Classical Historiography for Chinese History

Ed./Corp.: Center for the Art of East Asia. See also The University of Chicago, Chicago, IL.

Description: "The Center for the Art of East Asia initiated the Digital Scrolling Paintings Project to support the teaching of classes on East Asian painting. The temporal and spatial qualities of handscroll paintings are lost in photographs of selected sections that are reproduced in books and projected in the classroom. Although used widely in current art education and the study of these works of art, such reproductions seriously distort the nature of handscrolls by erasing their sequential anad participatory viewing process. The display of these paintings in long cases in museums also is not the way in which these paintings were made to be experienced. With the assistance of the Humanities Computer Research Department, the Center developed a prototype for digital scrolling technology as an exciting tool to simulate the viewing experience and to improve understanding of handscroll paintings. The scrolling paintings website has been designed with interactive elements to allow unprecedented accessibility to the complete works of art for educators, students and researchers."

Currently (Aug 2012) more than 20 Chinese and Japanese scrolls are available.. Note: Macromedia's Flash Player (version 6+) is required.

"Recording the Grandeur of the Qing -- The Southern Inspection Tour Scrolls of the Kangxi and Qianlong emperors," created in collaboration with the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Visual Media Center of Colmbia University's Art History and Archaeology Department. The website explores Qing art, government, and commerce through the presentation of four artworks of the period, which is supplemented by topical essays on the Qing.

Administered by Sarah E. Fraser

As Sinica Sinoweb’s (中研院漢學網) twin product, also the sole full-text searchable database of its kind from Taiwan, “Taiwan Journals Search”(臺灣人社百刊) collects more than 200 journals on humanities & social sciences and keeps adding new journals. More than Top 100 journals in which were ever selected in the most credible journal-appraisal list in Taiwan, TSSCI (Taiwan Social Sciences Citation Index), THCI Core (Taiwan Humanities Citation Index), and THCI (Humanities Citation Index). Differing from other alternatives from Taiwan, TJS excludes common/ popular periodicals unconcerned with academia. It is purely scholar-oriented and able to hit the researchers’ demand precisely. Meanwhile, TJS can be called as “the greatest collection of China studies/Sinology based on Taiwanese viewpoint”.

Cumulating very plentiful Chinese modern historical data of the past 55 years, Zhuanji Wenxue Magazine (傳記文學1962-present) wins the globally impressive fame──The Great Wall of Chinese Republic History. Being ranked at the same academic position with heavyweight, national research institutions of modern history, it is rated as the paragon of unofficial library of historical data, and an excellent, unique supplement of authoritative history in China/Taiwan during the past 2000 years. Scholars say the top 3 research institutions in Taiwan that own dominant academic achievement on studying Dr. Sun Yat Sen (Father of R.O.C.) and Chinese revolution history are Kuomintang Party History Commission, Modern History Institute of Academia Sinica and Zhuanji Wenxue Magazine. On content quality, Zhuanji Wenxue is regarded equal to the former two that are most important academic institutions in Taiwan. It helps historians to find clues of difficult historical problems, and replenish flesh into the skeleton of official history. It treats various people’s narrations as historical data. What it biographies are not only the political and military leaders, prominent officials and eminent personages, but also famous scholars, social celebrities, chiefs of secret societies, information spies, renowned actors or actresses and common people. So Zhuanji Wenxue helps to fill the breach of official history. As an essential historic-material database of more than 130 million characters and also the core reference of dissertations on Chinese Republic history in the past 40 years, it includes autobiography, critical biography, memoir, exclusive historical data, diary, handwriting, oral history, etc.. Readers will praise and sigh on its extensive data, living, popular legends, genuine people and true events.

Founded by Chinese Kuomintang, “Modern China Magazine” is always renowned for plenty of Republic history, Revolutionary Martyrs archives and Revolutionary documents of China. While other historic academic journals of its kind regard discourse and comment as important, Modern China peerlessly exposes first-hand historic materials of Kuomintang authority, reveals the “oral history” in Republic period, and combines exclusive archives and historic research. Which are really its precious and unique features. Including 4600 articles, 157 issues, 48200 figures, 38000 institutions/historical events in these 29 years, Modern China usually sponsors and hosts international academic seminars, members of which and magazine’s articles contributors come from Mainland China, Koreas, Japan, Hong Kong as well as Taiwan. Ever holding the reins of Taiwan’s government for 69 years, Kuomintang always takes great efforts to close to Taiwanese mainland, and designs many special Taiwanese and Chinese reports and cover stories in Modern China magazine. And historians regard most of them as classical masterpieces.

