A quick look at Bodley’s special Chinese collections
DAVID HELLIWELL
Our first datable acquisition was made in 1604. It isshelfmarkedSinica 2,and was signed by Thomas Bodleyhimself – upside down, as neither he, nor any other Oxford scholar would be able to read it for well over two centuries.
It is part of a very down-market edition of the so-called “Four Books” of Confucian learning, probably produced in the late 16th century in the city of Jianyang, which at the time was the centre of commercial book production in China. It is a unique surviving copy of this edition.
Sinica 41,another book acquired at this time, is one of only two surviving copies, and the other is incomplete. It is a collection of stories about good morality, but more interesting is the inscription on its cover. This is in Dutch, and is dated 1603. Experts at Leiden University have transcribed it, and we read towards the bottom that the book is accompanied by “a little Chinese box, various sea-shells, and two sheets of white Chinese paper”.
In fact this is the most vivid evidence we have of what can only be inferred from other sources: that this book, and others like it, was obtained by members of the Dutch East India Company from overseas Chinese traders in Southeast Asia (on whose tropical shores the sea-shells were gathered), and that it was sold as part of a job lot of curiosities at an auction in Amsterdam.
At that time Chinese books were considered to be curiosities, for inclusion in the so-called “cabinets of curiosities” which were often the founding collections of museums, including our own Ashmolean. But it is testimony to the intelligence of Thomas Bodley, as if any were needed, that he regarded these books not as curiosities, but for what they were, in the belief that one day, there would be scholars in Oxford who could read them. And so by far the biggest part of the early 17th century Dutch East India Company imports is to be found right here in this building.
Also part of this corpus is the famous manual of shipping routes with compass bearings which came from the estate of William Laud in 1637. MS.Laud Or.145, which we now call the “Laud Rutter”, is not only a unique surviving manuscript of its type, but in describing the route from the coast of Fujian Province to the Ryukyu Islands, it mentions the disputed Senkaku Islands by their Chinese name of Diaoyu – the earliest document to do so.
Later in the sixteenth century, the English East India Company also brought Chinese books home, although not so many, as they had by now ceased to be curiosities, and in any case nobody could read them.
Notable among these are the official calendars acquired from the Southern Ming dynasty on the island of Taiwan. As the Manchus swept down from the north in 1644, the last Ming emperor hanged himself in Peking, and the remnants of his dynasty fled to the south and eventually holed themselves up on the island of Taiwan where they held out for another thirty years or so. They produced these calendars in the time honoured fashion to give themselves credibility as an imperial dynasty.
Sinica 58 is one of fifty copies of the calendar for the year 1671 that was given to Henry Dacres, agent of the East India Company, as a sign that the Company was officially entitled to trade there.Sinica 88, a unique surviving copy which can currently be seen next door in the Genius exhibition, is of particular interest because of its rather late date of 1677. It was formerly in the possession of Elias Ashmole, who describes it as “A Chyna Almanack. Given me by Mr. Coley, 28 Sept. 1680”. Henry Coley was a tradesman in Oxford who even published his own calendars, and his connection with Ashmole was a shared interest in astrology.
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Earlier and most later maps depicted China not only as the centre of the known world, but as occupying almost its entire area. This is evidenced in Sinica 123, a pair of printed maps in the form of hanging scrolls given to us in 1684 by George White, an East India Company merchant. They are almost certainly another unique surviving printed copy, and were perhaps made to hang in a local school or family academy. One of them depicts the heavens, the other the earth.
Leggewas the famous translator of the so-called “Chinese classics”, the canonical works of Confucianism, and Edkin’s catalogue shows that we already had an excellent edition of that large-scale work in the Library. Sinica 364 was made in Canton in 1871, and is a woodcut facsimile of the imperial edition made in Peking at the behest of the Qianlong emperor in 1739. It was the best edition available at the time, and I wonder if Legge used it when making his translations.
Twenty years earlier, in 1856, we had already bought books from Edwin Evans, another missionary, who seems to have been particularly fond of popular novels. Sinica 217 is from his collection. It was printed in 1839, and is of the “gong’an” genre. Such novels were and remain extremely popular. They are concerned with the committing of a crime, and its subsequent legal handling, focusing on the actions of a clever judge. Evans used his English signet ring to mark his ownership, and some of his books have pencil markings indicating when and where he read them.
But the most significant missionary for our collections was Alexander Wylie, who for thirty years was and agent of the British and Foreign Bible Society in China. His Notes on Chinese literature, published in Shanghai in 1867 is still a useful reference. He retired to Oxford, and when his eyesight began to fail in the early 1880s, he sold us the books on which this monumental work was based, thus trebling the size of our collections.
