... Under the Emperor Shï-huang-ti works of literature and of art had a narrow escape from being consigned to oblivion, owing to the persecution of this enemy of all ancient civilization.  Lovers of these precious monuments of antiquity had to bury, immure, or conceal them, lest they might be discovered and destroyed under a cruel law.  Later centuries rediscovered them, when a period of renaissance set in, culminating in the imperial collections of the T'ang dynasty in the eighth, and again in the twelfth, century, under the great imperial collector Hui-tsung, and finally under K'ién-lung of the present dynasty... (The Ancient History of China, to the End of the Chou Dynasty, Hirth, 1911).