Editing Emperor Qianlong (section)

===Censorship of pro-Ming books===

The Siku Quanshu(Chinese:Four Repositories Complete Library) is an official collection of Chinese books created by Qianlong between 1772 and 1782. Seven copies were created; four were sent to imperial residences, and others were sent to public libraries in Hangzhou(this copy is still there), Zhenjiang, and Yangzhou(these latter two were destroyed during the Taiping Rebellion).

While this compilation was a massive undertaking assembling a great deal of Chinese history and culture, around 2,855 books that Qianlong found to have a pro-Ming Dynasty or anti-Manchu sentiment were banned and put on a list known as the Siku Jinshu(Chinese: Four Repositories Banned Library). The books themselves were burned, and anyone who researched using them would be executed by a thousand cuts; each cut would remove body parts until the victim was dead. If a writer was already dead, his corpse would be mutilated and his family members would be executed. One did not have to directly praise the Ming Dynasty or disparage the Manchu people; a poet named Cai Xian who wrote a poem praising red peonies, believing them to be the true peony color whereas others were "alien", was executed on the grounds that the Chinese word for red, ''zhu'', was a homonym of the surname of Ming emperors, and that the Qing Dynasty was not Han(and therefore alien to China)

In doing this, Qianlong sought to eliminate any remaining support for the Ming Dynasty, which his great-grandfather, Emperor Shunzhi, had overthrown a little over a hundred years earlier. Such attempts at censorship had occurred before as far back as Shunzhi's reign, but under Qianlong they became systematic. What was known as the "literary inquisition" would continue until his son, Emperor Jiaqing, ended it in 1799.