The Han Kitab Authors 155
Chinese Muslim literati elite, it is helpful to observe their culmina-
tion, arguably the late eighteenth-century publication of the first
Chinese Muslim bibliography, a bibliography that can be seen as
an embryonic codification of the Han Kitab as a whole.
Sometime around 1780 , Yuan Guozuo, a Muslim publisher and
editor from Nanjing, compiled a list of texts entitled Tianfang qun-
shu xu 天方群書序 (An introduction to collected Islamic books).
As noted above, Yuan was the grandson of Yuan Ruqi and was
himself a teacher in the Yuan school. Yuan Guozuo published sev-
eral works by Liu Zhi, to which he contributed prefaces.^101
In the Tianfang qunshu xu, Yuan listed all Chinese Islamic works
known to him. Yuan named twenty-nine texts, of which sixteen
were printed and thirteen existed in manuscript. Yuan is particu-
larly proud of including both published and unpublished materials:
“Of the more than twenty books written by former generations,
early and late, more than ten have been printed, [and] more than
ten [which were] not printed have been transmitted to the present.
I present here a list of all the printed and unprinted books.”^102
Next to each entry, Yuan detailed the name of its author, its
place of composition, and the location of its engraving blocks (to
facilitate future printings). He attached this short text to the first
printed edition of the Tianfang zhisheng shilu, the biography of the
Prophet written about sixty years earlier by Liu Zhi. Yuan consid-
ered the publication of The Veritable Records to be the culmination
of his editing, printing, and publishing endeavors; it was a project
to which he had devoted many years. The short list appended to it,
however, was no less significant; despite its unassuming appearance,
it was in fact the first bibliography of Chinese Islamic books. Even
though it did not, include all Chinese Islamic works extant in
Yuan’s day, this “Sinica Islamica” documented almost a century
and a half of intensive Chinese Muslim literary production. Symp-
tomatic of general eighteenth-century Chinese intellectual trends,
Yuan’s work is also indicative of significant developments within
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101. All his prefaces are gathered in HRZ (Qingdai), pp. 226 – 29 , 394 – 95.
102. Yuan Guozuo, Tianfang qunshu xu (An introduction to the collection of
Islamic books), in ZSSL. The translation is from Leslie, Islamic Literature in Chi-
nese, p. 12.