Tang Emperor Xuanzong Orders the Kaiyuan Daozang Copied Widely

In 748, the seventh year of the Tianbao era, Emperor Xuanzong of Tang ordered the newly assembled Daoist canon copied and distributed widely across his empire, one hundred thirty years after the Tang dynasty had elevated Taoism as its ancestral faith in 618, already recorded here, and three hundred seventy one years before Emperor Huizong completed the first printed Daoist canon in 1119, also recorded here. The canon Xuanzong ordered copied, later known as the Kaiyuan Daozang after the reign era in which its compilation began, grew out of a catalogue project he had commissioned early in his reign, the Yiqie Daojing Mu, and out of a nationwide search for Daoist scriptures conducted during the Kaiyuan years that assembled surviving texts from across the empire into a corpus called the Sandong Qionggang, the Exquisite Compendium of the Three Grottoes, organized under the canon's traditional threefold classification. No printing technology yet existed to reproduce it at scale, so Xuanzong's 748 order meant hand copying, temple by temple, the empire's first attempt at a complete, standardized body of Daoist scripture rather than the scattered, locally held collections that had preceded it. The project's fortunes did not survive Xuanzong's own reign intact: the imperial libraries at Chang'an and Luoyang that held its texts were destroyed within a decade during the An Lushan and Shi Siming rebellions, and much of the compendium was lost with them. But the Kaiyuan Daozang stood for more than three centuries as Chinese Daoism's first attempt at a canon in the fullest sense, the model the Song dynasty's own eventually printed Daozang of 1119 consciously built upon rather than invented from nothing.