From the Imperial Catalogue to Western library science

This article examines the replacement of the Imperial Catalogue by library systems based on Western library science in the late nineteenth century. The change had an impact on classical Chinese literature and the relationship between cataloguing and knowledge production essential to the Chinese tradition. We shall argue that the adoption of Western systems of book classification books triggered a new understanding of the meaning structure of Chinese classics, resulting in a loss of significance of classical Chinese literature in relation to other branches of humanities. The divisions in the Imperial Catalogue conveyed value judgments about the books they classified, because the order of appearance of a book displayed its importance in accordance with Confucian views of the affairs of the state. The Imperial Catalogue builds on two interconnected meanings embedded in the allocation of books, nowhere to be found in Western library science: the “textual meaning” of the book and the “catalogue meaning,” referring to its larger cultural context. However, the recent development in digitization of the catalogues may bridge the differences between the Imperial Catalogue and Western library science by including complex and composite references for a given work that unite different catalogue systems in the same database.