So, how did these "book thieves" steal the Yongle Dadian? According to Miao in Qing Dynasty, some officials in imperial academy stole books very skillfully. They usually choose to steal in winter.
When the official entered imperial academy in the morning, he took a cotton robe with him, but he didn't wear it. The shape of the bag is as big as two Yongle ceremonies. As night fell, some officials also began to implement their plans to steal books. Their solution is to wrap two "big ceremonies" in the luggage, but wear the cotton robe that was originally wrapped in the luggage. The guards didn't get suspicious when they saw them coming with luggage in the morning and leaving with luggage at night.
According to records, during Guangxu period, an academician served Wen and one person stole more than 65,438+000 copies of Yongle Dadian. After Wen's death, these books were sold to foreigners or antique dealers by later generations. In this way, "Yongle Dadian" lost a lot. Moreover, after several exhibitions, the whereabouts of these stolen Yongle ceremonies could not be found.
At present, Yongle Grand Ceremony is scattered in Japan, Britain, the United States and other countries. What caused these Yongle ceremonies to be far away from the motherland and scattered abroad? The disaster of Yongle ceremony originated from the well-known history of national humiliation in China. In the 26th year of Guangxu (1900), Eight-Nation Alliance invaded Beijing, burning and looting in the ancient civilized capital.
The Hanlin Academy is located in Dongjiaomin Lane, near the embassy district, and has become a battlefield. Those priceless ancient books, some of which have never even been out of the palace, are being swallowed up by the fire bit by bit, and some ancient books that have not been burned are thrown into the yard and pond at will. The invaders plundered the Yongle Grand Ceremony at will and even replaced bricks to build fortifications. After this disaster, the Yongle Grand Ceremony was almost lost, with only a few hundred copies scattered all over the world.
In the National Library of China, experts found that all the Yongle ceremonies collected here have some common characteristics: from the paper point of view, these Yongle ceremonies used leather paper from Jiajing period, also called white cotton paper. In addition, at the back of the book, the names of general school officials, branch school officials, authors and enumerators are indicated. Therefore, it can be inferred that these "Yongle Dadian" are all manuscripts of Jiajing period of Ming Dynasty. In other words, all the Yongle Dadian collected by the National Library were not compiled during the Yongle period. So in addition to this version of Yongle period, how many versions of Yongle Dadian are there?
In the basement of the National Library of China, there is 16 1 the world-famous Yongle Dadian. It has been more than 600 years since the Ming Emperor Judy wrote Yongle Grand Ceremony. In the long years, Yongle Dadian experienced various misfortunes and lost more than 10,000 copies. At present, less than 4,400 volumes of this book are scattered around the world. However, experts have found that the Yongle Dadian, which can be seen all over the world at present, has some common characteristics: on the back of each book, the re-recording officials at that time were indicated, and these officials were all officials during the Jiajing period of the Ming Dynasty.
In other words, all the Yongle Dadian that can be seen in the world at present were not compiled during the Yongle period. So besides this version, how many versions are there in Yongle Dadian? According to historical records, after the completion of the Yongle Ceremony, few emperors in the Ming Dynasty consulted the Yongle Ceremony.
Emperor Jiajing of Ming Shizong was an exception. Emperor Jiajing at 152 1 was not a glorious role in the history of the Ming Dynasty. After 45 years in office, he believed in Taoism and was ignorant of political affairs. However, it is such an emperor who seems to have a special interest in Yongle Grand Ceremony. Different from other emperors, Emperor Jiajing often put several volumes of Yongle Dadian on his desk for reading at any time.
For a long time, Emperor Jiajing wanted to re-record Yongle Dadian, and talked with Xu Jie, a great scholar, many times. However, this idea was shelved because the project was too huge and it was too difficult to re-record. Of course, Emperor Jiajing should know very well that it is difficult to re-record such a big book. So, what made Emperor Jiajing make up his mind to overcome all kinds of difficulties and start re-recording Yongle Dadian?
According to historical records, in April of the thirty-sixth year of Jiajing (1557), a fire broke out in the palace, and the fire continued. The wenlou, where the Yongle Grand Ceremony is stored, is threatened and the situation is very critical. When the news of the fire came, Emperor Jiajing was most worried about the safety of Yongle Grand Ceremony. He gave three or four orders in one night to let the left and right sides board the Wenlou to urge the rescue of the Yongle Ceremony. Fortunately, the Yongle ceremony was able to escape this disaster in time. Emperor Jiajing was so worried that he decided to copy another book, Yongle Grand Ceremony, "two collections, just in case".
