Origin from 1445
In 1445, the tenth year of the Zhengtong reign, the Ming imperial court completed and printed the Daozang, the largest officially compiled collection of Taoist scripture ever assembled. Work had begun decades earlier under the Yongle emperor, when the forty third Celestial Master Zhang Yuchu was ordered to recompile the canon; after his death in 1410 his successor Zhang Yuqing continued the project, and the Daoist scholar Shao Yizheng finally collated and completed it under the Zhengtong emperor. The finished Daozang of the Zhengtong Era ran to 5,305 volumes filling 480 boxes, organized into the traditional Three Grottoes, Four Complements and Twelve Subsections, and copies were distributed across the country to major mountains and Taoist temples as an imperial gift. A supplement of about fifty further titles was added in 1607. It remains the only complete government compiled Taoist canon to survive, and modern editions of the Daozang are still based on it.
Facts
Dates
StatusEstablished marks a completed compilation and countrywide distribution of Taoist scripture, not a claim that the texts it contains were newly written in 1445, since the canon gathers works composed across more than a thousand years of Taoist history. Cross-Tradition Connections
Associated With
This source names Celestial Masters directly: "In 1445, the tenth year of the Zhengtong reign, the Ming imperial court completed and printed the Daozang, the largest officially compiled collection of Taoist scripture ever assembled."
Occurred In
Spread Event Of
Adds a specific, dated institutional milestone between the Tang dynasty's imperial patronage of Taoism and its later arrival in Taiwan with Fujian settlers already recorded here: the completion and countrywide distribution of the Zhengtong Daozang, the canon every modern edition of Taoist scripture still descends from.
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