Ts'ung Shu

THERE is no suitable English word to designate what in China is known as a ts'ung shu ( t I: ).1 The word collectanea comes nearest to the meaning of the Chinese expression, and it is possible that continued usage may ultimately fill it with the content which the Chinese has. The words anthology and thesaurus have been suggested, but these are yet too restricted in their connotations to include all that a ts'ung shu is. The same is true of Alexander Wylie's designation, collection of reprints ; for a ts'ung shu is by no means restricted to articles already printed; it may, and often does contain original articles. A ts'ung, shu is, or should be, a collection of reprints on several subjects by several authors. Until seven hundred years ago the Chinese had no ts'ung shu. There were so-called general collections (a A) of which the Chao ming wen hsilan (3 FigJ I a ), a collection of poems of the 6th century A. D., is the first representative. But this is not a ts'ung shu because the work, although the product of many authors, relates only to a single subject, namely literature. The first use of the words ts'ung shu to designate a collection of writings is in the title of a work of the T'ang dynasty known as the Li tse ts'ung shu ( t j I ft) by Lu Kuei-ming (died about 878 A. D.). This collection is still in existence, and although it bears the name ts'ung shu, it does not properly fall within that class, for the reason that it represents the collected writings of only one author. While it was in the T'ang dynasty that the Chinese first created great encyclopedias and similar works of reference, it was in the Sung dynasty that they first had ts'ung shu. Before going into these earliest ts'ung shu of the Sung period let us digress for a moment to speak of the purpose and the uses of ts'ung shu. When the ts'ung shu originated there was, of course, a total absence in China, as in the West, of anything corresponding

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