He was also very active in recording and documenting the works in Chinese written by the missionaries themselves, and was probably instrumental in our acquisition of a very large collection of these which had been exhibited at the international exhibition at Philadelphia in 1876. Shortly after, we also received the exhibits from the international exhibition in London in 1884, so that the Bodleian now holds what is probably the biggest collection of the printed output of the nineteenth century Protestant missionaries to China.
This collection is of outstanding interest, and is by far the most heavily used of all our Chinese special collections. I’ll try to give you a flavour of it.
Sinica 1767is by the American missionary John Winn Quaterman. It is an illustrated tract on Bible stories, published in Ningbo in 1855. The illustration shows Samson bringing down the pillars of the Temple.
The missionaries made great efforts to make their teachings comprehensible to the common people, and were the first to publish in Chinese local dialects, usually expressed in romanisation. Sinica 311 is a translation of Genesis into Ningbo dialect by the English missionary William Armstrong Russell, written in romanisation and blockprinted. It was also published in Ningbo, four years earlier in 1851, and our copy may be a unique survival.Sinica 1311 is a primer of Ningbo dialect by the American missionary Henry van Vleck Rankin, reprinted in Shanghai in 1871. It was first published in Ningbo in 1857.
In the 1850s, the American missionary Tarleton Perry Crawford even invented an alphabet for writing Shanghai dialect, and a number of tracts were published in it. Sinica 1280 is a tract on the sources of good an evil by Mrs Cabannis, wife of the Southern Baptist missionary A B Cabannis, published in Shanghai in 1856. In an article in the China recorder in 1888, Crawford pronounced that “Chinese hieroglyphics, like their Egyptian predecessors, are doomed to the tomb and the antiquary.” Needless to say, this is not quite what happened. While the Chinese script continues to flourish, the forgotten remains of Crawford’s efforts survive perhaps only in the form of a few publications in the Bodleian (all from the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition) and one or two elsewhere.
The need to sing hymns also caused the missionaries to introduce western music and its theory to the Chinese. Sinica 1260 is a treatise on this subject by the English Presbyterian missionary Carstairs Douglas, published in Amoy in 1870. Sinica 1636 is a hymnbook by the American missionary Edward Clemens Lord, published in 1856. Here we have not only the hymns in Chinese characters, but also a romanised transcription into Ningbo dialect, together with the musical score.
The missionaries were also instrumental in translating the standard works of western science and technology into Chinese. We could spend the afternoon looking at these, they are so interesting, and so important.
Sinica 2162 is one of the large number of such works that were published by the Kiangnan Arsenal during the 1860s and 1870s. The Kiangnan Arsenal was established in 1865 as part of China’s “self-strengthening” movement, and had a translation bureau directed by the Englishman John Fryer, a former missionary, who also had a hand in most of the translations. Sinica 2162 is his translation of The engineer and machinist’s drawing book,a work by the French industrial engineersLe Blanc and Armengaud which at the time was standard and ran into many editions.
We bought Sinica 6308 only last year. It is the revision by Henry Thomas Whitney of Dauphin William Osgood’s translation of Gray’s Anatomy, published in Fuzhou in 1889. This edition is of exceptional rarity, and contains a number of coloured woodcut illustrations. Osgood was an American medical missionary, and first published his translation of Gray’s Anatomy in 1881. We already had a copy of this – it was the first scientific work on human anatomy to be written in Chinese.
Some of you may have heard the name of Edmund Trelawney Backhouse, who was the subject of book by Hugh Trevor-Roper, A hidden life,published in 1976 (later editions were called The hermit of Peking). Backhouse was a contemporary of Oscar Wilde at Oxford, but fled to Peking in 1895 without a degree, having accumulated debts of over £20,000 – a fortune at the time, and not an inconsiderable sum even now.
He was a linguistic genius, and attained total fluency in Chinese, picking up Russian and Japanese on the way. In Peking he moved in the highest circles, and put together a Chinese library of outstanding quality which he donated to the Bodleian in stages between 1913 and 1922 in the hope that the University would offer him the Chair of Chinese. It didn’t, but we kept the books (there’s a lesson here, perhaps). Thus, at a stroke, for a brief period the Bodleian held the finest Chinese library outside the Far East, until we were equalled and in some cases overtaken by the big American university libraries, and some of the great national libraries. But we are still left with many editions unique in the west.
The books in the Backhouse Collection are quite unlike anything we had collected hitherto. There are dozens, even hundreds of editions published by the imperial government during the Ming and Qing dynasties, and by famous scholars – editions which the missionaries, with their limited means and social connections could not hope to lay their hands on.
Backhouse 406 is an edition of the standard Ming dynasty rhyming dictionary Hong wu zhengyun, or “Correct rhymes of the Hongwu period”. This edition was published in 1561. Our copy is superb, as it preserves its original covers and printed labels.
