Asia Literature

he library's very rich stocks of books, periodicals and newspapers in Oriental languages are concentrated in the Department of the Literature of Asian and African Countries, totalling more than two million items. The best represented language is Chinese with almost 50,000 publications. These embrace the complete corpus of Chinese classical literature, a very broad range of works by modern writers, as well as books on history, art, linguistics and medicine. There are quite a number of rare, unique publications: a complete encyclopaedia of Chinese culture — the 1,360-volume Tu shu chi ch'eng (18th century), two large "universal library" series known as Ssu pu ts'ung k'an and Ssu pu pei yao, a celebrated history of the Ch'ing dynasty in some 900 volumes, and more.

The Arabic stocks contain printed material from the Arabic-speaking world. Mainly they are books on philosophy, history and art, works of mediaeval Arabic literature, and also publications by modern and contemporary authors. There are some unique sixteenth- and seventeenth-century editions here, including the Vita Timuri (1636) by Ahmad ibn Muhammad ibn Arabshah. Notable too is The Book of Songs (1868) a 20-volume collection of verse by Abu'l-Faradj al-Isfahani.

The National Library's Jewish stocks are some of the largest in the world: 45,000 books, more than 900 different periodicals and a large quantity of newspapers. The main sections — Hebrew and Yiddish — contain literature published in this country and abroad from the fifteenth century to the present day. The most complete category of works are Hebrew books produced in Russia, from the first early-nineteenth-century examples onwards. Especially precious are the early printed works, which include incunabula and palaeotypes. The Yiddish section also consists chiefly of Russian publications. It includes, apart from books, the first Russian "jargon" magazines and newspapers, and also early Soviet periodicals. In the Jewish stocks too one can find...