IRVINE : UCI Acquires Rare Chinese Writings

A reprint of a rare, 500-volume collection of Chinese writings has been donated to UC Irvine. The collection is one of only three in the world.

The collection, known as the Digest of the Great Encyclopedia of Four Treasures, was a gift to UCI from the National Palace Museum in Taipei, which has the original work, said William Wong, UCI’s librarian for East Asian publications. It is an abbreviated version of a 1,500-volume anthology of great Chinese works of literature, philosophy, history and the classics through the 18th Century.

The donation is yet another milestone as UCI seeks to build its fledgling department of East Asian Languages and Literatures.

“These are the basic texts, the collections of writers of standard Chinese historical texts that anybody studying in this area would need,” said Pauline Yu, professor of Chinese literature and chairwoman of the department of East Asian Languages and Literatures, which was created by the University of California Board of Regents in November.

Both the digest and the larger collection were commissioned in 1773 by Ch’ien-lung, the fourth emperor of the Manchu, or Ch’ing, Dynasty. The digest, however, offers something the lengthier original does not, experts say. Because it was prepared for the emperor’s personal use, it still contains anti-Manchu passages and political information censored from the public version.

“It was collected specifically for the emperor’s own reading pleasure, so it represents the most important works within the larger collection,” Yu said. “Because it was intended for the emperor’s eyes only, nothing was censored. In the larger collection, anything deemed possibly seditious or not beneficial to the Ch’ing Dynasty’s image . . . was edited or censored in some way. For scholars, it is important to have the uncensored version.”

The digest is believed to be the only copy at any University of California campus, and one of the few within the United States, Wong said. UC Berkeley, however, has the larger, 1,500-volume set, said John C. Jamieson, chairman of the university’s Center for Korean Studies and an expert in Chinese bibliography.

Taiwan museum officials had commissioned 200 reprints of the historic digest to allow broader access to scholars. Yu said UCI’s digest was the museum’s last remaining copy, and is valued at about $20,700.

The Taipei museum also is donating to UCI a 57-volume collection covering 5,000 years of Chinese art, Yu said. That set is valued at about $1,800.

Yu, one of the department’s three professors, plans to recruit three more scholars in East Asian studies for the 1991-92 academic year. The department now offers an undergraduate degree, but hopes to add a graduate program, as well as an interdisciplinary major that includes the schools of humanities, social sciences and fine arts.

UC Berkeley and Harvard and Columbia universities, among others, already are established and internationally respected centers for Asian studies. What Yu hopes to do differently is incorporate East Asian language and literature into the basic history and literature curricula at UCI, which has the largest concentration (34%) of Asian students of any UC campus.

“We don’t want to be a department that takes place on the margins of the university community,” said Yu, who came to UCI from Columbia University in 1989. “One of things that is very important to us is that the (Asian) literary traditions, for example, are integrated in the mainstream of literary study.”