Qing+Encyclopedia

The History of Encyclopedias When you write a paper or a report you usually get your information from encyclopedias. Maybe even an Internet encyclopedia. Even though people don’t realize it, their retrieval of information depends almost entirely on books like encyclopedias and dictionaries. Books like these have been made since the beginning of history. The Qing dynasty of China is known for making one of the biggest encyclopedias in the world. But people were making encyclopedias even before that time in history.

Some of the first people to create encyclopedias were the Greek philosophers. Many Greek philosophers like Aristotle, were superb writers. Aristotle tackled the project of making an encyclopedia of all human knowledge. Another philosopher, Pliny the Elder wrote an encyclopedia that was 37 volumes! During the Middle Ages the Muslims wanted to have a way to compile all of their knowledge on a subject into a book. Many Muslims started writing encyclopedias on specific subjects. Famous Muslim writer Abu Bakr al-Raze wrote an encyclopedia of science. Ibn Sina wrote a medical encyclopedia that is still used by medical professionals to this day. http://www.csdl.tamu.edu/~marshall/encyclopedia-volumes.jpg

The Qing dynasty of China created the largest encyclopedia in the world. The encyclopedia consisted of over 11,000 volumes that were handwritten by the Chinese scribes. In the encyclopedia there were 37 million Chinese characters. But sadly, today there are only 400 characters that remain legible because the pages have been ruined and decayed over the years. One of the later emperors of the Qing dynasty Qianlong added 40,000 poems to the encyclopedia. Qianlong had personally composed those 40,000 poems! Emperor Qianlong added this encyclopedia to his library that had 4.7 million books in it!

During the early 1950’s in the United States, there were several popular encyclopedias that were being made. The most popular were World Book and Funk and Wagnall. During the 20th century written encyclopedias were becoming less popular. More and more encyclopedias were being made online. Microsoft’s encyclopedia Encarta was a perfect example for it had no written version of it. Traditional Encyclopedias were written cooperatively by a group of people with an academic degree. But with some encyclopedias like Wikipedia, people are able to post their own information on to the website. By 2005 Wikipedia had made over 200 articles in more than 80 languages.

The average American relies too much on the retrieval of information and not on where that information comes from. They are much unlike the Qing people who valued knowledge greatly and wanted praise. Encyclopedias are an important part of our history. We should all try and learn the origin of this important historical item. Questions Who were the first people to create encyclopedias? How many languages has Wikipedia been translated into? How many characters of the Qing encyclopedia still remain legible to this day?