Genre

The leishu (traditional Chinese: 類書; simplified Chinese: 类书; lit. 'category books') is a genre of reference books historically compiled in China and other East Asian countries. The term is generally translated as "encyclopedia", although the leishu are quite different from the modern notion of encyclopedia.The leishu are composed of sometimes lengthy citations from other works, and often contain copies of entire works, not just excerpts. The works are classified by a systematic set of categories, which are further divided into subcategories. Leishu may be considered anthologies, but are encyclopedic in the sense that they may comprise the entire realm of knowledge at the time of compilation.Approximately 600 leishu were compiled from the early third century until the eighteenth century, of which 200 have survived. The largest leishu ever compiled was the 1408 Yongle Encyclopedia, containing 370 million Chinese characters, and the largest ever printed was the Complete Classics Collection of Ancient China, containing 100 million characters and 852,408 pages. Source: Wikipedia (en)

Genre - wd:Q4942969

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