第九十章《胡适英文论著：中国文学》（2）

  第九十章《胡适英文论著：中国文学》（2）

  But in that year, the Chinese Navy was defeated and destroyed in the first Sino-Japanese War. There was no ship for his advanced training. He had to go home to wait for a year before he was taken on the naval training ship Tungchi on which he served as a cadet officer for three years. It was on board the Tungchi that Chang Poling experienced one of the most unforgettable episodes of China's national humiliation which brought about in him and finally led to his decision to leave the Navy and devote his life to education.
  Under Three Flags
  In those years immediately following China's defeat by Japan, the great imperialistic powers of Europe were striving to compete with Japan in securing by force territorial concessions from China. With various territorial seizures, Russia, Germany, Great Britain and France were mapping out their spheres of influence in China. The partitioning of the Chinese Empire was openly and frequently discussed everywhere.
  It was at Weihaiwei, on the northeastern coast of Shantung, that young Chang Poling was made to realize most vividly and indelibly the depth of China's humiliation. The Chinese naval base of Weihaiwei had been occupied by Japan since early 1895. It was now to be returned by Japan to China and then to be leased by China to Great Britain. The training ship Tungchi was sent by the Chinese Government to receive the port back from the Japanese and then to transfer it the next day to the British.
  I was there, says Chang Poling, and saw the flags over Weihaiwei change color three times in two days. I saw the Dragon Flag replace the Rising Sun, and the next day I saw the Dragon replaced by the Union Jack. Sorrow and indignation set me to thinking. I came to the firm conviction that our national survival in this modern world could depend only upon a new kind of education which would produce a new generation of men. And I resolved to dedicate my own life to this task of national salvation through education.
  The Yen School
  This decision that was shaping itself in the mind of a young naval cadet on board the Tungchi , was an echo and a reflection of the great nationwide agitation for reform which in that memorable year of 1898 culminated in the Hundred Days of Reform. The leaders of this movement had succeeded in moving the youthful Manchu Emperor to issue in rapid succession a large number of edicts abolishing old abuses and inaugurating new policies. The old empire seemed to be at last awakened from its long centuries of complacency by the grave dangers of foreign encroachment and national extinction. For a time, it looked as if it might be possible to bring about the long needed reforms through government leadership and imperial patronage.
  But these false hopes were soon shattered by the reactionary forces headed by the ignorant Empress-Dowager who made her son virtually a prisoner, put to death six of the leaders of the reform movement, exiled a number of others, and annulled all the reform edicts and policies.
  Among the enlightened officials who retired from political life after the failure of the Reforms of 1898, was the scholar Yen Hsiu, a native of Tientsin and a friend of Chang Poling's father. In October of that year, Mr. Yen invited the young Chang Poling, now 22 years old and recently retired from his training ship and his naval career, to be private tutor in his Tientsin home and teach western learning to his own and his friends' children. Chang gladly accepted the invitation and began his life-long mission with five young pupils.
  The association and co-operation of Chang Poling and Yen Hsiu was a very happy event from the very beginning of the Nankai Schools. Mr. Yen was one of the most lovable and most inspiring representatives of the best intellectual and moral tradition of the old China. He was a scholar, bibliophile, poet and philosopher, a public-spirited citizen and patriot. His faith in education, his open-mindedness to the new learning of a new age, and his great moral prestige in the Tientsin district and in the Chihli (Hopei) province were of immense help to the youthful Chang Poling in building up his great educational enterprises.
  The late Fan Yuen-lien, one time Minister of Education in the early years of the Republic, who in 1918 was with Mr. Yen on an educational tour in the United States, told me this story about Mr. Yen. The United States Government, alarmed by a recent case of assassination of a prominent Chinese writer by a Chinese terrorist on the western coast, assigned a secret service officer to accompany the Chinese educators on their tour. Although Mr. Yen could not speak a word of English, the American officer was so deeply impressed by his quiet and humble ways of life that, at the end of the long journey, he said to Mr. Fan: I have been assigned to accompany many distinguished foreign visitors to America, but I have never seen a more lovable character than your Mr. Yen!
