Old Book Resources

[tacrab]

Here's a great bunch of old Chinese books available digitized, from World Digital Library/Library of Congress.
Includes a couple Yi (Cheng Yi and Kong Yingda), as well as astronomy, history, maps, etc.

https://www.wdl.org/en/search/?ddc=951

 

[hilary]

Thanks, tacrab. These are rewarding to browse even for those of us who can't read the Chinese - we can still appreciate the pictures!

 

[Liselle]

Cangue picture, 21.6.

 

[hilary]

Cangue picture, 21.6.
View attachment 3864

Exactly! This gives you a vivid sense of what it's like to wear one, doesn't it? Being very strangely cut off from the rest of your own body. I'd always imagined them with hand-holes, like the stocks, but maybe that's a European version.

 

[remod]

Here's a great bunch of old Chinese books available digitized,

Thanks tacrab!

Among the many interesting things there, I've found a very fine book of images: https://www.wdl.org/en/item/301/ and, in that book, a set of symbols I had never seen.

Does anybody know if they represent or refer to something? Or are they just graphic elements?

 

[remod]

In the same book there is also this interesting image (page 121):



Where the trigrams are in the King Wen order (oriented with the lowest line outwards).
It would have been wonderful to know what the text says ...

 

[dfreed]

Where the trigrams are in the King Wen order (oriented with the lowest line outwards).

I don't know what it says.

You may already know this, but this is the Houtian, or King Wen, or Later Heaven Bagua (trigram) circle. There is another thread here - Harmen on trigram circles - where Harmen Mesker talks about the age and origin of this circular arrangement, but not really what it means.

 

[tacrab]

This book is the Fang Family Book of Ink-cake 方氏墨譜。 16th century.
Perhaps could call it a pattern book. These are designs that would be embossed onto ink cake in mold.