Academic Journals and Articles (Contemporary)
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Biblioteca Virtual de Macau
The Biblioteca Virtual de Macau (澳門虛擬圖書館) is a free online reading platform established in 1999 by the Macao Foundation (澳門基金會), dedicated to Macau studies (澳門學). The platform provides open access to thousands of publications in or about Macao, including books, academic journals, and dissertations from local government agencies, universities, and cultural organizations. In addition to a searchable library of books and journals (書刊文庫), the platform features a Scholar Zone (學者專區) profiling researchers working on Macao, an Institutional Directory (機構團體) connecting publishers and academic bodies, an Academic News section (學術動態), and themed online exhibitions (專題特展). A major redesign in 2022 expanded full-text search capabilities and integrated scholarly news and book reviews. The platform accepts submissions of Macao publications from organizations and individuals and has a companion mobile app. Content is available in Chinese and Portuguese.
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CNKI Journal Translation Project
The CNKI Journal Translation Project provides English translations from the most important articles from a carefully selected group of Chinese academic journals. A wide variety of fields is covered, from humanities and social sciences to exact sciences including medicine, with international studies featured: archaeology and cultural relics, biology, chemistry and materials, ecology, agronomy, economics, finance, education, physical culture, engineering technology, ethnology, religion, geoscience, management, mathematics, physics, medical science, politics, law, military, psychology, sociology and demography. The original Chinese is also included. Selection and translation is done by specialists in the field from all over the world. Each article has an abstracts and press release. Articles on current hot topics can also be accessed through special folders.
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China Academic Journals / CNKI
China Academic Journals (CAJ) via CNKI provides full text and/or full-image articles from 8,000+ Chinese academic journals spanning the humanities, social sciences, education, economics, politics, law, and science and technology fields, from first issue to date. Coverage includes the Literature, History, Philosophy, Economics, Politics, Law, Education, Social Sciences, and Electronic and Information Series. After accessing the database, users can switch between English and Simplified Chinese interfaces. Use the PDF format for downloading articles.
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China Monographic Series / CNKI
China Monographic Series gives access to journals that are infrequently published in monographic form rather than as continuously published journals. This happens mostly in the Humanities, but to a lesser extent also in the Social Sciences. These journals are not searchable in the main China Academic Journals database and have to be retrieved from a separate interface. The link to the database is available in the lower part of the CNKI welcome page. Use the PDF format for downloading articles.
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China Research Gateway
China Research Gateway (CRG) from East View Information Services brings together the full spectrum of Chinese research content in one comprehensive package, including substantial English-language content. CRG aggregates multiple databases for centralized discovery and access, spanning scholarly journals, reference works, statistical publications, government documents, newspapers, dissertations, conference proceedings, standards, images, and videos across STEM, the social sciences, and the humanities. Core components include CAJ China Academic Journals (covering 99.9% of academic journals published in China), China Master's Theses, China Reference Works, China Statistical Yearbooks, and China Conference Proceedings, supplemented by specialized subject databases for particular research needs.
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Duxiu
Duxiu (读秀) is a large-scale discovery and full-text database for Chinese-language academic content, comparable in scope to a combined Google Scholar and Google Books but with features unique to the Chinese academic publishing ecosystem. The database contains over 600 million full-text pages, with flexible search across books, journal articles, theses, web pages, and newspapers. Duxiu works best with Firefox; users may encounter problems when requesting PDFs using Chrome.
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Hong Kong Journals Online
Hong Kong Journals Online (HKJO) is a full-text image database developed by the University of Hong Kong Libraries, providing access to selected academic and professional journals in both English and Chinese published in Hong Kong. Subjects covered include philosophy & religion, social sciences, law, language & literature, science & technology, medical & health, buildings & construction, arts & recreation, and history & geography. Issues included vary from journal to journal, with the earliest going back to 1872. Currently, more than 491,290 images from over 60 titles are accessible in the database. New issues continue to be added as they are received, and more titles with granted digitization permissions are being included. Scholars doing research on Hong Kong will find this an invaluable resource.
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Kao gu
Kao gu (考古) is a peer-reviewed monthly journal of Chinese archaeology published by the Institute of Archaeology of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS). Founded in 1955, it is one of the premier journals in the field, publishing excavation reports, research articles, and field surveys on archaeological discoveries across China. Many articles include English abstracts. Full-text access to back issues is available through CNKI for subscribing institutions.
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NCL Taiwan Periodical Literature
The NCL Taiwan Periodical Literature (formerly PerioPath: Index to Taiwan Periodical Literature System / 臺灣期刊文獻資訊網), developed by Taiwan's National Central Library, was originally launched as the Index to Chinese Periodicals in January 1970. The database indexes Chinese and Western language periodicals primarily published in Taiwan since 1970, with some journals from Hong Kong, Macau, and Singapore also included. The database currently covers more than 5,500 journal titles with more than 2.76 million article citations, of which approximately 420,000 articles have been authorized by publishers for open-access full-text viewing. Some academic journals published before 1970 are also available. The system provides comprehensive indexing for post-WWII periodical literature from Taiwan.
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National Center for Philosophy & Social Science Documentation
Administered by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, the National Center for Philosophy and Social Science Documentation (NCPSSD) is a free open-access platform providing approximately 2,487 Chinese academic journals and collected works (期刊、集刊、辑刊), with over 27 million data entries covering philosophy, social sciences, and humanities. Journals are browsable by subject category (philosophy & religion, social sciences, politics & law, economics & management, cultural science, linguistics, literature, art, and history & geography), by national social science funding status, by core journal designation, by party-building designation, and by region. It includes approximately 20,000 Chinese rare books in high-resolution scans (with watermarks). Institutions can request IP-based access. The database interface is in Chinese only.
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National Palace Museum eJournals (Airiti)
Provides access to the periodicals published by the National Palace Museum in Taibei, Taiwan: the 3 Chinese periodicals Gugong wenwu yuekan (National Palace Museum Monthly of Chinese Art), Gugong jikan (National Palace Museum Quarterly), and Gugong xueshu jikan (National Palace Museum Research Quarterly) as well as the National Palace Museum Bulletin (published in English). All three Chinese periodicals are full-text searchable.
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PubScholar (Chinese)
PubScholar is a free public welfare academic platform launched in November 2023 by the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS). The platform provides access to over 107 million journal articles, as well as preprints, patents, dissertations, scientific datasets, and open-source software—totaling several hundred million academic resources. Content is primarily focused on the natural sciences, engineering, and technology, though social sciences are also represented. PubScholar offers AI-powered tools including 'Kexun Toutiao' (科讯头条), an automated subject intelligence monitoring platform, along with intelligent literature summarization and document-level OCR. The platform interface is available in both Chinese and English. It supports the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) and is committed to open-access cooperation with academic resource institutions at home and abroad.
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Renda funü yanjiu
Renda funü yanjiu (人大复印报刊资料·妇女研究) was a retrospective compilation of selected journal articles on women's studies in China, published as part of the Renmin University Copies of Chinese Periodicals (人大复印报刊资料) series, covering gender, women's rights, and women's history topics published between 1995 and 2001. The linked resource, Women's Studies Institute of China (WSIC, wsic.ac.cn), is operated by the All-China Women's Federation and provides online access to the journal 妇女研究论丛 (Collection of Women's Studies Research) along with related indexing resources for current women's studies scholarship in China.
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Sinica SinoWeb
This database gives access to past and (if applicable) current issues of the following Sinological periodicals published in Taiwan (mostly from the Academia Sinica): 中央研究院歷史語言研究所集刊, 中央研究院中國文哲研究集刊, 中央研究院近代史研究所集刊, 中央研究院近代中國婦女史研究, 中央研究院口述歷史期刊, 中央研究院近代中國史研究通訊, 中央研究院臺灣人類學刊, 中央研究院臺灣史研究, 漢學研究, 思与言, 鵝湖學誌, 鵝湖月刊, 食貨月刊, 民俗曲藝. The home page is in English; you may want to change to Traditional Chinese for better results. This database was previously offered as a stand-alone resource and is now hosted as part of the Taiwan Academic Classics (台灣學術經典) platform.