  Such was the host in whose back yard Chang Poling started his first school of five students. It was called the Yen Kwan (Yen School). Three years later, another Tientsin leader, Wang Kwei-chang, invited Chang to teach his six children at his home in the afternoon. This was called the Wang Kwan (Wang School).
  My friend, Mr. L. K. Tao, Director of the Institute of Social Research of the Academia Sinica, who was one of the early pupils in the Yen School, tells me that Chang Poling's teaching even in those early days justly deserved to be called modern education. He was a good teacher in the western learning: English language, mathematics, and the elements of natural science. He laid great emphasis on the physical exercises of his pupils. He made designs from memory of the dumbbells and Indian clubs used in the Naval School, and ordered them to be made for the use of his students. He played with his students and taught them various exercises and outdoor sports, such as bicycle-riding, high jumping, broad jumping and football. Mr. Tao also recalls that his first lessons in whist and billiards were from his teacher Chang Poling. It was this recognition of the place of science and physical culture in education and this free and democratic association of the teacher and the pupil in work and play that marked out the young tutor Chang as one of the founders of modern education in China.
  Birth of Nankai
  In 1903, Yen Hsiu and Chang Poling visited Japan to study the schools and colleges there. Chang brought back numerous educational and scientific apparatus for the use of his school. Both he and Mr. Yen were impressed by the rapid educational development in the Island Empire. On their return to China, they decided to expand their private tutoring schools into a full-sized middle school.
  The middle school, known as the First Private Middle School, was opened in the fall of 1904, with 73 students and 4 teachers occupying a part of Mr. Yen's house and operating with a monthly budget of two hundred taels of silver equally borne by the Yen and Wang families. To meet the need for teachers, a special class was organized for a number of maturer students selected from the two earlier private schools, who were to be part-time teachers in the school while continuing their advanced studies. Among these select students was Mr. L. K. Tao who after graduation studied in Japan and England and has been a pioneer and leader in Chinese sociological studies.
  In 1906, a wealthy friend gave to the new school two acres of land in the suburban area of Tientsin, locally known as Nankai. Funds were raised to build a school house on this land. When the school moved into its new building in 1907, it was renamed the Nankai Middle School, a name which, together with that of its founder, will always occupy an illustrious place in the history of Chinese education.
  The story of Nankai during the next 30 years was one of rapid but planned expansion and progress. In 1910 and 1911 the school began to receive financial contributions from the local and provincial governments. Endowments from private sources continued to increase throughout the years. In 1920, General Li Chun, a native of Tientsin and Military Governor of the Province of Kiangsu, committed suicide and left a will by which a part of his estate amounting to half a million Chinese dollars was given to Nankai as an endowment. The China Foundation and the Sino-British Indemnity Fund Commission which administer the Boxer Indemnity funds remitted by the United States and Great Britain, respectively, have been among the chief public contributors to Nankai. The Rockefeller Foundation of New York City has given generously to the building and equipment funds of Nankai University and to the maintenance of its Graduate Institute of Economics. Beginning with two acres of land, Nankai was able, in the course of years, to buy over a hundred acres adjacent to the school and to build up a spacious campus for its expansion.
  Chang Poling had long dreamed of a university built on the foundation of his middle school. After several unsuccessful attempts in the early years of the Republic, the dream came true in 1919 when Nankai University formally opened with three colleges: Liberal Arts, Science and Commerce. A college of Mining was added in 1920. The Graduate Institute of Economics was established in 1931, and the Institute of Chemistry in 1932.
  A middle school for girls was founded in 1923, and an experimental primary school was added in 1928.
  Thus by 1932, the Nankai group of schools comprised five main divisions: a university, a graduate school, a middle school for boys, another for girls, and a primary school. Total enrollment reached 3,000 in the years before their destruction by the Japanese.
