Study On Liu Ya-tzu’s Book Collection

Liu Ya-tzu is a very excellent poet,scholar and revolutionary in modern China.He was sociable and was in the successful accomplishment of literature,history and philology.Liu had more than 70 thousand books that were so astonishing that without them he couldn’t do his academic research well.There are four chapters of this thesis.The first chapter is about Liu’s family background and his life-history and the atmosphere and characteristics of book collecting activities during the late Qing Dynasty and early Republic of China.The second chapter is about relationship and friendship linked by books between Liu and his friends.We’ll focus on book collecting activities and books exchanging activities taken place between Liu and his friends.The third chapter discusses about ideas and characteristics of Liu’s book collecting activities.There are 6 sources of Liu’s book collecting activities,including inheriting family collection,copying or hiring someone to copy other people’s books,buying from others,receiving as gifts,publishing by himself,and getting copies from publishing house.Within the specific research of Liu’s books,it’s not difficult to find that under the tenet of cultural protection,Liu indulged in collecting endemic document of Wujiang,and because of his idea of collecting to research,he also collected historical books about later Ming Dynasty in abundance while his collection of Confucian classics was in a small scale.The third part of this chapter is about the way that how did Liu dispose his book collection.Liu had a great quantity of books,he didn’t leave them as a legacy for his family but donated all of them to the country.His collection now is kept mainly by National Library of China and Shanghai Library,secondarily by Nanjing Library,Chinese Academy of Social Sciences,Central Revolutionary Museum and Suzhuo Museum.The fourth part of this chapter is enumerating Liu’s signets of himself when he was collecting books.The last part of this chapter is talking about xis family libraries and six book-collection-seal of Liu.The final chapter analyzes Liu’s utilization of he’s books including collating books,doing textual research,redacting and publishing books.