Imperial Readings of the Taiping Era

The Imperial Readings of the Taiping Era is a massive encyclopedia compiled by a number of officers commissioned by the imperial court of the Song Dynasty with the lead editor being Li Fang from 977 to 983 during the era of Taiping Xingguo. It is divided into 1,000 volumes and 55 sections, which consisted of about 4.7 millions words . It included citations from about 2,579 different kinds of documents spanning from books, poetry, ode, proverbs, steles to miscellaneous works. After the compilation, the Emperor Taizong of Song is said to have finished reading the book within a year with 3 volumes per day.