He also set up the East Library and the Hanfenlou Library and made use of the resources in more than 50 official or private libraries to print 610 books and 20,000 volumes by photo-offset, including Sibucongkan, The Histories of Twenty-four Dynasties and Xuguyi Series. Beautifully printed, these unprecedented versions were complete and became examples for later generations. The Commercial Press also edited and published lots of reference books. In 1915, the first new dictionary Ci Yuan or Chinese Etymological Dictionary was published. The press also published many well-known periodicals such as The Magazine of the East, Novel Monthly, Education, Women, Students and others.
During the Second World War, Commercial Press was destroyed. Zhang Yuanji formed a committee to revive the press and wrote a slogan that underlined his enthusiasm, and that of the country’s, for new publishing ventures: “Sacrificing for the country and striving for culture.” He continued printing in Chongqing and other places.
Zhonghua Book House and Lu Feikui
In the history of modern Chinese publishing, the Zhonghua Book House, established in 1912, enjoys equal fame to the Commercial Press. Its founder was Lu Feikui, who was from Zhejiang Province. He was well educated and had plenty of publishing experience. He led the Zhonghua Book House for almost 30 years, during which time the book house published more than 4,000 different books.
In its first year of operation in 1912, fixed capital was only 25,000 RMB. By 1916, the printing house’s capital had reached 1,600,000 RMB and the book house became the second largest private press in the country, behind Commercial Press.
The house had a number of significant types of publications. Te x t b o o k s w e r e t h e m o s t important. The publishing house put out more than 400 different textbooks, which were the best in the industry in the years of the Republic of China. The second most important type was social science books. There were more than one thousand different social science books edited and published by the book house. Among them, Culture Series, Social Science Series and so on were most popular. The third type was magazines. The book house published more than 20 magazines, among which The Great Zhonghua, Education in Zhonghua, Novels in Zhonghua, Students in Zhonghua, Children in Zhonghua, Women in Zhonghua, Zhonghua English Weekly and Zhonghua Children Pictorial were most famous. The fourth type was reference books. The Zhonghua Great Dictionary was published in 1915, The Compendium of Works of Past and Present printed by photo-offset and Words Encyclopedia published in 1936 were the most famous. The fifth type was ancient books, which were rearranged and reprinted. The Ju Zhen Fang Song Version of the Histories of Twenty-four Dynasties published in 1930 and the Ju Zhen Fang Song version of Si Bu Bei Yao printed in 1930 were best known.
The Emergence of New Publications
After the 19th century, with the rise of modern publishing, the content and type of publications in China changed greatly.
Books focused on modern disciplines
Confucian classics, history, philosophy, literature are the main categories of Chinese traditional books. After the 1840s, China opened up to the outside world gradually with increasing contacts with the west. As a result, intellectuals broadened their horizons and began to learn about and introduce western culture and thoughts. At the same time, many translated books were published to spread the new knowledge, which led to fundamental changes in the content and structure of publications. Besides Confucian classics, many books on history, philosophy, literature, many natural sciences, applied science, philosophy and social science were published and many new disciplines established. More than 120,000 different books in 18 categories published from 1912 to 1949 were collected in The Title Catalogue in the Years of the Republic of China, comprising philosophy, psychology, religion, politics, law, military, economy, culture, science, education, sports, literature, arts, medicine and health, agricultural science, communication, transportation and others. Based on these classifications, by 1949, the system of modern disciplines had become almost mature.
Newspapers and magazines published in massive scale
With the great expansion of content for publication, the types of Chinese publications were enriched increasingly and various new publications came into existence. Newspapers and magazines are published in a large scale. The Join Title Catalogue of Chinese periodicals of China shows almost 20,000 Chinese periodicals in 50 libraries across China, which were published at home and abroad from 1833 to 1949. The catalogue of Collected Chinese newspapers published before the founding of PRC in Shanghai Library records more than 3,500 different Chinese newspapers, published at home and abroad from 1862 to 1949. According to these two figures, the state of the newspapers and magazines publishing industry can be ascertained. In addition to reporting the news, those modern newspapers and magazines promoted the development of modern publishing and mass media and exerted great influence on society.
Textbooks, new references and pictorial books