siku

The History of Siku Quanshu
The Siku Quanshu (Complete Library in Four Branches of Literature) was compiled during the years 1773�1782 by edict from Emperor Qianlong. It includes 3,460 works, with a total of more than 36,000 volumes. Having approximately 800 million characters, the Siku Quanshu is unarguably the single largest collection of literary works in the world.

In the Siku Quanshu are important works pertaining to the five thousand years of Chinese civilization, including history, astronomy, geography, rules and regulations, politics, economics, society, science and technology, and philosophy. In the course of the compilation, large numbers of rare books and manuscripts were collected and preserved. Different versions of each work were examined and the best available one was used as the origin from which copies were made.

Electronic Version of Siku Quanshu (Wenyuange Edition)
Siku Quanshu itself is a gigantic Chinese database. The purpose of the electronic version is to provide easy access of this culture world to more people. The Electronic Version of Siku Quanshu (Wenyuange Edition) is designed into two versions: the Standard Version and the Professional Version.

STANDARD VERSION, including 167 CD-ROMs, stores 4.7 million pages of scanned images of original scripts and provides title searching function.

PROFESSIONAL VERSION, including around 175 CD-ROMs and having all the functions of the Standard Version, provides full-text retrieval functions of the 800 million Chinese characters.

Features of the Electronic Version
Fast and Convenient
The Siku Quanshu in book format is extremely space-consuming. Now the space-saving 175 CD-ROMs version is a convenient method of storage.

There are various retrieving functions in the Standard and Professional Versions respectively,
� searching by original catalogue
� searching by concise catalogue
� searching by author name
� composite search
� full text search (Boolean Search)

Authentic and Authoritative
To ensure its authenticity, the Standard Version is designed as a complement to the Professional Version. It enables users to open the original page at any time for examination.

The electronic version engaged over one hundred technicians and editors from Beijing, Shanghai and Hong Kong. Celebrities, experts and scholars were invited to be consultants of this project. They are Gu Tinglong, Hsieh Ching-chun, Jao Tsung-i, Pan Mei-yueh, Ren Jiyu, Wang Daohan, Wang Yuanhua, and Wong King-keung.

Practical and Innovative
For the convenience of users, references of the ancient Chinese language such as Contents of the Electronic Version of Wenyuange Siku Quanshu, A Dictionary for the Complete Library in Four Branches of Literature (Jilin University Press), The Classical Chinese Language Dictionary (Shanghai People's Publishing House), and the Single Character Pronunciation System (designed by the Computer Department of Tsinghua University) are added to this set of CD-ROMs.

Users of the electronic version can also publish their research work and interchange with other scholars through Internet.

After-sale Service
Free data amendments service until 2003

Customer Service