Page:Eminent Chinese Of The Ch’ing Period - Hummel - 1943 - Vol. 2.pdf/124

 TING Ping 丁丙, Aug. 15, 1832–1899, Apr. 18, bibliophile, publisher and philanthropist, was a native of Ch'ien-t'ang (Hangchow). An ancestor of the Ting family, named Ting K'ai 丁顗, accumulated a collection of books comprising 8,000 chüan. Ting Ping's grandfather, Ting Kuo-tien 丁國典, built in memory of Ting K'ai's collection a library called Pa-ch'ien-chüan lou 八千卷樓. Ting Ping's father, Ting Ying 丁英, was also a bibliophile who in the course of wide travels over China added many more volumes to the family library. But this collection was destroyed in 1861 when the Taipings besieged Hangchow. Thereupon Ting Ping and his elder brother, Ting Shên 丁申, began another collection which grew to larger proportions and became better known than the earlier one.

At the age of twenty-two (1854) Ting Ping became a licentiate of the first class but failed to obtain a higher degree. When the Taiping forces laid siege to Hangchow, early in 1860, the Ting brothers assisted in the defense of the city. After the fall of the city (March 19) they retired to Sungkiang and then to Ch'ing-p'u—both in Kiangsu. Although Hangchow was recovered by the government forces (March 24) it again fell to the Taipings late in the following year (1861, see under ). Early in 1862 Ting Ping went to Liu-hsia-chên, a town located several miles northwest of Hangchow. While making certain purchases he noticed that the articles were wrapped in paper that had been taken from a set of the Ssŭ-k'u ch'üan-shu (see under ). He rightly concluded that the Wên Lan Ko (which housed in Hangchow a duplicate set of the Ssŭ-k'u) must either have been destroyed or in part dispersed. With great difficulty he and his brother rescued many volumes of the set and stored them in a safe place. After moving to Hsiao-shan, to Shaohsing, and then to Ningpo (all in Chekiang), they finally went to Shanghai in the summer of 1862, temporarily settling their families there in 1863. While in Shanghai Ting Ping persuaded a bookdealer by the name of Chou Hui-hsi 周匯西 to go to Hangchow to save what remnants he could from the Wên Lan Ko. The dealer gained entrance to the city (then in the hands of the Taipings) and, on the pretense of collecting paper with characters on it to save it from being put to base uses a pious custom, known in Chinese as 敬惜字紙), he brought back to Ting some two hundred bundles of which about ten per cent were in the form of bound volumes. Later Ting had a painting made of this rescue of books from the Ssŭ-k'u ch'üan-shu which he entitled 書庫抱殘圖 Shu-k'u pao-ts'an t'u. With reference to the same event he took as his sobriquet, or hao, the words "Shu-k'u pao-ts'an shêng" (生).

The Ting family returned to Hangchow in 1864, after had recovered that city. Throughout their lives the members of the family were active in local rehabilitation and in philanthropic service. The scattered remnants from the Wên Lan Ko, which they had gathered, were placed in the prefectural school (府學). During the years 1866–71, the two brothers searched for and bought some three hundred more items of the Ssŭ-k'u collection, bringing the total to some 9,060 volumes (册). Although the building known as the Wên Lan Ko was not completely destroyed, it was badly damaged and in no condition to house books. When T'an Chung-lin 譚鍾麟 became governor of Chekiang in 1879, plans for restoring it were discussed and construction began in 1880 with Ting Ping as one of the two superintendents. The work was completed in 1881 and the volumes that had been recovered were deposited in it. Since a large percentage of the original Ssŭ-k'u collection was still missing, Ting Ping began in 1882 to assemble more by purchase and by borrowing, with a view to transcription. These labors continued until 1889 and during that time 891 incomplete works were assembled and 2,174 works were copied. These, together with the 331 original works that were not molested, comprised 34,769 volumes (ts'ê).

In the years 1888–89 Ting Ping built at Hangchow a library for himself, consisting of a series of three two-storey buildings. In the front structure he deposited some five thousand works whose titles appear in the Ssŭ-k'u Catalogue (see under ), together with a set of the Ku-chin t'u-shu chi-ch'êng (see under ), and a set of the Ch'üan T'ang-wên (see under ). The first floor of this building he named Chia-hui t'ang 嘉惠堂, and the second he named in memory of the earlier ancestral library, Pa-ch'ien-chüan lou. The name Chia-hui t'ang he derived from a phrase, "Chia-hui shih-lin" (嘉惠士林, "benefiting the scholastic world"), which appeared in the imperial edict issued to the Ting brothers in 1881 in praise of their efforts to restore the Wên Lan Ko. The building erected to the rear of this one bore on the lower floor a tablet reading, 726