Taiping Yulan

Imperial readings of the Taiping era The Imperial Readings of the Taiping era (traditional Chinese: 太平 御 覽, pinyin: Taiping Yùlǎn) is a huge leishu (encyclopedia) made by a group of officers commissioned by the imperial court of the Song Dynasty being its main editor Li Fang 977-983 during the Taiping Xingguo era. It is divided into 1,000 volumes and 55 sections, which consisted of about 4.7 million Chinese characters. It included citations of about 2,579 different types of documents ranging from books, poetry, singing, proverbs, stelae to various works. After the compilation, the emperor Song Taizong is said to have finished reading the book in a year with 3 volumes per day.

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