A CHINESE LIBRARY IN MONTREAL.

Sun (Auckland), Volume I, Issue 175, 14 October 1927, Page 12

A CHINESE LIBRARY IN MONTREAL.

{Written for The &un.] I REACHED MONTREAL late al night and so weary that Samuel Butler’s nasty poem, "Oil God! Oh Montreal!” written when he failed to collect his debts there, came unbidden to the mind. The discovery next day of a real Chinese library with all its treasures banished both weariness and grouch. Recall, if you will, the flight of the scholars from Constantinople in the middle fifteenth century, when capture by the Turks seemed imminent. Consider what an influence the unfold-

ing of the ancient manuscripts they carried to the new universities of Northern Italy and of Germany exercised on European thought, just as It was beginning to revive after the Dark Ages. Here in Montreal is a vast collection, still growing, of ancient literature which offers a strange parallel to the renaissance manuscripts. It will not cause a revival of philosophic learning any more than the manuscripts of Aristotle caused the renaissance; but it is just as significant of change ms they were and may give a stimulus to processes already begun and quite comparable with the revival of learning. Not one of the more than 30,000 volumes ha 3 been bought in the open market The donor of the library explained to me how he> keeps his agents in China liberally supplied with funds. Every now and again an emissary comes to one of them secretly from some Manchu prince or Chinese mandarin who finds himself unable in these troublous days to cling any longer to his cherished bocks and treasures of art. The written word has nowhere such reverence as it has in China, the immemorial Paradise of scholars. Parting with these books to the unworthy foreign barbarian is the last expedient to which a cultured Chinese comes. After the bargain is struck the books are taken away secretly, usually at night, in order that the owner’s face may be saved. Mr Gest. the owner of this library, has taken on himself the duty of collection and preservation. In the meantime he has loaned the books to McGill University; but he is prepared eventually to restore them in some worthy way to the land from which they have come. Many of the volumes are Imperial editions bound in covers decorated with the Imperial yellow. Four sets, numbering scores of volumes, date back to the 13th century; and nearly 200 sets were published during the Ming dynasty (1368-1544). The scholars responsible ior selecting the volumes have done their work faithfully—there is hardly a book which is not listed in the standard works on Chinese literature.

The library contains many editions of the great classic writers of China and hundreds of the commentaries upon them which have enshrined the wisdom of centuries. There is a dictionary published in 160 volumes by the Emperor K’ang Hai in 1712-1724. For histories! scholars there are mines of original material. Besides the standard history of the 24 dynasties which in 820 volumes recounts China’s earlier centuries, there are available in 620 volumes all the Imperial Edicts suid Proclamations of the Ten Manchu Emperors up to 1875. This Imperial Edition, taken together with another book of 600 volumes containing ttie Laws and Statutes in force in China during the Manchu dynasty, is now available to give the Chinese point of view concerning the gradual Invasion of our western barbarian peoples in the modern age. It is long centuries since historians had opened to them such a collection of original sources. Nor is the library deficient in works on other subjects of human interest. It has the great encyclopedia in 1620 volumes which is a resume of that great work still In process of compilation. An Imperial edition of a hook on Medicine in 225 volumes contains 80 which treat of the pulse alone. Philosophy, the arts, mathematics, astronomy, belles-lettres, poetry—all are worthily represented.

In themselves the books are works of art, not printed cheaply by massproduction as with us; but produced lovingly by craftsmen to whom time and expense mattered little. Each page of printed matter is produced from a wood-block separately prepared and carved by an artist. The word-characters or ideograms have, a beauty and clarity of outline that is only equalled by such type as William Morris copied from the mediaeval illuminators. The paper is thin but exceedingly tough: and even the earliest books, preserved with care by scholars for many centures, are as readable as If they had come from the press yesterday. Each of them is bound in the Chinese manner, three or four volumes inside wooden boards clasped together by carved Ivory pins. Each page of printed characters contains approximately four times as much information as a similar page printed In English. The wood-pictures or ideograms are economical of space to this extent. Moreover, a great part of their value often consists in the literary allusions which they call up, so that, even more than Pericles’ famous speech, these books may be said to he ’written in backgrounds.” .

Much of the material they contain will be of mere antiquarian interest for the modern world; but hidden in them there lies also a great deal of beauty which the modern world lacks. One illustration must suffice. For hours I turned over the pages of a book on s chitecture, printed in many volumes. Its characters meant nothing to me but interspersed among its pages were hundreds of pictures, each

a work of art, which even a foreign devil could begin to appreciate. The Intricate details of Chinese buildings, of mouldings and cornices and roof patterns, were drawn minutely Jn thousands of diagrams; but more fascinating still was the revelation of decorative design reproduced in coloured plates. Geometrical, floral, and life patterns succeeded one another in bewildering profusion; and each seemed tc contain some new arrangement of shade or colour. The colours themselves, produced by dyes, the secret of which remains to-day, as it did centuries ago, locked in the minds of gildsmen, have the luminosity and subtle quality which was present in mediaeval stained glass but has since been lost. J. B. CONDLIFFE, Montreal*