It was commissioned by the imperial court of the Song dynasty during the first era of the reign of Emperor Taizong.

It included citations from about 2,579 different kinds of documents spanning from books, poetry, odes, proverbs, steles to miscellaneous works.

The team who compiled the Taiping Yulan includes: Tang Yue (湯悅), Zhang Wei (張洎), Xu Xuan (徐鉉), Song Bai (宋白), Xu Yongbin (徐用賓), Chen E (陳鄂), Wu Shu (吳淑), Shu Ya (舒雅), Lü Wenzhong (吕文仲), Ruan Sidao (阮思道), Hu Meng (扈蒙), Li Fang (李昉), and others.

It is one of the sources used by Ming and Qing scholars to reconstruct the lost Record of the Seasons of Jingchu.

[2][3] In 2024, a grant from the Agency for Cultural Affairs and the Yomiuri Shimbun will help conserve and restore the Tōfuku-ji encyclopedia, which is the only 1000 volume version to survive from the Song Dynasty.