  This rapid expansion was chiefly due to Chang Poling's remarkable leadership. He often tells his friends that an educational institution ought to be always in the red, and that any school administrator who leaves a bank balance at the end of the year, is a miser who misses his opportunity to do a good job with the money. He started from nothing and never was afraid of spending more money than the budget allowed him to spend on the school. He was always planning for new projects of expansion. Lacking funds never stopped him from dreaming wilder and bigger schemes. He was always optimistic about the future. I have a way of deceiving myself, says he. That is his manner of saying that he can always make himself believe that things will turn out all right in the end. And things do turn out all right in the end, and he always got the help he desired for carrying out his new schemes.
  His Educational Credo
  The Nankai Schools, says Chang Poling in an autobiographical account written in 1944, was born in China's national calamity. Therefore its object was to reform the old habits of life and to train youth for the salvation of the country. He summed up China's weaknesses under five headings: (1) physical weakness and poor health, (2) superstition and lack of scientific knowledge, (3) economic poverty, (4) disunity in the sense of a deplorable lack of associated life and activity, and (5) selfishness.
  To correct these shortcomings, Chang proposed his five-fold educational reform. The new education must aim at the improvement of the bodily fitness of the individual. It must train the youths in the results and methods of the modern sciences. It must enable the students to organize and actively participate in group life and team work. It must give them a vitalized moral training. And, lastly, it must cultivate in each and every individual the capability to work for his country.
  All this sounds platitudinous today. But it was Chang Poling's great achievement to have succeeded in actually making most of these ideals an integral part of the life in his school. There is no doubt, for example, that, of all the non-missionary schools in China, Nankai has been the most famous and most successful school in athletics. Chang Poling's athletes have won high honors in North-China, All-China and Far-Eastern Olympic Meets. Ever since 1910, he was always invited to be the presiding umpire in all important athletic meets. His life-long interest in physical culture and his constant preaching of the importance of sportsmanship in all games, have been responsible for the high standard of athletics in Nankai.
  Nankai also enjoys the highest reputation in the training of group activities and team work. The most famous of Nankai's student activities has been its New Drama Club. As early as 1909, Chang Poling was encouraging his students in dramatics. He wrote a play for them and directed its staging and acting; and, to the surprise and scandalization of the outside audience, the principal character was played by no other person than the school principal himself! In later years, his talented younger brother, Dr. Pengchun Chang (P. C. Chang) who studied literature and dramatics at Columbia University, took over the leadership in this field. Several Nankai new dramas were quite successful on the public stage. Under the directorship of Dr. P. C. Chang, several European masterpieces, including Ibsen's A Doll's House and An Enemy of the People , were successfully enacted in their Chinese version and were enthusiastically received by the general public. One of the student actors in the Ibsen plays was Mr. Wan Chia-pao who, better known by his pen-name, Tsao Yu, has become one of the celebrated playwrights in present-day China.
  In the sphere of moral and patriotic education, Chang Poling's personal leadership played an important role, especially in the early years when the enrollment was small. On every Wednesday afternoon, he would call the entire school to a special convocation at which he would discuss with the students problems of life and affairs of the state and the world. He knew almost every student by name and took pains to give personal advices to the boys.
  In 1908, he paid his first visit to the United States and Great Britain and made a study of the educational institutions in those two countries. His own moral earnestness, his long association with Christian friends and his recent observations of the social and civic life in America and England led him to cherish great faith in the Christian religion as a powerful force for good. The year after his return from America and England (1909) he was baptized as a Christian. He was then 33 years old.
  But my friend Chang Poling is never an austere moralist. He has too much sense of humor to be that. One of his students, Dr. Ling Ping, one-time Chinese Minister to the Republic of Cuba, loves to tell this story about his first meeting with his teacher and schoolmaster. Mr. Ling, then a young boy from the interior province of Honan, called at the office of Chang Poling to apply for admission to his middle school. He was told to wait, because the master was coaching his football team in the field. After half an hour, Ling saw a tall and perspiring man walk into the office with long leathern boots full of mud. This was the great Chang Poling! He immediately perceived the expression of amazement on the face of the young visitor. Smilingly he asked him a few questions and told him to sit down at the desk and write a short Chinese composition on the old dictum: The teacher must himself be dignified before the Truth could be respected! This sense of humor disarmed the young applicant who wrote his composition on how austere and reverent his ideal teacher ought to look. Chang glanced over the piece and said: Good! Good! You are admitted to the Fifth Class.