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Taiwan Electronic Periodicals Service
The TEPS (Taiwan Electronic Periodicals Service) database now included in the Airiti Digital Library offers an archive of several hundred Taiwanese periodicals in various subjects, including natural and applied sciences, medicine, the humanities, and social sciences. Full texts can be downloaded in PDF format. One can browse by title. The TEPS collection is part of the Chinese Electronic Periodical Service (CEPS) database. The majority of the journals included in the database are covered in electronic form from 2000 on-wards, but there are many journals with digital back issues going back to the mid-20th century. The database even includes some 1930s journals.
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Wanfang xueshu huiyi
Wanfang’s Academic conference papers database. Searches more than 2 million conference papers. Also browsable by topic and then year. Although an extra function “full text only” is available, differences between “all” and “full-text only” seem to be minimal. As with all Wanfang databases, once on the Wanfang home page, you can move from database to database via tabs. The “xue shu lun wen” tab combines several databases into one mega-search, and you can also combine searches across databases using the advanced search option.
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Wanfang xueshu qikan
Wanfang’s Online academic journals or Periodicals database . More than 22 million full-text searchable articles, which are also browsable by topic or journal. Covered years are fewer than the China Academic journals database (most journals do not go back further than 2001), and page numbers are only visible when viewing the article itself, not in the index. Hence, searching CNKI’s China Academic Journals should be your first choice for finding articles; yet, with exclusive online contracts on the rise in China, some journals may be only available in one database and not the other. Again, you can narrow down your results not only by using the topical and chronological facets, but also by typing within the tab-looking grey boxes on top of your results: e.g., by typing 2003 to 2008 in the starting and concluding year boxes. As with all Wanfang databases, once on the Wanfang home page, you can move from database to database via tabs. The “xue shu lun wen” tab combines several databases into one mega-search, and you can also combine searches across databases using the advanced search option.
Academic Journals and Articles (Late Qing and Republican)
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Chinese Periodicals of Modern Chinese Film
This database is a subsection of the Shanghai Library National Index to Chinese Newspapers & Periodicals. Other than most other parts of the National Index this subsection on film is full-text searchable. It gives access to 30 periodicals from the Republican period including titles such as 电声, 电影新闻, 电影, 电影杂志, 好莱坞, 电影话剧. Most of the content was published between 1930 and 1949.
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Dacheng
A text-searchable database of ca. 7,000 Chinese periodicals published from late Qing to 1949 in all fields of knowledge: the humanities, social sciences, exact sciences, as well as popular journals. Examples include the Shidianzhai huabao, Xiandai, Shaonian Zhongguo, Dazhong shenghuo, Guocui xuebao, Qingnian Zhongguo, Minfeng. Listings per subject area are provided. Contents are regularly updated. One can search by keyword in title in simplified or traditional Chinese, which retrieves article titles; clicking on such a hit retrieves the page with the term, which however is not highlighted. One can browse by category of publication (use the pop-up menu called +fenlei tixi). Clicking on a periodical title gives the issues available of that title; clicking on the issue gives a table of content. PDFs can be downloaded. Advanced searching (by article or periodical title) is available. This database complements the Quanguo baokan suoyin database.
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Early Chinese Periodicals Online (ECPO)
Early Chinese Periodicals Online (ECPO) is an open-access research platform developed by the Heidelberg Research Architecture at Heidelberg University, providing integrated access to digitized Chinese periodicals from the late Qing and Republican eras. The platform currently hosts over 300 publications with approximately 435,000 entries—including 300,000 scans, 85,000 records, and 50,000 agent names—with collections focused on women’s magazines (the WoMag database: four influential titles, 1904–1937) and entertainment newspapers (Xiaobao 小報). ECPO provides fully bilingual metadata in Chinese and English, an API in MODS XML format, and publishes its metadata on heiDATA, Heidelberg University’s research data repository.
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Early Chinese Periodicals Online (ECPO) (free)
Hosted at the University of Heidelberg, ECPO collects newspapers and other periodicals from the late Qing and Republican era. So far the emphasis has been on Chinese Women's Magazines in the Late Qing and Early Republican Period and Chinese Entertainment Newspapers ( Xiaobao 小報).
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Quanguo baokan suoyin
The Quan guo bao kan suo yin 全国报刊索引 (National Index to Chinese Newspapers & Periodicals) compiled by Shanghai Library is a collection of databases giving access to a diverse array of sources. The platform has a strong focus on the period from the late Qing Dynasty to the Republic. It also indexes articles published in Chinese periodicals from 1833 to current. Some of the resources are categorized index-only (in Chinese, pian ming shu ju ku 篇名数据库), some have the full-images of the indexed articles; the content itself is not text searchable (confusingly, and wrongly, this database is called quan wen shu ju ku, 全文数据库 in Chinese) and other parts of the resources on the platform are actually full-text searchable (全文搜索版). Most of the journal and newspaper publications from the late Qing and Republican periods are full-images of the indexed articles; lately the platform also has added Republican e-books which are full-text searchable. Post 1949 the database includes indexes only, and in most cases it would be better to search the China Academic Journals database instead. The three kinds of databases are integrated on one and the same platform. Downloadable articles show a pdf icon. For most flexible search, click on the "search center" icon (进入检索中心). You can then specify which database(s) to search, etc. The full-image databases include the Late Qing and part of the Republican Periodical databases (Wan Qing qi kan quan wen shu ju ku 晚清期刊全文数据库, 1833–1911, and Minguo shi qi qi kan quan wen shu ju ku 民国时期期刊全文数据库, 1911–1949). The Late Qing database includes 625 journals. The Republican full-image database currently includes some 22,000 journals. For most of the Late Qing and the Republican journals full-text searching is not possible. The database also includes a large number of Chinese and English language newspapers that are mostly indexed on the article title level. A small selection of newspapers is full-text searchable. One important feature of the database is that it indexes images (mostly news photography) and advertisements.
Archival Material
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Anti-Japanese War and Modern Sino-Japanese Relations Documents Platform
The Anti-Japanese War and Modern Sino-Japanese Relations Documents Platform (抗日战争与近代中日关系文献数据平台), developed by the Institute of Modern History at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, is a comprehensive free database focused on the Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945) and China-Japan relations more broadly. The platform provides access to a wide range of digitized Republican-era source types including archives, books, newspapers, journals, communist publications, audio recordings, photographs, and musical scores, spanning both official and unofficial sources and the broader Republican period beyond the war years. The database is regularly updated with new entries.
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Archives Unbound
Also known as the Declassified Documents Reference Service. These digital collections of historical material on many topics include manuscripts, printed books and periodicals, and government documents. The material comes from the U.S. National Archives, the U.K. National Archives, and many other libraries and archives. East Asian topics include: China (religion, Chinese Maritime Customs, Shanghai, international politics, economics, biographic material), Japan (religion, international politics, Japanese American internment, economics), and Korea.
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Archives of the Institute of Modern History, Academia Sinica
The online archive system of the Institute of Modern History (AIMH) at Academia Sinica provides catalog search and digital image viewing for over 682,000 archival records in five major categories: Foreign Ministry Collection (1861–2009), Economic Ministry Collection (1903–1980), Personal Papers, Institutional Materials, and Historical Maps. The Foreign Ministry Collection documents China's foreign relations from the Zongli Yamen (1861–1900) through the ROC Ministry of Foreign Affairs (1928–2009); the Economic Ministry Collection, the largest single set, spans commerce and economic agencies from 1903 to 1980. Approximately half of the total holdings have been digitized; 60 percent of digitized items are viewable online, while the remainder require on-site reading room access.
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British Colonial Policy and Intelligence Files on Asia, 1880–1950
This series comprises fourteen collections of historical British government documents pertaining to various countries in Asia and the Middle East on which intelligence was gathered. The original documents are part of the Oriental & India Office Collections (OIOC, now part of the Asia, Pacific, and Africa Collections), British Library, London.
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CR/10: China's Cultural Revolution in Memories
CR/10 (Cultural Revolution: 10) is an experimental oral history project documenting ordinary people's memories and experiences of China's Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), launched in December 2015 at the University of Pittsburgh. The project has posted 121 interviews in its Digital Collections, offering unmediated personal perspectives without imposing interpretive frameworks, conducted across various Chinese dialects and regional languages. The project also produced the documentary film 'The Revolution They Remember,' available on the project website, further disseminating these personal testimonies to broader audiences. CR/10 serves as a valuable primary source collection for researchers studying the social, rural, and human dimensions of the Cultural Revolution.
