Research into the fate of one of China's historic libraries has become a political cause celebre. The library of the Hanlin Academy, the main centre for scholarly studies in imperial China, was destroyed during the anti-Western Boxer uprising of 1900. Most of its books and manuscripts were burned. A few survived in foreign collections.
Drawing on a paper presented at an international conference in Beijing, China's official Xinhua news-agency has called its destruction "a crime comparable to the burning of the library of Alexandria" and wants the surviving books and manuscripts returned, notably 41 volumes in the United States's library of congress. Xinhua reported "international librarians" saying that "newly discovered evidence" showed that "western countries looted and destroyed the library during their siege of Beijing".
But Donald G. Davis Jr of the University of Texas at Austin, one of the co-authors of the paper which triggered Xinhua's interest, says there has never been any controversy over who was responsible. In June 1900, the "Westerners" were under siege from the Boxers, with only 450 troops of various nationalities to guard the legations.
The British assumed that the Boxers (who claimed to be defending China's traditional values) would leave the academy, which adjoined their compound, untouched. However, the Boxers set part of the building on fire, and were shooting from it into the British compound. With the wind blowing towards their compound, the British moved into the academy, and pulled down the library building to make a fire-break.
Some books were rescued, but a few accounts say that the British threw others into a lotus pond. Even if this is true, it may have been not so much an act of vandalism as an attempt to destroy highly inflammable material.
Dr Davis says the Xinhua report "magnifies the destructive elements of the allied defence and minimises [the Boxers'] own lack of concern and interest" in the library.
Dr Davis's paper, presented at a conference of the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions last month, aroused the interest of the 800 or so Chinese participants, who were, he said, by no means as "fanatic" as the Xinhua release. The reporter who interviewed him, he said, was simply "after a good story".
Xinhua releases are habitually slanted in accordance with the prevailing Chinese ideology. The agency contrasts the US retention of its volumes with the USSR and East Germany's return of their holdings.
The Boxers, he says, "did not care about their heritage" and "it is quite likely that the fire would have reached the library" if the British had not intervened.
, 64 and 3 volumes respectively, in the 1950s.
Dr Davis co-authored his paper with Cheng Huanwen, dean of the school of librarianship and information science at Zhongshan University. His interest in the library was purely to locate and identify those books and manuscripts which have survived.