This blew my mind: between 1403 and 1407, the Ming Dynasty emperor commissioned an encyclopedia - now called the Yongle encyclopedia, after the emperor - that was so vast in scale (around 400 million Chinese characters) that the only other encyclopedia that finally exceeded it was Wikipedia in 2007, 6 years after its launch! This is yet another example of West-centric our sense of intellectual history is: in French education we're taught that encyclopedias as a concept started with Diderot and d'Alembert's "Encyclopédie" in the mid-18th century, which we're told was the first attempt in history to gather all of human knowledge in one place. Not only was the Yongle encyclopedia completed 350 years earlier, and not only is it 20 times larger than L'Encyclopédie, but it was itself a very late entry in a Chinese tradition of encyclopedias which started with the Huanglan - more than 8 million characters in length - compiled around 220 AD ( Unfortunately much of the encyclopedia has been lost: out of the original 11,095 volumes, only around 400 are known to have survived (300-ish of which are in China). But we sometimes find new ones, like two volumes that surfaced in 2020 in the attic of a French family, descendants of a naval officer who had received them as a gift from corrupt Chinese officials in the 1870s. They went to auction in Paris with a starting price of 5,000 euros and sold for 8.12 million to a Chinese textile entrepreneur, Jin Liang, who donated them to China's National Archives of Publications this summer (