Imagine being ordered by an absolute monarch
to just manually track down, verify, and then
publish 49 ,000 distinct pieces of literature.
Yeah, and no pressure, right? Right. Like, if
you miss a crucial document or if you compile
the wrong version of a really sensitive text,
the emperor might literally have your head. Literally.
Oh, and by the way, you have to do all of this
without a computer, without a search engine,
without a modern printing press, and without
any pre -existing organizational software whatsoever.
It's just wild to even think about. It really
is. So welcome to the deep dive. Today we are
traveling back to the year 1705 to look at one
of the most astonishing data collection projects
in human history. Yeah, we're talking about the
creation of the complete Tang poems, which is
known in Chinese as the kuantangshi. Exactly.
You know, for you listening right now, if you've
ever felt overwhelmed by information overload,
like just managing your inbox or your photo app.
Oh, yeah, constantly. Wait until you hear how
they handle data collection in the 18th century.
Because it is, well, it's just mind blowing.
It really is a master class in. information architecture
because, you know, we tend to act as though we
just invented the concept of compiling and categorizing
vast amounts of human output in the digital age.
Right, like we own big data. Exactly. But the
drive to capture, collate, and preserve a massive
cultural data set that is centuries old and the
mechanics of how they actually pulled it off
back then are staggering. Okay. Let's unpack
this because the sheer scale of what we're dealing
with here is, I mean, it's almost comical. It
really is. The complete Tang poems is exactly
what it sounds like, but on a level that completely
defies logic. Like we mentioned, we're talking
about compiling up probably 49 ,000 poems. Yeah.
And these poems were written by more than 2 ,200
different poets. And just to establish the tagging
line here, this monumental project was not happening
during the Tang dynasty itself. Right. That's
a huge point. Yeah. It was commissioned much,
much later, in 1705, under the direction of the
Qing dynasty. Specifically, the Kangxi Emperor.
I just, I keep trying to wrap my head around
that number. 49 ,000 poems. That's a lot of paper.
It's an incredible amount of paper. To put this
in perspective for you listening, compiling that
much specific literature without a search engine,
it's essentially the equivalent of trying to
manually transcribe and categorize every single
meaningful tweet or blog or social media post
from a golden era of the internet. Oh, wow. Yeah,
that's a great way to look at it. Right. Imagine
someone telling you to go out and collect the
49 ,000 most important posts from the last decade.
But you can't use a screen. No screens allowed.
None. You have to track down people's physical
diaries. You have to travel on horseback to different
cities to look at local archives and physically
carry stacks of paper back to your office. It's
a logistical nightmare. But what's fascinating
here is the cultural and political behind that
directive. Well, this was the first of the great
literary projects for which the Manchu dynasty,
the Qing dynasty became famous. You really have
to look at the power dynamics at the time. OK.
Here is the Kangxi emperor, and he's issuing
this massive imperial mandate to preserve the
lyric poems, the Shifar of an entirely previous
era. Wait, let me push back on that first. Why
do it? Yeah, I mean, the king emperors were the
ones in charge. They had the army. They had the
throne. Why on earth do they care about poetry
written hundreds of years before they even took
power? It seems counterintuitive, right? It just
seems like a massive waste of resources and time
for a relatively new regime like Focus on the
Present. Well, it is actually a brilliant strategic
move. You see, the king rulers were Manchus.
They were essentially foreign conquerors who
had taken control of China. So they faced this
constant underlying crisis of legitimacy among
the Han Chinese elite. Oh, I see. Yeah. So by
taking ownership of the defining literature of
a past Chinese golden age, the Tang dynasty,
the Kangxi emperor, is essentially asserting
cultural dominance and continuity. Ah. So it's
a massive political flex. Precisely. It's a huge
flex. He is saying to the people, we, the current
rulers, are the ultimate stewards and protectors
of your greatest cultural achievements. It proves
they possess the mandate of heaven. It is just
an incredible demonstration of soft power, but
executed on an industrial scale. By compiling
the complete collection, they control the narrative
of history itself. you know, standing up in a
palace and declaring that you own history, that
doesn't actually put books on a shelf. No, it
definitely doesn't. The Kangxi Emperor has the
vision, sure. But he is completely separated
from the physical reality of finding 49 ,000
scattered poems. He's not out there riding the
horses. Exactly. To actually pull this off without
the internet, he needs a human search engine.
