Content area
Full Text
1. Introduction
According to The Standard for the Restoration and Control of Ancient Books by [4] China Ministry of Culture (2006), Chinese ancient books are defined as "books written or printed before 1912, with classical binding and layout forms" such as bamboo slips, silk manuscripts, paper transcripts and rubbings, woodblock print books, movable wooden-type books, stone lithograph books and so on. In China, the term "rare books" usually refers to ancient books with high quality of collating, old block-printed editions or hand-written manuscripts by famous people. It is a subjective concept, varying from person to person during different historical periods. In the Song Dynasty (960-1279), people identified rare books mainly based on the quality of the intellectual content. In the Ming Dynasty (1368-1661), people identified rare books mainly based on printing styles and formats. In the Tsing Dynasty (1636-1911), people decided rare books based on both content and style. In the early 1980s when compiling the Chinese Rare Books Bibliography , some scholars proposed another criterion for rare book identification: rare books need to have high archeological, academic and artistic value ([2] Cao, 2007, p. 543). This is still a subjective criterion and it requires high-level expertise to judge values. Many curators of ancient books are not qualified experts to judge the values of ancient books. Therefore in practice, a simple criterion for identifying rare ancient books is books written or printed before 1795 (the 60th year of the Qianlong Emperor' reign in the Tsing Dynasty). However, as the history moves along, the value of some ancient books grows. [31] Zhao (2004) suggested re-defining the cutting point for "ancient books" and "rare books". He suggested to include documents with high values produced during the late Tsing Dynasty (1795-1911) and the Republic of China period (1912-1945) in the category of rare books. Owing to the subjective nature and the moving cutting point, people sometimes debate whether certain books belong to the category of "rare ancient books".
According to incomplete statistics, currently 27.175 million volumes of ancient books are preserved in various libraries in China. If the collections in museums and temples are included, the total number of ancient books is over 30 million volumes ([33] Zhang, 2007, p. 29). Among them, more than 2.5 million volumes...