The Art of Producing a Catalogue: the Meaning of ‘Compilations’ for the Organization of Ancient Knowledge in Tang Times (original) (raw)

2019, Chaussende, Damien, et Morgan, Daniel (eds.), Monographs in Tang Official Historiography : Perspectives from the Technical Treatises of the Book of Sui, London/New York/Heidelberg : Springer

The Sui shu 隋書 bibliographical treatise ('Jingji zhi' 經籍志) gives us an example of how knowledge was organized in Medieval China. In this chapter, I focus on the meaning of the last section of this treatise, the 'Compilations' (ji 集), and attempt to explain the rationale behind this particular bibliographical classification. Many scholars have argued that the category is a sign of the 'discovery' of literature in the Chinese Middle Ages. However, as this chapter will show, 'Compilations' were unrelated to 'literature' in the narrow sense we give to this word in modern times: 'Compilations', as a category, I argue, was a repository of exempla for ministerial learning. My analysis will have three layers: first, I will focus on the moral and political inspiration of the cataloguing activities; second, I will contextualize the four categories in general, and of 'Compilations' in particular, within the history of cataloguing; third, I will analyze the rationale of this category as it is given in the bibliographical treatise of the Sui shu. After the analysis, I will hopefully have contributed to describe the category of 'Compilations' in terms which are closer to the experience of the actors.