Newspaper (Reporter Wang Guangyan) At 11pm Beijing time on July 7, two volumes of the "Yongle Grand Prix" were auctioned at the Beauxanne-Le-Feuver auction house in France. The auction started at 5,000 euros and the bid price soared to 6.4 million euros. The final transaction with a commission of 8.128 million euros is about RMB 64 million. It is reported that the buyer is a Chinese woman who came to bid on behalf of a buyer from mainland China.
"Yongle Dadian" is a collection of ancient Chinese classics in Dacheng compiled by Ming Chengzu, Zhu Di, Xie Jin, Yao Guangxiao, etc. during the Ming Yongle period. The book is about 370 million words, a total of 11095 volumes, known as "Chinese ancient history" "The largest encyclopedia", mostly destroyed by fire and war. According to the auction company, these two lots are from private French collectors. Their family members were sent to China in the second half of the nineteenth century to hold the rank of colonel. In the 1870s, they had a deep relationship with some officials in China. To be able to collect these two volumes of "Yongle Dadian".
After the news that two new volumes of "Yongle Diandian" were photographed by Chinese collectors came out, the domestic ancient book collection community responded strongly. Shen Jin, an expert in ancient book edition, wrote that the "Yongle Classic" currently stored in China is only 252 volumes and 2 pages, which is far from the original 22877 volumes. The one with the most domestic collections is the first to be promoted by the National Library of China, with a total of 246 volumes. According to Weng Lianxi, director and researcher of the Palace Museum, as of now, only 400 copies, 800 volumes, and some zero leaves have been found in the copy of the "Yongle Classic", scattered in the hands of public and private collectors in many countries and regions. The two volumes and four volumes of this auction are connected to the "Lake" and "Mourning" albums collected by the National Library, and the appearance of the "Lake" album makes all the "Lake" scrolls found now connected.