How It's Used

“Among the treasures which she mused upon more than the rest was the library which the Ancestor Ch’ien Lung himself had caused to be collected and created from the great books of the past of four thousand years.  By his command these books had been copied by the scholars of his reign into one vast treasure.  Two sets of the manuscripts these scholars made, the one to remain in the Forbidden City and the other here [in the Summer Palace], lest fire or invading enemies destroy either.  Tzu Hsi had not herself laid hands upon these libraries which the scholars had made, for inside the city the one was stored in the Hall of Literary Glory and kept under lock and key, except for a single season each year, this at the Feast of Classics, when it was the duty of the highest scholars to take out the ancient writings and expound their meaning to the Emperor, then ruling.  For ever since the First Emperor eighteen hundred years ago had burned the books and buried scholars to put an end to ancient learning, and make himself supreme, it had been the first care of scholars to preserve books by teaching reverence for them, first from the Emperor and then from all his subjects, and that the words of the sage Confucius could not be destroyed by willful rulers, the Four Books and the Five Classics were even carved on stone and these stone monuments stood in the Hall of Classics, whose gates were barred.”

—Pearl S. Buck, Imperial Woman, (Wakefield, R.I.:  Moyer Bell, 1956, 1999), p. 102.

Links

Related on eAlmanac
The Four Books

Beyond eAlmanac
Wikipedia article on the Five Classics