  Chang Poling is first and last a patriot and nationalist. His life mission has been national salvation through education. He sums up his educational theory in the motto he coined for his school: Kung Neng , which means Public-spiritedness and Competence. All teaching and all training should aim at this double objective: public-spiritedness and professional competence to work for society and the state.
  Wartime Blows
  As a patriotic educator, Chang Poling was worried about Japan's aggressive movements in Manchuria. In 1927, he made a study trip through the Northeastern Provinces. After his return, he formed in the University a club for the study of the Northeast, and sent a group of professors to make a survey of the conditions and problems in Manchuria.
  With the Japanese invasion and occupation of the Northeastern Provinces in 1931 and with the Japanese wars brought to the Peiping-Tientsin area since 1933, the nationalistic tradition of Chang Poling's schools often came into direct conflict with the invading enemy. Between Nankai University and the Nankai Middle Schools lay the barracks of the Japanese Garrison Army in Tientsin. Yet, says Chang Poling, in those years before the fall of Peiping and Tientsin in July, 1937, the patriotic demonstrations of the students in North China were mostly led by our Nankai students.
  For this patriotic leadership, the Nankai Schools and University were deliberately destroyed by the Japanese military on July 29 and 30, 1937. For two successive days, low-flying Japanese bombers rained destruction on the Nankai buildings. The sad news reached Chang Poling in Nanking. Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek said to him: Nankai has been sacrificed for China. As long as China lives, Nankai will live.
  Shortly after the destruction of the Nankai Schools, Chang Poling suffered a great personal loss in the death of his beloved son Hsihu, who was killed when the bomber he was piloting to the front crashed in the Kiangsi mountains. Hsihu had graduated from the National Military Aviation School three years before. At the graduation ceremonies, the Generalissimo spoke as president of the school, and Chang Poling made a stirring address on behalf of the parents of the graduating class. When he learned of his son's death, he said after a moment's silence: I have given this son to the nation. He has done his duty.
  The destruction of Nankai by the Japanese army had been foreseen by Chang Poling and his colleagues. In 1935, he made a trip to the western province of Szechuan, and visited many of its cities. A few months later, the dean of the Nankai Middle School was sent to Szechuan to survey the possibilities of establishing a branch school in western China. A site near Chungking was decided upon; the building began. The new school was opened in September 1936, and was called the Nanyu (South of Chungking) Middle School. Among the first contributors to its building and equipment fund, was Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek.
  In 1938, at the request of the Nankai Alumni Association, the new school was renamed Nankai School of Chungking.
  After the fall of Peiping and Tientsin, the Ministry of Education asked Nankai University to join National Tsinghua University and National Peking University in forming the first Associated University at Changsha, Hunan, one thousand miles away from the Peiping-Tientsin area. When the Changsha site was bombed by the enemy in 1937, the three universities were ordered by the Government to move on another thousand miles to Kunming, Yunnan, where for seven years they have been functioning as The National Associated University of the Southwest.
  Nankai Will Live
  But Chang Poling stayed most of the time with his Nankai School near Chungking. The Institute of Economics was revived in Chungking in 1939. A Nankai Primary School was opened in 1940. During those years of most severe Japanese bombing of Chungking (1939-1940), the new Nankai buildings were three times bombed. Thirty huge bombs were dropped on the campus in August, 1940. But the damaged buildings were soon repaired and school work was never interrupted.
  Chang Poling who loves his country has naturally been always deeply interested in China's political developments. But he many times declined high offices in the government, including the posts of Minister of Education and Mayor of Tientsin, because he wanted to devote himself whole-heartedly to the carrying out of his educational ideals of Nankai.
