Preserving Rare Chinese Books

Located in the Botanical Garden in Taipei, the National Central Library is the largest research and public library in the Republic of China, housing some 143,998 volumes of rare Chinese books. Since the library was established in 1933 in Nanking, every effort has been made to acquire these rare books from various sources, including private collections. Immediately after the Second World War, the number of books in the library reached one million, but only 120,000 were shipped to Taiwan in 1949. This small percentage however, included the choicest works, such as 281 titles from the Sung Dynasty, 360 from the Yuan Dynasty, 8,339 from the Ming Dynasty and 344 from the Ching. Also among the collection today are one title from the Chia Hsing Buddhist Canon, the Tripitaka; 3,500 hand-written manuscripts; 153 Tun Huang manuscript scrolls; 273 Korean editions; 230 Japanese; and two An-nan (Vietnam) editions. Included in the new volumes acquired since 1949 are a collection of 20,000 valuable books formerly belonging to the National Peiping Library, which were shippedback from the U.S. in 1965.

These rare volumes are preserved in the National Central Library in iron, fireproof safes, which contain camphor to drive off worms and other pests, and are also lightproof to protect the paper from the sun's damaging rays. Because of Taiwan's hot and humid climate, thermometers, hygrometers and air conditioners are installed to keep the air clean and the humidity at an ideal level.

Despite all these precautions, volumes are constantly in need of repair. This important task is entrusted to 64-year-old Lu Chi-sen, who started work with the library in Nanking as a driver. When he helped to ship some of the rare books from the mainland to Taiwan in 1948, he came to realize the importance of repairing them. Since the library was reopened in Taipei in 1954, Lu has lived on the premises and returns home only once a week. Although he officially retired in 1976, he decided to stay on to continue the important repair work. About 8,000 volumes are currently in need of repair--a formidable task in view of the fact that Lu can only process three or four a month. Using his main tools--scissors, paste, brushes, drills, tweezers and rules, he works every day from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. The mending process, through unbinding the damaged book, taking out torn pages, pasting in new paper and rebinding, might seem tedious, but Lu finds it fascinating.

To facilitate the study and research of valuable Chinese books and ensure their preservation, the National Central Library has set up a five-year (1973-78) project to reproduce its entire contents on microfilm. The microfilm center was established in the library in July 1968, with a grant from the Asia Foundation and a loan from the Columbia University in the U.S. The center has a staff of eight handling the microfilm cameras, copying and processing and taking care of quality and storage of the film rolls. Under normal conditions, the capacity of the center amounts to 300 rolls of microfilm negatives and 400 rolls of microfilm positives a month. Up to July this year, a total of 11,921 titles comprising 5,851,715 pages of Sung, Yuan, Ming and Ching editions had been processed. It is planned that by the end of the year, the five-year project of microfilming the entire rare books collection will be completed.