Advancement of the Yongle Encyclopedia Compilation

Timeline

1. 1411Wenyuan Pavilion, Nanjing · JiangsuThe Yongle Encyclopedia was finalized in the fifth year of Yongle and transcribed by the sixth year; the whole work comprised 22,877 juan bound in 11,095 volumes, with the original stored in the Wenyuan Pavilion in Nanjing. By the ninth year of Yongle, the court treated it as a 'wellspring for recovering lost texts,' used for history compilation, collation, and citation of Song and Yuan texts lost since, becoming the core support of the Yongle-era textual system.
2. 1411Capital (Nanjing) · JiangsuIn the ninth year of Yongle, the Chengzu emperor appointed Grand Tutor of the Crown Prince Yao Guangxiao and Minister of Revenue Xia Yuanji as supervisory compilers; the third revision of the Veritable Records of Ming Taizu officially began, with chief compilers Hu Guang, Hu Yan, Huang Huai, and Yang Rong. The compilation took over six years, completed in the sixteenth year of Yongle, and together with the Yongle Encyclopedia belonged to the Yongle-era system of large-scale textual projects.
3. 1411Nanjing—Beijing · North ChinaThe Yongle court continuously dispatched people in all directions to collect books to fill gaps in the collections, and used the seven or eight thousand works gathered in the Yongle Encyclopedia as base texts for collation and organization. As the schedule for moving north to Beijing approached, the court began planning the future relocation and management of the Wenyuan Pavilion's collections and the Encyclopedia's original, making arrangements in advance for the northward transport of texts in the nineteenth year of Yongle.