  It took the war to draft him into public service as one of the unquestioned leaders of the nation. He was called upon to serve on the People's Political Council ever since its formation in 1938, first as Deputy Speaker and later as a member of its Presidium. He has great faith in this body as an experiment in democratic parliament for China. Except on occasions of serious illness, he has never missed a PPC session, including the bi-weekly meetings of its Resident Committee. He seldom spoke; more often than not he made his influence felt in the Council Chambers by his weighty presence. Essentially educational in outlook, he would like to teach every one of his students to be politically conscious, though they do not necessarily have to be in government.
  During these nine years of war Nankai University has been supported by the National Government, but Nankai Middle School remained a private institution. Recently the Government acted to continue the support of the three universities associated in the wartime Southwest University, of which Nankai is one, after each has returned to its original campus. But all his life Chang Poling has believed in and encouraged private support of educational efforts. He will continue to exert in that direction and his middle schools will remain private. Last October, shortly after formal Japanese surrender in China, the principal of Nankai Middle School returned on the same plane with the Mayor of liberated Tientsin to reopen his school in that city. The Chungking Nankai Middle School will carry on its splendid wartime record. Whether by private or public support, as Chiang Kai-shek has promised, As long as China lives, Nankai will live.
  At seventy, Chang Poling continues to dream wild dreams for his Nankai. As I look back on Nankai's past history of heroic struggles and as I look forward to the great task of rehabilitation, says he to his colleagues and alumni, I see a great future full of bright hopes. The work of Nankai has no end, and its development has no limit. Let us work together with the same courage and perseverance as of old, and endeavor to make Nankai play a greater role than ever in the period of reconstruction facing our country.
  Ten-Year Plan for China's Academic Independence
  China Magazine
  Dec., 1947. Vol. 17. No. 12. pp. 25-29.
  My Early Association with the Gest Oriental Library
  Green Pyne Leaf
  Jan. 1, 1951. No. 6. pp. 1-3.
  The Gest Oriental Library at Princeton University
  The Princeton University Library Chronicle
  Spring, 1954. Vol. 15. No. 3. pp. 113-141.
  T he Gest Oriental Library was founded by two men, Guion Moore Gest and his friend and adviser Commander I. V. Gillis. Mr. Gest (1864-1948) was a Quaker in religion and an engineer by profession. In 1914 he founded in New York City the construction engineering firm bearing his name, which specialized in laying underground electrical conduits and which did important engineering work in South America and Asia as well as in the United States and Canada. It was during one of his business visits to China that Mr. Gest met Commander Gillis, then Naval Attaché at the United States Legation in Peking, who later was to resign his naval commission and become Mr. Gest' s adviser and agent in the selection and purchase of the Chinese books which now form the Gest Oriental Library. In a true sense, Gillis (who died also in 1948) was a cofounder of the Gest Library.
  The story of the accidental founding of the Gest Library is told in the unpublished autobiography of my friend Mr. Thomas C. S. Sze, who was a fellow member with Gillis in the International Lodge, Peking, a Massachusetts constitution masonic lodge. According to this story, it was Mr. Gest's eye trouble that first aroused his interest in Chinese books. He had long suffered from a disease known as glaucoma, for the treatment of which he had visited the leading ophthalmologists in America and Europe. It was in Peking that Commander Gillis suggested to Mr. Gest that he try an eye medicine of the Ma family of Tingchow, which was so well-known among the people of Peking that the family shop selling only that one item was able to make a livelihood from it. It is said that Mr. Gest bought the Chinese eye medicine and tried it on himself. It did not cure his glaucoma, but gave him some temporary relief. This interested Mr. Gest so much that he left an amount of money to enable Mr. Gillis to buy for him Chinese books on medicine, materia medica, and, in particular, the treatment of diseases of the eye.
  That was how the Gest collection of Chinese books was started. This story, which has been confirmed from other sources, helps to explain the prominence of a special section of the Gest books, marked as CM (Chinese Medicine), which includes some 500 works in nearly 2,000 volumes and constitutes the largest collection of Chinese medical books outside of China and Japan.