It was awarded “the Innovation Prize of Digital publication” in 2006 by Government Information Office, Taiwan. It integrates digital search engine with traditional calligraphic dictionary and celebrated calligraphic works. It collects plenty of renowned calligraphists’ handwritings, stone rubbings and inscriptions from Chinese successive Dynasties for 4700 years, including ancient Yin-Shang, Qin, Han, Wei-Jin Nan-Bei Zhao, Tang, Song, Jin, Yuan, Ming, Qing Dynasties, and the handwritten scripture of Dun-Huang Caves. Which come to 700 calligraphers,4014 calligraphic models, and 1.7 million characters in various forms. It owns 5 kinds of functions accordingly----studying, teaching, appreciating, textual researching and applying. It contains 2 sub-databases----“Single-Character Databank”, in which every photo was scanned from single character reserves its original look, charm and feeling. “Work-Fulltext Databank”, in which users can promptly find different calligraphers’ works from different Dynasties and enjoy or compare their styles via search engine.

Recording 1971-1996 history of Taiwan's art, Lionart Monthly was ever the most powerful magazine and hot platform that many artistic workers rushed to contribute works to. It has fostered many outstanding characters of artistic circles in Chinese areas for 1/4 centuries. Lionart Databank is honored to get the visual-art subsidy from Taiwan's Ministry of Culture and nominated "Digital Content Product Awards" of Taiwan's Ministry of Economic Affairs separately in 2011. The Databank collects 44 million characters, 30000 articles/commentaries/albums, 68000 pictures, 10000 pages of rare, nostalgic advertisement, and 12220 vocabulary entries. Most of which are exclusive historical data on Taiwan art. It contains 307 issues of Lionart Monthly Magazine, 3 classical bestsellers "Chinese Art Dictionary", "the Western Art Dictionary" and "Taiwanese Art Yearbook". Including vocabulary, artists'/ artistic workers' brief biographies and chronicles, these 12220 entries come from these 3 reference books above and are integrated into the databank for additional annotation and supplementary information for users' deeper understanding. Briefly, the databank features plentiful content of culture, classical articles of art, and convenient value-added functions.

Based on the Taiwan Literatures Series (Taiwan Wenxian Congkan, edited by Chou, Hsien-Wen周憲文, former Dean of Law School, National Taiwan University, and published by Taiwan Bank), the database of the same title above is the sole full-text/full-image version among similar databases of same content. Containing the most frequently used content by scholars of Taiwan studies, the database can be called as “the Encyclopedia of Taiwan”. It collects 309 books, 48 million of characters, and incorporates local histories, official documents of Ming, Qing Dynasties as well as Nan-Ming . Also included are poems and private collections, many of which are sole copies and out-of-print books. Spanning from Tang Dynasty to the Japanese occupation period, its data/literatures are gathered from not only local libraries, but also overseas libraries, such as Japan, the USA, Hong Kong, the Great Britain and Netherlands. At the Taiwanese viewpoint, the database records a whole variety of dimensions of Taiwan, including, development history of individual district, cities evolvement, personage deeds, local customs and culture. It is indeed the largest collections of Taiwan's history in the Chinese language.

“Taiwan Wen Xian Cong Kan” (台灣文獻叢刊) edited by Taiwan Bank is always regarded as the most important classics on Taiwan studies. But dozens of years have passed since its publication during 1958－1972, and many new historical data have been discovered continually during this period, there is no new representative collection to cover and agglomerate all the new data. Accordingly, UDP compiled “Taiwan Wen Xian Cong Kan Continuation” database. All the books, archives and literatures gathered in the “Continuation” were published by 1956. Half of which are rare books, the only copies extant, manuscripts and handwritings coming from various universities of China. The other half of data came from several “heavyweight” research institutions and publishers in Taiwan. Digitized and digitizing data in other publication plans were excluded in the “Continuation”. Those books of the same title/content in “Taiwan Wen Xian Cong Kan” are also not included in the “Continuation” except the new versions are indeed different from the old ones. Database “Continuation of Taiwan literature Series” is full-text and full-image, plus, textual criticism, original sources and authors’ introductions are attached to every title. It contains 204 books, 20 million characters, and covers chorography, geographic accounts, folkways, poems, literature, political archives, official documents, civil commotions, war records, coast defenses, Japanese pirates’ actions, 228 Incident, face-off between Zheng, Cheng-Gong and Manchu court, and historical data of Nan-Ming Dynasty.

