The encyclopedia is a morgue with an index

Status: Anticipated · untested

Status is derived only from the shepherd-authored triage/prediction data above -- community submissions and claims are a separate overlay and can never change it (see the participation panel below).

This is a proposed connection between two domains, generated by a language model. It is not an article and not evidence: it sits below the evidence/publication boundary. A quantitative prediction and a named kill-dataset are attached (when registered) so the claim stays falsifiable rather than merely evocative.

Claim (verbatim)

The Taiping yulan (太平御覽, completed 983 under Song Taizong, 1,000 juan) preserves its sources by dismembering them: it quotes, attributed and by title, from the roughly 1,600-plus works of its yinyong shumu (引用書目, bibliography of cited books), and for a large fraction of those works the excerpt inside the encyclopedia is now the only substantial text that survives. The mechanism is a preservation filter with a brutal bias: a leishu compiler excerpts what is quotable - the striking anecdote, the lexical gloss, the ornamental couplet - so a source enters the encyclopedia through its most detachable matter and is then remembered only by that matter once the parent book dies. The encyclopedia does not preserve books; it preserves the excerptable cross-section of books, and its cited-title list is a register of the dead. Prediction restated: more than half of the distinct titles the Taiping yulan cites have no surviving independent full-text witness - they live, if at all, only as quotation. That the compendium looks like a library of a thousand scrolls is an illusion of the index; most of the shelves behind it are empty, and the citation is the tombstone.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Prediction: taking the distinct source-titles named in the Taiping yulan's (太平御覽) attributed citations and testing each for independent survival, more than half will have no surviving independent full-text witness - a quotation-only share above 0.5 (primary clause: the >0.5 quotation-only share among distinct cited titles; the verdict follows it); a title counts as independently extant only on a full-text witness outside the leishu tradition, and the test voids for coverage if fewer than 1,000 distinct cited titles can be extracted and resolved.

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Kill: the Chinese Text Project (ctext.org) full text of the Taiping yulan (太平御覽), extracting the attributed source-titles from its citation markup and testing each against ctext's full-text library and the Siku quanshu holdings for independent survival.

Nobody has run this test. The kill-data is named above. If you can run it — or you know the paper that already settles it — claim the kill or submit the prior scholarship. Kills and prior scholarship are credited here, by name, as they come in.

Provenance

Run: Fresh agent generation · model: claude-fable-5

Fresh blind generation by claude-fable-5, 2026-07-17, East Asia instrument-anchored wave against ctext/CBETA/SAT/Kanseki: every kill names a specific open corpus and a countable operation (loss-annotation counts, catalogue-to-survival ratios, cited-title censuses, citation-geometric overlap, attribution-growth), thresholds far from 1 with coverage guards; disjoint from the 2026-07-08 East Asia wave (different works and operations - Suishu/Yiwenzhi/leishu reused only as instruments under new loss-census operations, flagged) and from the 2026-07-16 India wave, which already owns the Kaiyuan lu missing-books register (pivoted here to An Shigao attribution inflation); Samguk Sagi (not the Yusa used elsewhere) and Fuyo wakashu (Kokka Taikan instrument shared with a Man'yoshu item, seam distinct); dropped the Yongle dadian survival-rate candidate as overlapping the prior wave's print-threshold item. Numbers flagged MODERATE where counts vary are kept out of the load-bearing primary clauses.

Novelty / leakage triage

anticipated in the literature — this exact test has never been run

That the Taiping yulan is a reservoir of otherwise-lost books, and that its 引用書目 lists on the order of 1,600-plus cited titles, is established (Hu Daojing's standard study of Chinese leishu; the encyclopedia's own bibliography of cited books). What is un-run is the primary clause's census: the >0.5 quotation-only share among distinct cited titles, scored against a full-text corpus outside the leishu tradition. The materials — the citation list and the general preservation-filter thesis — are in print, but the specific survival fraction has not been tabulated as posed. Adjacent. (A van der Loon citation for TPYL sources was dropped: not confident a dedicated study exists exactly as it would be described.)

胡道靜 (Hu Daojing), 中國古代的類書 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1982)
The Taiping yulan's own 引用書目 (經史圖書綱目, bibliography of cited books), printed with the text

Predictions

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