EACS-2016. Book of Abstracts

Chinese Manuscripts, Books, Artifacts Abroad 21st Biennial Conference of the European Association for Chinese Studies 92 Maiatckii Dmitri (St. Petersburg State University) About Chinese Rare Books Collections in the Library of the Faculty of Asian and African Studies at St. Petersburg State University Key words: China, books, collections, xylographs, manuscripts The report summarizes four years experience in the study and description of Chinese rare books stored in the library of FAAS SPbSU. The library contains a comparatively large collection of Chinese books, consisted of woodcut block- prints, manuscripts, maps and albums, belonged to Ming and Qing Dynasties. Although it is one of the largest European collections and although it attracts attention of many scientists in Russia and abroad, the people have never tried to catalogue it totally, there were only few attempts to describe the fund partially. In fact too little materials about the fund are available. In this article the author endeavors to make up for lack of information about the books. He postulates main issues in the study of the books: formulates essential features of the book fund, reveals its general structure and component collections, traces the history of the fund’s formation, names major collectors and speaks about their fate, characterizes some prominent editions in different themes and genres, especially those ones that are considered to be extremely valuable or very rare. At the same time the author offers some hypothesis about the origin of certain corps of books. For example, he singled out a number of books containing symbols of the Jesus Society. After comparison of possessory inscriptions on them he made an assumption that they originated from the lost Peking library of the Jesuits. In general, the information reported by the author of the paper can be useful not only to scientists engaged in book science, but also in the History of Russian and Western Sinology, and also in different areas of China's traditional culture. Monnet Nathalie (Bibliothèque National de France) Jade as aWriting Material for Emperor Qianlong Key words: Qianlong, jade, inscriptions, Buddhism, rectification of history Emperor Qianlong’s imperially sponsored texts circulated not only in book form and manuscripts, but were also inscribed on stelaes and precious materials such as jade. A book made of jade, engraved with a text written by Qianlong, preserves a corrective note of a Ming stelae inscription written at the time of the restoration of an old Guanyin temple near Beijing. Qianlong develops his historical and theological arguments to correct the errors he finds in the inscription. The emperor’s commentary offers an insight into his personal convictions and is an invaluable example of how he imposed his views by rectifying history. Popova Olga (Institute of Scientific Information for Social Sciences RAS) Alekseev Collection of Chinese Calligraphy and Books in Moscow Key words: Lithography, woodcuts, old historical novels, library Collection of rare books in Chinese and European languages formerly owned by well-known Rus- sian Sinologist Vasilij Alekseev (1881–1951) is preserved in the funds of the RAS Library of Sinology in Moscow. Scholar with encyclopedic breadth of knowledge in Chinese culture collected Chinese woodcuts, manuscripts, lithographs and contemporary book editions. Some of the items are directly connected with scholarly interests of V.Alekseev. For example, he translated into Russian novels of Pu Songling (1640–1715) and owned a valuable illustrated Shanghai edition of his works. The Collection embraces three illustrated editions of the Three Kingdoms by Luo Guanzhong, two edi- tion of Jin Ping Mei, a 1893 copy of the Wonderful Story of Two Beauties , three editions of the Journey to the West by Wu Cheng-en, Xu Zhonglin’s Elevation to the Rank of the Spirits (1908 edition) and the