The Daozang is the Taoist canon and its scale is the first thing to say about it: the Ming edition of 1445, with its 1607 supplement, comprises about 1,476 titles in over five thousand volumes. Earlier canons were assembled from the fifth century onward and repeatedly destroyed — most drastically under the Mongol Yuan in the thirteenth century, when Taoist texts were ordered burned after Taoists lost a court debate with Buddhists, and most of the pre-existing canon was lost. What survives contains liturgical manuals, alchemical treatises, pharmacology, cosmological diagrams, hagiographies, meditation instructions, geography of sacred mountains, talisman patterns and blank forms for memorials to heaven. Very little of it circulates outside the priesthood; the organising system is opaque even to specialists; and large sections have never been translated into any Western language, which is why general accounts of Taoism in English still rely so heavily on two short philosophical books that are unrepresentative of the tradition's actual textual bulk.