This site is maintained by Prof. Ron Epstein (epstein@sfsu.edu), who is currently a research professor at the Intitute for World Religions in Berkeley, California.

CBETA is a main force to digitalize Chinese Buddhist scriptures, which is founded in Taiwan. It produced Chinese Buddhist scriptures in the form of downloadable ISO file titled "CBETA CD 電 子 佛 典 集 成 光 碟 April 2010", which is installable, searchable and copiable.

It is a comprehensive list of Chinese Buddhist texts. It currently contains 4418 texts by 1513 authors/translators/compilers, and it is now maintained by Christian Wittern . It also has a Japanese Version with Shift-JIS encoding.

It is a digitalized dictionary based on a paper-based dictionary under the same book name, which was compiled by Fo Guang Shan Monastery 佛 光 山, Taiwan. Please use Big 5 Code to search in it.

This site was founded in 1995 by Prof. Heng-ching Shih 釋 恆 清 with its first name of "Buddhist Internet Database 佛 學 網 路 資 料 庫", and now it is maintained by Research Center for Digital Humanities, National University of Taiwan. You can also use its Big5 version.

This site includes databases as "Time Authority Database 時 間 規 範 資 料 庫", "Person Authority Database 人 名 規 範 資 料 庫", and "Place Authority Database 地 名 規 範 資 料 庫". These databases integrate information from various projects at the Library and Information Center at Dharma Drum Buddhist College 法 鼓 佛 教 學 院, Taiwan. By providing information on Chinese calendar dates, as well as an onomasticon of person and place names from Buddhist sources they help with disambiguation and geo-spatial referencing of names and dates.

Produced by Chung-Hwa Institute of Budhhist Studies, Taiwan, which contains basic information of 1620 historical figures who had written about Budhhism, their works, and modern researches on them.

It is set up by Bukkyosho Somokuroku Kankokai 仏 教 書 総 目 録 刊 行 会 in Japan, which provides bibliographical search for published books related with Buddhist topics.

It provides a searchable index for both Daoist Canon 道 藏 and Taishō Shinshū Daizōkyō 大 正 新 脩 大 藏 經, and also a full-text database for a number of books which are related with Taoism, which is titled "A Searchable Database of Chinese Texts 漢 籍 テキスト·データベース 檢 索"(ALL of these systems are in JIS code). Besides, it also provides downloadable books which were published by Dokisha in PDF files, see Books Published by Dokisha 道氣社製作の本.

edited by Damien Keown, Charles S. Prebish

by Robert Buswell, Donald S. Lopez

by Robert Buswell, revised and expanded by William Bodiford

This site is maintained by Mahlon H. Smith of the Religion Department at Rutgers University. It is a part of the Virtual Religion Index. There is also a section on East Asian Studies with links to Confucian and Daoist resources. The links are well-annotated, and include content on several branches of Buddhism, including Nichiren, Pure Land, Tibetan, and Chan traditions.

Compiled in Vienna on Sino-Western cultural relations.

by Ad Dudink and Nicolas Standaert, (CCT-Database). This is a research database of primary and secondary sources concerning the cultural contacts between China and Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (from 1582 to ca. 1840). The cultural contacts comprise documents in the various fields of cultural interaction: religion, philosophy, science, art, etc.

History: The late Professor Erik Zürcher (1928-2008) took the initiative of compiling a bibliographical list of Chinese primary sources concerning Christianity in China in the seventeenth century. Since the 1980s, Ad Dudink and Nicolas Standaert have continued and elaborated the project and converted the data thus far collected into an online research database. In that form it is an on-going project, which makes it possible to continually add new sources and to update, revise or expand the description of sources already included.

Structure: The database is set up as a research database, both in regard to its content and search possibilities. The description of primary sources is intended as to be extensive and to allow for multiple links. In addition to the usual bibliographical references such as title, author, impressum or reprints, these references include: a content description, the mentioning of call numbers in major library collections, references to translations or secondary sources, and various notes on the author or text history. The database is multi-lingual in the sense that there are references to documents and publications in a wide variety of ancient and modern Asian and European languages. The primary and secondary sources are given a thematic category, which basically follows the categorisation of the Handbook of Christianity in China : Volume One (635-1800), Leiden : Brill, 2000.

