Another work of the same kind was the San Ts'ai T'u Hui, issued in 1609, which is bound up in seventeen thick volumes. It is especially interesting for the variety of topics on which information is given, and also because it is profusely illustrated with full-page woodcuts. It has chapters on Geography, with maps; on Ethnology, Language, the Arts and Sciences, and even on various forms of Athletics, including the feats of rope-dancers and acrobats, sword-play, boxing, wrestling, and foot-ball.
Under Tricks and Magic we see a man swallowing a sword, or walking through fire, while hard by an acrobat is bending backward and drinking from cups arranged upon the ground.
The chapters on Drawing are exceptionally good; they contain some specimen landscapes of almost faultless perspective, and also clever examples of free-hand drawing. Portrait-painting is dealt with, and ten illustrations are given of the ten angles at which a face may be drawn. The first shows one-tenth of the face from the right side, the second two-tenths, and so on, waxing to full-face five-tenths; then waning sets in on the left side, four, three, and two-tenths, until ten-tenths shows nothing more than the back of the sitter's head.
There is a well-known Chinese story which tells how a very stingy man took a paltry sum of money to an artist—payment is always exacted in advance—and asked him to paint his portrait. The artist at once complied with his request, but in an hour or so, when the portrait was finished, nothing was visible save the back of the sitter's head. "What does this mean?" cried the latter, indignantly. "Oh," replied the artist, "I thought a man who paid so little as you wouldn't care to show his face!"
Perhaps some one may wonder how it is possible to arrange an encyclopædia for reference when the language in which it is written happens to possess no alphabet.
Arrangement under Categories is the favourite method, and it is employed in the following way:—
A number of such words as Heaven, Earth, Time, Man, Plants, Beasts, Birds, Fishes, Minerals, and others are chosen, and the subjects are grouped under these headings. Thus, Eclipses would come under Heaven, Geomancy under Earth, the Passions under Man, though all classification is not quite so simple as these specimens, and search is often prolonged by failing to hit upon the right Category. Even when the Category is the right one, many pages of Index have frequently to be turned over; but once fix the reference in the Index, and the rest is easy, the catch-word in each case being printed on the margin of each page, just where the finger comes when turning the pages rapidly over.
The Chinese are very fond of collections of reprints, published in uniform editions and often extending to several hundred volumes. My earliest acquaintance with literature is associated with such a collection in English. It was called The Family Library, and ran to over a hundred volumes, if I recollect rightly, and included the works of Washington Irving and the immortal story of Rip Van Winkle. There is also a Chinese Rip Van Winkle, a tale of a man who, wandering one day in the mountains, came upon two boys playing checkers; and after watching them for some time, and eating some dates they gave him, he discovered that the handle of an axe he was carrying had mouldered into dust. Returning home, he found, as the Chinese poet puts it,
"City and suburb as of old,