The East Asian Library and the Gest Collection (pronounced "Guest") in the Princeton University Library is the university's principle collection of materials in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean languages, as well as works on Chinese, Japanese and Korean linguistics and literatures in Western languages.
The Gest Oriental Library is named in honor of Guion Moore Gest (1864-1948), whose collection of Chinese books and manuscripts formed the Gest Chinese Research Library. The Gest Research Library was officially opened on February 13 (Chinese New Year's Day), 1926, at McGill University in Montreal. It was renamed the Gest Oriental Library when the collection was moved to Princeton in 1937. The library's holdings were expanded into Japanese and Korean after World War II to form one of the largest collections in North America. The Chinese collection is especially strong in Ming dynasty editions and works on traditional Chinese medicine.
History of the Gest Collection
The original collection
Guion Moore Gest built one of the largest collections of Chinese language rare books in North America in spite of the fact that he was not especially wealthy and could not read Chinese. Hu Shih, a prominent scholar who served as curator 1950-1952, noted that the collection, which "began as a hobby and developed into an investment, soon became a burden to a founder".
Gest travelled often to Asia in the 1910s and 1920s on business for the Gest Engineering Company, which he founded and headed. As early as the 1890s he developed an interest in Buddhism and bought a Japanese manuscript scroll. He retained Chen Baozhen, a Chinese scholar who had been an imperial tutor, to locate and purchase books for his collection. Chen assembled more than 8,000 volumes, (juan?) mostly standard works.
After Chen's death in 1900, Gest retained an agent in Beijing, Commander I.V. Gillis (1875-1948), a retired United States Naval Attaché. He spoke Mandarin Chinese fluently, but could not read classical Chinese texts that had not been punctuated. He developed intimate knowledge through many years of handling books, however, and a leading Chinese bibliographer who examined his collection and his catalogues wrote that "his knowledge of Chinese bibliography is exceptionally good". Gillis' wife was a Manchu princess, and his web of personal relations led him to the Guangxu emperor's tutor and other high officials with collections of useful volumes. Gest suffered from glaucoma, and Gillis suggested that he try an eye medicine which was a specialty the Ma family of Dingxian, Hebei province, who kept a shop in the capital. This medicine sparked Gest's interest in traditional Chinese medicine and in collecting books on the subject.
Because Gest's funds were limited, Gillis bought selectively, concentrating on works printed in the Ming and Qing dynasties, which were of less interest to wealthy Chinese and Japanese collectors than works printed in the Song dynasty. He acquired "Palace editions," treatises printed by government agencies, commercial publishers, and manuscripts from all parts of the country. He did not always insist on rare editions, though he bought a great many. Gest and Gillis acquired some 500 works in 2,000 juan on Chinese medicine, the largest such collection in the West at the time. Probably the most important single work in the history of Chinese medicine, Li Shizhen's Bencao gangmu (The Compendium of Materia Medica), for instance, was published in the 16th century, but the collection's edition is a 19th-century reprint. Together with later additions, the collection offers material all aspects of medical thought and practice, as well as the history of Chinese science.
Gillis' staff of three searched bookstores and examined private collections. Gillis had worked in American naval intelligence, and enjoyed using his training to demonstrate to his friends how to determine that the same person had used different typewriters by the similar weight of their strokes. He once verified the date of a purported Sung dynasty book by examining the paper fiber under a microscope. He and his staff marked missing or damaged pages with signed slips and had damaged books interleaved, rebound, and boxed. Gillis catalogued the books, which meant that they were ready to shelve upon arrival in North America, and he even crated and shipped the furniture and wall decorations that were used first at McGill and then at Princeton.