized by the art form calligraphy, was intimately associated with Chinese classical texts, knowledge classification, bibliographers, and imperial libraries and eventually with an elite culture empowered by the sociopolitical repertoire of scholar-officials. It particularly focuses on the discussion of how ‘public’ is viewed differently in Chinese culture than in the West and how Chinese society, including libraries, was transformed by redefining the meaning of ‘public’ at the beginning of the twentieth century.

KEYWORDS:

• Public library
• Chinese writing
• calligraphy
• Confucianism
• scholar-official
• Chinese knowledge classification

Acknowledgements

This article was initially submitted to another journal and it was not accepted. However the reviewers gave thought-provoking suggestions and encouragement. The author wants to give special thanks to anonymous reviewers from both journals for their valuable suggestions. The author also wants to give thanks to the following for their editing: Rita Watson, research associate; Judith Lerner, art historian; Vincent Leung, visiting professor at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, New York University; Rebecca Luce-Kapler, dean of education and professor of language and literacy education, Queen's University, Canada; former colleague Mirtha Hernandez at Green Library, Florida International University; Professor John Drobnicki at York College Library, City University of New York; and Daniel O'Day, professor and executive director of the School of English Studies at Kean University. Special thanks are given to Dennis Labeau, Duane Watzon, and Bill Bailey for their ongoing support.

Notes

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2. ‘Imperial China’ refers to the period from 221 BCE, when the first empire of Qin was built, to 1912, when the last empire of Qing ended. The period before 221 BCE is considered as Early China or Pre-Imperial China. See David Curtis Wright, The History of China (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2001).

3. H.-W. Lee, ‘American Contributions to Modern Library Development in China: A Historic Review’, Journal of Information, Communication and Library Science 4, no. 4 (Summer 1998): 10.

4. J. Goody, The Domestication of the Savage Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977).

5. R. K. Logan, The Alphabet Effect: The Impact of the Phonetic Alphabet on the Development of Western Civilization (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2004), 189.

6. Ibid., 191.

7. J. Goody and I. Watt, ‘The Consequence of Literacy’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 5, no. 3 (April 1963): 311–15.

8. Y. Yen, Calligraphy and Power in Contemporary Chinese Society (New York: Routledge, 2005), 47, 50.

9. Ibid., 121.

10. M. Knight, ‘Introduction: Decoding Chinese Calligraphy’, in Out of Character: Decoding Chinese Calligraphy, edited by Michael Knight and Joseph Z. Chang (Los Altos Hills, CA: Guanyuan Shanzhuang Press, 2013), 33.

11. L. Ledderose, ‘Chinese Calligraphy: Its Aesthetic Dimension and Social Function’, Orientations 17, no. 10 (October 1986): 35.

12. R. C. Kraus, Brushes With Power: Modern Politics and the Chinese Art of Calligraphy (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1991), 48.

13. Knight, 30.

14. Yen, 105.

15. Ibid., 106.

16. B. A. Elman, ‘Political, Social, and Cultural Reproduction via Civil Service Examinations in Late Imperial China’, Journal of Asian Studies 50, no. 1 (February 1991): 7.

17. P. W. Kuo, ‘The Evolution of the Chinese Library and Its Relation to Chinese Culture’, Bulletin of the American Library Association 20, no. 10 (October 1926): 190.

18. W. T. Swingle, ‘Chinese Books and Libraries’, Bulletin of the American Library Association 11, no. 4 (July 1917): 122.

19. W. H. Nienhauser Jr, The Indiana Companion to Traditional Chinese Literature, i (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1986), 310.

20. S. Jiang, ‘Into the Source and History of Chinese Culture: Knowledge Classification in Ancient China’, Libraries & the Cultural Record 42, no. 1 (2007): 1.

21. Ibid., 10.

22. Ibid., 1

23. J. P. McDermott, A Social History of the Chinese Book: Books and Literati Culture in Late Imperial China (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2006), 95.

24. T.-H. Tsien, Written on Bamboo & Silk: The Beginnings of Chinese Books & Inscriptions, 2nd edn (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1962), 15.

