Fan Qin, the founder of Yige.
Ruan Yuan, a scholar in the Ganjia period of the Qing Dynasty, said: "Fan's Tianyi Pavilion has been self-evident for hundreds of years and is the only bibliophile in China."
Fan Qin, a native of Jiajing period of Ming Dynasty, was admitted to the Imperial Examination at the age of 27 and began to be an official all over the country. He has been to many places, from Shaanxi and Henan in the north to Guangdong, Guangxi and Yunnan in the south, and then to Fujian and Jiangxi in the east. Finally, I became the right assistant minister of the Ministry of War, and my official position was not small. This provided a sufficient source of funds for his collection. At that time, the cultural materials were very scattered, and a decent cultural market had not been established in this respect. The official position itself was also an important basis for collecting books. Wherever he went to be an official, he always paid great attention to collecting local public and private editions, especially collecting all kinds of local chronicles, political books, memoirs, literati records, poems and words carved by people in various positions in the Ming Dynasty, which were not paid much attention to by other bibliophiles. He also collected a lot.
Another bibliophile who can be compared with Fan Qin is his nephew Fan Dache. Fan Dache was influenced by his uncle since he was a child, and he is very similar to Fan Qin in many ways. For example, he is very capable of being an official and has been abroad many times, but he has a strong interest in books. He is knowledgeable and has a judgment on the cultural value of books, so he has collected some important rare books. His book collection has both positive infection and negative stimulation from his uncle. It is said that once he borrowed books from Fan Qin, Fan Qin was not very cheerful, so he decided to build his own library and quietly compete with his uncle. After years of hard work, he often invited his uncle to be a guest, and specially filed some precious cheats for his uncle to read at will. In this case, Fan Qin always smiles. Here, the difference between an uncle and a nephew is evident. Although my nephew does things very well, there is an emotional motive behind him, which is a bit petty. In this case, his ultimate goal is very limited. As long as he builds a building and collects the versions that his uncle doesn't have, he will masturbate happily. As a result, the newly-built library, as a descendant, only lasted for several generations and logically dispersed, while Tianyi Pavilion stood firm with a strange force.
Most of the real troubles encountered by bibliophiles are behind. Therefore, the problem facing Fan Qin is how to turn his willpower into unshakable family inheritance. It may be said that the real tragic history of Tianyi began after the death of Fan Qin.
At the age of 80, Fan Qin finally came to the end of his life. He called his eldest son and his second daughter-in-law (the second son has died) to arrange the inheritance. When the old man died, he presented a difficult problem to his descendants. He divided his inheritance into two parts, one is twelve thousand pieces of silver, and the other is the library on the first floor, so two rooms can choose.
The eldest son, Fan Dachong, spoke immediately. He was willing to inherit the library and decided to set aside a part of fertile land to rent for the maintenance of the library.
In this way, an endless relay race began. Many years later, Fan Dachong will have a will, and so will Fan Dachong's son ... The will of the later generation is even stricter than that of the previous generation. The original motivation to collect books is getting farther and farther, but the family reproduction is getting bigger and bigger.
During the Jiaqing period, Qian, the niece of Qiu Tieqing, the magistrate of Ningbo, was a girl who loved poetry and books. She wanted to go to Tianyi Pavilion to read some books, but let the magistrate marry the Fan family. Modern sociologists may ask Miss Qian whether you are married to a book or a man, but in my opinion, in an era when marriage is not free, she values neither money nor power, and just wants to read more books through marriage, which is always very touching. However, she never imagined that when she became the daughter-in-law of the Fan family, she still couldn't go upstairs. One view is that family rules prohibit women from going upstairs, and the other view is that the descendants of the Fan family she married were already sideline at that time. Anyway, I was depressed to death because I didn't read any books at Tianyi Pavilion.
From the standpoint of the Fan family, it is really out of helplessness not to let them go upstairs to read books.
The fann family stipulated that no matter how many families were born, all rooms had to agree to open the cupboard door. The key to the cupboard door and the key to the bookcase control each room, forming an indispensable chain. You can't read any books if there is only one room. Since every room can effectively exercise the veto power, over time, every room also has the ultimate thinking: what is the purpose of Tianyi Pavilion, which has been blocked by us layer by layer?
Just then, the news came that Mr. Huang Zongxi, a great scholar, was going upstairs to study! This is undoubtedly a great shock to every room in the Fan family.