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China Reform and Opening Up Database
The China Reform and Opening Up Database (中国改革开放数据库) is a comprehensive documentary record of China's reform era from 1978 to 2018, organized in chronological format with four major sections: annual highlights, a chronology of major events, oral history interviews with reform participants, and material evidence and artifacts. Sponsored by the China (Hainan) Institute for Reform and Development, the database contains extensive full-text speeches, images, and oral history recordings documenting the forty-year reform period. Basic browsing is free, though downloading articles and images requires creating a personal account.
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China Unofficial Archives
The China Unofficial Archives (CUA, 中国民间檔案馆) is a publicly registered non-profit digital repository founded by journalist Ian Johnson, dedicated to preserving and making accessible documents, films, blogs, and publications by Chinese citizen historians offering alternative perspectives on PRC history. Fully bilingual in Chinese and English, the archive covers materials from before 1949 through current events, organized by topic, era, creator, and format, with all items available as free open-access downloads. The archive also maintains an active Substack newsletter with regular bilingual commentary and new acquisitions. An advisory board of scholars and archivists in multiple countries supports the project.
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China, America and the Pacific
An extensive range of archival material connected to the trading and cultural relationships that emerged between China, America and the Pacific region between the 18th and early 20th centuries. Manuscript sources, rare printed texts, visual images, objects and maps document this fascinating history. The resource includes a wide range of manuscript, printed and visual primary-source materials as well as other key features to support research and teaching. One can use the fully searchable interactive chronology to discover facts and world events, explore voyages to China using an interactive map, find out about different merchants and the companies they formed in the Merchant Biographies and view online exhibitions to find out about aspects of the collection. A helpful tour of the collection is available.
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China: Culture and Society
China: Culture and Society is a full-text searchable database of the often colorful pamphlets held in the Wason Collection of Cornell University, written mostly in English and published between c. 1750 and 1929. Types of material in the collection include addresses and speeches, annual reports, catalogues, examinations, guides, lecture notes, letters, magazine articles, minutes, etc. Some possible themes to be explored are: the arts, the Chinese diaspora, education, the foreign presence in China, foreign relations and diplomacy, governance, international conflict, language and literature, leisure, missionaries, opium, rebellion and revolution, science and medicine, trade, and travel and exploration.
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China: Trade, Politics and Culture
This database is based mainly, but not exclusively, upon the holdings of the Library of the School for Oriental and African Studies and the British Library. It consists of all kinds of English-language textual and visual sources relating to China and the West, with key documents relating to the Chinese Maritime Customs service, letters, diaries, color paintings, maps, drawings, photographs, and fully searchable missionary periodicals such as the Chinese Recorder. Important subjects treated include the Amherst and Macartney embassies, the Opium, Boxer, Russo-Japanese and Sino-Japanese wars, events such as the Taiping Rebellion, and the Rape of Nanking, and the missionary movements.
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Chinese Film and Newsreel Scripts from the Cultural Revolution Online
Online access to transcripts of documentary films and newsreels from China, 1946(?)-1985. The bulk of the items are from the Cultural Revolution, 1966-1976; all documents are in Chinese. The 1,750 items were created by the Central Newsreel and Documentary Film Studio (Zhong yang xin wen ji lu dian ying zhi pian chang), a cinema company with nation-wide responsibilities based in Henan province. This online version is directly based upon a previously published microfilm set entitled The Chinese Filmscript and Advertisement Collection; the text images are of intermediate quality and not full-text searchable. The collection is arranged into four series: Advertisements and Film Description Series, 1953-1966; Documentary and Newsreel Scripts, 1946(?)-1985; Feature Filmscripts, undated; and Newspaper Clipping Scrapbook, 1950-1959. The original items are held at Duke University.
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Digital Library of Qing Archives
The Digital Library of Qing Archives (清代檔案檢索系統) at the National Palace Museum in Taipei integrates the Grand Council Archives Database (清代宮中檔奏折及軍機處檔折件), the Qing Historical Figures Database (大清國史人物列傳及史館檔傳包傳稿資料庫), the Index to Qing Archival Volumes (清代文獻檔冊目錄資料庫), and additional NPM Qing holdings into a single searchable system. Free account registration is required to view full-text images online. The database is an essential resource for research on Qing dynasty government, biography, and bureaucracy.
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Digital National Security Archive (East Asian Parts)
The ProQuest Digital National Security Archive, produced in partnership with the National Security Archive at George Washington University, is a comprehensive collection of declassified U.S. government primary documents on U.S. foreign and military policy since 1945. The database includes over 750,000 documents organized into more than 40 topic-based collections. East Asian modules include: China: US Intelligence and China: Collection, Analysis, and Covert Action, 1945–2010; China and the United States: From Hostility to Engagement, 1960–1998. Japan: Japan and the United States—Diplomatic, Security, and Economic Relations, Parts I, II, and III (1960–2000). Korea: The United States and The Two Koreas, Parts I and II (1969–2010).
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Diplomacy and Political Secrets (China and the Modern World 3)
Diplomacy and Political Secrets comprises over 4,000 China-related historical documents selected from the following India Office Records: the Political and Secret Department Records, the Burma Office records, and the Records of the Military Department. These documents consist of manuscripts and monographs in the form of reports, memoranda, correspondence, pamphlets and official publications, intelligence diaries, accounts of political and scientific expeditions, travel diaries, handbooks and maps, reflecting the security concerns of British India regarding the frontier regions of China bordering British India (Xinjiang, Tibet, and Yunnan.) They range from 1869 through the cooperation between China and Britain during WWII.
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Folk History Archive
The Folk History Archive (民間歷史檔案庫) is hosted by the Universities Service Centre for China Studies (USC) Collection at the Chinese University of Hong Kong Library. The archive grew out of the Folk History Project, which collected personal testimonies, memoirs, and biographies documenting 20th-century Chinese social history from the perspective of ordinary people. The online collection includes approximately 500 original contributions — 70 novellas and over 400 articles — and provides downloadable metadata for over 9,000 records drawn from magazines, newspapers, and books. The site also lists related resources including book series, websites, and social media platforms. Note: the Folk History Project ceased active updates in 2022; the archive remains accessible through the CUHK Library LibGuides platform, and offline USC Collection holdings continue to be available for borrowing.
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Foreign Office Files for China, 1919-1980
The database "Foreign Office Files for China, 1919-1980" contains complete digitized images of all British Foreign Office files dealing with China, Hong Kong and Taiwan during the period 1919-1980. There are six subsections: 1919-1929: Kuomintang, CCP and the Third International; 1930-1937: The Long March, civil war in China and the Manchurian Crisis; 1938-1948: Open Door, Japanese war and the seeds of Communist victory; 1949-1956: The Communist revolution; 1957-1966: The Great Leap Forward; and 1967-1980: The Cultural Revolution.
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Grand Secretariat Archives
This database contains full text images of hundreds of thousands of government documents from the Ming and Qing dynasties. The database may be searched by responsible official, title, matter and document number. It is produced by the Institute of History and Philology, Academia Sinica, Taiwan. To login please click “licensed usage” 授權使用 on the entry website of the database. The contents of the previous Ming-Qing dang’an set in print is fully incorporated in this database. For some supporting material, including glossaries and Qing document samples arranged by kind, see https://newarchive.ihp.sinica.edu.tw/ .
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Grassroots Chinese History Archive
The Grassroots Chinese History Archive (GCHA) is an open-access digital archive hosting grassroots documents collected primarily in Tianjin between 2003 and 2011, focused on China's social, political, and cultural history from the 1950s through the 1970s. The archive contains two main collections: Tianjin's Cultural Revolution Collection, comprising documents created by mass organizations and discarded institutional records, and the Chen Xiuliang and Sha Wenhan Family Collection, featuring files related to two prominent Zhejiang provincial officials of the 1950s. Built by students and faculty at Simon Fraser University, the database supports keyword search, advanced search, and tag-based browsing, with new items regularly added.
