The question of rhyme in Chinese is a curious one, and before going any farther it may be as well to try to clear it up a little.  All Chinese poetry is in rhyme; there is no such thing as blank verse.  The Odes, collected and edited by Confucius, provide the standard of rhyme.  Any words which are found to rhyme there may be used as rhymes anywhere else, and no others.  The result is, that the number of rhyme-groups is restricted to 106; and not only that, but of course words which rhymed to the ear five hundred years B.C. do so no longer in 1902.  Yet such are the only authorised rhymes to be used in poetry, and any attempt to ignore the rule would insure disastrous failure at the public examinations.

This point may to some extent be illustrated in English.  The first two lines of the Canterbury Tales, which I will take to represent the Odes, run thus in modern speech:—­

  “When that Aprilis with his showers sweet,
   The drought of March hath pierced to the root.”

No one nowadays rhymes sweet with root.  Neither did Chaucer; the two words, sote and rote, were in his days perfect rhymes.  But if we were Chinese, we should now rhyme sweet with root, because, so to speak, Chaucer did so.

When the Tone of a word is known, it is also known in which quarter of the whole work to look; and when the Rhyme is known, it is also known in which part of that quarter the key-word, or rhyme, will be found.  Suppose the key-word to be gale, it might be necessary to turn over a good many pages before finding, neatly printed in the margin, the required word, tale.  Under tale I should first of all find phrases of two words, e.g. “traveller’s tale,” “fairy-tale”; and I should have to look on until I came to groups of three characters, e.g. “old wife’s tale,” “tells his tale,” and so forth.  Finally, under “tells his tale” I should still not find, what all students would like so much, a plain explanation of what the phrase means, but only a collection of the chief passages in literature in which “tells his tale” occurs.  In one of these there would probably be some allusion to sheep, and in another to counting, and so it would become pretty plain that when a shepherd “tells his tale,” he does not whisper soft nothings into the ear of a shepherdess, but is much more prosaically engaged in counting the number of his sheep.

Our Cambridge copy of the Concordance is bound up in 44 thick volumes.  Each volume contains on an average 840 pages, and each page about 400 characters.  This gives a sum total of about 37,000 pages, and about 15,000,000 characters.  Translated into English, this work would be one-third as large again, 100 pages of Chinese text being equal to about 130 of English.

In the year 1772 the enlightened Emperor Ch’ien Lung, who then sat upon the throne, gave orders that a descriptive Catalogue should be prepared of the books in the Imperial Library.  And in order to enhance its literary value, his Majesty issued invitations to the leading provincial officials to take part in the enterprise by securing and forwarding to Peking any rare books they might be able to come across.