25. Kuo, 192.

26. Y. Wang, Zhongguo tu shu guan fa zhan shi (Jilin: Jilin jiao yu chu ban she, 1991), 47.

27. Ibid., 107.

28. Ibid., 197.

29. Ibid., 197–99.

30. McDermott, 72.

31. S. Ping, ‘The Tianyige Library: A Symbol of the Continuity of Chinese Culture’, Library Trends 55, no. 3 (Winter 2007), 424, https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/bitstream/handle/2142/3720/Situ553.pdf?sequence=2 (accessed 3 October 2012).

32. McDermott, 146.

33. Ping, 423.

34. S. C. Lin, Libraries and Librarianship in China (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1998), 1.

35. J. K. Fairbank, China: A New History (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1992), 88.

36. Ibid.

37. Lin, 3.

38. C. Hsu, China: A New Cultural History (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2012), 299.

39. McDermott, 96.

40. Fairbank, 167.

41. X. Li, ‘The Social Dimension of Religion and its Representation: A Fundamental Thesis of Chinese Sociology of Religion’, in Marxism and Religion, edited by Lü Daji and Gong Xuezeng (Boston: Koninklijke Brill NV, 2014), 103.

42. K.-C. Chang, Art, Myth, and Ritual: The Path to Political Authority in Ancient China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), 106.

43. R. Chen, ‘Zhongguo li shi shang gong de guan nian ji qi xian dai bian xing: yi ge lei xing de yu zheng ti kao cha’, http://202.120.85.33/Jweb_zsfzlc/CN/article/downloadArticleFile.do?attachType=PDF&id=116 (accessed 16 October 2014).

44. H. S. Quigley, ‘The Political System of Imperial China’, American Political Science Review 17, no. 4 (November 1923): 554.

45. Ibid.

46. J. Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry Into a Category of Bourgeois Society (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1989), 31–43.

47. T. Kelly, Early Public Libraries: A History of Public Libraries in Great Britain before 1850 (London: The Library Association, 1966), 29.

48. McDermott, 126.

49. M. Kevane and W. A. Sundstrom, ‘The Development of Public Libraries in the United States, 1870–1930: A Quantitative Assessment’, Information & Culture 49, no. 2 (2014): 117.

50. Ibid., 120.

51. The whole sentence is ‘Da dao zhi xing ye, tian xia wei gong’ and comes from the Book of Rituals. James Legge translates it as ‘When Grand Course was pursued, a public and common spirit ruled all under the sky.’ See Internet Sacred Text Archive, http://www.sacred-texts.com/cfu/liki/liki07.htm (accessed 13 January 2016).

52. Fairbank, 264.

53. Ibid., 266.

54. M. Shi, ‘From Imperial Gardens to Public Parks: The Transformation of Urban Space in Early Twentieth-Century Beijing’, Modern China 24, no. 3 (July 1998): 250.

55. H. W. Cheng, ‘The Impact of American Librarianship on Chinese Librarianship in Modern Times (1840–1949)’, Libraries & Culture 26, no. 2 (Spring 1991): 375–76.

56. Y. Chen, Zhongguo tu shu guan bai nian ji shi, 1840–2000 (Beijing: Beijing tu shu guan chu ban she, 2004), quoted in Jing Liao, ‘Chinese–American Alliances: American Professionalization and the Rise of the Modern Chinese Library System in the 1920s and 1930s’, Library & Information History 25, no. 1 (March 2009): 29.

57. Kraus, 4.

58. L. M. Chan, ‘Foreword’, in Sharon Chien Chan, Libraries and Librarianship in China (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1998), xiv.

59. Jiang, 10.

60. D. N. Keightley, ‘Art, Ancestors, and the Origins of Writing in China’, in The New Erudition, special issue of Representations 56 (Autumn 1996): 89.

61. Ibid.

62. McDermott, 150.

63. Ibid.

64. F. Coulmas, ‘Writing and Literacy in China’, in Writing in Focus, edited by Florian Coulmas and Konrad Ehlich (New York, NY: Mouton, 1983), 239–53.

65. E. B. Brooks and A. T. Brooks, The Original Analects: Sayings of Confucius and His Successors (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1998), 103.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Junli Diao

Notes on contributor

Junli Diao is the cataloging librarian at York College Library, City University of New York. He previously worked as an assistant research scholar and Chinese language bibliographer at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World Library, New York University.