  It was Gillis who made Gest more and more deeply interested in collecting Chinese books far beyond his original narrow scope. Mr. Gest was not a very rich man even before the depression, and he could not read nor house the large number of Chinese books which Gillis was buying for him in Peking. This great collection, which began as a hobby and developed into a kind of investment, soon became a burden to the founder. The most urgent problem was to house the thousands of rare books and in particular the Chinese encyclopedias and the ts'ung-shu (collectanea), each numbering many hundreds of volumes.
  Arrangements were made by Mr. Gest, whose firm had a branch office in Montreal, Canada, to deposit the collection in the Redpath Library building of McGill University, where it was formally opened on February 13, 1926, as The Gest Chinese Research Library, with 232 works consisting of about 8,000 volumes. By 1931 the collection had increased to some 75,000 volumes. In 1937 the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, with the assistance of the Rockefeller Foundation, acquired the Gest collection with the understanding that it was to be administered as a part of the University Library. About 27,000 additional volumes were sent by Gillis from Peiping to Princeton, giving the collection a total of approximately 102,000 volumes. With Princeton University's Chinese collection added to it, and with the acquisitions of recent years, the Gest Oriental Library has 137,087 volumes as of June, 1953. Dr. Nancy Lee Swann, whose connection with the collection began in 1928, was its curator from 1931 until her retirement in 1948. Mr. Shih-kang Tung, who joined the Gest Library in 1951 as my assistant, became its librarian in 1952 at the conclusion of my two years of curatorship. When the collection came to Princeton, it was installed at 20 Nassau Street, a building belonging to the University, where it remained until 1948, when it was moved into the Firestone Library.
  Because of Mr. Gest's financial difficulties during the depression years, Mr. Gillis' book-buying seems practically to have ceased after 1931. Gillis, who had married a Chinese wife and bought a house in her name, continued to stay in Peiping and worked on his bibliographical notes and his Title Index to the Catalogue of the Gest Oriental Library , which was printed in Peiping in 1941, shortly before Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor. When war was declared, he was ordered by the Japanese military to be interned in Shantung. But he was too sick to go, and his Chinese friends persuaded the Japanese to allow him to live in Peiping. He died in September, 1948.
  Mr. Gillis was a very remarkable man. Originally trained for naval intelligence work, he was an expert in microscopic analysis of fingerprints and of typewriters and typewriting. Mr. Yüan T'ung-li, Director of the National Library of Peiping, told me that Gillis would often entertain his friends by showing them how to identify a writer who typed his writings on two or three different typewriters. He would use a magnifying glass and lecture to them on his method of detection through the more or less similar lightness or heaviness in the imprint of the same letter of the alphabet, although different machines were used.
  It was this remarkable training in detective work which Gillis applied to the study of Chinese books and editions. He had studied the Chinese language and was able to speak the Peking dialect with some fluency, although he could not read an unpunctuated text in classical Chinese. By hard work and by many years of intimate handling of authentic material, he succeeded in acquiring a very good knowledge of Chinese books. Mr. Wang Chung-min, of the National Library of Peiping and of the Library of Congress, who was invited in 1946 to make a study of the rare books in the Gest collection, wrote of him in these words: I have also examined the I. V. Gillis Notes in English on items [1029 through 3707], and feel that his knowledge of Chinese bibliography is exceptionally good. He made almost no mistakes in his Notes , but at times he failed to point out the significance of a certain rare edition.
  After examining about a third of the rare books in the Gest collection, Mr. Wang had this to say:
  Among all the [Chinese] collections which I have ever examined, I think that the Gest collection is a very important one. I have examined 1,500 items at the Library of Congress, and also the 2,700 items which have been on deposit [during the war] in this country by the National Library of Peiping, yet I have found that of Gest's A section (Classics) seventy per cent are not duplicated either in the Library of Congress Orientalia section, or in the National Library of Peiping's rare book section. Of the D section (literary writings) I found that fifty per cent are not duplicated. This suffices to prove the value of the Gest collection.
