Late Qing Encyclopaedias: Establishing a New Enterprise

From the 1810s on, a variety of new instruments in media and communications began to appear in regions surrounding southern and south-eastern China, including pamphlets, books, monthly periodicals, and commercial periodicals. Up until 1895, media and communications institutions such as printing houses, new-style schools, and translation bureaus sprang up on the coasts of China and spread inward from the edges to the center, from south to north, from the concessions to the interior. As Li Renyuan 李仁淵 has argued, however, during these eight decades, even though many Chinese people came in contact with these new modes of communication and used them to gain a new understanding of Western technology, thought, and religion, these cultural flows did not make a deep impression on the core elements of the Chinese empire. Well within the bounds of their social class, the gentry simply ignored many of these new things. A fundamental change occurred after 1895, when “Western learning,” xixue 西學, became an essential new discourse among learned people. As new-style newspapers and schools sprouted up in many parts of the country, events such as the founding of the Self-Strengthening Society, Qiangxue hui 強學會, meant that new-style publications, once marginalized, had moved from cosmopolitan cities such as Shanghai and Hong Kong to the political center in Beijing, gaining the support of important government officials and functionaries.