Emperor Huizong Completes the First Printed Daoist Canon

Between 1111 and 1119, Emperor Huizong of the Song dynasty sponsored the compilation and printing of the Zhenghe Wanshou Daozang, the Longevity Daoist Canon of the Zhenghe reign, the first Taoist canon ever produced in print, more than five centuries after the Tang dynasty elevated Taoism as its ancestral faith in 618, already recorded here. Huizong, a devoted patron of Taoism, ordered his officials to search the empire for surviving Daoist texts and appointed the Daoist priests Yuan Miaozong and Wang Daojian to collate them at a newly established scripture office; Huang Shang, a court scholar serving as prefect of Fuzhou, then employed craftsmen to cut some seventy thousand printing blocks in that city, a major publishing center of the period. The finished canon ran to more than five thousand volumes filling hundreds of storage boxes, and though the original blocks were lost within a decade to the Jin conquest of northern China, the project fixed the model that later dynasties followed whenever they cut their own editions of the Daoist scriptures, more than a century before Genghis Khan met the Daoist master Qiu Chuji near the Hindu Kush in 1222, already recorded here.