Yongle Encyclopedia
The Yongle Emperor of the Ming dynasty oversaw the compilation of the "Yongle Encyclopedia", one of the largest encyclopedias in history, which was completed in 1408 and comprised over 370 million Chinese characters in 11,000 handwritten volumes, of which only about 400 remain today. In the succeeding Qing dynasty, the Qianlong Emperor personally composed 40,000 poems as part of a 4.7 million page library in 4 divisions, including thousands of essays, called the "Siku Quanshu" which is probably the largest collection of books in the world. It is instructive to compare his title for this knowledge, "Watching the waves in a Sacred Sea" to a Western-style title for all knowledge. Encyclopedic works, both in imitation of Chinese encyclopedias and as independent works of their own origin, have been known to exist in Japan since the 9th century.