Huanglan
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| Huanglan | |||||||||||||||||||||
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| Chinese name | |||||||||||||||||||||
| Traditional Chinese | 皇覽 | ||||||||||||||||||||
| Simplified Chinese | 皇览 | ||||||||||||||||||||
| Literal meaning | Imperial Mirror | ||||||||||||||||||||
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| Korean name | |||||||||||||||||||||
| Hangul | 皇覽 | ||||||||||||||||||||
| Hanja | 황람 | ||||||||||||||||||||
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| Japanese name | |||||||||||||||||||||
| Kanji | 皇覽 | ||||||||||||||||||||
| Hiragana | おうらん | ||||||||||||||||||||
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The Huanglan or Imperial Mirror was one of the oldest Chinese leishu encyclopedias, compiled by the Cao Wei dynasty on the order of its founding emperor Cao Pi (Emperor Wen). Compilation started in 220 and was completed in 222. The purpose of the Huanglan was to provide the emperor and ministers of state with conveniently arranged summaries of all that was known at the time. Complete versions of the Huanglan existed until the Song dynasty, when it became a mostly lost work, although some fragments did survive in other encyclopedias and anthologies. The Huanglan was the prototype of the classified encyclopedia and served as a model for later ones such as the Tang dynasty's Encyclopedia of Literary Collections (624) and the Ming dynasty's Yongle Encyclopedia (1408).
The title combines huáng 皇 "emperor; imperial" and lǎn 覽 "see; look at; watch; inspect; display" (compare the Taiping Yulan encyclopedia). This character 覽 redundantly combines jiàn 見 "‘see" and the phonetic element jiān 監 < Old Chinese *kˁram "see; look at; inspect", which was an ancient graphic variant character for jiàn < *kˁram-s 鑑 or 鑒 "mirror", cognate with jìng 鏡 *qraŋ-s "mirror".
Five centuries before the title Huanglan first occurred, but the words huang (before it meant "emperor") and lan co-occur in the Chuci poem Li Sao "Encountering Sorrow", believed to be written by Qu Yuan (c. 340-278 BCE). The 1st line establishes the poet's noble ancestry from Zhuanxu, the legendary Yellow Emperor's grandson, the 2nd describes his auspicious birth, and the 3rd line says, "My father, seeing the aspect of my nativity (皇覽揆余初度兮), Took omens to give me an auspicious name".[1] In this context, huang 皇 means "august; stately; revered" in reference to the poet's father and lan 覽 means "see".
The "mirror" meaning of the Chinese lan in Huanglan parallels the Medieval genre of speculum literature that aimed to encompass encyclopedic knowledge in a single work (e.g., Albertus Magnus's Speculum astronomiae), and the modern scholarly survey article that summarizes a field of knowledge.
Although the title is usually transliterated Huanglan or Huang Lan, some English translations are:
