Eastern Culture Nucleus: Chinese Rare Books in the USC Libraries

Introduction

USC’s Library did not make the building of a Chinese language research collection a priority until the latter part of the 20th century. Despite its late start, the East Asian Library benefitted from the donation of several private collections that have allowed it to be able to claim some surprising strengths.  For example, what had been heralded, at the time of its formation by the Chinese Congregational Church in 1931, as Los Angeles’ first Chinese-language library was given over to the East Asian Library in 1987. Also, a “general” of the Republic of China, who came to Los Angeles in the 1930s to serve as an advisor in the filming of the film version of Pearl Buck’s The Good Earth, gave the library a set of government documents that are now otherwise scarcely held elsewhere. In such an unplanned and fortuitous manner, books and materials that much later helped to form the Libraries’ Chinese Collection were brought together by various people who had a connection of some sort with USC.

Regarding the Library’s collection of Chinese rare books—defined as any and all books published in the Chinese language prior to the founding of the Republic of China in 1911—the great majority came from two particular donations: those of Dr. Peter Marie Suski and Professor Chow Tse-tsung 周策縱.

Dr. Suski, for whom a brief biographical sketch may be found on the East Asian Library website, built the collection that he later called the “Oriental Culture Nucleus” around his own interests. These included, most prominently, classical studies of the origins and development of the East Asian written language. Great attention was paid in the Qing period to such works as Explaining Single-Component Graphs and Analyzing Compound Characters (Shuowen jiezi 說文解字) and Examples of Refined Usage (Erya 爾雅), and as a result, the Library had a good representative collection on Chinese and Japanese etymology by the early 1960s, when the Suski Collection was donated.

Chow Tse-tsung was born in Qiyang county, Hunan in 1916. With an interest in literature, he joined the Nationalist Party (Kuomintang 國民黨) in the 1930s and served as an editor for the Chongqing government, including drafting documents for President Chiang Kai-shek. In 1948, he emigrated to the United States to pick up his educational career, receiving his Ph.D. in History from the University of Michigan in 1955. He is renowned for his landmark history The May Fourth Movement: Intellectual Revolution in Modern China, as well as his life-long interest in The Dream of the Red Chamber (Hong lou meng 紅樓夢) and for his poetry.

USC had well-established connections with Professor Chow through Dr. Dominic Cheung 張錯, now Professor Emeritus of Chinese and Comparative Literature who shared a lengthy friendship with him in the U.S. academe, and Lillian Yang 浦麗琳, the East Asian Library’s former Chinese Studies Librarian who shared membership in the White Horse Society (Bai ma she 白馬社) with Prof. Chow in the early 1950s and later collaborated with him on several publications. When Prof. Chow was nearing retirement, both Prof. Cheung and Lillian Yang made substantial contributions to bring his extensive book collection to the East Asian Library at USC. Aside from the subject areas noted above, Professor Chow’s research interests were wide and varied, including additional works on etymology, to supplement those the Library had received from Dr. Suski.

There have been a number of other rare Chinese titles donated to the East Asian Library, or to the University President, who then passed them along to the Library, but the Peter Suski and Chow Tse-tsung collections most define its strengths and character. As a component of research assets at the University, the Chinese rare book collection has remained largely unknown.

In 2019, with support from the Dean of USC Libraries, Dr. Soren Edgren, the renowned Chinese Rare Book Specialist from Princeton University was invited to campus to critically evaluate the collection, title-by-title. As a result, there is a much more accurate sense of its contents and search value. The new additional attention this catalog will give to USC’s rare Chinese collection is long overdue and certainly welcome.

Further Reading: 

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