TITLE:
Five Places to a Fascicle: The Waterborne Assembly of the Jiaxing Canon and the Fate of Its Texts
AUTHORS:
Yulin Yao
KEYWORDS:
Jiaxing Canon, Colophons, Jiangnan Water Network, Network Morphology, State Legibility
JOURNAL NAME:
Open Access Library Journal,
Vol.13 No.10,
October
30,
2026
ABSTRACT: Cutting of the Jiaxing Canon (Jiaxing zang) began in the seventeenth year of the Wanli reign (1589) and continued for more than two centuries. Fascicles circulated as they were carved, and neither a fixed recension nor a unified catalogue was ever produced. Drawing on eleven terminal colophons in which all five native-place elements are recorded, this article examines the canon’s productive organization through the drainage-network morphology of Horton, Strahler, and Shreve and the graph-theoretic network analysis of Haggett and Chorley, with reference to Skinner’s macroregional model and Scott’s concept of state legibility. The hill country west of Lake Tai is a tree. Every channel segment holds an order fixed once and for all at the point where it joins a larger stream; the graph contains no circuits, every edge is a bridge, and every interior vertex is a cut vertex. The low plain east of the lake is a net. Channels are dense, gradients are slight, tidal backwater produces reciprocating flow so that “upstream” and “downstream” cease to name anything stable, and the tangpu polder system of Wu-Yue date has laid cross-cutting canals into a grid. Circuits abound, and there is no single outlet. Ordering presupposes knowledge of the whole; addition does not, and this is precisely where Strahler’s order parts from Shreve’s magnitude. The shelving plans of the Siku quanshu, like the Thousand Character Classic sequence used by earlier printed canons, are systems of order. The colophons of the Jiaxing Canon record only character counts, silver paid for transcription and cutting, and numbers of blocks, quantities that add but cannot rank. The Thousand Character Classic numbering in the supplementary canon breaks off after a handful of characters, and surviving catalogues differ by more than four thousand fascicles. The Siku procurement chain, running from county to prefecture to province to the editorial bureau and finally to the Grand Council and imperial review, is a textbook tree, and a sluice can be set at any node: cut one branch and everything above it is severed from the outlet. Within a single colophon of the Jiaxing Canon, the five places stand in no hierarchy at all. Danyang silver passes directly into the hands of a Shangyuan block-cutter without traversing either Zhenjiang or Yingtian prefecture, and the only barrier the state maintained along this waterway was a customs station taxing goods in transit. Expurgation could therefore proceed only point by point, its labour scaling with the number of nodes rather than diminishing with the depth of the hierarchy, and the criterion shifted accordingly to one that requires no opening of the book: “nothing perverse in the language” gave way to “their inclusion in the supplementary canon was already excessive”. On a tree, water reaches the outlet only by passing every confluence, and contemporary and local writing is stopped at the first of them. A net has no confluences. The recorded sayings and stupa inscriptions of Ming and Qing Chan masters entered the canon with the money that paid for them and were never examined. Two hundred and eighty-eight titles that no modern canon has since taken up, together with several unique copies surviving in a single incomplete set at Zhejiang University Library, owe their survival to this.