"Yongle Dadian" is the largest encyclopedia in ancient my country.
It was compiled by Xie Jin in Nanjing during the Ming Dynasty. At its peak, nearly 10,000 supervisors from home and abroad carefully created the largest encyclopedia in ancient China with approximately 370 million words in the Chengxian Street area of ??Southeast University, with a total of 22,877 volumes. , and sixty volumes of regulations and catalogues, which were packed into eleven thousand and ninety-five volumes. ?
"Yongle Dadian" contains 8,000 kinds of ancient books from the pre-Qin to Ming dynasties. It is an extremely precious historical document in my country's ancient books and is also the largest and earliest encyclopedia in the world. Because he had so many volumes, he only copied one at first. In 1562 (the 41st year of Jiajing reign), Emperor Shizong of the Ming Dynasty ordered 109 people to copy the book. The copying was not completed until 1567 (the first year of Longqing reign), which lasted five years. When compiling this book, the official mobilized more than 3,000 people to participate in editing, recording, marking, etc. The compilation started in the first year of Yongle (1403) and was completed in the sixth year of Yongle (1408). Therefore, it was written during the Yongle period, so it was named "Yongle Dadian".
The contents of "Yongle Dadian" include astronomy, geography, literature, art, classics, history books, engineering, agriculture, religion, medicine and other subjects. ?
The fate of "Yongle Dadian" is very tragic: the original was destroyed by war in the late Ming Dynasty, and part of the copy was destroyed by imperialists such as Britain, the United States, Japan, Russia, and Germany when the Eight-Power Allied Forces invaded Beijing. They were snatched away and part of them was destroyed in the war. After the founding of New China, 215 copies were collected from all over the country and are now in the National Library. In 1959, Zhonghua Book Company photocopied and published 720 volumes of the remaining copies at home and abroad, which was only about 3% of the original volume. In recent years, Zhonghua Book Company has collected the parts that were not collected in the previous edition, compiled them into a sequel, and photocopied them for publication.