Author: Paul Vierthaler 李友仁

       Modern scholars of late-Imperial Chinese literature benefit from collected texts printed during the Ming and Qing dynasties that are supplemented with bibliographic information on both extant and non-extant books. Cataloging old texts was traditionally an important part of late-Imperial Chinese scholarship. Scholars closely researched important works by exploring their textual histories, identifying forgeries, and tracing their provenance. Some of this information was eventually preserved in large annotated indexes.        Publishing houses also printed compilations of popular texts and sometimes reprinted entire libraries. Though some were commercial products, other endeavors aimed to preserve (particularly those sponsored by the government). Many examples of this exist, the most famous being the 18th century The Complete Library of the Four Treasuries (Si ku quan shu 四庫全書), compiled under the Qianlong (乾隆) emperor.  This was accompanied by An Index of Summaries of the Complete Library of the Four Treasuries (Si ku quan shu zong mu ti yao 四庫全書總目提要), a bibliographic index that provided short descriptions of the titles within, as well as many that were not included in the Si ku quan shu.  This tendency to publish collections of older books was common and likely lead to the preservation of