Gunpowder Saltpeter was known to the Chinese by the mid-1st century AD and there is strong evidence of the use of saltpeter and sulfur in various largely medicinal combinations. A Chinese alchemical text dated 492 noted saltpetre burnt with a purple flame, providing a practical and reliable means of distinguishing it from other inorganic salts, thus enabling alchemists to evaluate and compare purification techniques; the earliest Arabic and Latin accounts of saltpeter purification are dated after 1200.
The first mention of a mixture resembling gunpowder appeared in Taishang Guaizu Danjing Mijue by Qing Xuzi (c. 808); it describes mixing six parts sulfur to six parts saltpeter to one part birthwort herb (which would provide carbon). The first reference to the incendiary properties of such mixtures is the passage of the Zhenyuan miaodao yaolüe, a Taoist text tentatively dated to the mid-9th century AD: "Some have heated together sulfur, realgar and saltpeter with honey; smoke and flames result, so that their hands and faces have been burnt, and even the whole house where they were working burned down." The Chinese word for "gunpowder" is Chinese: 火药/火藥; pinyin: huŏ yào /xuou yɑʊ/, which literally means "Fire Medicine"; however this name was only came into use some centuries after the mixture's discovery. By the 9th century Taoist monks or alchemists searching for an elixir of immortality had serendipitously stumbled upon gunpowder. The Chinese wasted little time in applying gunpowder to the development of weapons, and in the centuries that followed, they produced a variety of gunpowder weapons, including flamethrowers, rockets, bombs, and land mines, before inventing guns as a projectile weapon.
The Chinese "Wu Ching Tsung Yao" (Complete Essentials from the Military Classics), written by Tseng Kung-Liang between 1040–1044, provides encyclopedia references to a variety of mixtures which included petrochemicals, as well as garlic and honey. A slow match for flame throwing mechanisms using the siphon principle and for fireworks and rockets are mentioned. The mixture formulas in this book do not contain enough salpeter to create an explosive however; being limited to at most 50% salpeter, they produce an incendiary. The Essentials was however written by a Song Dynasty court bureaucrat, and there's little evidence that it had any immediate impact on warfare; there is no mention of gunpowder use in the chronicles of the wars against the Tanguts in the eleventh century, and China was otherwise mostly at peace during this century. The first chronicled use of "fire spears" (or "fire lances") is at the siege of De'an in 1132.
Kangxi Dictionary
The Kangxi Dictionary editors, including Zhang Yushu and Chen Tingjing , partly based it on two Ming Dynasty dictionaries: the 1615 Zihui ("Character Collection") by Mei Yingzuo , and the 1627 Zhengzitong ("Correct Character Mastery") by Zhang Zilie . Since the imperial edict required that the Kangxi Dictionary be compiled within five years, a number of errors were inevitable. The Daoguang Emperor established a review board and their 1831 Zidian kaozheng ("Character Dictionary Textual Research") corrected 2,588 mistakes, mostly in quotations and citations.
The supplemented dictionary contains 47,035 character entries, plus 1,995 graphic variants, giving a total of 49,030 different characters. They are grouped under the 596 radicals and arranged by the number of additional strokes in the character. Although these 596 radicals were first used in the Zihui, due to the popularity of the Kangxi Dictionary they are known as Kangxi radicals and remain in modern usage as a method to categorize traditional Chinese characters.
The character entries give variants (if any), pronunciations in traditional fanqie spelling and in modern reading of a homophone, different meanings, and quotations from Chinese books and lexicons. The dictionary also contains rime tables with characters ordered under syllable rime classes, tones, and initial syllable onsets.
The Kangxi Dictionary is available in many forms, from old Qing Dynasty editions in block printing, to reprints in traditional Chinese bookbinding, to modern revised editions with essays in Western-style hardcover, to the digitized Internet version.
The Kangxi Dictionary is one of the Chinese dictionaries used by the Ideographic Rapporteur Group for the Unicode standard.
SiKu Quanshu
During the height of the Qing Dynasty in the 18th century CE, the Qianlong Emperor commissioned the Siku Quanshu, to demonstrate that the Qing could surpass the Ming Dynasty's 1403 Yongle Encyclopedia, which was the world's largest encyclopedia at the time.
The editorial board included 361 scholars, with Ji Yun and Lu Xixiong as chief editors. They began compilation in 1773 and completed it in 1782. The editors collected and annotated over 10,000 manuscripts from the imperial collections and other libraries, destroyed some 3,000 titles, or works, that were considered to be anti-Manchu, and selected 3,461 titles, or works, for inclusion into the Siku quanshu. They were bound in 36,381 volumes with more than 79,000 chapters , comprising about 2.3 million pages, and approximately 800 million Chinese characters.
Scribes copied every word by hand, and according to Wilkinson, "The copyists (of whom there were 3,826) were not paid in cash but rewarded with official posts after they had transcribed a given number of words within a set time." Four copies for the emperor were placed in specially constructed libraries in the Forbidden City, Old Summer Palace, Shenyang, and Wenjin Chamber, Chengde. Three additional copies for the public were deposited in Siku quanshu libraries in Hangzhou, Zhenjiang, and Yangzhou. All seven libraries also received copies of the 1725 imperial encyclopedia Gujin tushu jicheng.
The Siku quanshu copies kept in Zhenjiang and Yangzhou were destroyed during the Taiping Rebellion. In 1860 during the Second Opium War an Anglo-French expedition force burned most of the copy kept at the Old Summer Palace. The four remaining copies suffered some damage during World War II. Today, the four remaining copies are kept at the National Library of China in Beijing, the National Palace Museum in Taipei, the Gansu Library in Lanzhou, and the Zhejiang Library in Hangzhou.
Timeline of the collection of booksIn the first month of the 37th year of the Qianlong Emperor, people were requested by Imperial Decree to hand in their private book collections for use in the compilation of the Siku Quanshu. However, only a small number of people actually did so at this time, partly in fear of possible persecutions due to Literary Inquisition such as in the case of Treason by the Book.In October of the same year, seeing that only a limited number of people actually handed in books, the Qianlong Emperor issued furthered Imperial Decrees stressing that Books would be returned to their owners once the compilation was finished. Book owners would not be persecuted even if their books contained Bad words. Less than three months after the issue of this decree four to five thousand different books were handed in.Apart from reassuring the book owners that they would be free from persecution, the Qianlong Emperor also made promises and gave rewards to Chinese book owners, such as that he would perform personal calligraphy on their books. By this time 10,000 books had been handed in.
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