How to use? The database is divided in "primary" and "secondary" sources. The primary sources are ca. 1050 Chinese texts documents dating from roughly the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. They include printed books, manuscripts, pamphlets and maps. There are over 4000 secondary sources, which, if applicable, are linked to the primary sources. Searches can be made in the whole database, or in the primary or secondary sources separately.

Access: The access to the database is free. You may also freely use its content, but on condition that you acknowledge it in the following way: Ad Dudink & Nicolas Standaert, Chinese Christian Texts Database (CCT-Database) (http://www.arts.kuleuven.be/sinology/cct), Sinology K.U. Leuven.

Additions and mistakes: The description of sources, especially primary sources, is still incomplete and therefore the authors will continuously insert further details and update existing descriptions. If you wish to propose additions or point out mistakes, send emails to: cct.database@arts.kuleuven.be. Substantial addenda or corrigenda will be acknowledged in the 'notes on author', 'notes on contents' or 'notes on text history.'

Today's hierarchy in the PRC is illegitimate in the eyes of the Vatican. Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau are up to date.

Hong Kong, China. Language: English, Chinese (Big5). Contents: (1) Historical Documents; (2) The Archives Holdings (1841-1969); (3) Rare Books; (4) Illustrated Catechism; (5) The Cathedral; (6) Church Buildings; (7) Leading Events (1841- ); (8) The Succession Line (1841- ); (9) Statistics (1705- ); (10) In Memoriam (short biographies of important figures of the Catholic Church in Hong Kong); (11) List of Popes (including the Chinese translations of their names); (12) 120 Chinese Martyrs; (13) Web Site Links.

Produced by The Ricci Institute for Chinese-Western Cultural History, University of San Francisco, USA. Self-description: "The Ricci 21st Century Roundtable Database adheres to the concept of shared data, and has established strong ties with institutions in China and Europe, so that the most relevant holdings are readily accessible to our users." Site contents: News; Archives; Bibliographies; Biographies; Directory; Images; Institutions; Locations; Sounds.

Part of Vatican Exhibit Main Hall, by the Library of Congress.

By Nanjing Library. This is a new project wit about 35,000 images already digitized and 4,925 are available online. The modern period is defined as 1840-1949, however for the initial stage the Nanjing Library is working primarily on 1911-1949. All images were taken from published works and not from original photographs. Although a date is provided, the source is not indicated at this time.

Maintained by Lu Miaw-fen at the Institute of Modern History.

The Society is a scholarly organization that promotes the study of the Ming dynasty (1368–1644). It publishes a journal and a book series, as well as sponsoring panels on Ming topics at the annual meeting of the Association for Asian Studies. This site includes both information about the Society and its activities and material of wider interest to scholars of the Ming, which is hosted by the Faculty of Arts, University of British Columbia, with support from the Department of Asian Studies. The "Resources" section of the site contains: A guide to reference sources (based on a former page named Guide to Ming Studies by Leo K. Shin, being updated); A selection from Matteo Ricci’s late-Ming map of the world, with an accompanying vocabulary list; A list of other relevant sites; Bibliographies of recent scholarship presented at meetings of the Society. Past issues of the journal Ming Studies are avaible online.

First established by Joseph Esherick and others at the University of California, San Diego. This site contains a bibliography of modern and contemporary Chinese history (Qing, Republican, and PRC). Now the website is designed and maintained by current students in the University of California, San Diego Modern Chinese History program.

A guide to bibliographies, indexes, dictionaries, encyclopedias, atlases and chronologies of use to those interested in all aspects of Chinese society during the Song Dynasty (960-1279). Peter Bol, Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University, published the first edition of Sung Research Tools in 1990. With the publication of the online guide in 2003 Song Research Tools went into its third edition. The online guide, now edited by Hilde De Weerdt, enables you to 1) browse the guide; 2) download the guide; 3) add and view comments (corrections or notes on use) to titles listed in the guide; 4) submit new titles; 5) search titles. For general comments and suggestions, contact Hilde De Weerdt at hdeweerd@utk.edu. Two hundred titles have been added since the previous update.

Located at the SunSite, University of North Carolina. The site includes model Beijing Opera, Chinese traditional music (various instrumental), ceremonial songs and music, historical voices, "Northwestern Wind" style songs, folk songs and local opera, and songs and music from TV series "Hong Lou Meng."

