Cataloguing the 'Mustard Seed Garden Painting Manual': a case study

Blog series Asian and African

Author Alexavier Iu, Chinese Retro-conversion Projects

Chinese books in a Western skin

One of the interesting aspects of the project I am currently working on is how the material from the Chinese collection differs from its Western counterpart. When books were deposited into this institution, many Chinese items were rebound into Western-style bindings and, in many cases, even bound as combined volumes.

Insofar as the condition of the items is stable from a conservation point of view and it is not practical to return the whole collection to its original bindings, this is likely to remain the case for the foreseeable future. It is therefore important to note the ways in which Chinese material is described in a primarily English cataloguing framework.

How Chinese books are bound differently from Western books

In a traditional Western book, text appears on both sides of a leaf — the front face, called the 'recto', and the back, called the 'verso'. In a Chinese book, however, text is printed on one side only. When the sheet is folded in half, the printed faces facing outward, creating the leaves of the book.

Imagine a paperback from your local bookstore: when you flip through it, you are thumbing through the cut edges of the pages, because the binding — whether thread or staples — runs along the folded inner edge. In a traditionally bound Chinese book, by contrast you find yourself thumbing through the folded edges instead, because the pages fold outward toward you rather than inward toward the binding. A folded sheet of this kind, presenting two printed faces from a single piece of paper, is therefore also known as a 'double leaf'.

Due to this difference, Chinese books often print the page numbers in the ‘middle’ of a sheet of paper. When the sheet is folded, the page number in Chinese character will fold in half along the fold. In other words, a 'page' in this context is the equivalent of a ‘folio’ in the Western binding tradition. It is also customary for every preface, foreword, table of contents, sections, and chapters to have their own pagination sequence.

Throughout its publication history, a work may appear in many forms – distinct editions, reprints from the same block, versions with sections added or removed, or content revised or even censored. Whether the agent is the author, editor or any third party, when researching the history of a work, one may want to distinguish the nuanced differences between editions.

To do so, it would be informative to know about the physical format of the item as well as the pagination sequences within it. In the British Library, due to its institutional history, it is not unusual to find East Asian-style volumes bound into a single Western-style volume – whether incorrectly or for practical reasons – making the resulting makeup quite perplexing to readers.

The Mustard Seed Garden Painting Manual

‘The Mustard Seed Garden Painting Manual’ (Jie zi yuan hua zhuan, 芥子園畫傳) at shelfmark Chin.F.506-8 exemplifies brilliantly these complexities. Originally compiled in 1679, this work is celebrated as one of the most famous Chinese painting manuals. Painting had always been a highly specialised craft primarily learned within master-apprentice relationships and facilitated by rote copying. In the seventeenth century, the adoption of cutting-edge woodblock-printing techniques such as multi-block printing, enabled the mass production of imagery that mimicked the quality of traditional brush painting.

This immediately gained traction among the public - not only opening up the relatively closed circle of elites, making the craft more accessible and mentoring many famous painters thereafter, but also democratising the appreciation and collecting of Chinese painting, a pursuit once confined to the upper echelons of society.

Popularity did not only come from the craft being more approachable. It is also worth noting that Li Yu (李漁, 1611-1680), who funded the production and publication of this work, was also something of a celebrity literatus. Juggling different roles, as a novelist, editor, playwright, actor, producer, publisher, business entrepreneur, and even landscape designer, he enjoyed financial success and fame, particularly from his plays, during his forties. Li Yu’s publishing house took its name from his own garden mansion, which he called ‘Mustard seed garden’ on account of its small size. It is from this that the painting manual derives its title: 'The Mustard Seed Garden Painting Manual’ (also: ‘The Manual of the Mustard Seed Garden’).

After more than three years of compiling and editing, Li Yu’s son-in-law Shen Xinyou (沈心友) instructed painter Wang Gai (王概, active 1662-1722) and his two brothers Wang Shi (王蓍) and Wang Nie (王臬) to compile the late-Ming painter Li Liufang (李流芳, 1575-1629)’s forty-three landscape sketches, then supplement them with texts, models, and painting instructions. Through these, painters can consult and practice by copying different motifs and traditional elements from the manual and eventually employ them in their own compositions.

The original publication consisted of five volumes, containing both written theory and illustrated templates, covering topics from landscapes, trees, hills, stones, people, and houses. In 1701, twenty-two years after the first publication, two additional parts were appended to expand on the painting of flora and fauna.

Given its popularity and high demand, there were many reprints throughout history, as well as several attempts to imitate or pirate the work in order to capitalise on the success of the original. Because of its many reprints and editions, the manual’s publication history is often dubbed as one of the most complex and convoluted of its time.

In the British Library, there are several different editions of this work, including some from Japan, where the work also proved to be immensely successful. One of the most challenging yet interesting aspects of cataloguing this was certainly describing the state of an item originally bound in Chinese style but encapsulated in a Western-style volume.

This copy (Chin.F.506-8) is possibly a second edition from the 18th century currently re-bound into four Western-style volumes, whereby the first volume consists of five original books (‘juan’ 卷 in Chinese), and the second and third volumes have four books each. The third volume has been arranged in reverse order from left-to-right, with the double leaves only attached to the gutter at one edge as if it were a fold-out page. Finally, the fourth volume consists of possibly seven books which are unable to be clearly determined due to the lack of cover pages.

Because of these complexities, a certain level of detailed description is needed to faithfully represent the current physical status of these items. Simply describing them as four volumes would not be adequate to acknowledge their original form. Similarly, the lack of detailed information on the catalogue card means that it does not sufficiently represent this specific edition or its current physical condition. On the other hand, simply following the cataloguing rules and providing a list of paginations would just make the catalogue record look like a cryptic number matrix. In my cataloguing attempt, I therefore constructed a formulaic, hierarchical descriptive note to help illustrate the physical makeup of these rebound volumes.

A catalogue is the primary gateway through which readers engage with the collections of a national library such as the British Library. Readers are often restricted by time constraints; to avoid disappointment, they need to know, with a high level of confidence, what they are getting from the proxy of a catalogue record.

This Mustard Seed Garden Painting Manual is merely one of the examples that illustrate the complexity and uniqueness of this collection. With regard to the cataloguing of East-Asian-style material within a Western cataloguing framework, having this level of detail reflects the physicality of the item and can aid researchers in discoverability and accessibility but also faithfully sheds light on what we have in the collection as a whole.

About this blog post

This blog post is part of the ‘Chinese Legacy Catalogues’ project funded by the British Library’s ‘Unlocking Hidden Collections’ initiative since April 2024. The project aims to improve access to significant parts of the Chinese collection through converting and enhancing records from various legacy formats such as catalogue cards, microfiches, or superseded digital databases, and incorporating the data into the Library’s main online catalogue.