First, burn it. There are 3.461volume, 79,000 volumes and nearly 770 million words in Sikuquanshu. There are more than 3,000 kinds of banned books (estimated to be 6,766 and 93,556), and the number of banned books exceeds the total income. This is not to mention the terrible atmosphere caused by the imperial edict at that time and the books secretly burned by the people. I'm afraid more than ten thousand books will be destroyed altogether. This is really an unprecedented cultural catastrophe.
Second, pruning. Just to give a few examples, according to Mr. Huang Shang's textual research, the imperial edict of Qianlong's forty-one years: if there are words in the book, you don't have to abolish the whole book; Forty-four years after Qianlong, the forbidden network has noticed local chronicles; Forty-five years after Qianlong's reign, his attention expanded to the fields of popular literature such as wild epics, plays and novels. Fifty years after Qianlong, in Memorabilia of the Late Ming Dynasty, it was changed from "Wu Sangui killed Li Zicheng" to "Qing army killed Li Zicheng".
Third, tampering. Mr. Lu Xun once said: "The Qing people usurped the Sikuquanshu, and the ancient books perished because they messed up the old style and deleted the original text." (Miscellaneous Talks after Illness) Not only the works closely related to the interests of the rulers of the Ming Dynasty and the Qing Dynasty were vigorously eliminated, but also the Song Dynasty. For example, the famous sentence in Yue Fei's "Man Jiang Hong" was changed to "Hungry to eat meat and laughing to drink the blood of Xiongnu", because "Land Rover" and "Xiongnu" were taboo in the Qing Dynasty. The most ridiculous thing is Xin Qiji's "Forever Happiness": "Grass trees in the sunset, ordinary alleys, human nature sent slaves to live" was changed to "human nature Song Zhu once lived". Posthumous title, the former Emperor of the Southern Song Dynasty, has nothing to do with taboos such as Hu, Rong, Yi and Lu, but slaves are afraid of tyranny and arrogance, so "consciously" to be on the safe side, we should know that "dogs always run ahead".
Fourth, mistakes. Li Yuerui, a Shaanxi scholar who supported the new law during the political reform, mentioned the Twenty-four Histories of Wuyingdian in his note "A Pen for Regret". "When reading" Twenty-four History of Wuying Temple ",only the collation history, Han and national records are innocent and detailed, and the book of Jin is not as good as that of Jin, and the typos cannot be enumerated." Is it the negligence of the shopkeeper in Siku Library? No, this is a pantomime performed by the treasurer, the official in the inner government and the eunuch in order to please the emperor-deliberately leaving some mistakes that are easy to see, waiting for the dry dragon who likes proofreading to mark them, and then reprimanding the treasurer for being "unlearned", thus "enjoying it" and feeling that his knowledge is also above that of the treasurer who is "the best in the world and a liberal scholar for a while". "However, although I like proofreading, I didn't proofread word for word at first, so I was tired after reading it for a long time. Every sample is submitted without looking at it. It needs to be revised with a big brush and a big notebook and printed as it is. Although the clerk knows his mistake, he dare not change the log. "
As can be seen from the above, the destruction, deletion and modification, including a large number of mistakes left behind, are intentional. Investigate its reason, still have to analyze the real intention of editing Sikuquanshu by Gan Long.
In Fei Zhengqing's magnum opus "America and China", he clearly pointed out the real intention of the Qing rulers to compile "Sikuquanshu": "Through this huge project, the Qing court actually conducted a text inventory (literary" religious trial "), and one of its purposes was to ban all works that criticized foreign rulers. Editors can also find out all heretical works that should be banned or destroyed when searching for rare books and compiling the full text into this big library. As demonstrated by L.C. goodrich, this is the biggest ideological rule. "