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History Vault (East Asian parts)
Below are listed the modules of the ProQuest History Vault database that are related to East Asia: CIA Cold War Research Reports and Records on Communism in China and Eastern Europe, 1917-1976 This module consists of two major series of records: CIA Research Reports from 1946–1976 and records collected by Raymond Murphy on Communism in China and Eastern Europe from 1917–1958. Beginning in 1946 with reports of the CIA's predecessor, the Central Intelligence Group; The module includes reports on security, international questions, and biographical reports (including profiles of relatively unknown leaders). The Murphy Collection provides information on war recovery efforts, international aid, and the formation of countries and substantial information on the Chinese Communist Party. Confidential U.S. State Department and Diplomatic Post Special Files, Asia, 1945–1966 Contains documents State Department officials considered too sensitive or important to forward to the general Central Files. The set of State Department and Diplomatic Post records covers the U.S. occupation of Japan following World War II, development of postwar Japan, the San Francisco Peace Conference of 1951, and economic conditions in Japan; the Korean War, peace negotiations, U.S.-Korea relations, and the rebuilding of South Korea after the end of fighting in the Korean War; military and economic relations between Japan, Korea, and the U.S. in the 1950s. Confidential U.S. State Department Central Files, Asia, 1960–1969 These modules collects exclusively those U.S. State Department Central Files that have not been microfilmed by the National Archives: special reports on political and military affairs; studies and statistics on socioeconomic matters; interviews and minutes of meetings with foreign government officials; court proceedings and other legal documents; cables sent and received by U.S. diplomatic personnel; reports and translations from foreign journals and newspapers; and countless translations of high-level foreign government documents. The countries covered in this module are: China, Far East (general), Hong Kong, Indonesia, Japan, Laos, Philippine Republic, and Vietnam. Immigration: Records of the INS, 1880–1930 The files cover Asian immigration, especially Japanese and Chinese migration, to California, Hawaii, and other states. Japanese American Incarceration: Records of the War Relocation Authority, 1942–1946 The Records of the War Relocation Authority document the day-to-day running of the relocation camps from 1942–1946. The collection is organized by relocation center.
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History of Contemporary Chinese Political Movements
Primary sources only, three contemporary Chinese political movements; first the Chinese Cultural Revolution, second the Chinese Anti-Rightists Campaign, third the Great Leap Forward and the Great Famine. There is a fully functional search-engine in both Chinese and English, with data retrievable by author, subject, title, date, keywords, and (new!) locality (the documents themselves are in Chinese, naturally.) New features further include keyword highlight and toggle between Chinese and English. The Cultural Revolution database includes primary sources mostly written during the Cultural Revolution; memoirs and interviews are not included. Sections included are CCP documents, directives, and bulletins; speeches, directives, and writings concerning the Cultural Revolution by Mao Zedong, Lin Biao, and other CCP leaders; important newspaper and magazine editorials and articles; important documents of the Red Guards and the Mass Movement; and material regarding “heterodox thoughts.” Materials are indexed in both English and Chinese, but the text is in Chinese. There is a introduction by Yu Yingshi. The Anti-Rightist database includes more than 10,000 documents (directives, bulletins, speeches, editorials, published views and their denunciations, original archives) including the so-called “rightist” articles themselves. Included are also materials related to contemporaneous campaigns, including the prior Campaign against the Hu Feng Counterrevolutionary Clique, Campaign for Eliminating Counterrevolutionaries, and Socialist Transformation of Industry and Commerce, and the subsequent Debate over Red and Expert, Double-Anti Campaign, Movement for Opening One’s Heart to the Party, and Campaign to Pull Out White Flags and Plant Red Flags. The Great Leap and the Great Famine database includes more than 7,000 documents (directives, bulletins, internal reports, officials’ speeches, and major media commentaries with detailed citations.) Of the material 50% is from internal archives at various levels, including 3,000 highly classified records and investigative reports filed during the Great Famine. Included are documents on the context of these topics, as on such policies and campaigns as the state monopoly on grain purchase and marketing, the Collectivization of Agriculture, the Campaign to Eliminate Counterrevolutionaries, the Great Debate on “Red and Expert,” the “Dual-Antis” Campaign, the Campaign to “Open One’s Heart to the Party,” and the Campaign to “Pull Out White Flags and Erect Red Flags”.
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Hong Kong Literature Database
The Hong Kong Literature Database (香港文學資料庫), developed by the Chinese University of Hong Kong Library, is the first comprehensive database on Hong Kong literature. As of June 2024, the database contains nearly 670,000 records, including over 200 Hong Kong literary journals, literary supplements from 20 early Hong Kong newspapers, and approximately 18,000 monographs, with over 180,000 items available as full-text images. The database offers multiple search functions including full-text search and image viewing, accessible without geographic restrictions, and serves as a platform for literary news, organizational activities, and writer information.
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Hong Kong, Britain and China 1841–1951 (China and the Modern World 4)
A collection of documents from the British Colonial Office on colonial Hong Kong, providing detailed information on the political, military, social, economic, and external development of Hong Kong in the context of modern China, the British Empire in Asia, and the international politics of East Asia. Textual Analysis Tools allow for the identification and visualization of patterns, trends, and relationships, while the applied HTR (Handwritten Text Recognition) allows handwritten documents to be full-text searchable.
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Hong Kong, Britain and China 1965–1993 (China and the Modern World 5)
Digitized primarily from the records of British Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO 40 and FCO 21), this collection continues where Hong Kong, Britain and China Part I, 1841–1951 left off, and documents the process of Hong Kong maneuvering, surviving, thriving, and transforming into a modern international metropolis and financial center in the wider context of the Cold War. Textual Analysis Tools allow for the identification and visualization of patterns, trends, and relationships, while the applied HTR (Handwritten Text Recognition) allows handwritten documents to be full-text searchable.
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Imperial China and the West (1815-1881, part I & II)
Digitized in two parts from the FO 17 series of British Foreign Office Files held at the UK National Archives, Part 1 of Imperial China and the West provides General Correspondence relating to China from 1815–1905. The FO 17 series provides a vast and significant resource for researching every aspect of Anglo-Chinese relations during the nineteenth century, ranging from diplomacy and war, to trade, piracy, riots and rebellions within China, international law, treaty ports and informal empire, transnational emigration, and translation. The files provide archival sources which cover the Canton System, the Opium Wars of 1839–1842 and 1856–1860, and the presence of Britain and other foreign powers in China in the 19th century. The hand-written documents of FO 17 have been processed with Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) technology, as well as item-level information drawn from the Foreign Office Indexes in series FO 605. A detailed review of this database and its content is available from the Journal of East Asian Libraries https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2809&context=jeal .
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Journeys of the Soul
Eight hundred twenty-six episodes of Radio Free Asia's program Journeys of the Soul 心灵之旅, 1998-2018. Episodes featured in-depth interviews with some of the most prominent Chinese diaspora writers, poets, scholars, public intellectuals, dissidents, and human rights activists in contemporary time. The program host is the award-winning journalist Zhang Min 张敏. The interviewees include leading exiled figures who had been at the center of political or diplomatic crises--including as the late Nobel Peace laureate Liu Xiaobo 刘晓波, astrophysicist Fang Lizhi 方励之, Tiananmen student leader Wang Dan 王丹, and the "blind lawyer" Chen Guangcheng 陈光诚. Those interviews with witnesses and participants cover many historical events in China from the Anti-Rightist Campaign of 1957, Mao's Great Famine (1959-61), the Cultural Revolution, to the June 4th Movement and the Weiquan movement (Civil rights movements).
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Maoist Legacy
The Maoist Legacy Database (MLD), a project led by Daniel Leese at the University of Freiburg with European Research Council support, is a digital archive of several thousand original documents, handbooks, and personal dossiers from the 1950s through the 1980s, focused primarily on the post-Maoist period when tens of millions of “unjust cases” were revised under Hua Guofeng, Deng Xiaoping, and Hu Yaobang. The collection ranks among the most comprehensive worldwide on communist-era transitional justice and the politics of historical reckoning. Over 5,000 documents have been annotated and digitized; due to privacy laws, the majority of individual case files remain unavailable in digital format. Free account registration is required for access.
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Modern History Databases (MHDB)
The Modern History Databases (近代史數位資料庫, MHDB), maintained by the Institute of Modern History at Academia Sinica, is an integrated platform consolidating digital scholarly resources covering Chinese history from the Qing dynasty through the Republican period. The platform unifies resources from the Institute’s library, archives, Hu Shih Memorial Hall, and database research group, enabling cross-database keyword search across constituent databases covering archives, women’s journals and biography, urban tabloids, maritime customs records, grain prices, historical GIS, and specialized reference tools. Cross-database search is available with free registration; results are typically improved by searching within individual constituent databases.
