even the most obscure facts are only a few clicks away on any Internet connected computer,
but it was not always so, just a few hundred years ago information had to be gleaned from cross referencing subjects in many books before a overall picture appeared of what you were researching, but go back earlier still to 1408 and all of this information could be found in a single encyclopedia, the Yongle Encyclopedia is a large-scale encyclopedia–the largest in pre-modern China--arranged by subject categories traditionally used in China, amounting to about 370 million characters in all, the encyclopedia preserved textual information from about 8,000 texts of all kinds, from pre-Qin times to the early Ming dynasty, covering the works of famous specialists in such areas as astronomy, geography, human affairs, famous objects, yin-yang philosophy, Buddhism and Daoism, crafts, and so forth,
but herein lies that problem, the finished version of the encyclopedia is estimated to have weighed about 40 tons! and took up about 1400 cubic feet of space, it comprised of 22,937 chapters in 11,095 volumes and 917,480 pages, the encyclopedia also included many thousands of immaculate hand drawn illustrations, most impressive of all was that it used over 370 million Chinese characters from start to finish; all of these hand written by some two thousand scholars in just 17 months, with the entire scope of the project, including information gathering, taking just five years, from 1403-1408, what a Herculean task for all involved, yet today all of this knowledge is just a few clicks away.
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