Backouse 69,currently in the Genius exhibition next door, is a so-called “palace” edition of the complete works of the Song dynasty neo-Confucian scholar Zhu Xi, cut in 1713. These editions were compiled by teams of scholars working in the imperial palace in Peking, and are of the highest quality both textually, and in their physical production. The two red seals are those of the Kangxi emperor.
Backhouse 217 is also a palace edition of the Kangxi period, cut a few years later in 1721. It is an encyclopaedia of elegant phrases, perhaps devised as a reference for writing essays and poetry. It is one of the most technically perfect blockprinted books in our collection. The printing is crystal clear – it must be a very early impression – and the fine white paper is of the highest quality. The red collector’s seal, perfectly applied, is that of Prince Guo, a title held by one of the Kangxi emperor’s sons who died in 1738 and his nephew, a son of the Yongzheng emperor, who inherited it.
Backhouse 19 is yet another palace edition, which contains two of the finest woodcut illustrations of its period. Its title can be translated as “A single drop from the ocean of scripture”. It is a collection of excerpts from the Buddhist canon that the Yongzheng emperor particularly liked to read, and was printed in 1735.
MS.Backhouse 11 is the famous book with jade covers which was given to Backhouse by Grand Secretary Ronglu –the man in charge of the entire government of China – on 26 June 1902. It contains twenty poems by the Qianlong emperor, and is an exquisite product of the imperial workshop. It is a so-called “sleeve edition”, as It is small enough to be carried in the sleeve of a gown. This book too is currently in the Genius exhibition next door.
The materials I have talked about are all what we now call “special”, and are kept and used in this building. Butfrom the mid-twentieth century we have been acquiring books printed by modern processes in large quantities. These are stored and read elsewhere. Furthermore, more than half of our expenditure is now on electronic resources, which have no tangible existence at all.What we acquired in former times has automatically become special on account of its date. Our special acquisitions now are made through either infrequent purchase, bequests, or donations.
I have already shown an example of something we have bought – the edition of Gray’s anatomy, and will conclude by briefly mentioning a very significant bequest, and a remarkable donation made as recently as April 2015.
In 2003 we inherited the library of Piet van der Loon, Professor of Chinese at Oxford when I first came to Oxford, some 10,000 volumes occupying 250 metres of shelving in his house on Boar’s Hill. Even now, we’re still going through it. Among his books were found three collections of highly ephemeral popular literature, mostly published in the opening decades of the twentieth century, amazing both for their quantity and the fact that that they even survived at all. Most people read and sang from such publications, then threw them away, just like newspapers.
Sinica 4058 is one of the 473 examples of songs from the Minnan region, that is, the area in southern Fujian province adjoining Xiamen, or Amoy. Sinica 5027 is a so-called “wooden fish book”, so-called because the chanting was kept in time by striking a wooden fish. These were produced in large numbers in Canton and Hong Kong, and Piet collected 319 of them. Added to the 102 examples already in our collections, we have what is almost the largest collection of this genre outside the Canton area. And Sinica 5326 with its interesting cover, far more risqué in the time and place that it was produced than it is here today, is one of 459 editions of short sung pieces that get translated as “Cantonese operas”.
As for the donation we received only a fortnight ago, it was made by Anthony Bradley, a retired lawyer living in Cumnor, and consisted of a single box. Its contents were the nachlass of his maternal grandfather Arthur Bonsey, who had been a missionary in Hankow in central China for over forty years, between 1882 and 1923. He was a younger contemporary of the well-known Welsh missionary Griffith John.
The box turned out to be a time-capsule of extraordinary interest. It contained almost one hundred missionary tracts of which we did not have a copy, and some seventy single sheet items, most of them almost certainly unique survivals. Some of these are missionary materials, for example the illustrated handout Sinica 6545detailing the activities of the college that had been set up by Griffith John, and of which Bonsey was principal for a time. It survives to the present day as “Wuhan No.4 Middle School”. Others are official handouts of one sort or another that were read and then discarded, such as the handbill (or perhaps a small poster) Sinica 6534announcing the establishment of mathematics and western science as a subject for the official government examinations.
One final source of special things which might perhaps surprise you, is material that just turns up in the Library, where it has lain undiscovered, or unrecognised for what it is, sometimes for centuries. Such things are inevitable in an institution as old the Bodleian, which houses such large and varied collections.
Four years ago, when sorting out the mess in the basement of this building in preparation for its magnificent transformation into the Weston Library, I found a box containing twelve large paper hanging scrolls which now bear the shelfmarkSinica 6334. Their provenance is unknown, but they bear the date stamp 24 January 1907.The twelve scrolls turned out to be three sets of acupuncture charts, each consisting of four scrolls. The oldest set is dated 1665, and other two 1782 and 1783. Such charts are of exceptional rarity, and for a library to possess three complete sets of them is almost unheard of. I don’t know how they managed to stay hidden here for so long, and wonder what else is waiting to be found.
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