Visible Traces: Rare Books and Special Collections from the National Library of China (review)

Visible Traces: Rare Books and Special Collections from the National Library of China. Compiled and edited by Philip K. Hu. New York: Queens Borough Public Library, and Beijing: National Library of China, 2000. xiii, 337 pp. $65.00. ISBN 0-964-53371-5.

This engaging and well-illustrated book is an exhibition catalog of a selection of rare books and special collections from the National Library of China. The exhibit from Beijing to the United States (Queens Borough Public Library, New York, 10 December 1999-15 March 2000; Getty Gallery, Los Angeles Public Library, 15 April-25 June 2000) was made possible through the leadership of Gary E. Strong, director of the Queens Borough Public Library, who, with the directors of the National Library of China, began discussions in 1996 on how the two libraries might collaborate. A cooperative agreement was signed in 1997, paving the way for the two libraries to exchange printed and electronic information and assist each other in obtaining library materials. The exhibition was funded by the Henry Luce Foundation, the E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Foundation, the Himalaya Foundation, and the Decentralization Program, a regrant program of the New York State Council on the Arts. Interestingly, the exhibit coincided with the ninetieth anniversary of the National Library of China. It should be noted that the National Library of China (NLC) is the largest major library in China and possesses the fifth largest collection in the world. The NLC contains unparalleled holdings of inscribed oracle bones, ancient manuscripts, rare printed books, epigraphical rubbings, cartographic works, and a variety of materials in non-Chinese scripts.

The sixty-eight exhibits included in this volume were selected by the staff of the Department of Rare Books and Special Collections of the NLC and are divided into four sections: "Rare Books and Manuscripts," "Epigraphical and Pictorial Rubbings," "Maps and Atlases," and "Texts and Illustrations from China's Ethnic Minorities."

It was no easy task to select sixty-eight objects that represent China's long and continuing history of writing and its complex world of books; nevertheless, it is fair to say that the selections for the exhibition were chosen wisely so that even nonspecialists from different cultural backgrounds will find them fascinating, pleasing to the eye, and educational.

In the NLC, the collection of rare books and ancient writings numbers close to 300,000 volumes. The section "Rare Books and Manuscripts" provides a representative sample (twenty-three exhibits) of all major book forms: scrolls, manuscript and printed, in paper; album binding; butterfly binding; wrapped-back binding; and thread binding. An early example is a hand scroll of a sacred Buddhist text known as the Sutra of the Lotus of the Wonderful Law. It was discovered at the Mogao Caves at Dunhuang in Gansu province in 1900, where many of China's greatest early Buddhist texts, paintings, and sculpture were stored. This Lotus Sutra, produced by Kumarajiva in A.D. 406, is considered the finest for its accuracy and persuasive expressiveness. This hand scroll version is one of China's oldest binding methods, still used today, dating back to the Tang dynasty. Also in the exhibit catalog are examples of Ming and Qing dynasties' woodcut book illustrations and examples of traditional Chinese color printing, textual and pictorial.

The NLC also houses the largest collection of 35,000 rubbings from oracle bones and 260,000 rubbings made from metal and stone. China's earliest form of the written word is seen in the "Epigraphical and Pictorial Rubbings" section (twenty-three displays), where objects such as turtle-plastron and ox-scapula fragments from the Shang dynasty bear engraved Chinese characters. The other rubbings in this section are from artifacts such as bronze and monuments referred to as jinshi. Visible Traces has metal rubbings from excavated bronze vessels, musical instruments, and mirrors from the Shang and Zhou dynasties that describe recorded events, ancestor...