Zhang Huang, a Neo-Confucian scholar of the Ming dynasty, spent several decades compiling the Tushu Bian — a 127-volume encyclopaedia published in 1613 that documented the concepts of heaven, Earth and humanity from a distinctly Chinese perspective, drawing on more than 200 printed sources.

What the Tushu Bian set out to do

The work, whose full title translates as Compendium of Illustrations and Texts, was conceived as a comprehensive repository of knowledge for educated readers of the era. Information designer Paul Kahn, who analysed the encyclopaedia extensively, described its ambition plainly: Zhang Huang's 'goal was to gather all the illustrations and texts an educated person needed to understand the world.'

The scope was vast — spanning cosmology, geography, and the full range of human affairs as understood through a Chinese intellectual lens. It stands as one of the most systematic attempts to organise knowledge in pre-modern Asia.

Why it matters: a non-Western knowledge tradition

The Tushu Bian offers a counterpoint to the dominant Euro-Mediterranean tradition of encyclopaedic knowledge, which has long shaped how the world understands its own intellectual history. Kahn placed the work alongside six other landmark books — including the Catalan Atlas and the Atlas Historique, produced in Amsterdam — that described the world from Western perspectives, foregrounding the contrast.

His comparative study, published in the book Mapping Knowledge Across Time: Seven Books That Visualised the World, argues that the Tushu Bian deserves recognition alongside those canonical Western texts as a foundational act of knowledge visualisation.

The cost that nearly silenced it

Despite its ambition, the encyclopaedia was too expensive to print during Zhang Huang's own lifetime. According to Kahn, 'it was eventually carved on woodblocks and printed after his death' — a fate that delayed but did not erase its influence on Chinese scholarly culture.

The woodblock printing process, laborious and costly, was nonetheless the technology that ultimately preserved the work for posterity, connecting it to a broader tradition of knowledge dissemination that predated the printing press in Europe.

The competitive backdrop: East versus West in knowledge mapping

The Ming dynasty period that produced the Tushu Bian was also the era of Admiral Zheng He's maritime expeditions and the flourishing of the Grand Canal as a commercial artery — a time when China was a centre of global civilisation. The encyclopaedia's existence challenges the assumption that systematic, illustrated knowledge organisation was a uniquely Western achievement.

Comparable intellectual projects were underway across the world in the same centuries, from the Mughal Empire to Japan, suggesting a global impulse toward documentation that mainstream Western historiography has often underweighted.

What's next

As digital humanities projects increasingly digitise and cross-reference pre-modern texts, works like the Tushu Bian are poised for renewed scholarly and public attention — raising the question of how platforms and archives will make non-Western knowledge traditions accessible to a global audience.