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The role of the Library is to protect, preserve and make available to the public in the form of exhibitions, popular publications, lectures and other events the heritage enshrined in the Collections and to provide the world of scholarship access to this internationally important resource.
Since its move to Dublin Castle in 2000, the Chester Beatty Library has gone from strength to strength. In its original location on Shrewsbury Road in the suburbs of Dublin, the Library was able to accommodate scholars but had limited facilities for conservation and inadequate facilities at its disposal to display elements of Beatty’s Collection for the public’s enjoyment. On average, the Library attracted a few thousand visitors a year. By contrast, a steady increase in visitor numbers in the past five years, culminated in over 340,000 in 2015.

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The East Asian Collections include a fine series of albums and scrolls from China, the largest collection of jade books from the Imperial Court outside China and a large collection of textiles and decorative objects. The Japanese holdings contain many superb painted scrolls from the 17th and 18th century, woodblock prints by Hiroshige and Hokusai and many others as well as decorative art objects.

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Over 6,000 individual items, mainly manuscripts and single-page paintings and calligraphies, make up the Islamic Collections. This includes more than 260 complete and fragmentary Qur’ans, some dating from the late eighth and ninth centuries and including the work of the leading calligraphers of the Islamic world.

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The Biblical Papyri, dating from the second to the fourth century AD, consist of the earliest known copies of the four gospels and Acts of the Apostles, the Letters of St Paul, the Book of Revelation and various very early Old Testament fragments. Armenian and Western European manuscripts from medieval, Renaissance and modern times, prints, early and fine books and bindings complete a remarkable conspectus of the arts of manuscript production and printing from many cultures and periods.

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Chester Beatty’s library has been described as the finest collection of manuscripts and books made by a private collector in the 20th century. It includes representative samples of the world’s heritage (artistic, religious and secular) from about 2700 BC to the present century.
The Western treasures of the Library include some of the earliest sources on papyrus for the bible and a great library of Manichean texts.

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A visitor's guide to the Chester Beatty Library

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Uploaded by ChesterBeattyLibrary on 2014-05-14.