New Scholar Program: Biblio-Internationalism

Biblio-Internationalism: Chinese Rare Books and Transpacific Alliance between the National Library of Beiping and the Library of Congress, 1926-1945

In the two decades before and during WWII, Yuan Tongli, director of the National Library of Beiping (NLB), forged a partnership between his fledgling institution and the Library of Congress (LC), in which Yuan helped obtain valuable editions for LC and arranged for Chinese scholars to offer cataloging service. My paper probes into Yuan’s seemingly unfathomable transfer of rare Chinese books to the U.S. I argue that Yuan’s actions were motivated by a cultural internationalism involving both ideal and practical considerations. On the one hand, he and American Sinologists shared a belief in the importance of the mutual understanding of culture and history between peoples for the prosperity and peace of an increasingly interconnected world. On the other hand, Yuan aimed to curry favor with American partners in return for resources that his library—and the Chinese research community at large—desperately needed, at a time when socio-political upheavals in China severely disrupted the work of Chinese scholars and scientists. Rare books became at once a fountain for a beautiful vision of the future between the two republics and an asset in exchange for material support vital to Chinese academic nation building. I further unpack the actual transfer of the books, highlighting three critical factors: a socio-institutional network that connected old-fashioned bibliophiles in North China to Sinologists in Washington D.C.; knowledge of bibliography that allowed for identifying, studying, and cataloging books; and the latest photographic technologies that facilitated long-distance exchange of important texts. Drawing on archival records and published primary sources, this paper reconstructs the human agency and material processes behind the transpacific movement of Chinese rare books.

Mindi Zhang is a PhD candidate in modern Chinese history at UCLA. He is broadly interested in the history of books, history of libraries, and history of science and technology. Zhang’s dissertation examines the institutionalization of Chinese research libraries in the first half of the twentieth century against a backdrop of Sino-US exchange. It examines how these institutions blended early modern Chinese bibliographical tradition with twentieth-century library methods and technologies. Part of the dissertation traces the growth of Sinological collections in the U.S. in which Chinese librarians and bibliographers played a vital role. Zhang is a Junior Fellow in the Andrew W. Mellon Society of Fellows in Critical Bibliography at Rare Book School.