The Siku Quanshu, literally the Complete Library of the Four Treasuries,[1] is a Chinese encyclopedia commissioned during the Qing dynasty by the Qianlong Emperor.

By March 1773, an editorial board composed of hundreds of editors, collators, and copyists had been created in Beijing to gather and review books brought to them.

[6] As indicated by its title, the work is structured in four categories, which reference the divisions of the imperial library: In the course of editing, a large number of corrections were made to local records.

Personal documents, often describing the actions of noteworthy local people, were often included in the Annotated Bibliography of the Four Treasuries if their contents could be verified through central government records.

[6] Medical knowledge was often documented through case studies, on the model of twenty-five instances in Sima Qian's Records of the Grand Historian, which blended narrative with analysis.

The Qianlong Emperor sought to discredit the Ming dynasty by highlighting the cruelty of its early rulers and contrasting it with the policies of his the Qing.

The first four copies were for the emperor himself and were kept in the north, in specially constructed libraries in the Forbidden City, Old Summer Palace, Shenyang, and Chengde.

The Siku Jinshu was partially the Qianlong Emperor's attempt to rid China of any remaining Ming loyalists by executing scholars and burning any books that made direct or implicit political attacks on the Manchu people.

The scholars working on the Siku Quanshu wrote a descriptive note for each book, detailing the author's name along with place and year of birth.

This short annotation, which reflected their own opinions, was put at the beginning of the Siku Quanshu and formed the Complete Catalogue.

The Siku Quanshu includes most major Chinese texts, from pre-Classical Zhou dynasty works like the I Ching to those written during the Qing.