He needs a project manager who can deliver the
impossible. And enter Cao Yin. Cao Yin. Yes.
The emperor issued an edict directly to Cao Yin
to compile and publish all these surviving lyric
poems. Now, Cao Yin was a really interesting
guy. He was a literary figure in his own right.
But crucially, he was a trusted imperial bond
servant. Okay, what exactly does that mean in
this context? An imperial bond servant? Because
that sounds intense. It is intense. Cao Yan wasn't
just like a regular government employee or a
hired contractor who could just quit. Right.
In the Qing dynasty, being an imperial bond servant
meant his family was legally bound directly to
the emperor. Oh, wow. Yeah. It is a role of absolute
inescapable loyalty. His entire existence, his
wealth, his status, everything was tied to the
throne. So the stakes were astronomically high
for him personally. Exactly. And this tells you
exactly how highly classified and culturally
sensitive the emperor considered this data project.
You don't hand it to just anyone. No, you don't
hand the preservation of the empire's cultural
legacy to some random bureaucrat. You hand it
to your absolute most trusted operative. And
Kao Yan didn't do it alone, right? He had to
build this massive production machine. A huge
machine. From what I read, he was assigned nine
scholars from the Hanlin Academy just to oversee
the collation of the texts and the Hanlin Academy.
That's essentially the absolute elite, right?
Like the Harvard, Oxford, and MIT of the Empire
all rolled into one. That is a perfect way to
describe it. These were the smartest guys in
the room. They were out there comparing texts
from various libraries, private collections,
just dealing with mountains of unorganized data.
Okay, so the intellectual firepower was immense.
Oh, unparalleled. But the physical production
is where the logistics become truly staggering.
Right, the actual printing. Yeah, they had more
than 100 craftsmen working on the printing. They
had to specially procure the paper just to handle
a job of this magnitude. Just finding enough
of the right paper in 1705 would be a nightmare.
Exactly, and remember they were carving wood
blocks for printing. Let's really talk about
the mechanics of that because it's wild. This
isn't setting movable metal type. No. Like if
you make a typo with movable type, you just pluck
out a little metal letter A and swap it for an
E. Right, it's an easy fix. But with woodblocks...
Every single page had to be meticulously carved
into a solid block of wood by hand. By hand.
And the characters are carved in relief. So if
a craftsman carves one wrong character, just
one slip of the chisel on a page containing hundreds
of words, the entire block is ruined. Oh my god.
They have to literally shave the wood down and
start the entire page over from scratch. So the
error rate had to be virtually zero. Here's where
it gets really interesting to me. Because of
those wood blocks, Cao Yan actually had to train
his calligraphers in a common style of writing
before they even began carving. Yes. Think about
the friction that solves. I mean, if you have
49 ,000 files, coming from hundreds of different
diaries, regional archives, private collections.
They all look completely different. Oh, completely.
Everyone has different handwriting, different
shorthand. Exactly. The visual chaos would have
been completely unreadable. It would have been
a mess. So it's less about picking a pretty font
and more about building, like, the first unified
operating system. Right. That's a great analogy.
If Cal Yen doesn't source a universal visual
code, a standardized calligraphy... The reader
would get syntactic whiplash trying to decipher
a new handwriting style on every single page.
Right. He literally had to invent a universal
user interface for an 18th century database just
so those 100 craftsmen could carve a visually
cohesive product. And if we connect this to the
bigger picture, it really highlights the immense
crushing pressure Kao Yen was operating under.
