The Emperor Who Had Books Read to Him in His Sleep Burned His Library

Every night, five men took turns reading aloud to the Liang prince Xiao Yi while he slept. If a reader skipped a sheet, he woke and had the man beaten — so says a history written a century later. One night in January 555, emperor by then, with a Western Wei army through the outer defenses of his capital at Jiangling, he burned his library: by the reckoning of a man who had helped catalogue it, the largest collection of books since histories began. One sentence has travelled with that fire ever since someone wrote it down: "I read ten thousand scrolls, and still I came to this." None of the surviving histories written in the century after the fire contains it. The version everyone quotes comes from Sima Guang's chronicle, finished in 1084. The earliest surviving account from anyone inside the city — by Yan Zhitui, a young official who had helped collate the books — gives the fire a single line and no reason at all. This episode takes the story apart layer by layer: the friendly official Liang history, the harsher History of the Southern Dynasties, the conquerors' own history, a poet's lament, Sima Guang's full scene with its two speeches, and a philosopher arguing with the famous answer eleven hundred years later. It ends with one of the librarians, who wrote the famous sentiment about himself: if only I had never read books. Sources: 北齊書 卷四十五 (Yan Zhitui's autobiographical poem and notes); 隋書 卷四十九 and 卷三十二; 梁書 卷五; 南史 卷八; 周書 卷十五 and 卷四十一 (including Yu Xin's lament); 資治通鑑 卷一百六十五 (Sima Guang, finished 1084 CE); 讀通鑑論 卷十七 (Wang Fuzhi). Content note: descriptions of starvation, executions and the enslavement of a city's people.