Chinese Chapbooks : A Survey on Printed Books of Quyi Kept in European Libraries

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The purpose of this research project is to investigate collections of the scripts of Chinese narrative music or storytelling genres quyi [曲芸performed narrative arts] and shuochang [説唱 telling and singing arts] held in European libraries. They were published voluminously as popular literature, or "Chinese chapbooks". People enjoyed reading these cheap books called guci [drum tales] and dagushu [big drum tales], as well as popular novels. These kinds of books were published in Shanghai, Beijing and other cities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (late Qing dynasty and Republican period) with the rapid improvement of Western printing technology. These books, some dozens of pages in length, have covers with illustrations, and the back covers were often used for advertising books or information about daily life. But many of them were lost in wars, the socialist revolution and other upheavals. It was difficult to preserve these popular chapbooks because people generally regarded them as having little lasting worth. We cannot find large collections in mainland China now. European collections however have up to now been a blind spot in this regard.Over the three-year survey period (2005〜2007), I have established that there are considerable collections of Chinese narrative music scripts, such as the 460 books of Minnan Gezai (narrative music of Minnan district) held in the Bodleian Library, Oxford University. It can be expected that it is possible to find yet unknown collections of Chinese chapbooks in Europe, especially private collections for which no catalogues exist.The main libraries where I carried out the survey are: Bibliotheque Nationale de France (Richelieu-Louvois), Oxford University Bodleian Library, Fu Ssu-Nien Library of the Institute of History and Philology, Academia Sinica (Taiwan), Hunan Provincial Library (China), and the Sankt-Peterburgskii Filial, Institut Vostkovedeniya, Rossiiskaya Akademiya Nauk (Russia).