Because of the timeline. Because of everything.
You have the emperor's mandate, the elite Hanlin
scholars breathing down your neck, the specially
procured paper, the standardized visual UI, and
100 craftsmen carving unforgiving wood. It's
a miracle it got done at all. And this massive
production machine moved incredibly fast. The
work was finished in a remarkably short time
for the era. Yet, despite that breakneck speed,
Khao In still felt the need to apologize to the
emperor for the delay. Wait, really? He pulls
off a logistical miracle, finishes a nearly impossible
task in record time, and he's still basically
sending a sorry I'm late email to the absolute
monarch? Pretty much. That tells you everything
you need to know about the stress levels in that
operation. It speaks volumes about the absolute
authority of the Kangxi Emperor. And, you know,
you see that same authority play out in the battle
for credit over the final product. Oh, the credit
battle, yes. There is a very revealing contradiction
in how the book was officially recorded. So the
emperor allowed Cao Yan's name to be listed first
in the book itself. Which is nice. A nice gesture,
acknowledging the project manager's Herculean
effort. Nice, yes. But there's a catch. There's
always a catch. A major catch. In the annotated
catalog to the complete library of the four treasuries.
Which is what? Exactly. It's basically the massive
official bibliography of the entire empire. Ah,
right. Right? So in that official permanent record,
the complete Tang poems are officially listed
as an imperial compilation or a newting. Meaning?
I'll let you put your name on the title page,
Cao. But in the official permanent record of
the empire, this is my book. Exactly. The workers
build the monument, but the emperor's name goes
on the plaque. The ultimate credit always rolls
up to the top. The emperor ensures he gets the
ultimate glory for preserving the culture. But
this brings up a huge issue, doesn't it? The
pressure from the emperor forced Cao Yan's team
to move. with absolute breakneck speed. Very
fast. And as anyone who has ever rushed a massive
data project knows, and you listening probably
know this from your own work, when you move that
fast, you are going to get bugs. Oh, guaranteed.
You are going to get errors and you are going
to drop files, which leads to the devastating
irony of this whole project. The complete Tang
poems is neither complete, nor completely reliable.
No. The title is definitely a misnomer. Because
the work was done in such haste, the editors
took massive shortcuts. Like what? Well, when
they found different versions of a poem, what
we call variant texts, they didn't systematically
justify or even indicate why they chose one version
over another. They just picked one. Basically.
Sometimes they offered a first choice and a list
of variants, but often they just made a quick
decision and moved on. Which, according to the
sources, is categorized as being Definitely weak
by modern academic standards. Yeah. Meaning they
didn't show their work. Exactly. By modern standards,
if you choose one word over another in a historical
document, you write a footnote explaining your
methodology. Right. You justify it. But Kalyan's
team didn't have time for footnotes. They just
picked a version. And the issues go way beyond
editorial sloppiness. There were huge blind spots.
They missed stuff. A lot of stuff. The compilers
entirely ignored some poems or simply couldn't
find others. For some major poets, there were
actually better texts sitting in individually
edited volumes that never made it into this supposedly
definitive master collection. And it gets even
crazier. Because centuries later, in the early
20th century, a sealed cave library was discovered
in Dunhuang. Yes. the Dunhuang caves. And inside
this desert cave they found many additional poems
and variant texts that the 1705 team completely
missed. It was a massive discovery. Plus we know
that a lot of poems listed in older Tang dynasty
catalogs simply didn't survive to the 18th century
because the imperial libraries had been burned
and destroyed over the years. Right. They were
working from a broken data set from the absolute
start. They really were. The Dunhuang Cave discovery
is a perfect visceral illustration of how fragile
the historical record truly is. It's terrifying,
honestly. It is! You can have the full backing
of the imperial throne, unlimited resources,
the smartest Hanlin scholars of your day, and
it doesn't matter. You cannot compile what has
been lost to fire or what is hidden away in a
sealed cave in the desert. But, and I have to
ask this, this makes me seriously question the
whole endeavor. If the editors were just picking
text variants on a whim, dropping files, and
completely missing a bunch of stuff hidden in
caves, should we even trust this collection?
