Three volumes, 8vo (28.1 x 18.3 cm). Printed in metal movable type. Collation: 43, 34 ff.; 38, 41 ff.; 42, 42 ff. Rebound in later plain wrappers. Stored in two later black cloth chitsus. Perfectly preserved in later wrappers.

Typeset with Juzhen copper movable-type characters, the entire work comprised more than 852,000 pages in 10,000 volumes, and only 64 complete sets of the first edition were produced between 1726 and 1728, a printing venture of almost unprecedented scale and technical ambition. While a very small number of first-edition sets were printed on white paper for members of the Imperial family and the Imperial libraries, most sets, as the present volumes, were printed on slightly brownish bamboo paper (zhuzhi). The present three non-consecutive volumes belong to the "Jingji huibian" (Political Economy) section: volumes 73-74 and 85-86 treat the distribution of food and goods, specifically in times of flooding, while volumes 191-192 address tribute payments and gifts, themes central to Qing statecraft and the performance of imperial responsibility.

In this copy there are a number of instances where single characters have been cut out and replaced with a corrected character which is carefully pasted in. The inserted characters are printed on the same paper as the original, and the character type is identical to that of the rest of the volume. This post-printing "patching" of replacement characters is a hallmark of the Wuying dian edition (cf. Edgren, p. 123) and a telling witness to the imperial proofreading regime.

Provenance: French private collection.

S. Edgren (ed.), Chinese Rare Books in American Collections (China House Gallery, 1984), pp. 122f., no. 39. C. Moll-Murata, State and Crafts in the Qing Dynasty (Amsterdam UP, 2018), p. 219ff. M. Loewe, "The Origins and Development of Chinese Encyclopaedias", China Society Occasional Paper 25 (London 1987). E. Wilkinson, Chinese History: A Manual, (Cambridge, MA, 2000), p. 601-609. Guo Songyi, "Gujin tushu jicheng", in: Zhongguo da baike quanshu, Zhongguo lishi (Beijing/Shanghai, 1992), vol. 1, pp. 257f. Ji Shuying, Lin Xiao'an, "Qing Yongzheng si nian neifu tong huozi yinben Gujin tushu jicheng", in: Zhongguo da baike quanshu, Wenwu bowuguan (Beijing/Shanghai, 1993), p. 436. Yuan Yi, "Gujin tushu jicheng", in: Zhongguo da baike quanshu, Xinwen chuban (Beijing/Shanghai, 1990), p. 117.