| Since the 1930s,the cause of public and private book collection in modern China society had been greatly affected by the continuous wars of aggression against China launched by the Japanese invaders.During the Anti-Japanese War period,which was from the fall of the Northeast China in 1931 to the victory of the war in 1945,wherever the Japanese troops went,there our national rare books and manuscripts were looted and destructed blatantly and on a large scale by the invaders,thus our national classics had suffered great loss from this unprecedented calamity,a disaster of modern China book collecting history as well as modern China culture history.After 8.13 Incident of 1937,the Japanese invaders captured Shanghai,Nanjing,Hangzhou,Suzhou after the battle of Songhu,and the fire of war soon spread to the entire Southeast China.With a history of hundreds of years,the collection of books in Jiangnan Region,many of which were dispersed in old bookstores centered around Shanghai,faced the destiny of looting and destruction.Meanwhile,due to the ever-maturing metropolis culture space of modern Shanghai,the intellectuals of modern China played a key role in the preservation of Chinese classics.Having witnessed the miserable condition of the loss and destruction of the rare books and manuscripts,those who were engaged in cultural work of Shanghai and concerned about the survival of the classics,like Zheng Zhenduo,Zhang Yuanji,Zhang Shouyong,He Bingsong and Zhang Fengju signed an appeal requesting our nation and government to save the classics in enemy-occupied area for the purpose of protecting and preserving national culture treasure.For this cause,the Documents Preservation Federation was founded in Shanghai.With the joint efforts of National Governmental Education Ministry,Board of Trustees for the Sino-British Educational and Cultural Endowment Fund,National Central Library and Shanghai scholars,the Society secretly acquired 4864 groups of books and texts consisting of 48,000 volumes.Taking the Documents Preservation Federation as the studying subject,this paper tends to make a specific research and analysis on the background,planning and operational mechanism,activity results and relevant historical events and figures of this special organization,while carrying out an appropriate observation by setting the organization in the anti-Japanese national salvation movement.Therefore,based on relevant historical materials,this paper can basically be divided into four parts.Firstly,it elaborates the hardships of books acquisition in the wartime by analyzing the changes of Shanghai culture ecology before and after the 8.13 Incident,which can also be regarded as the reveal of historical background.Secondly,the article explained the foundation process and organizational planning of the Documents Preservation Federation in detail.Thirdly,this paper presents the activities and achievements related to the organization's work on culture preservation.For the last part,the author tends to seek an approach to deal with the relationship between figures and books,the interest selection and the entanglement of their inner emotions by analyzing the preservation activities under historical backgrounds.In the process of expound there are two basic lines which can be followed in this paper.The first line is to illuminate basic historical events processes,while the other line is to probe into the missions and spirit of intellectuals to preserve national culture during the Isolated-Island period.These two lines interweave and advance together.In conclusion,according to the author,the Documents Preservation Federation and its colleges' act of rescuing the rare books and manuscripts in the wartime is just to preserve our state's culture and national history at the moment of crisis bearing on national existence.In spite of the hardships during the Isolated-Island period,their efforts to preserve the rare books and to extend the life of culture stand for the righteous cause of defending our national culture and history. |
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