That's a fair question. Is it just hopelessly
flawed as a historical document? Honestly, if
a modern database was this full of holes and
arbitrary choices, we'd probably throw it out
and start over. Well, this raises an important
question about how we judge historical preservation.
You really have to weigh academic rigor against
the very real threat of total erasure. Total
erasure. Yes. By modern peer -reviewed standards,
the editorial choices are absolutely weak. But
consider the alternative. We just talked about
how older imperial libraries had been destroyed.
History is violent and literature is incredibly
fragile. So it was a race against time. Absolutely
a race against time. If Kauvian and his scholars
had waited for absolute perfection, if they had
spent decades debating every single variant text
instead of moving in haste, the project might
never have been completed. Right. The emperor
could die. Exactly. They might have lost funding.
Or a new emperor might have come along and canceled
the entire operation. And then those 49 ,000
poems might have been scattered and lost forever.
Flawed preservation is better than perfect oblivion.
Exactly. The complete Tang poems may not be a
flawless definitive reflection of the Tang dynasty,
but it is a monumental lifeboat that carried
a vast amount of cultural heritage across the
centuries. That's a beautiful way to put it.
The shock of the Dunhuang cave discovery doesn't
invalidate their work. It simply proves that
complete is always a relative term. It completely
shatters the illusion of the definitive edition.
History isn't just what happened. History is
just what survived the fire and the rush job
editors. That is precisely the right way to look
at it. So despite all the missing pieces, the
arbitrary editing, and the crushing deadlines,
Cal Yen's team still had an unfathomable amount
of material sitting in front of them. Mountains
of it. They had 49 ,000 poems that they did manage
to collect. And now they had to figure out how
to organize it all. How do you sort that much
chaotic data so that a reader can actually use
it? This is where the architecture of the collection
becomes truly revealing. The complete Tang poems
is divided into 754 distinct sections. 754, that
is so granular. It is incredibly granular. The
largest number of these sections are arranged
quite logically by author. Okay, that makes sense.
Yeah, and they even include brief biographies
of the poets, which is immensely helpful for
historical context, but they didn't stop there.
Other sections are arranged by poetic form, like
the yufu. Can you clarify what the yufu form
is for those who might not know? Certainly. Yufu
translates roughly to music bureau style. These
were originally folk song style poems collected
by the government, and they often dealt with
the hardships of common life, war, or social
injustice. OK, so a very specific grounded form
of poetry. Exactly. But beyond author and form,
the editors created sections arranged by highly
specific subjects. So what does this all mean?
How specific are we talking? Because when I was
looking through this part of the breakdown, my
jaw kind of dropped. It's quite the list. They
had sections for emperors, sections for consorts.
They had five entire sections dedicated solely
to women. Yes. And then the list just goes completely
off the rails in the best way possible. They
have sections for monks, priests, spirits, ghosts,
dreams, prophecy, proverbs, mystery, rumor, and
drinking. It is a remarkable taxonomy. I mean,
spirits, ghosts, rumor, and drinking. That sounds
like an amazing weekend playlist. It really does.
It feels exactly like scrolling through Netflix
and finding one of those hyper niche algorithm
categories like gritty sci fi thrillers featuring
strong female leads, but applied to eighth century
poetry. That's a great analogy because just like
modern algorithms, the categorization serves
a profound purpose. When you look at those categories,
dreams, prophecy, mystery, rumor. You are not
just looking at a filing system. You are looking
at a map of a civilization's consciousness. It
wasn't just about grouping words that rhymed
or finding poems with the same syllable count.