In the autumn of the fifth year after the fire, the large-scale re-recording of the project officially began. For such an unprecedented large-scale work, the re-recording officer chose the simplest and most correct method to "copy the book according to the original". This work was carried out for six years until the death of Emperor Jiajing, and the re-recording work was still going on. After the new emperor Ming Muzong succeeded to the throne, the re-recording work was completed.
According to historical records, the re-recorded Yongle Dadian is exactly the same as the original in content, format and binding, which is amazing. Since then, there have been two versions of Yongle Dadian. Nowadays, people are used to calling the first edition of Yongle Grand Ceremony the original edition and the re-recorded Jiajing edition the codex. In other words, all the Yongle Dadian collected by Guo Tu are copies of the Jiajing period of the Ming Dynasty.
What's more, what was destroyed and plundered by Eight-Nation Alliance in history was the transcript copied in the later period of Jiajing in Ming Dynasty, and the residual copies collected overseas and at home were also the transcripts copied by Jiajing or its transcripts. The original Yongle Dadian has not been found yet, and its whereabouts have not been accurately recorded. In other words, the original Yongle Grand Ceremony is gone!
The original 1 1095 of Yongle Dadian has completely disappeared for centuries! Where did the original Yongle ceremony go? Does this world still exist? If it exists, where is it? If it no longer exists in the world, when, by whom and in what way was it destroyed? Why didn't the history books of past dynasties accurately record the whereabouts of the original?
The original work of Yongle Dadian is one mystery after another, and some scholars even call it "the biggest mystery in the book history of China". The first statement about the original work is that it was destroyed by a fire in the Qing Dynasty. Miao, a scholar in the late Qing Dynasty, put forward this view. The history of Gan Qing Palace can be traced back to the 12th year of Shunzhi in Qing Dynasty (AD 1655) and the reconstruction in the 8th year of Kangxi. However, the Gan Qing Palace we see now was not built in this era, but was rebuilt two years after 1797 Jiaqing. The reason for the reconstruction was a fire in the second year of Jiaqing, which almost completely destroyed the whole Gan Qing Palace.
Then, was the original Yongle Grand Ceremony, as Miao said, hidden in the palace at that time and unfortunately destroyed by this fire? Zhang put forward different opinions on this statement. During the nine to forty years of Qianlong, the Qing government cleaned up the books in the palace, and all the rare books and records were collected and compiled into Tianlu Lin Lang Bibliography. Yongle Grand Ceremony is a behemoth in books, with more than 10,000 volumes. If the original is easy to find in Gan Qing Palace, how can it not be included in Tianlu Lin Lang Bibliography?
Coincidentally, the records in the history books about the large-scale visit to the Yongle Grand Ceremony during the Qianlong period seem to question the authenticity of the original Yongle Grand Ceremony destroyed by the fire in Gan Qing Palace. During the Qianlong period, when editing Sikuquanshu, I searched for Yongle Dadian inside and outside the palace because I wanted to collect the lost books of Yongle Dadian. At that time, some people suspected that when Xu and others were writing books during the Kangxi period, they often looked through this book of Huang Shizhen, which might have taken away the reference and failed to return it. So Qianlong ordered AG, Governor of Liangjiang, and Sanbao, Governor of Zhejiang, to inspect the two houses. Specifically, the ceremony is an official property. Even if it was taken in those years, it was not intended to be collected. As long as you hand it in, you won't pursue it, but you haven't found any.
If the original was stored in Gan Qing Palace, why did you go to Jiangsu and Zhejiang to find a copy? In this way, since the argument that the original was destroyed by the fire in Gan Qing Palace is untenable, will the original disappear before the Qing Dynasty?
The second argument about the disappearance of the original is that it was destroyed in the Ming Dynasty. To put it bluntly, it was burned by Li Zicheng. In March of the seventeenth year of Chongzhen, Li Zicheng and his Dashun army captured Beijing, reaching the peak of their glory. However, this glory lasted only 40 days, and the Manchu-Han allied forces of Wu Sangui and Dourgen defeated this army composed of peasants.
On April 29th, after Li Zicheng acceded to the throne and proclaimed himself emperor, he left Beijing in a hurry. He vented his anger on Beijing's centuries-old palaces and towers and ordered them to be set on fire. In such troubled times, no one will care about the existence and fate of a book. Has the original Yongle ceremony been completely and silently reduced to ashes at this time? However, in Zhang's view, there is no real evidence for this statement.
There are too many to post.