Chaling Dongshan Academy

Chaling Dongshan Academy

Chaling Dongshan Academy is located in Zhuzhou. Established during the Yuan Dynasty, it was one of the three most influential academies in Huguang during the transition from the Song to the Yuan Dynasty, and also the largest private academy in Hunan during the Yuan Dynasty. Its founder, Chen Renzi, styled Tongfu and also known as Guyu, was a native of Chaling Dongshan (present-day Dongshan Village, Yaopi Town). In the tenth year of the Xianchun era (1274) of the Southern Song Dynasty, he ranked first in the Caoju examination and was appointed as a Dengshi Lang (a junior official rank). Five years later, after the fall of the Southern Song and the establishment of the Yuan Dynasty, he repeatedly declined imperial summons, chose to live in seclusion on Dongshan Mountain, exhausted his family fortune to build the Dongshan Academy, and thereafter gathered students to teach, wrote books, and printed publications. He became one of the most renowned private publishers of the Yuan Dynasty, and the printing house at Dongshan Academy was the first of its kind in Hunan at that time.

Chaling Dongshan Academy was primarily an academy dedicated to printing books. The famous bibliophile and scholar Ye Dehui noted in his work Shulin Qinghua: “(Dongshan Academy) is called an academy, but is in fact a private publishing house.” The academy is also known as Chen Family Guyuan Academy or Chen Family Private School, under which names it published a large number of books. The books printed by Dongshan Academy were exquisitely produced and quite distinctive, featuring white, durable paper suitable for long-term preservation, and were regarded as treasures by bibliophiles throughout the ages. Many of them were housed in the imperial cabinets of successive dynasties and referred to as the “Chaling editions.” For instance, the Dongshan Academy-printed edition of Mengxi Bitan (Dream Pool Essays), after flowing out of the imperial palace and into the hands of the public, was treasured as a rare manuscript in the “Yiyun Jingshe” (Art Cloud Studio) of the prominent Qing Dynasty bibliophile Wang Shizhong. It later circulated and ended up in Hong Kong, where it was acquired by a local collector. In 1965, when this collector fell on hard times and planned to auction the book along with other rare ancient texts, it attracted academic attention. In November of that year, with the approval of Premier Zhou Enlai, the book was purchased at a high price and housed in the Beijing Library (now the National Library of China). In December 1975, the Cultural Relics Publishing House of China published a facsimile edition of this ancient text under the title Yuan Kan Mengxi Bitan (Yuan Dynasty Printed Dream Pool Essays). The book printing efforts of Dongshan Academy had a profound influence on later generations. During the Ming and Qing Dynasties, private book printing flourished in Chaling, making it one of the three major book printing centers in Hunan at the time.