Page 215 - JOURNAL OF LIBRARY SCIENCE IN CHINA 2015 Vol. 41

214 Journal of Library Science in China, Vol. 7, 2015

3.5 The losses of books

Book losses provide the most striking evidence of the severe damage Japan brought to China.
Researchers have different opinions on the specific number of books lost. In 1946, Chinese
government finally produced a document called The inventory of China’s lost books and the
valuation of losses. According to the estimates of government, we have lost approximately
2 742 108 books and another 7 195 kinds of books, 579 boxes of books, 45 753 tomes of books.
However the book losses of Tibet, Yunnan, Guizhou, Qinghai and Sichuan were not included.
Another resource of relevant official documents is the Ministry of Education which produced a
directory of Chinese relics plundered by Japanese, and provided a summary table estimating the
number and value of all the book losses. The directory and table together indicate the numbers of
lost things are about 3 607 074 pieces and another 1 870 boxes of cultural relics, including books,
paintings, calligraphy rubbings, antiquities, equipment, samples, maps, artworks, and sundries.
In addition, 741 cultural sites were robbed by the Japanese. It is estimated that all of the looted
material was worth approximately 9 885 646 silver dollars in the pre war period (The delegates of
the Republic of China to Japan, 1980). X. Dai (2004) made a statistical table about book losses of
each province and city according to the records of the committee of counting lost cultural relics
during the war.
However, discussion above only covers the book losses in the third stage of plundering. For
now, there is not much information about how many books China had lost in the first two stages
of plundering. In 1946, the Ministry of Education established a special committee for receiving
and accounting cultural properties losses. When summarizing book losses, the committee was
recommended to add information about cultural losses dating back to the first Sino-Japanese War.
The committee has made a comparatively complete directory of cultural relics which were taken to
Japan. According to this directory, Japan robbed as many as 15 245 Chinese cultural relics since the
first Sino-Japanese War including: oracle bones, transcripts of Buddhist sutra, inscription rubbings,
ancient books and other cultural properties (“Japan had plundered 15 245 pieces of cultural relics
from China since the Sino-Japanese War—The directory of cultural relics into Japan after the Sino-
Japanese War tells us another shocking fact”, 2010). P. Y. Li (2005) conservatively estimates that at
least 30 000 000 books were lost which includes 17 010 000 books destroyed by Japan, 7 583 307
books taken out of China, and another 5 000 000 books are lost for uncertain reasons.
As the result of obstructions from Japan and the League of Nations, the beginning point of
book plundering was defined as July 7th of 1937. By definition international estimates fail to
account for the losses of cultural properties between 1894 and 1937. In addition, most statistical
figures are limited to regions controlled by the Nanjing National Government. There is not enough
information about damages in other places like northwest China, Taiwan, and Communist Party’s
anti-Japanese base areas. As a consequence, all statistics underestimate the losses. Even though
Japan returned 158 873 books to China after the war and Wang Shixiang found an additional 117