Yang Shoujing

Yang Shoujing (1839–1915), courtesy name Xingwu and style name Linsu, was a native of Yidu, Hubei. He was a late Qing and early Republican scholar of historical geography, epigraphy, bibliography and textual criticism, as well as a calligrapher and book collector. While serving as an attaché at the Chinese embassy in Japan, he searched extensively for rare Chinese books that had been scattered and lost, and supervised the printing of the Guyi Congshu, leaving an important record of modern Sino-Japanese book exchanges. His scholarship spanned geography, epigraphy, bibliography and calligraphy, with emphasis on empirical research and textual verification. His representative works include Shuijing Zhu Shuyi, a comprehensive synthesis of earlier studies of the classical waterway text, and Riben Fangshu Zhi, which documents the editions and textual histories of the books he examined in Japan. This library holds three of his works, commonly classified under Eastern philosophy, historical reading and literary appreciation.