To our surprise, all the rooms in the Fan family agreed to let Mr. Huang Zongxi go upstairs and allowed him to read all the books upstairs carefully. 1673 became a particularly brilliant year in the history of tianyige.
Huang Zongxi rummaged through all the books in Tianyi Pavilion, sorted out the widely circulated books into a bibliography, and wrote another book, Secretary of the Collection of Tianyi Pavilion.
From then on, Tianyi Pavilion has a new regulation, which can be opened to real scholars, but the implementation of this regulation is still very strict. In the next 200 years, only 10 scholars were allowed to climb the building, and their names were all in the cultural history of China.
In this way, Tianyi Pavilion finally showed its meaning of existence, although the probability of showing it was so small. There is a sharp contradiction between the consanguineous inheritance of feudal families and the overall needs of sociologists, and bibliophile families are faced with an irreconcilable dilemma: either keep secrets or give play to their social values and let them dissipate. There seems to be no way to make a very limited opening through the strictest choices like Tianyi Pavilion. However, such a strict choice by national academic circles has gone far beyond the functional scope of a family.
It was not until Qianlong decided to compile Sikuquanshu that some new trends appeared in the solution of this contradiction. Gan Long ordered all provinces to interview the suicide note, and asked all book collectors, especially those in Jiangnan, to actively donate books. Tianyi Pavilion presented more than 600 kinds of precious ancient books, including 96 kinds in Sikuquanshu and more than 370 kinds in the catalogue. Gan Long is very grateful to Tianyi Pavilion for its contribution. He has awarded many awards and instructed the newly-built North-South main building to be built according to Tianyi Pavilion.
Tianyi pavilion is famous for this. Although most of the books on display have not been returned, it has found its own life in the National Encyclopedia and the Royal Library. I have seen many works and articles saying that it is a great disaster for Tianyi Pavilion to give the book as Sikuquanshu after Qianlong, which is quite true. The significance of book collection will eventually be widely spread, and "hiding" itself should not be the ultimate goal. Even the royal family used Tianyi Pavilion's collection greatly, and the family collection became administrative propaganda, which proved that Tianyi Pavilion was a great success and Fan Qin was a great success.
Tianyi Pavilion finally came to modern China. In modern China, everything is always weird, and this ancient library has started its own new adventure.
First, when the Taiping Army attacked Ningbo, local thieves took advantage of the chaos to steal books and then sold them to paper mills as waste paper by weight. A man once bought a batch from a workshop at a high price, but it was destroyed by fire.
This has become a harbinger of Tianyi Pavilion's future destiny. The problem it faces now is not to let a scholar go upstairs, but that thieves and thieves have become its biggest rivals.
19 14, a thief named Xue Jiwei miraculously sneaked into the library and stole books silently during the day and at night. Every day, he only uses the dates he brought to satisfy his hunger. On the river outside the east wall, there is a boat to pick up the stolen books. This time, almost half of Tianyi Pavilion's precious books were stolen and gradually appeared in bookstores in Shanghai.
Unlike those thieves in the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, Xue Jiwei's theft is not only huge in number and operating system, but also related to bookstores in Shanghai, which is obviously instigated by booksellers. Booksellers in modern cities have embezzled an ancient library in this way, and I always feel that it contains some symbolic meaning. Fan Qin, who thought of all the measures to protect the library at home, really didn't think much about anti-theft, because it was not a big threat to the yard of such a family at that time. However, this is just as Fan Qin could not imagine the arrival of modernity, nor could he imagine what measures those businessmen in the modern market would take during the primitive accumulation of capital period. The bookshelf on the bookshelf is empty, and Miss Qian Yunxiu sadly looks up at the floor that she can't climb any more. Mr. Huang Zongxi stepped on the floor carefully, leaving only a lot of jujube stones spit out by thieves on it.
Mr. Zhang Yuanji, who was in charge of the Commercial Press at that time, heard that Tianyi Pavilion had been devastated, and learned that a bookseller was going to sell Tianyi Pavilion's books to foreigners, so he immediately set aside huge sums of money for rescue and kept them in Hanfen Building of Oriental Library. Hanfenlou is famous in the cultural circle because of the moist collection of Tianyi Pavilion, and many contemporary cultures have absorbed nutrition there. However, as we all know, it was completely burned by the Japanese invaders.
This is certainly not what Mr Fan Qin could have predicted hundreds of years ago. His secret fire spell "water comes from the sky" finally failed.
All the above contents are selected from "Cultural Journey". A stormy pavilion