The encyclopedia Wung Lo Ta Tien (The Great Standard of Yung Lo) receives imperial approval. It is a monumental undertaking, commissioned several years earlier by the third emperor of the Ming Dynasty, to collect all knowledge in various fields: the Confucian canon, history, philosophy, literature, astronomy, geography, cosmogony, medicine, divination, Buddhism, Taoism, and the arts and crafts. Three commissioners, five directors, 20 subdirectors, and 2,141 editors worked on it for five years. It is composed of 22,877 sections, with an index of 60 sections. Each section has 20 folios, for a total of 917,480 pages and 3,66992,000 characters. It will never be printed, but only hand-produced in three copies: one kept in Beijing and the other two in Nanjing. Both copies will be destroyed with the fall of the Ming Dynasty. Beijing’s will also be largely destroyed, with the exception of a few scattered volumes. By comparison, consider that the English Wikipedia in 2023 will contain 6.6 million articles totaling 4.3 billion words and approximately 21 billion characters, and Wikipedia itself will represent approximately 3% of GPT-3’s training corpus.
