Sweep Leaf Sanbanggulsa History Research

This thesis focuses on the Saoye Publishing House, a famous publishing house in the Qing Dynasty, which was founded by a Xi family in Dongting, Suzhou, nearly two hundred years ago and since then had been handed down in the family. Instead of giving an introduction to the complete history of the publishing house, the writer pays more attention to the key period in history of Saoye together with the relevant ancient books and data. The thesis consists of four chapters.Chapter 1 verifies the time of foundation of Saoye.Chapter 2 reviews the life of Xi Shichen, the founder of Saoye, and the features of printing and publication in Qianlong and Jiangqing Periods of Qing Dynasty.Chapter 3 probes into the features of block-printed book printed by Saoye in Tongguang period of Qing Dynasty and Saoye's relationship with others of the same trade in this period.Chapter 4 focuses on the change of lithography during the late Qing and early Republican periods and the feature of The Journal of Literature issued by Saoye .In current academic circle, quite a lot of researches concern the history of the development of publishing houses as the whole and few case studies have been carried out. In response, this thesis makes an in-depth study on certain key questions in the development of the Saoye Printing House and some fruitful findings have been achieved. For example, the correction of the time of foundation of Saoye, which has corrected certain different kinds of views that were wrong or fell short of the historical facts. The thorough study of the relationship among Saoye and two other publishing houses in the Tongguang Period provides important criterion for the accurate copying of the books published in such period. The investigation on the role of the Saoye Publishing house and the early publishing trade association holds a valuable clue for the study on the development of the copyright consciousness in the late Qing period. Meanwhile, the study on lithographic book by the Saoye Publishing house and the collecting and neatening of the books available enlighten the development of the lithography technique as a whole during the late Qing Dynasty and the early Republican China.In conclusion, this thesis has practical value in that it has presented an example as a practical case study on the history of development of the publishing houses in Qing Dynasy.The data quoted in this thesis mainly take its sources at such first-hand materials, such as pedigrees, chorography, biography, history archives (annals), inscriptions, works of the scholars of Qing Dynasy, novels and so on. Useful statistics are presented in the thesis with the relevant data. At the same time, spot check was carried out on some important ancient editions published by Saoye, and only with a little cleaning-up work, the true and credible data was obtained. At the end of the thesis, part of the achievements of the thesis was organized into "the bibliography available lithographed by the Saoye Publishing house " and incorporated into the addenda for the sake of reference.