Division E is a very important one for students of the Chinese language. Here we find a number of works of reference, most of which may be characterised as indispensable, and the great majority of which are easily procurable at the present day.
Beginning with dictionaries, we have the famous work of Hsü Shên, who died about A.D. 120. There was at that date no such thing as a Chinese dictionary, although the language had already been for some centuries ripe for such a production, and accordingly Hsü Shên set to work to fill the void. He collected 9353 written characters,—presumably all that were in existence at the time,—to which he added 1163 duplicates, i.e. various forms of writing the same character, and then arranged them in groups under those parts which, as we have already seen in the preceding Lecture, are indicators of the direction in which the sense of a character is to be looked for. Thus, all characters containing the element 犭 "dog" were brought together; all those containing 艹 "vegetation," 疒 "disease," etc.
So far as we know, this system originated with him; and we are therefore not surprised to find that in his hands it was on a clumsier scale than that in vogue to-day. Hsü Shên uses no fewer than 540 of these indicators, and even when the indicator to a character is satisfactorily ascertained, it still remains to search through all the characters under that particular group. Printing from movable types would have been impossible under such a system.
In the modern standard dictionary, published in 1716, under the direction of the Emperor K'ang Hsi, there are only 214 indicators employed, and there is a further sub-arrangement of these groups according to the number of strokes in the other, the phonetic portion of the character. Thus, the indicators "hand," "wood," "fire," "water," or whatever it may be, settle the group in which a given character will be found, and the number of strokes in the remaining portion will refer it to a comparatively small sub-group, from which it can be readily picked out. For instance, 松 "a fir tree" will be found under the indicator 木 "tree," sub-group No. 4, because the remaining portion 公 consists of four strokes in writing.
Good copies of this dictionary are not too easily obtained nowadays. The "Palace" edition, as it is called, is on beautifully white paper, and is a splendid specimen of typography.
A most wonderful literary feat was achieved under the direction of the before-mentioned Emperor K'ang Hsi, when a general Concordance to the phraseology of all literature was compiled and published for general use. Word-concordances to the Bible and to Shakespeare are generally looked upon as no small undertakings, but what about a phrase-concordance to all literature? Well, in 1711 this was successfully carried out, and remains to-day as a monument of the literary enterprise of the great Manchu-Tartar monarch with whose name it is inseparably associated.
The term "literature" here means serious literature, the classics, histories, poetry, and the works of philosophers, of recognised authorities, and of brilliant writers generally.
It was not possible, for obvious reasons, to arrange this collection of phrases according to the 214 indicators, as in a dictionary of words. It is arranged according to the Tones and Rhymes.
Let me try to express all this in terms of English literature. Reading a famous poem, I come across the lines