The Zhengtong Daozang, completed in 1445 under the sponsorship of the Ming dynasty's Zhengtong emperor, represents the most complete surviving edition of the Daoist scriptural canon, compiled from whatever manuscripts, printed texts and fragments could be gathered following the significant losses the Daoist textual tradition had suffered in the Yuan dynasty's 1281 burning and the disruption of the Yuan to Ming transition more generally. A further supplement, the Xu Daozang, was added in 1607 under the Wanli emperor, incorporating additional material that had come to light or been composed in the intervening period.
Compilation was organized under imperial sponsorship and carried out with the participation of leading Daoist clergy, who worked to gather, authenticate and arrange texts from across the tradition's major lineages, including material from the Celestial Masters, Shangqing, Numinous Treasure and Quanzhen schools, into a single organized collection using a classification system, the Three Caverns and Four Supplements, adapted from earlier Six Dynasties period canon compilations.
The resulting collection runs to more than a thousand individual texts covering scripture, ritual manuals, philosophical commentary, hagiography and technical material on subjects including alchemy and meditation, making it by far the largest single compilation of Daoist textual material to survive into the modern period.