Wenlan Pavilion

This guide to Wenlan Pavilion on West Lake in Hangzhou traces the fate of the Siku Quanshu, the Qianlong Emperor's 1782 encyclopedia project that took hundreds of scholars and thousands of scribes years to copy by hand into more than thirty-six thousand volumes. It follows what happened when Taiping rebels sacked Hangzhou in 1861 and gutted the pavilion holding the only complete copy south of Beijing. You'll hear about the book collector named Ding who spent years afterward chasing down whatever survived. Look closely at the rebuilt hall's shelves.