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My China Roots
A resource for researching Chinese genealogy. Usable in English. Includes Chinese exclusion records, immigration case files, Identity certificates, zupus 族谱 and jiapu 家谱 (family tree books), alien case files, passenger lists, naturalization records, burial records, death records, association records and directories, financial records, military records, indices, and newspapers: Sai Gai Yat Po = Shijie Ribao = The Chinese World Newspaper 世界日報 (1909-1923) and Chinese Digest (1935-1936). The database has a focus on émigrés from Guangdong and Fujian province. Good resource for finding anglicized names.
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Nineteenth Century Collections Online
Large digital archive of 19th-century primary source collections from major libraries and archives worldwide, published by Gale. Includes monographs, newspapers, pamphlets, manuscripts, maps, photographs, and documents in multiple languages. East Asian content is found primarily in the 'Asia and the West: Diplomacy and Cultural Exchange' collection, which covers diplomatic correspondence and reports from US and British missions to China, Japan, Korea, and other Asian nations, as well as missionary records and periodicals related to Asian culture and society.
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Records of the Maritime Customs Service of China (China and the Modern World 2)
The Maritime Customs Service of China was a predominantly British-staffed bureaucracy under the control of successive Chinese central governments from 1854 until 1950. At the heart of Chinese trade, communications and international affairs, it was the only bureaucracy in modern China which functioned uninterruptedly between 1854 and the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949. The records in this collection - official correspondence, despatches, reports, memoranda, and private and confidential letters - constitute often unique evidence of Chinese life, economy and politics through the Taiping Rebellion, the Boxer Rebellion, the Revolution of 1911, the May 30 Movement, the two Sino-Japanese Wars, and the Chinese Civil War. The records are arranged into five sections: 1. Inspector General's Circulars; 2. London Office Files; 3. The Policing of Trade; 4. Semi-Official Correspondence from Selected Ports; and 5. The Sino-Japanese War and its Aftermath, 1931–1949. The records are in manuscript format.
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Telling Stories: Linguistic Diversity in Hong Kong
Telling Stories: Linguistic Diversity in Hong Kong is a comprehensive linguistic documentation project created by Professor Jette G. Hansen Edwards of The Chinese University of Hong Kong. The database showcases 195 stories collected from speakers of 70 different languages and varieties that have been historically spoken or are currently in use in Hong Kong. Each story is presented as speech samples with transcriptions in the original language/variety, translated into English, traditional Chinese, and simplified Chinese. Many also include video translations into Hong Kong Sign Language, making the resource accessible to the deaf community while helping document and preserve this endangered indigenous language. The project highlights Hong Kong's vibrant multiculturalism and multilingualism, serving as an educational tool and research resource for exploring linguistic diversity, minority languages, language endangerment, linguistic discrimination, and world Englishes.
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The Memory Project
The Memory Project (民间记忆计划) is a landmark oral history collection comprising approximately 740 digital video interviews (as of September 2024) documenting mid-20th century rural Chinese life, launched in 2010 by pioneering Chinese independent filmmaker Wu Wenguang through his Work Station documentary studio in Caochangdi, Beijing. More than 150 young filmmakers have visited 246 villages across 20 provinces between 2010-2016 to interview over 1,100 elderly villagers, primarily about the Great Famine (1958-1961), which caused 20-43 million deaths and is officially known in China as the “Three Years of Natural Disasters.” The project also covers the Land Reform and Collectivization (1949-1953), the Great Leap Forward (1958-1960), the Four Cleanups Movement (1964), and the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976). Many filmmakers returned to their families’ rural hometowns, creating new intergenerational relationships while documenting memories excluded from official state history. Duke University houses the project archives, providing raw footage and transcripts (many in regional dialects) to students, researchers, and the public. An accompanying website features an interactive map, timeline, and featured interviews.
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Tokyo Trials Literature Database
Full-text searchable database of documents and audio-visual resources covering the trials of World War II Japanese war criminals. The collection is published in stages. All documents will eventually be available in English, Chinese and Japanese. To access the database, click the 'Log In' button in the top menu and choose 'Institutional User Login' without entering any credentials.
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U.S. Intelligence on Asia, 1945-1991
Declassified documentary records of the U.S. intelligence community in the Far East during the Cold War (1945-1991). With focus on People's Republic of China, North Korea and North Vietnam. Also covered are Japan, Taiwan, Indonesia, Thailand, the Philippines, Malaysia, Singapore, and Australia.
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Unofficial Poetry from China
Unofficial Poetry from China is an internationally unique collection of unofficial or “underground” poetry publications—primarily journals—from the People’s Republic of China, held and digitized by Leiden University Libraries and made freely accessible online. The print collection was built by Maghiel van Crevel during fieldwork trips since the 1990s and extends from the late 1970s to the twenty-first century, with some materials from the high-socialist period; titles include Today (今天), Wings (翼, a feminist journal), and The Lower Body (下半身). The collection documents how unofficial poetry accommodates marginalized groups including avant-garde poets, precarious workers, and members of the queer community; a satellite research documentation collection (UNPOD) and related scholarly resources further support research use.
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Wenshi ziliao indexes
Wenshi ziliao are collections on local history that are being published on all administrative levels in form of open-ended series. The collecting and editing of Wenshi ziliao was first suggested in April 1959 by Zhou Enlai to document the experience of modernization 60 years after the reform movement of 1898. Local 文史研究馆所 were set up and supported by the Political Consultative Conference. During the past 60+ years they have often changed from internal to open publications and back. Estimations of the amount of Wenshi ziliao issues are hovering between 80,000 to 100,000 volumes. Here table of contents indexes are available for searching on each administrative level (with some exceptions like Xinjiang), and the underlying PDFs can also be downloaded for local use. Altogether there are about 1,250 documents with about 45,800 pages of article information for about 500,000 articles. So far online access is only available to a small subset of Wenshi ziliao. Lately the 抗日战争与近代中日关系文献数据平台of the CASS 近代史研究所 made some 16,000 volumes of Wenshi ziliao freely accessible .
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West China Missions Digital Repository
West China Missions Digital Repository at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville documents Canadian and American Protestant missionary activity in Sichuan Province from the late 1880s through 1951. Beginning as a small stream in the 1880s, missionary numbers swelled to hundreds by the 1920s, driven by Social Gospel theology emphasizing practical social reform through medicine, education, and community development rather than solely evangelization. Numbers dwindled during the 1930s due to civil unrest and WWII, before expulsion by the communist government in 1951. The repository presents open-access resources by and about West China missionaries, particularly photographs and ephemera from families of their descendants - materials often unavailable in institutional archives. The collection is compiled and researched primarily by Cory Willmott, emerita professor of anthropology. Materials document missionary daily life, medical work, educational institutions (West China Union University), interactions with Chinese communities, wartime experiences, and the complex legacies of missionary presence.
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Wilson Center Digital Archive
Wilson Center Digital Archive provides open access to documents, timelines, essays, and other resources related to modern international history of China, focusing primarily on the People's Republic of China (PRC) from its founding in October 1949 through 1989 (Tiananmen Square crackdown) and beyond. The Archive compiles materials from archives worldwide including formerly classified documents from US, Soviet, Eastern European, and Asian archives made available after the Cold War. Collections cover PRC domestic political and economic history, China's evolving global role, Sino-Soviet relations, Sino-American relations, the Korean War, Taiwan Strait crises, the Cultural Revolution, Reform Era, and China's relationships with Third World countries. The Digital Archive features expert annotations contextualizing documents, bilingual materials (Chinese/English), thematic collections organized around key events and issues, primary source document translations, and scholarly introductions.
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Zhongguo difang lishi wenxian shujuku
The documents in this database were brought together by the Center of Local Archives at Shanghai Jiaotong University. The archives (mostly in manuscript form) originate mainly from private collections in the provinces of Jiangsu, Anhui, Fujian, and Jiangxi. Major parts of the collections come from Shicang 石仓 (Zhejiang) and from Huizhou 徽州. Included are contracts, private and company ledgers, examination documents, medical prescriptions, local theater and opera material, court records, letters, family records, and various other types of material. The majority of the documents date from the Qing and Republican period, but there are also some Ming and PRC documents included. Currently, this database is the only one of its type in China. The texts have been arranged according to regions, with archives from families in the same region put together, by village. Various full-text and multidimensional searches are available in both simplified and traditional characters.
