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Rh of classification, and headed by the works of the Confucian school.

The next great catalogue was that of the Sui dynasty, describing the state of Chinese Literature about 618 a.d., when the Sui was displaced by the T'ang dynasty. This catalogue has furnished the pattern for all future classifications of Liter- ature up to the present day. The Imperial collection was then for the first time divided as at present, into four great divi- sions, called k'u, i.e. "storehouses" or "treasuries," the arrangement of which may be said to correspond to the rela- tive estimation in which the several branches of Literature are held by Chinese critics. The "Four Treasuries" (ss'i-k'u) are: —

(1) Classics (king), by which name the works of the Con- fucian school with their extensions and commentaries are understood ;

(2) Historians (sh'i), containing historical, biographical, geographical, etc., works;

(3) Philosophers {tzl), with the exclusion of the Confucian classics, including besides a host of miscellaneous philosophical writers the entire Tauist Literature, works on agriculture, military science, astronomy, divination, medicine, etc.;

(4) Belles-lettres, including the poetical literature and miscellaneous prosaists.

Several later catalogues represent the state of Literature at certain periods. Thus we have one, the Ch'ung-wdn-tsung-mu in sixty-six volumes, published in the eleventh century, and the description of the private collection of Ch'on Chon-sun, a bibliophile of the thirteenth century, and similar records of historical value down to the great catalogue of the Imperial Library in Peking, published in 1782, now the principal source of our knowledge of Chinese Literature. To give even a faint idea of the contents of this great collection — consisting of 3460 works in more than 75,000 volumes — is, of course, impossible in a space of time calculated by minutes;