The discourse of loss in song dynasty private and imperial book collecting

The most famous case was that of Li Guang (1077-1155). Prior to the capture of Emperor Qinzong in 1126, Li Guang opposed negotiating territory with the Jurchens. In the 1130s he became an advocate for strengthening defenses along the Yangzi River, which had become the de facto border between the Song andJin Empires. He agreed to serve as assistant councilor under Qin Gui in 1139. When the latter began to remove from office all generals who had served in the war against Jin, Li became a harsh critic of Qin Gui's pro-peace diplomacy and argued that the Jin forces could not be trusted to abide by peace regulations. He was dismissed from office one year later. In 1147 Li Guang's family burned his library of at least 10,000 juan (M. Wang, 1195/2000, 7.174; Tuo, 1345/1977, 473.13760; Fan, 2001, p. 104). (3) The collection of Wang Zhi (?-1145?) suffered a similar fate. He was dismissed from court around the same time as Li Guang. Qin Xi's call to local administrators first resulted in the alleged confiscation of over half of the collection estimated at 25,000 juan. In 1147 anxious relatives burned the other half of the collection (Hartman, 1998, pp. 93-94, 99-102; Fan, 2001, pp.106-8). (4)

The combination of active collecting and censorship instilled fear and paranoia among those related to or associated with officials ousted by Qin Gui. Soon after the death of Councilor Zhao Ding (1084-1147), who had been exiled to Hainan Island in 1147, his son burned the entire family collection of books and weapons (Huang, 1993, p. 60). Not all those fearing the impact of the Qin family's cultural policies resorted to such extremes. Xue Jixuan (1134-1173) wrote that his father hastily removed those pieces in his collection that contained prowar sentiments and criticisms of the propeace policy and hid them in a separate cabinet. The effect of the campaign was reduced in this case, but Xue still blamed it for the dismal state in which he later discovered his father's writings (Huang, 1993, pp. 60-61).

LOSS AS OPPORTUNITY: PRIVATE COLLECTORS AND PRINTING IN THE TWELFTH CENTURY

When remembering the losses that resulted from warfare and the forced migration in the 1120s and 1130s, private collectors shared a common historical analogy. Several of them referred back to the destruction of private collections under the First Emperor of Qin in 213 BCE (Petersen, 1995). They were united in their estimation of the scale of the losses that resulted from this deliberate destruction, but they connected it to the subsequent restoration of the classical textual legacy. They attributed this restoration to the collective efforts of the community of Han Dynasty scholars. In Ye Mengde's words,

   I reflected on the fact that in the beginning of the Han
   Dynasty [ca. 200 BCE] it had not been that long since the
   time of Confucius, and, yet, after the chaos brought on by
   the Qin, fifty-one chapters of The Book of Documents had been
   lost, six chapters from The Book of Songs, and the sections
   "The Officials of Winter" in The Rites of Zhou had been
   entirely lost. If this was the case for the classics, it must
   have been much worse in all other categories! Fortunately, the
   rest had been preserved in the collections stuck in the walls
   of private homes. What has been preserved until today is the
   result of scholars upholding [these texts'] transmission. (Ye,
   12th c./1983, 4.1b) (5)