and was named _Yung Lo Ta Tien_, or The Great Standard of
Yung Lo. To achieve this, 3 commissioners, with 5 directors, 20
sub-directors and a staff of 2141 assistants, had laboured for the
space of five years. Its contents ran to no fewer than 22,877 separate
sections, to which must be added an index filling 60 sections. Each
section contained about 20 leaves, making a total of 917,480 pages for
the whole work. Each page consisted of sixteen columns of characters
averaging twenty-five to each column, or a total of 366,992,000
characters, to which, in order to bring the amount into terms of
English words, about another third would have to be added. This
extraordinary work was never printed, as the expense would have been
too great, although it was actually transcribed for that purpose; and
later on, two more copies were made, one of which was finally stored
in Peking and the other, with the original, in Nanking. Both the
Nanking copies perished at the fall of the Ming dynasty; and a similar
fate overtook the Peking copy, with the exception of a few odd
volumes, at the siege of the legations in 1900. The latter was bound
up in 11,100 volumes, covered with yellow silk, each volume being 1
ft. 8 in. in length by 1 ft. in breadth, and averaging over 1/2 in. in
thickness. This would perhaps be a fitting point to conclude any
notice of Chinese encyclopaedias, but for the fact that the work of
Yung Lo is gone while another encyclopaedia, also on a huge scale,
designed and carried out sonic centuries later, is still an important
work of reference.

T'u Shu.

The _T'u Shu Chi Ch'eng_ was planned, and to a great extent made
ready, under instructions from the emperor K'ang Hsi (see above), and
was finally brought out by his successor, Yung Cheng, 1723-1736.
Intended to embrace all departments of knowledge, its contents were
distributed over six leading categories, which for want of better
equivalents may be roughly rendered by (l) Heaven, (2) Earth, (3) Man,
(4) Arts and Sciences, (5) Philosophy and (6) Political Science. These
were subdivided into thirty-two classes; and in the voluminous index
which accompanies the work a further attempt was made to bring the
searcher into still closer touch with the individual items treated.
Thus, the category Heaven is subdivided into four classes,
namely--again, for want of better terms--(_a_) The Sky and its
Mani