Officials and commoners also could buy books directly from the Wuyingdian. In the Kangxi and Yongzheng periods, there was no clear regulation of this. Because the number of books printed in the Wuyingdian increased and demand grew with it in the early Qianlong period, Wuyingdian officials started to draft regulations for selling the books. In 1742 the emperor approved new regulations, which stated: (1) All books currently stored in the Wuyingdian may be purchased by officials, who should submit their request and payment through their own departments. As soon as the request and money are received, the Wuyingdian will send the books to the officials. (2) Retired officials and commoners may also buy books from the Wuyingdian. They should submit their request and payment through the Hanlin Academy. (3) Officials who are willing to reprint the books for their personal use are allowed to make use of the woodblocks in the Wuyingdian.61
Two years later, in 1744, the Wuyingdian established the Book Circulation Bureau, and bookselling activity was further institutionalized.62 The bureau was in charge of selling the Wuyingdian books to individual readers. However, although the creation of both the bookselling regulations and the Book Circulation Bureau itself was intended to ensure that individuals had access to the Wuyingdian books, the complexity of the procedures was intimidating to most people. It was difficult for commoners without sufficient social connections to submit their requests and payment through the Hanlin Academy to buy books from the Wuyingdian. Even for officials, buying books from the Wuyingdian was not easy. They had to submit a formal request through their own department and wait for the communication between their department and the Wuyingdian, and the payment was deducted from officials’ salaries. This process might take days or even months.63
Every book sold by the Wuyingdian through the Book Circulation Bureau was carefully recorded on the department’s bookselling registers, including the books’ titles and cost and the buyers’ names and occupations. Some of these registers from the Tongzhi and Guangxu periods are extant today. Thanks to them, we can learn who the purchasers were and what kinds of books they brought from the Wuyingdian. From 1865 to 1871, the Book Circulation Bureau all together received 70 orders from 46 individuals and sold 766 books. On average it received 10 orders and sold about 109 books per year. Since the publishing activity in the Wuyingdian had been in decline for a long time before the Tongzhi period, the number of books sold by the Wuyingdian in this period was probably less than those sold in the mid-Qing period when the Wuyingdian’s publishing was at its height. Because of the absence of sources, the exact statistics on book sales in the mid-Qing period are not clear. According to a financial report submitted by the Wuyingdian’s officials in 1792, the Book Circulation Bureau sold 187 books in that year.64 Since the Wuyingdian’s printing and publishing businesses were most active and the printed books most abundant in stock in the mid- and late Qianlong period, it can be roughly estimated that the Wuyingdian sold around two hundred books per year in the late Qianlong period. The number probably gradually declined thereafter until the Tongzhi period, when, as we have seen, the bureau sold about one hundred books per year. Thus the number of books sold through the Book Circulation Bureau was limited.
According to the bookselling registers from 1865 to 1871, purchasers of the Wuyingdian books were from various social backgrounds, including Manchu princes (20 percent of the books sold by the Wuyingdian), officials and clerks in the central government (43 percent), craftsmen of the Wuyingdian (13 percent), and commoners (22 percent). Most purchasers of the Wuyingdian books, however, were people with close connections to the Qing central bureaucracy, especially with the Imperial Household Department and the Wuyingdian itself. For example, the vice director of the Wuyingdian, whose abbreviated name was Chun on the registers, placed 7 orders and bought 89 books in total. One Wuyingdian craftsman named Zhao Junying placed 7 orders and bought 96 books, including many duplicates.65 Some of these purchasers bought the Wuyingdian books for their own use, but some probably bought for their friends or even for sale on the book market. Although a broader audience might get access to the Wuyingdian books through their friends working in the Wuyingdian or through bookstores in Beijing, considering the small number of books sold by the Wuyingdian (only 766 books in 7 years), the audience was probably not large. The audience for books sold by the Book Circulation Bureau was thus small and restricted to certain social groups.
Generally speaking, the books sold by the Wuyingdian were not expensive. Because the Wuyingdian was not a profit-oriented publishing institution, pricing was based on the cost of materials and labor as well as some overhead charges. According to the “Catalog of the Wuyingdian Books for Circulation” (Wuyingdian tongxing shuji mulu qingce), a document probably compiled in the Qianlong period, 154 titles were on sale in the Book Circulation Bureau. The price ranged from 0.007 taels to 14.6 taels, based on how many volumes the book contained and on the kind of paper used. Most of the books cost less than five taels. Some were even cheaper than similar books sold by bookstores. For example, while the price of the Code, a forty-volume book, was only about 1.1 taels (table 1.2), similar editions printed by commercial publishing houses and sold in bookstores ranged from 2.4 to 7 taels.66
The books sold by the Book Circulation Bureau covered a wide range of categories. According to the Department’s bookselling registers from 1865 to 1871, histories were the most popular genre of the books sold by the Wuyingdian. In seven years, the Wuyingdian sold 239 history books, about one-third of all copies it sold in this period. The works of the Qing emperors (191 copies, 25 percent of all copies sold by the Wuyingdian), Confucian classics (135 copies, 18 percent), and dictionaries (105 copies, 14 percent) were also in demand. Books about laws and regulations, however, were not popular among readers. From 1865 to 1871, the Wuyingdian altogether sold only one copy of books related to law and regulations—The Substatutes for Arresting Escapees (Dubu zeli). It did not sell a single copy of the Code or the Expanded Substatutes between 1865 and 1871. According to the “Catalog of the Wuyingdian Books for Circulation,” there were twenty books on Qing laws and regulations for sale by the Book Circulation Bureau (table 1.2), which was about 14 percent of the 154 books.67 However, from 1867 to 1871, such books only comprised 0.1 percent of all books sold by the Wuyingdian. The reason for this is unclear based on the Wuyingdian’s documents. It is possible that these books were out of stock in the Book Circulation Bureau. A more plausible explanation is that readers were not interested in purchasing such books from the Wuyingdian, as commercially published editions of the Qing Code and some other books about Qing laws and regulations were better quality and easier to buy from various bookstores.
THE CODE PUBLISHED BY THE WUYINGDIAN
Throughout the Qing period altogether the Wuyingdian appears to have published seven imperially authorized editions of the Qing Code, in 1725, 1740, 1768, 1790, 1802, 1825, and 1870, at an average interval of twenty years. The Wuyingdian also published at least eighteen editions of the Expanded Substatutes, at an average interval of five years (see table 1.1). Because the laws usually went into effect immediately after they were promulgated and Wuyingdian editions were the only authorized editions acknowledged by the Qing court, it was necessary for the Wuyingdian to provide the Qing bureaucracy with the updated Code and the Expanded Substatutes in a timely fashion. In fact, however, because the reviewing and printing process in the Wuyingdian was rather slow, it usually took several years to finish printing a multivolume book like the Code.
TABLE 1.2. Prices of Wuyingdian Books Relating to Laws and Regulations
| Book Title | Volumes (ben) | Price (taels) | ||
| The Great Qing Code (Chinese) | 40 | 1.10 | ||
| The Great Qing Code (Manchu) | 40 | 2.50 | ||
| The Expanded Substatutes (Manchu) | 2 | 0.10 | ||
| The Expanded Substatutes (Chinese) | 2 | 0.05 | ||
| The Expanded Substatutes, 1743–1745 (Manchu) | 3 | 0.15 | ||
| The
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