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Zhongguo shanghui dangan - Baoding juan
The China Chamber of Commerce Archives Database (Baoding Volume) includes archival records from 1908 to 1956. The archive documents the social and economic history of Baoding and North China over this period. The database is full-text searchable. It includes 50,000 pages of documents.
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Zhongguo sifa dangan -Jiangjin juan
This database collects legal archives of actual lawsuits during the Republican Era (1911–1949) from the archives of the Jiangjin District in the city of Chongqing, with a strong focus on materials from the 1920s. The collection consists of 12 categories with a total of 4,330 volumes and about 270,000 pages of documents. The first part mainly includes six categories: debt disputes, tenancy disputes, marriage disputes, tax law, property, and sales disputes. The second part mainly adds theft, fraud, family disputes, smoking and drug abuse, and also supplements the six categories of the first part.
Biographical Data
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Biographical Dictionary of Later Han to the Three Kingdoms (23 – 220 AD) Online
Biographical reference work for early China this biographical dictionary complements Michael Loewe's acclaimed Biographical Dictionary of the Qin, Former Han and Xin Periods (2000). Compiled by Rafe de Crespigny, the dictionary includes more than 8,500 biographical entries based on historical records and surviving inscriptions. The entries, including surnames, personal names, styles and dates, are accompanied by maps, genealogical tables and indexes.
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Biographical Dictionary of Occupied China
Biographical Dictionary of Occupied China (BDOC / Dictionnaire Biographique de la Chine Occupée) addresses a significant gap in scholarship on the Japanese occupation of China (1937-1945). Remarkably, no dedicated biographical dictionary on this subject exists in Chinese, Japanese, or Western languages. BDOC elucidates the structure of the Japanese occupation state through biographical pathways of key figures including Japanese officials, Chinese collaborators, resistance leaders, and other historical actors. Each entry provides internal cross-references and hyperlinks to external resources including the Biographical Dictionary of the International Labor Movement ("Maitron"), Biographical Dictionary of Republican China ("Boorman"), and Historical Dictionary of Japan. The bilingual (French/English) database examines the complex web of actors involved in occupation governance, collaboration, resistance, and wartime society.
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Biographical Dictionary of the Qin, Former Han and Xin Periods (221 BC - AD 24) Online
Biographical reference work for early China with almost 6,500 entries compiled by Michael Loewe. The work draws on primary historical sources as interpreted by Chinese, Japanese and Western scholars and is supplemented by archaeological finds and inscriptions.
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China Biographical Database Project (CBDB)
China Biographical Database Project (CBDB / 中國歷代人物傳記資料庫) is a freely accessible relational database containing biographical information about approximately 649,533 individuals as of May 2025, primarily from the 7th through 19th centuries (Tang through Qing dynasties). Developed collaboratively by Harvard University, Academia Sinica, and Peking University, CBDB is one of the largest and most comprehensive prosopographical databases for pre-modern China. The database includes information on kinship relations, social connections, office-holding, examination degrees, literary works, and geographical locations associated with historical figures. CBDB enables researchers to conduct network analysis, study elite circulation, trace intellectual lineages, examine social mobility, and analyze patterns of political power across Chinese dynastic history. Data can be accessed through web interface or downloaded in Access and SQLite formats for offline analysis.
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China Vitae
China Vitae is a foundation-supported activity whose objective is to provide current information on China 's leaders to scholars, analysts, and the general public. It consists of an English language database containing detailed biographies of thousands of Chinese leaders. Free of commercials, pop ups, and banners, the database is highly searchable, using state-of-the-art tools to find officials by name, institution, or location. A special comparison engine allows users to identify similarities in the backgrounds of officials. Another search tool tracks daily appearances of the most important officials.
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Jinshi Examination Database
Compiled by Professor Gong Yanming from Zhejiang University and constructed by Zhonghua Shuju, this is the first section of the larger Biographical Examination Database (历代科举人物数据库). It records information on all Jinshi degree holders throughout Chinese history, including their regional and ancestral origins. The database currently includes information on over 102,000 Jinshi degree holders with search options by regional origin, dynasty, year of degree, and surname, and both accurate and fuzzy searches are available. Each entry cites its historical sources, and statistical analysis functions are also provided. To access, click on 登录 and choose IP登录. Copying is limited to 200 characters at a time using the built-in pop-up copy function; downloading is not possible. Users may also register a personal account for features such as saving searches and submitting corrections.
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Modern China Biographical Database
Modern China Biographical Database (MCBD) is a freely accessible relational database recording historical actors active in China during the Late Qing and Republican periods (1830-1949), regardless of origin, nationality, or duration of presence. MCBD currently holds data on over 75,000 individuals, 20,000 positions, 6,000 curricula/degrees, 10,000 institutions, and 14,000 companies. A distinctive feature is presenting individuals under all forms their names took, including Chinese characters and various Western-language transliterations, addressing the complex challenge of name standardization across linguistic boundaries. The database captures the diverse actors who shaped modern China's transformation—Chinese and foreign officials, educators, missionaries, businesspeople, journalists, intellectuals, and revolutionaries. The database is built on the Heurist platform (huma-num.fr) and designed for both individual queries and large-scale prosopographical analysis of institutional development, elite networks, educational systems, commercial enterprises, and transnational connections.
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Treasury of Lives
Treasury of Lives is a comprehensive biographical encyclopedia of Tibet, Inner Asia, and the Himalayan region, in continuous development since 2007. The open-access platform provides accessible, well-researched biographies of notable deceased individuals native to the region, including religious teachers, political leaders, scholars, artists, and other significant figures primarily from Tibetan Buddhist traditions. Most biographical essays are peer-reviewed, ensuring scholarly rigor. Content is enhanced by a dynamic interactive map showing geographic connections and movements of historical figures, genealogical information, and links between individuals. The database covers figures from ancient times to the modern era, with particular strength in documenting the religious and intellectual history of Tibetan Buddhism across the Tibetan plateau, Mongolia, Bhutan, Nepal, and other Himalayan regions.
Classical Texts
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Academia Sinica Hanji wenxian ziliaoku
Full-text database of classical Chinese texts digitized by the Institute of History and Philology of the Academia Sinica, Taipei. The database is UTF-8 encoded with no additional font download required. Click on 「shouquan shiyong」 (authorized access) to enter. For a listing of titles included, click on 書目瀏覽 and then search by title with nothing in the search box.
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Bianjiang Lishi Dili Shujuku
This database has two parts. The first part called 史地經典文庫 collects full-text historical textual material on the Chinese borderlands dating from the Ming Dynasty to the Republic in the punctuated editions by Zhonghua shuju. The second part 邊疆史料文庫 gives access to Republican monographs, periodicals, government gazettes and other documents on the history of the border regions. The original printed text is displayed side-by-side with a fully searchable digital edition of the text for comparison. Downloading is not possible. Copying (with a maximum of 200 characters at a time after signing in) is possible, but only using the pop-up copy function, not the usual browser function. To use the database you need to register a personal account. To sign in, choose 登录 on the upper left and then switch to 邮箱登录 on the following page. Please note: This database does not fully support the Firefox browser.
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Buddhist Digital Archives
Buddhist Digital Archives (BUDA) is a collaborative platform developed by the Buddhist Digital Resource Center (BDRC) providing open-source, open-access to Buddhist texts across multiple Asian languages. The platform contains vast collections of Tibetan Buddhist works alongside materials in Sanskrit, Chinese, Pāli, Burmese, and Khmer. BUDA represents one of the world's largest repositories of Tibetan Buddhist literature, with hundreds of thousands of scanned pages from canonical works, commentaries, ritual texts, historical documents, and philosophical treatises. The innovative platform features advanced search capabilities, image viewers for manuscript materials, text transcriptions where available, and metadata describing texts, persons, places, and topics. Resources come from BDRC's own digitization efforts and partner collections worldwide, including major monasteries, libraries, and private collections in the Himalayan region and beyond.
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CHANT (Chinese Ancient Texts)
The CHANT (CHinese ANcient Texts) databases, compiled under the Institute of Chinese Studies of the Chinese University of Hong Kong since 1988, give full-text access (single words, phrases and sentence patterns) to all traditional texts from the Pre-Han period through the Six Dynasties (581 AD), covering over 30 million characters. Texts are divided into two databases: Pre-Han & Han (Xian Qin Liang Han), and Six Dynasties (Wei Jin Nanbeichao). During compilation, different versions of the same texts were carefully compared and modern punctuation was added. CHANT also includes databases of excavated wood/bamboo and silk scripts (the Zhu-jian-bo shu database), oracular inscriptions (the Jiaguwen database), and bronze inscriptions (Jinwen), as well as a database of extant Chinese encyclopedias (Leishu). To enter, click first on 'dengru wenku', and then on 'jigou yonghu dengru' (IP user only; no password is necessary for institutional IP access). Navigation until entering each database is slow; searching is faster. To use the databases fully, download and install the specialized fonts from the download page after logging in.