  This is a great tribute to the Gest collection and to Mr. Gillis, who was responsible for its selection and purchase. I heartily endorse this tribute from Mr. Wang, whom I consider one of the best trained experts in Chinese bibliography.
  I have also examined Gillis' Notes and have been greatly impressed by his remarkable qualities of bold vision and painstaking attention to minute details—an unusual but necessary combination of virtues which make a good research worker in any branch of knowledge. Let me cite his Notes on items 1337 and 1338 as an illustration of his method of working. These two items are two sets of the Imperial collectanea known as the Wu Ying Tien Chü Chên Pan Ts'ung Shu (The Imperial Palace Movable Type Reprint Series).
  This series was started by the Emperor Ch'ien-lung in 1773 for the reprinting of rare and long-lost works which were then being copied out of the Yung-lo ta-tien , the great Encyclopedic Library of A.D. 1403-1407. The first four reprints were printed in 1773 from wood blocks. In the same year, an ingenious official named Chin Chien suggested to the throne that these reprints could be more economically and more speedily printed with movable wood type. Accordingly, some 250,000 wood types were cut and 134 works, totaling over 800 volumes, were printed with the Palace movable type in the course of the next twenty years (1774-1794). These, together with the four works printed from wood blocks, made a total of 138 reprints, and were collectively known as The Imperial Palace Movable Type Reprint Series.
  As soon as the work of printing any particular work was completed, the types were immediately distributed to prepare for printing other works. For each reprint, twenty copies were made for the Emperor's various studios in the palaces, and some three hundred copies would be offered for sale. Because the books were printed and sold separately throughout a period of twenty years, no attempt was made to assemble them in a complete set—except for one complete set of all 138 works originally kept in the Summer Palace at Jehol and now preserved in the Palace Museum of Peiping.
  Now, said the bibliophile T'ao Hsiang, after nearly two hundred years, although copies of individual works of this series are often found in circulation, a complete set of all the original reprints is something hitherto unknown to collectors. … Only recently the bibliophile Mr. Miao Ch'üan-sun [1844-1919], after a life-long search, finally succeeded in getting together a complete set of the 138 works, all of the original movable type edition.
  Here the emphasis is placed on the difficulty in getting together a complete collection of all the 138 works in the original movable type edition . The original edition of each work was probably never more than the specified three hundred copies, and the more technical works, such as the mathematical and medical books of ancient and medieval times, were probably printed in even smaller numbers of copies. In 1776-1777 the provincial governments in the Southeast were ordered by the Emperor to make new wood-block editions of these reprints for wider circulation. Eight works were printed in Nanking and thirty-eight in Chekiang—these were printed from wood blocks in much reduced format, and are therefore easily differentiated from the original editions. But the Kiangsi provincial government printed fifty-four works and the Fukien provincial government printed 123, both using the original movable type edition as a model for cutting the wood blocks. These provincial editions continued to be reprinted throughout the nineteenth century, and in 1895 the provincial press at Canton made a new wood-block edition entirely modeled on the Fukien edition. These editions were all loosely called by the same name as The Imperial Palace Movable Type Reprint Series.
  Mr. Gillis was determined to acquire for the Gest collection one complete set of the original movable type edition. He bought the set originally collected and owned by the bibliographical scholar Miao Ch'üan-sun, of which the 138 works were bound in 812 volumes. This Gillis called The First Copy (No. 1337). Then he succeeded in acquiring a nearly complete set of 137 works rebound in 600 volumes. This he called The Second Copy (No. 1338). And he also succeeded in getting together a complete third set for the Harvard-Yenching Institute at Harvard. In 1940 he got together a complete fourth set and offered to sell it to the Library of Congress for two thousand dollars. The Library of Congress could not buy it, and when Gillis was interned in Peiping, his books were looted by the Japanese and this set was scattered.
