Chapter 122 The final fate of the fourth quarter of the Yellow Book

After the fall of the Ming Dynasty, the Hongguang court finally discovered the usefulness of the yellow books: they used these files as raw materials for making armor and gunpowder. This discovery did not save the Nanming regime.The Qing army marched southward in a large scale and captured Nanjing with ease.With strong curiosity, they visited this yellow book library full of legends.They were surprised to find that although the Ming Dynasty perished in the 17th year of Chongzhen, the last record in the Yellow Book was actually the 24th year of Chongzhen's household registration.It turned out that this was the last yellow book fabricated by Chongzhen in fifteen years, and it was prefabricated by officials from all over the country to save trouble.This has become the best example of people lamenting the Ming Dynasty.

The Yellow Book Bank, once the largest archive in human history, has been wiped out, so that when scholars of later generations want to study this famous system, they can hardly find a single surviving Yellow Book.In early 2010, when I went to Xuanwu Lake to visit the "Old Site of Yellow Record Library", I found that there was only a modern and rough reinforced concrete antique building, and there were only a few pictures of historical materials of poor quality displayed there.