類書に表現される中國社會の特性

Abstract

Of all books produced throughout the ages from the pre-Ch'in period down to the Ch'ing a category called "lei-shu" or a kind of cyclopaedia is of the nature we scarcely find in other parts of the world. In volume they constitute almost a half of all Chinese books before the modern period. These lei-shu seem to indicate the fact that the Chinese ruling class was always inclined to find their norms of behaviour in old books, so that the featutes peculiar to each period must be somewhat reflected in the lei-shu of that period. One of the characteristics common to all lei-shu from Huang-lan (皇覽) to Ku-chin-t'u-shu-chi-ch'eng (古今圖書集成) is that they include everything contained in old books without selecting certain things and excluding others. This fact seems to show that the Chinese ruling class or, in other word, the literati remained fundamentally of the same nature from Han down to Ch'ing. Incidentally, in view of the fact that such pre-Han books as Shu-ching (書經), Chou-li (周禮), Tso-chuan (左傳), Chuang-tzu (莊子) and Kuan-tzu (管子) share to a certain extent the nature of later lei-shu, the period from Ch'un-ch'iu (春秋) to the Han must have already reached practically the same stage of development with the succeeding periods.