  Thus Gillis achieved the almost impossible task of acquiring four of the only five sets of the original Imperial Palace Movable Type Reprint Series in the world, the fifth set being the one in the Imperial Palace in Peiping. To appreciate the magnitude of Gillis' achievement, one must realize that neither the National Library of Peiping, nor the Library of the National Peking University, nor the most celebrated private collectors in China, can boast of possessing more than a few of the 138 works in the original Palace movable type edition. Mr. Gillis' great achievement, however, lies not so much in his boldness in conception and execution in the acquisition of these four sets, as in his painstaking method in establishing the minute criteria for distinguishing every one of the 800-odd volumes of the original movable type edition from that of the provincial wood-block editions.
  It seems that Mr. Gest was somewhat troubled by the high price offered by Gillis for the first complete set in 812 volumes, and he made independent inquiries of American Sinologues in this country. At least one of them wrote Gest a letter challenging Gillis' judgment in accepting the whole set as of the original movable type edition. This letter said in part:
  If the edition being offered is of the first, every individual work in it should be printed from these movable types. If there is one that is not, this would prove that the edition in question is one of the later provincial reprints. In other words, it is not sufficient that some or most of the individual work show this characteristic of lack of alignment of the characters, because this feature would naturally be transmitted when the
  In a lengthy reply to this challenge, Gillis pointed out:
  When this collection of works (with the exception of the first 4 works in 8 volumes which were printed from wood blocks before the types were made) was printed with movable types, it was found upon final proof-reading that there were many errors in each and every work, so these were corrected in the usual manner—the incorrect character was cut out, the space filled in by pasting on a small slip on the under side, and the correct character substituted. The provincial reprints were undoubtedly made by using copies of the original edition as models, so unless the copy made use of was an uncorrected one the resulting reprint would not contain the errors just mentioned above. … It may be taken for granted, therefore, that provincial reprints do not contain the errors to be found in copies of the original edition, and so may be readily detected.
  I may add that, in the original Palace edition, the name of the proofreader was printed on the middle margin of every double page, and there was a prescribed penalty for errors undetected and uncorrected by the responsible proofreader. So these final and post-printing corrections were very good evidences of the original edition.
  To establish these criteria, Gillis and his Chinese assistants had to examine minutely each of approximately 37,600 double pages to detect the cut-out spaces and the pasted corrections. In his Notes on the first copy, there are thirty-six foolscap pages of a double-column table of 2,082 such corrections, listing the volume, chapter, page, line, and words for each. This task probably involved many months of hard work. By this painstaking method, Gillis proved that literally there were many errors in each and every work of the 134 works printed with movable type; and thereby he established for the first time in Chinese bibliography an indisputable criterion for identifying the original edition of this huge series of valuable reprints.
  In his Notes (No. 19), Gillis applied this criterion to his second set, and said that one or more pages of each booklet has been compared with the same pages of the First Copy and the corrections found to be the same in every instance, with the important exception of one work (No. 128) wherein no corrections have been made…at the time of publication or subsequently. … I have no doubt that he applied the same criterion to the third copy, which he got for Harvard, and to the fourth copy, which he offered to the Library of Congress.
  It was this ability to work hard and attend to very minute details that enabled Gillis to overcome the tremendous obstacles of language and culture and to earn the well-deserved eulogy from Mr. Wang Chung-min that his knowledge of Chinese bibliography is exceptionally good.
  The Gest collection has often been described—sometimes disparagingly—as a collector's library. That is what Mr. Gest and Commander Gillis originally intended it to be. And it is precisely as a collector's library that the Gest collection is unique, priceless, and so far matchless among all Chinese collections outside of China and Japan. That is the pride and the real worth of this remarkable collection.
  What are the collector's pieces in the Gest collection? What is a rare book according to the traditional Chinese bibliophile's standards? What are the distinctive features of the Gest collection, which was collected by an American naval officer turned Chinese bibliographer and collector? And, finally, what is the value of this collection to the trained research scholar in the field of Chinese and Oriental history and culture? These questions I shall try to answer in a form which I hope will be intelligible to the Occidental reader.