The Obaku Tetsugen Canon is the first Chinese Tripitaka in the West

I am writing a paper for the Third International Conference on the Chinese Buddhist canon.  The title of my paper is "Finding the First Chinese Tripitaka in Europe: The 1872 Iwakura Mission in Britain and the Mystery of the Obaku Tetsugen Canon in the Indian Office Library." The discovery I made is that the Obaku Tetsugen Canon 黄檗/鐵眼大藏經 is actually the first Chinese Tripitaka which was brought to the West and it was sent by Iwakura Tomomi 岩倉具視(1825-1883) in 1875.

The story is like this:　 The Obaku edition was carved by Tetsugen based on the main section of the Jiaxing canon 嘉興藏 which is a reprint of the Northern Ming Canon 明北藏. Tetsugen received this Jiaxing edition from the Chinese monk Yinyuan Longqi 隱元隆琦(1592-1673), the founder of the Japanese Obaku Zen tradition. It was the most popular edition during the Edo period.

In the mid-nineteenth century, because of the discovery of Sanskrit and Tibetan Buddhist texts, European scholarship on Buddhism was greatly advanced.  Therefore, there was a need to find the Chinese Tripitaka as well. In 1872, the Iwakura mission arrived in Britain. Samuel Beal (1825-1889), a professor of Chinese and a chaplain at University College, through his personal connection, made a request to Iwakura about sending a Chinese canon to England. Iwakura kept his word after he returned to Japan and the whole set of the canon arrived at the Indian Office Library in 1875.

Samuel Beal made a English catalog of the received books in 1876 and Max Müller's (1823-1900) Japanese student Nanjō Bunyū 南條文雄 (1849-1927) translated its entire catalog into English in 1883. However, Nanjō didn't mark in the title page that this canon is actually the Tetsugen canon carved in Japan. It still reads as the Chinese Tripitaka of the Great Ming Dynasty.