This site mainly focuses on studies on Chinese philosophy. Useful sources include: digital philosophical classics from various historical periods; guide to sources of Confucian studies; full-text of the journal of the society; index of philosophical research articles in Chinese.

This collection contains video interviews with people who experienced China’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (1966-1976). The CR/10 (Cultural Revolution: 10) Project also includes interviews with young Chinese people born after the Cultural Revolution, who discuss how they learned of this historical incident.

Documentary filmmaker Wu Wenguang launched the Memory Project in 2010 to collect oral histories from survivors of the Great Famine that devastated rural China between 1958 and 1961. More recently the project has also covered the Great Leap Forward of 1958-1960, the Land Reform and the Collectivization of 1949-1953, the Four Cleanups Movement in 1964, and the Cultural Revolution of 1966-1976. More than 650 interviews show regional variations in famine experiences and rural culture. They add intimate detail and humanity to the story of the deaths and starvation of millions of Chinese, providing a unique perspective on the unofficial history of the Great Famine.

The Chinese Railroad Workers in North America Project at Stanford conducted interviews with families who trace their lineage in China and North America to the Chinese who helped build the railroad. The project includes 50 conversations with descendants three, four, and five generations after the period of the workers who built the railroad. During the interviews, family members share documents, mementos, and stories that have formed their family collective memory.

The USC Shoah Foundation's Visual History Archive has collected 100 testimonies on the Nanjing Massacre. The testimonies are in Chinese and have been subtitled in English. Keywords have been indexed and are searchable.

The author of the book is Ka Wai Fan 范 家 偉, who is now a full-time lecture in the Chinese Civilization Center 中 國 文 化 中 心, City University of Hong Kong 香 港 城 市 大 學 (See Website). This book collected abundant online resources about Chinese medicine, which includes websites of digital museums, databases, bibliographies, organizations, schools and libraries, etc.

From FOREAST: the Internet East Asian Library, provides links to a number of websites containing pre-modern medical texts in East Asia:

Based on the Nukata Bunko, a book collection that the Nukata family accumulated over a period of four generations, this resource provides fulltext images of 43 Japanese medical books (in 275 volumes) that were printed from the 17th to 19th centuries. It was made available by Toho University in 2009.

Consists of four hundred Japanese woodblock prints on health-related themes. "It is the largest collection of woodblock prints related to health in the United States". – University of California, San Francisco.

This digital collection consists of 80 paintings of Chinese patients with large tumors or other major deformities. The portraits were painted by Chinese artist Lam Qua in 1830s, under the commission of Peter Parker, the first Protestant medical missionary to China.

Including one of the largest early photograph collections in Japan, and several collections related to history of modern science, medicine and economics in Japan.

Contains details of the library and its holdings, together with instructions for on-line searching.

Home Page by David Joyce.

By Nathan Sivin. "The purpose of this document is to outline basic sources in European and Asian languages for dealing with common problems that come up when reading literary and historical documents. Each section begins with an orientation that suggests how to get started in dealing with that class of problems. It then provides an annotated list of some important reference sources."

Sponsored by Technische Universitaet Berlin, Faculty I, Humanities.

Compiled and updated by Marilyn Shea, Department of Psychology, University of Maine at Farmington.

In conjunction with Academia Sinica, Taiwan, Beijing University, and Harvard-Yenching Institute, Cambridge, MA, USA. Language: Chinese ; English. Cited description: "[...] an online relational database with biographical information about approximately 40,000 individuals as of July 2008, primarily from the seventh through fourteenth centuries. The data is meant to be useful for statistical and spatial analysis as well as serving as a kind of biographical reference. The long term goal of CBDB is systematically to include all significant biographical material from China s history and to make the contents available free of charge, without restriction, for academic use." Contents: (1) Home; (2) History of the CBDB; (3) Collaborating Institutions and Editorial Committee; (4) Methodological Issues; (5) Mapping and Analyzing CBDB Data; (6) Structure of Data; (7) Work Progress; (8) Download CBDB Data; (9) Conferences and Papers; (10) First International Workshop on Biographical Databases for China's History; (11)Discussion Forum; (12) FAQ; (13) Chinese Homepage. Availability: Free. For more Biographical Databases, see:

2 vols. Washington: United States Government Printing Office, 1943-44. The electronic version is a beta version of an online database containing all the biographies in Hummel and is is available at the Dartmouth College Qing Research Portal, coordinated by Pamela Crossley. The database is searchable, although some functions are still in the works. Users are required to download some software (for free).