Рукописи и ксилографы на восточных языках в научной библиотеке им. М. Горького СПбГУ

Ŷ РУКОПИСИ И КСИЛОГРАФЫ НА ВОСТОЧНЫХ ЯЗЫКАХ Ŷ 170 Ŷ In 1689 the first Russo-Chinese treaty demarcating the border between the two states was signed. However, the Russian prisoners of war captured during the military conflict prior to the agreement were settled in Beijing. Since there were no Russian Orthodox Christian priests in China, the Chinese government allowed the establish- ment of a Russian Christian mission in the capital. This Russian Ecclesiastical Mis- sion —which existed for more than two centuries — became a cradle of Russian Far Eastern studies, especially of Sinology and Buddhist studies. Needless to say that the Ecclesiastical Mission served as a channel through which books in various languag- es were acquired in China and brought to Russia. A major part of the book collections kept at present in St. Petersburg University Library in Chinese and Manchu arrived through this mission. The major part of the Chinese book collection was assembled in the mid-nineteenth century through the efforts of a famous Russian scholar V. Vassiliev who stayed in Beijing from 1841 to 1850. Originally they were brought to the Kazan University. When in 1855 the Oriental Department was moved from Kazan to St. Petersburg, these books also moved to the capital of the Russian Empire. This is how Vassiliev himself described purchasing of the Chinese books in Bei- jing: “Our predecessors [missionaries] liked to demonstrate Russian generosity and were ashamed to bargain; … they purchased books in one shop, while we knew all of them. Of course, we could not attain good results from the very beginning, and at first we often made fools of ourselves; sometimes we could not avoid the deceit even though we saw it clearly. […] The book-seller who was the permanent supplier of books for the missionaries, deceived me the very first time we met by selling me an incomplete set of books. Luckily, I managed to be through with him having detained his other books. Later, when we knew all book-shops, and book-sellers became cer- tain of the accuracy of our payment and high quality of our silver, then vying with one another they tried to get our confidence — we paid them the same price as the Chinese did. However, one should not think that it was easy to buy books in Beijing, and that the books were ready for us as soon as we just made a list of the books which we wanted to have. On the contrary, only the books “for the everyday use” by a Chi- nese scholar are exclusively on sale in the book-shops: classical books, dictionaries, etc. These books are brought from the South in enormous quantities; they are the cheapest since their price depends on the number of pages. In order to buy the most valuable works one should wait for them to appear on sale; some of them were printed 200 years ago. For the most part, they were printed in the last [eighteenth] century, so the woodblocks are either destroyed or became so worn-out that there is no possibility to make prints from them. Therefore one should seize the opportunity when some impoverished scholar sells these books to book-shops where they are usually immediately intercepted by other customers. Some books have never appeared on sale for a decade. That is why strolling over Liulichang where book-shops are mostly located, was our habitual and most favourite occupation.” Vassiliev wrote two review articles about this collection. Also his course on the history of Chinese literature which he taught to students of the St. Petersburg Uni-