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Chinese Rare Book Digital Collection, Library of Congress
The Chinese Rare Book Digital Collection at the Library of Congress makes available approximately 2,000 digitized titles drawn from the 5,300 Chinese rare books held by the Library’s Asian Division. Holdings span the 11th through 20th centuries and include Song, Yuan, and Ming dynasty block-print editions, manuscripts, Buddhist sutras, works with hand-painted illustrations, local gazetteers, and ancient maps. Among the most notable items are texts dating to the 11th or 12th century that are unique surviving copies not held by any other major library in China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, or Japan. Materials are freely searchable and accessible through the Library of Congress Digital Collections interface.
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Chinese Text Project
Chinese Text Project (CTP / ctext.org) is a comprehensive open-access digital library of pre-modern Chinese texts, with particular focus on pre-Qin (before 221 BCE) and Han dynasty (206 BCE-220 CE) materials. Founded by Donald Sturgeon, the platform now contains tens of thousands of texts spanning from ancient classics to late imperial works, organized by traditional categories including Classics (經 jing), History (史 shi), Masters/Philosophy (子 zi), and Collected Works (集 ji). The site provides accurate transcriptions with parallel translations where available, powerful full-text search across the entire corpus, concordance tools, statistical analysis, and cross-referencing between editions. Advanced features include automated textual analysis, markup tools for collaborative annotation, API access for computational research, and integration with other digital repositories.
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Dharmamitra
Dharmamitra is an integrated ecosystem developed at UC Berkeley for studying Buddhist texts across Pāli, Sanskrit, Tibetan, and Buddhist Chinese languages. The platform provides powerful, accessible tools addressing real-world needs of translators, researchers, and scholars: MITRATranslate offers machine translation from classical Buddhist languages (Pāli, Sanskrit, Tibetan, Buddhist Chinese) into modern languages, trained on Buddhist corpus-specific terminology and concepts; MITRASearch provides multilingual semantic search finding conceptually related passages across the entire Buddhist canon regardless of source language, enabling identification of parallel texts, doctrinal development, and intertextual relationships; MITRA-OCR utilizes Gemini-based AI for document-level OCR of Buddhist texts up to 100MB, handling classical scripts and layouts; DharmaNexus explores intertextuality within Buddhist literature based on the open-source BuddhaNexus initiative, mapping textual reuse and transmission patterns.
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Dianjin
Dianjin (典津) is the successor to the Global Image Catalogue of Ancient Chinese Book Collections (全球漢籍影像開放集成系統 / GIC-ACBC), a digital image retrieval platform for ancient Chinese texts developed jointly by Tsinghua University and CNKI (China National Knowledge Infrastructure). The platform aggregates digitized images of ancient Chinese texts from over 90 databases worldwide, with the current collection comprising over 753,000 entries. It supports comparative textual research, rare edition discovery, and version comparison by providing unified access to dispersed global holdings of Chinese classical texts. Access now requires institutional or individual login registration.
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Diaolong database collection
Database of classical Chinese and Japanese texts providing full-text access to a wide range of major collections, including: the Zhengtong daozang (Daoist scriptures) and Daozang jiyao; manuscript collections from Dunhuang; the Imperial Encyclopedia (Yongle dadian); the Imperial Library (Gujin tushu jicheng); collected historical material on the Qing dynasty (including the five-dynasty huitian, Qing shilu, and Jinshen quanshu series); a collection of old Japanese books; the two collectanea Sibu congkan and Sibu beiyao; and the Siku quanshu, Xuxiu siku quanshu, Siku catalog, banned books from the Siku, and supplemental texts to the Siku. An alternative access portal (Fanyun wenxian 繃雲文獻) is available; select 古籍文獻 to access the same content.
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Digital Library of Chinese Rare Books
A collaborative digitization project, sponsored by Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange Program, which includes Chinese rare books digitized from the collections of four participating libraries: the Asian Division of the Library of Congress, the East Asian Library and the Gest Collection of Princeton University, the Harvard-Yenching Library of Harvard University, and the Fu Ssu-Nien Library of the Institute of History and Philology of the Academia Sinica in Taiwan. Each library provided some 100,000 images, covering between 171 and 295 titles each. They have now been made available free of charge to the world. A description of the project is available.
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Digital Repository of Chinese Manuscript Literature
Zhongguo xieben wenxian shuzi ziyuan ku (中國寫本文獻數字資源庫/ Digital Repository of Chinese Manuscript Literature) is operated by the China Academic Digital Associative Library (CADAL) at Zhejiang University. The database provides free access to digitized Chinese manuscript materials, with primary focus on Dunhuang manuscripts from Cave 17 (Library Cave) and other Silk Road sites. Images currently derive mostly from collections in China and the UK (British Library, which holds approximately 14,000 Dunhuang items), with plans to expand coverage to include holdings from France, Russia, Japan, and other international collections. Beyond Dunhuang materials, the database includes collections of local manuscript documents, particularly land contracts, property deeds, and legal documents from various Chinese regions spanning multiple dynasties. These non-canonical manuscripts provide crucial evidence for social history, economic relations, and daily life in pre-modern China. The platform offers high-resolution images with OCR capabilities where applicable, searchable metadata, and cross-references to related materials. The image viewer works best with Edge and Chrome browsers.
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Dunhuang wenxian ku
Full-text and image database of texts discovered at Dunhuang. When complete, the database will provide access to 30,000 titles and documents; currently some 3,000 texts are available in both full-text searchable and original image format. The database is unique in providing interlinear notes, corrections, overlapping and upside-down characters, and images alongside the searchable text. To access, select 'Ancient Classics' on the platform landing page, then choose login and click 'jinru' (enter) on the database home page.
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Fojiao Jingdian ku
The Buddhist Classics Database provides full-text access to collections of Buddhist scriptures, with scans of original scriptures viewable side-by-side with the machine-readable text. The first installment includes the Qisha Song Tripitaka (宋碧砂藏) and the Zhaocheng Jin Tripitaka (金赵城藏). To access, select 'Ancient Classics' on the platform landing page, then choose login and click 'jinru' (enter) on the database home page.
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Gujin tushu jicheng
The Gujin tushu jicheng , compiled by Chen Menglei et al. and published with movable copper type in 1726-28, is by far the largest leishu to have been printed (6,109 subsections, 852,408 pages.) Under each subsection excerpts from sources are gathered from the beginnings of writing to the 17th century, from a 18th-century standpoint. The full text is included in the Taiwan Academic Classics Database. You can search the full text, but resulting pages are also viewable as PDFs. To browse individual parts of Gujin tushu jicheng , you can open the menu on the left by clicking on 標點古今圖書集成. You will then be able to browse by different categories. Please also note the possibility to switch the language of the interface to English on the top of the page. Alternatively the Diaolong database collection also provides access to the Gujin tushu jicheng .
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Harvard Yenching Chinese Rare Books
Harvard-Yenching Library’s Chinese Rare Books collection (13th–19th centuries) includes Chinese books from the 13th to 19th centuries covering classics & history, philosophy, collectanea, and unique manuscripts. The collection comprises: 1,500 Song, Yuan, and Ming block-print books (with 188 titles not found in any major libraries in China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, or Japan — representing unique surviving editions), approximately 1,500 manuscripts including holographs (original manuscripts in authors’ own handwriting), Song, Yuan, and Ming encyclopedias (leishu 類書) including Sancai tuhui 三才圖會, Shantang sikao 山堂肆考, and Tang leihan 唐類凵, nearly 2,600 gazetteers (including 720 rare editions from Ming through Qianlong period), banned books (禁書 / jinshu) censored during imperial periods, and women’s writing — a rare category systematically excluded from traditional canons. Materials are accessible through digital catalog.
