Scotland/China news

The oldest book in Edinburgh University Library

by Website Editor, 22 July 2014

The oldest printed book belonging to the University of Edinburgh dates from China's Ming Dynasty, and was published in 1440. On 24 June, a small group from Edinburgh Branch had the opportunity to see it, “up close and personal”, at the Centre for Research Collections in the Main Library of the University.

The book is Zhouyi zhuanyi daquan, or Complete Commentaries on the Changes of Zhou. It is an extremely rare edition of one of the standard texts used for the civil service examinations – the only known complete copy in existence is at Harvard University.

The SCA group with Rare Books Librarian Joe Marshall and some of the University's Chinese treasures ;
a close up of the Ming book ; SCA members take a closer look

Our host, Rare Book Librarian Joe Marshall, explained that the book was produced using woodblock technology, several years before printing with moveable type was invented in Western Europe. We were all struck by the remarkable quality of the print, which seemed as clear and bold as if it had been printed only a few decades ago. Many of the characters were also very familiar !

The book was given to the Library in 1628, by a Scottish minister, Robert Ramsay, who had graduated that year. He may have made the donation to mark his graduation, but the Library does not know where he got it from.

As it is an important heritage item, last year the Library had the fragile pages repaired and the book rebound in the Chinese style – it had originally been bound upside down.

The book's contents are two commentaries on the Book of Changes, one of the most important works of the Confucian tradition. One of these, by Cheng Yi, interprets the Changes as a moral and philosophical treatise, while the other, by Zhu Xi, reads it as a manual of divination. According to a recent article by Ming specialist Dr Stephen McDowall, Chancellor's Fellow of History at the University, the significance of this book is “the method by which these two very different commentaries were reconciled within a single work”.

However, Dr McDowall adds, “although the official Palace edition of this book, published in 1415, represents imperial authority, the 1440 edition....may be said to inhabit a very different world”. It was published at Jianyang, in northern Fujian province, at the Twin Cassia Book Hall, a commercial publishing house which provided books for educated men, whether examination candidates or not. Such publishers had a poor reputation, with their works often having badly-printed text, poor quality paper and textual errors. This led to a low survival rate amongst such cheap editions, which is one reason why the University's copy is, in fact, so uncommon.

The Edinburgh copy is incomplete, having only about one fifth of its original pages. However, despite this and its low production values, Dr McDowall argues that the book is nevertheless part of a more “nuanced 'socialogy of texts', and a reminder of the 'human motives and interactions which texts involve at every stage of their production, transmission and consumption'” (Dr McDowall's article is now available online here, in the Journal of the British Association for Chinese Studies).

We were also shown a number of other China-related rare books, selected from roughly 300 in the Library's collection. Over the coming years, the Library intends to deepen their holdings of pre-1900 China-related books and manuscripts, not just for academic study and research but for the wider community to appreciate and enjoy. We hope to bring you more news on this exciting new initiative later in 2014.