156 The Han Kitab Authors
the Chinese-Muslim intellectual community. Yuan’s compilation
reflects trends in his broader geographical and cultural context and
provides some insight into how Chinese-Muslim intellectuals
viewed themselves vis-à-vis that context.
Elman has noted that “descriptive catalogs and annotated bibli-
ographies became essential elements in the growth of evidential
scholarship in Kiangnan during the eighteenth century.”^103 Clearly,
Yuan’s work served not only to codify pre-existing scholarship but
to stimulate its ongoing growth and production. Wang Ming-
sheng’s 王鳴盛 ( 1722 – 98 ) observation in the introduction to his
study of the Seventeen Dynastic Histories that “bibliography is the
most important field in scholarship”^104 is directly applicable to
Yuan and his vision of the Chinese Muslim intellectual community.
Bibliography, to Yuan’s mind, was, at heart, the backbone of the
Han Kitab and, in turn, of Chinese Muslim education, knowledge,
and identity.
The composition of a bibliography during the early 1780 s is sig-
nificant for what it tells us about the interplay between the Chi-
nese Muslim intellectual elite and the broader Chinese intellectual
milieu. At this time, much of the broader Chinese literary elite was
involved, to varying degrees, in the largest book-collecting project
in Chinese history, the Siku quanshu 四庫全書 (Complete library
of the four treasuries). Initiated in 1772 by the Qianlong emperor,
the Siku quanshu project involved thousands of scholars, from
within and without the state apparatus, in collecting, collated, cor-
recting, editing, copying, and censoring more than ten thousand ti-
tles. It was a monumental project and had a far-ranging impact at
both the state and the local level.
Yuan’s bibliography has significance both internally, to the Chi-
nese Muslim scholarly community as an independent entity, and
externally, as one manifestation of a broader bibliographic trend in
Chinese literati society. By touching on matters of concern both to
a specifically Muslim scholarly collectivity and to the dominant
scholarly elite, Yuan’s bibliography in fact tied those two constitu-
encies together, albeit implicitly. That is, by echoing the imperial
—————
103. Elman, From Philosophy to Philology, p. 160.
104. Cited at ibid.