| Yiwen Leiju | |||||||
| Traditional Chinese | 藝 文 類 聚 | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Simplified Chinese | 艺 文 类 聚 | ||||||
| Literal meaning | Collection of Literature Arranged by Categories | ||||||
| |||||||
The Yiwen Leiju is a Chinese leishu encyclopedia completed by Ouyang Xun in 624 under the Tang. Its other contributors included Linghu Defen and Chen Shuda.
The leishu is a genre of reference books historically compiled in China and other East Asian countries. The term is generally translated as "encyclopedia", although the leishu are quite different from the modern notion of encyclopedia.
Ouyang Xun (557–641), courtesy name Xinben, was a Chinese calligrapher, politician, and writer of the early Tang Dynasty. He was born in Hunan, Changsha, to a family of government officials; and died in modern Anhui province.
The Tang dynasty or the Tang Empire was an imperial dynasty of China spanning the 7th to 10th centuries. It was preceded by the Sui dynasty and followed by the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms period. Historians generally regard the Tang as a high point in Chinese civilization, and a golden age of cosmopolitan culture. Tang territory, acquired through the military campaigns of its early rulers, rivaled that of the Han dynasty. The Tang capital at Chang'an was the most populous city in the world in its day.
It is divided into 47 sections and many subsections. It covers a vast number of subjects and contains many quotations from older works, which are well cited. Many of these older works are otherwise long lost, [1] so this is one of the sources used by Ming and Qing scholars to reconstruct the lost Record of the Seasons of Jingchu . [2]
The Ming dynasty was the ruling dynasty of China – then known as the Great Ming Empire – for 276 years (1368–1644) following the collapse of the Mongol-led Yuan dynasty. The Ming dynasty was the last imperial dynasty in China ruled by ethnic Han Chinese. Although the primary capital of Beijing fell in 1644 to a rebellion led by Li Zicheng, regimes loyal to the Ming throne – collectively called the Southern Ming – survived until 1683.
The Qing dynasty, officially the Great Qing, was the last imperial dynasty of China and Mongolia. It was established in 1636, and ruled China proper from 1644 to 1912. It was preceded by the Ming dynasty and succeeded by the Republic of China. The Qing multi-cultural empire lasted for almost three centuries and formed the territorial base for modern China. It was the fifth largest empire in world history. The dynasty was founded by the Manchu Aisin Gioro clan in Manchuria. In the late sixteenth century, Nurhaci, originally a Ming Jianzhou Guard vassal, began organizing "Banners", military-social units that included Manchu, Han, and Mongol elements. Nurhaci formed the Manchu clans into a unified entity. By 1636, his son Hong Taiji began driving Ming forces out of the Liaodong Peninsula and declared a new dynasty, the Qing.
