Lost Encyclopaedia (Enciclopedia Perdida)

Fishburn and Hughes: "An encyclopaedia compiled at the order of Yongle, the third emperor of the Luminous Dynasty, which became known as Yongle da dian (The Great Work of Yongle), Yongle being the reign-title of the Emperor. The manuscript of 22,877 sections bound in 11,095 volumes was completed in 1408; two more copies were made in 1567. The original and one copy were destroyed in Nanjing; the other copy, kept in Hanlin Academy in Peking, was apparently already incomplete when the Academy was destroyed by fire during the Boxer uprising in 1900. A few lost volumes of the encyclopaedia are now scattered in libraries in China and elsewhere, including the British Library." (118)