From the Empress Dowager
to Columbia: A Benefaction
 

TE-KONG TONG
 

^ ARLY in 1902, as residents on Morningside Heights
~^ were celebrating the inauguration of a new president of
I  yt the University  (Nicholas Murray Butler), the epoch-
 

making festi\al was doubly brightened In* the arri\al of what
was to become an epoch-making gift from across the Pacific. It
was a large set of a Chinese encyclopedia entitled T'u shu chi
ch'eng (" complete collection of illustrations and books"), being
donated by the Chinese Imperial Government which was then
ruled by an autocratic woman known to her contemporary
Westerners as the Manchu "Empress Dowager." When the set
was delivered, it constituted the beginning of Columbia's Chinese
Collection, wiiich later was to become the East Asian Library.

This encyclopedia consists of 5,044 volumes which contain
altogether more than 100,000,000 Chinese characters, being di¬
vided into 10,000 chapters under 32 heads. The size of this work
was well described by Professor Lionel Giles, w ho was then a
most noted Sinologist and who later compiled an alphabetical
index to it. "For purposes of comparison," said Giles, "we may
take the 11th edition of the Encyclopaedia Britaunica, which
contains on a rough estimate some 40,000,000 words. As 150
English words, or thereabouts, are required to translate 100
characters of the Chinese book-language, we may say that the
T'u shu contains between three and four times as much matter
as the largest English encyclopaedia."

Most of the T'u shu chi ch'eng was originally compiled in
the mid-17th century under imperial auspices, but it was not com¬
pleted until the next century. Because of its enormous size, only