One Manchu bibliographer dates the work of another, or “The Librairie Française and the Manchu books at Capital Library, Beijing,” cont.
Mårten Söderblom Saarela
April 19, 2017
A little more than three years ago (2014), I wrote a note for this blog on the Manchu books held at Capital Library (Shoudu Tushuguan) in Beijing. That Manchu collection originated with the publisher Henri Vetch (1898–1978), who operated the bookstore Librairie Française in Beijing in the Republican period. The bookstore was “the scholar’s social club in Peking in those years,” Frederick Mote wrote about it in referene to the situation in the late 1940s, “and I often stopped in to browse the shelves and see what scholars might drop in” (Oriens Extremus 35 [1992], p. 16).
In my earlier blog post, I mused on the typewritten bibliographical précis that are found on the inside cover for each book in the Vetch collection and probably date from the war years or later. I thought the précis might have been written by Walter Fuchs (1902–79), a Manchu bibliographer who was in Beijing during this period, but I didn’t know.
I still don’t know who wrote the bibliographical notes, but recently, I found myself unexpectedly staring at one of them at my desk in Berlin. I had ordered the Mongolian bannerman En-hua’s 恩華 (b. c. 1867) bibliography Baqi yiwen bianmu 八旗藝文編目 (Edited catalog of eight-banner literature), finished in 1936, as an interlibrary loan from the Harvard-Yenching Library in Cambridge, Mass. The reason I ordered the book was that the Harvard library catalog specified it as an edition from 1941. The easily accessible edition of Enhua’s book (Liaoning Minzu Chubanshe, 2006), however, made no mention of an edition from 1941. In fact, only the catalog for the Harvard-Yenching collection specified that what it held was a version from that year.
The information in the current Harvard library catalog came from the typewritten précis added to the inside cover of their copy of the book. There is no doubt that the book is from the collection at Libraire française; the front cover says “Vetch” in pencil, right above the stamp saying that the book entered the Harvard-Yenching collection on April 20, 1950.
Conform to its counterparts in the Capital Library, the précis noted that En-hua’s book “[c]ontains information not found elsewhere. See MS.VIII. 1941 MT. of the Compilor’s [sic].” What “MT.” means in this context eludes me, but volume 8 of M[onumenta] S[erica] includes an article on “sinological books published in China since 1938” by Hellmut Wilhelm (1905–90), who notes that En-hua “is a well-known collector of books composed by bannermen” (p. 340). The life of En-hua is largely unknown today, with the information given in the recent reprint of his book coming, as far as I can determine, almost entirely from the book itself. Yet Wilhelm in the 1940s knew more about En-hua, as the German scholar was living in Beijing during the thirties and through the war years. Wilhelm thought the book might have been published in 1941.
Wilhelm had been born in Qingdao and studied with leading scholars of the Republican era. No wonder, then, that he knew that chonghuang dahuangluo 重光大荒落, with which Enhua closed his colophon to the bannerman bibliography, is the literary variant of xinji 辛己, meaning, in this context, 1941. Indeed, next to the unpunctuated phrase (obscured by an errant comma in the 2006 reprint) in the Harvard-Yenching copy, xinji has been added in pencil. Who made that note? The anonymous bibliographer at Librairie française or maybe even Wilhelm himself? Being a bibliographer in Beijing, he had both means and motive to make an inventory of the books at Librarie française. Vetch even published three volumes written by Wilhelm in 1942–43.
Such speculation is ultimately idle. The identity of the author of the bibliographical précis remains a mystery. Yetone thing is clear: it was Francis Woodman Cleaves (1911–95) who brought Baqi yiwen bianmu to Cambridge. Many of the books that Cleaves brought back from Beijing entered the library’s collections precisely in 1950, like Baqi yiwen bianmu. Probably, Cleaves bought the book from Vetch. If any other of the books in Harvard-Yenching’s collection of Manchu and bannermen literature came from Librairie française remains to be investigated. In any case, books in at least two of of the world’s major collections of Manchu sources, the Capital Library and the Harvard-Yenching Library, at one point passed through Henri Vetch’s bookstore.