Under the emperor Xuanzong, the most devoted of the Tang rulers, teams of priests gathered Daoist writings from across the empire, collated them against the imperial library's copies, and issued the Kaiyuan Daozang, a canon of some seven thousand scrolls copied by hand for the great temples. Catalogued by 748, it was the first Daoist canon produced as an imperial edition, and its table of contents governed every canon after it until printing.
Tagged: Celestial Masters and Zhengyi Daoism
The Event
- Date
- 748 (exact)
- Era
- Tang Imperial Daoism; Standard periodization of Daoist history
- Location
- Chang'an, the Tang capital; today Xi'an, Shaanxi, China
- Traditions
- Daoism
- Streams
- Celestial Masters and Zhengyi
- Key figures
- Emperor Xuanzong of Tang
- Key texts
- Kaiyuan Daozang
Connections
Primary Sources
- The Kaiyuan Catalogue of the Daoist Canon.
Secondary Sources
- Kohn, Livia, ed. Daoism Handbook. Brill, 2000.
- Robinet, Isabelle. Taoism: Growth of a Religion. Translated by Phyllis Brooks, Stanford University Press, 1997.
Provenance: HIST-0809; confidence 0.95; accessed 2026-10-28.
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