Not at all. By organizing the poems into these
specific bins, the 1705 editors were effectively
mapping out the psychological and social landscape
of the Tang dynasty. It was about documenting
the entirety of the human experience as it was
lived and imagined during that era. Think about
what a category like rumor implies. It's fascinating.
It means they recognize poetry not just as high
art for the elite, but as a vehicle for social
commentary. It was the ancient equivalent of
political subreddits whispers in the imperial
court, the anxieties of the common people. Exactly.
And a section dedicated to drinking captures
the social rituals, the camaraderie, and perhaps
the escapism of the time. They needed a blow
off scheme. We all do. They were using these
754 sections to build a comprehensive taxonomy
of Tang life. They captured everything from the
divine and the spiritual down to the absolute
bottom of a wine glass. It really humanizes these
ancient scholars. You realize they were dealing
with the exact same messy, chaotic, beautiful
human emotions that we deal with today. They
absolutely were. They just needed a way to organize
all those feelings into wood blocks. And it clearly
worked because this massive collection had lasting
impact. The complete Tang poems actually served
as the major reservoir, the parent database essentially,
for a much more famous highly curated spin -off
anthology called The 300 Tang Poems. Yes, and
that perfectly illustrates the natural life cycle
of information. First, you have the monumental,
almost desperate effort to gather and preserve
absolutely everything, the complete Tang poems.
The huge data dump. Right. It is bulky, it is
flawed, and it is overwhelming. Then comes the
subsequent effort to distill that massive archive
into something accessible, digestible, and easily
transmittable, the 300 Tang poems. So they built
the massive 49 ,000 poem unmanageable archive,
and then later someone came along and curated
the best -of playlist that everyone actually
ended up reading and memorizing. Exactly. The
larger work ensured the survival of the material,
while the shorter anthology ensured its popularity.
Without the massive flawed database, The curated
masterpiece couldn't exist. It's all about curation.
And honestly, looking back at all of this, I
want to speak directly to you listening for a
moment. Think about how you operate every single
day. We are constantly trying to curate our own
knowledge, aren't we? We're bookmarking articles
we find interesting. We are saving deep dives
to listen to later. We are meticulously organizing
our photo albums and tagging our files. We're
all little archivists. We really are. We're all
trying to build our own little complete libraries
to make sense of the world around us. The tools
evolve, but the human imperative to remember
and organize remains completely constant. Khao
Yin did it with 100 craftsmen, specially procured
paper, and thousands of carved wood blocks. We
do it with a tap on a glass screen. But the underlying
human desire, the absolute need to capture, organize,
and hold onto brilliance before it fades away,
is exactly the same today as it was in 1705.
Then we are still fighting the same battles against
lost data and the relentless forward march of
time. Which brings me to a final thought I want
to leave you with, a little thought experiment
to mull over long after this deep dive is done.
Okay, let's hear it. Think about that overwhelming
mountain of digital data we generate every single
day. The open tabs, the endless feeds, the entire
chaotic output of the modern internet. It's terrifying
to think about. Imagine if, 300 years from now,
a future ruler decided to compile the complete
thoughts of our current era. If they tried to
sort our entire digital lives into 754 specific
categories. What would those categories even
be? Oh, wow! Would they have sections for memes,
outrage, unread newsletters, or late night online
shopping? It makes you wonder how much of what
we consider essential today will be preserved
and how much will just vanish into the margins
of history. And more importantly, centuries from
now, when the dust has settled on our civilization,
what hidden cave library of our lost data will
future archaeologists discover? A digital Dunhuang.
Exactly. What forgotten server farm will they
unearth out in the desert that proves our supposedly
complete digital record was actually missing
the most important voices of all? We're all just
compiling our own flawed histories, hoping they
survive the fire. We really are. So next time
you feel overwhelmed by your open tabs, just
remember Kao Yen and his 49 ,000 poems. You're
not disorganized. You're just compiling your
own historical archive. Thanks for joining us
on this deep dive.