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Lidai jiao wai she fo wenxian shujuku
A database of Buddhist-related documents from non-Buddhist sources published by Zhonghua Shuju, assembled and punctuated by Prof. Li Shen 李申 of Shanghai Normal University. Collects a wide variety of documents including edicts, monastery records, stele inscriptions, rock carvings from Buddhist sites, philosophical texts, and poems, drawn from sources including the Siku quanshu, Xuxiu siku quanshu, various inscription collections, Quan Song wen, Quan Liao wen, Ming-Qing shilu, local gazetteers, and many other sources. The collection is divided into four sections: Jin shi fo zong 金石佛蹤, Shi bu fo ji 史部佛跡, Zi bu fo ying 子部佛影, and Ji bu fo lun 集部佛論; each section can be browsed individually or searched simultaneously. To access, click on 登录 and choose IP登录. Users may register a personal account for features such as copying text and saving searches.
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Lidai shiwenji zongku
The Lidai shiwenji zongku 歷代詩文集總庫 (formerly Lidai bieji ku 歷代別集庫) is an Erudition (Airusheng) classical text database consisting of the collected poetry and prose writings of individual authors, covering the full range of pre-Ming, Ming, and Qing authors as well as multi-author anthologies—over 9,000 titles in total, carefully digitized and checked for optimal full-text searching. To access, select 'Ancient Classics' from the platform landing page, then choose 歷代詩文集總庫; sub-databases for 'Ming qian', 'Ming 1', 'Qing 1', 'Qing 2', and 'zongji bian' will be highlighted.
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Ming Qing Women's Writings
Ming Qing Women's Writings (明清婦女著作) is a digital archive and database dedicated to the digitization and documentation of writings by women in late imperial China (1368–1911), originally launched at McGill University in 2005 and now hosted and maintained by Academia Sinica (updated October 2025). Close to 5,000 collections of poetry and writings by individual women are recorded for the Ming and Qing periods, though less than a quarter have survived. Each writer entry links to the China Biographical Database hosted at Harvard University. Digital assets were provided by partner libraries including Harvard-Yenching Library, Peking University Library, Sun Yat-sen University Library, and the Chinese University of Hong Kong Library.
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National Library of China e-resources
National Library of China e-resources (中国国家图书馆数字资源) provides free public access to 21 specialized databases through the China Ancient Books Protection Network (中国古籍保护网). Databases include: Digital Rare Books (数字古籍) with works dating to Song-Yuan-Ming-Qing dynasties; Digital Gazetteers (数字方志) covering local histories nationwide; China Genealogical Database (中华寻根网) with bibliographic information on nearly 30,000 family histories (家谱) and reading access to more than 2,000, plus over 6,000 gazetteers linked into the system; Zhaocheng Jin Tripitaka (赵城金藏) — rare Buddhist canon; Chinese New Year Prints (年画汀英); Rubbings Database (碑帖精华) supporting full-text searching of transcribed rubbings, with particular depth for the Tang and Qing periods; Collected Works of Song Dynasty Authors (宋人文集, focusing on first editions); Oracle Bones Database (甲骨世界); Tangut Texts (西夏文献) and Tangut Studies Bibliography (西夏论著); Historic Photographs (前尘旧影); Huizhou Genealogies (徽州善本家谱); Classical Chinese Medicine Works (中华医药典籍资源库); Dunhuang Manuscripts from Bibliothèque Nationale de France (法藏敦煌遗书); Yunnan Library Rare Books (云南图书馆古籍); Tianjin Library Rare Books (天津图书馆古籍); Shanghai Library Family Histories (上海图书馆家谱); Toyo Bunko Rare Chinese Books (东文研汉籍影像库); Harvard Yenching Library Rare Books (哈佛大学善本特藏); and the Union Catalog of Chinese Rare Books (中华古籍善本联合书目) — a catalog of 3,481 editions of rare books in Chinese and international collections.
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National Library of China e-resources - 中国国家图书馆数字资源
The National Library of China (NLC) has opened 31 databases on its 中国古籍保护网 to the public, with additional databases on Republican materials and national minorities added recently. All databases are freely accessible. Sub-collections include: 数字古籍 Digital Rare Books; 数字方志 Digital Gazetteers (side-by-side transcribed text and image; not full-text searchable); 中华寻根网 China genealogical database (bibliographic information on 30,000 jiapu, reading access to over 2,000 titles, biographical entries for 14,000 individuals); 赵城金藏 Zhaocheng Jin Tripitaka (scan access only); 年画撷英 New Year prints; 碞帖精华 Rubbings database (full-text searchable transcriptions); 宋人文集 Collected works of the Song; 甲骨世界 Oracle Bones; 西夏文献 Tangut texts; 名家手稿 Famous author manuscripts; 徽州善本家谱 Huizhou Jiapu; 中华医药典籍资源库 Classical works of Chinese medicine; 法藏敦煌遗书 Dunhuang collections of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France; rare book collections from Yunnan, Tianjin, Yangzhou, Shanghai Library, Toyo Bunko, Harvard Yenching, and Shandong University; 民国时期文献 (approx. 100,000 titles of Republican e-books); 民国法律 Republican laws; 民国期刊 (approx. 8,000 Republican journal titles); 民国报纸 selected Republican newspapers; 电子图书 modern e-books; 博士论文 doctoral thesis index; 民族文字古籍特藏库 national minorities rare books; 日本细菌战资源库 Japanese Bacteriological Warfare database; 东京审判资源库 Tokyo Trials database (note: different from the Tokyo Trials Literature Database developed by Shanghai Jiaotong University); and 中华古籍善本联合书目 Chinese Shanben Catalog. NLC does not currently provide a central search index across all databases; most collections are listed in the Zhongguo Yanjiu Faxian discovery system.
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Sibu congkan
Fully searchable collection of 504 original and historical works (3,134 volumes) published by the Commercial Press in 1919–1936. The original collection used photolithography, which resulted in higher-quality editions than the then-available typeset editions. Both full-text search and page images of the authoritative editions are available. The Sibu congkan is also accessible via the Diaolong database collection.
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Siku quanshu
Electronic database published by Digital Heritage Publishing Ltd. (Hong Kong) in association with the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Contains the complete contents in full text and image of the 3,460+ titles of the Wenyuange edition of the Siku quanshu (1782), totaling over 800 million characters arranged under almost 2 million piece titles. Titles include large compilations such as the Quan Tang shi, Zi zhi tong jian, Wen xuan, Pei wen yun fu, Tai ping yu lan, and the 25 Histories. Note that the Siku quanshu editions are not always the best available or complete, as the compilation involved censorship. Features include linked dictionaries and the ability to save notebooks. The Siku quanshu is also available via the Diaolong database collection.
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Taiwan Academic Classics
Taiwan Academic Classics (TAC) is an interdisciplinary digital research platform from United Digital Publications that brings together over 6,600 classical texts spanning China's earliest dynasties, approximately 300 academic journals in the humanities and social sciences, and more than 100,000 dissertations in Chinese studies. The platform integrates content from leading Taiwanese academic institutions, including journals and rare materials from Academia Sinica and the National Palace Museum, searchable across two billion characters. TAC also includes the punctuated full-text edition of the Gujin tushu jicheng and the Scripta Sinica journal database.
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The Ming History English Translation Project
The Ming History English Translation Project is a collaborative, ongoing effort to translate portions of the 明史 Mingshi (Official History of the Ming Dynasty) and other Ming-era texts into English. The Mingshi, presented to the Qing throne in 1736 and published in 1739, contains valuable information on Ming government, society, and prominent individuals from the period 1368–1644. The site also provides translations from the Da Ming Huidian (大明會典) and other Ming sources, contributed by scholars and students primarily under Creative Commons licenses. Originally founded at UC San Diego, the project is currently maintained by Yiming Ha at Hong Kong Baptist University.
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Xuxiu siku quanshu
Set of 5,328 full-text searchable classical Chinese titles forming an important addition to the Siku quanshu. Based on an assessment of important works post-dating the 18th-century Siku compilation, it is arranged in the same classification scheme and is strongest in Qing material, but also includes better versions of some earlier texts. Originally published in 1,800 volumes drawn from over 80 Chinese libraries. The database allows comparison of OCR text with original page images. Available as part of the Diaolong database collection; note that the Xuxiu Siku quanshu content appears as 'Siku fenlei shu 四庫分類書' in the Fanyun wenxian 繃雲文獻 alternative portal.
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Zhongguo jiben guji ku
One of the Erudition (Airusheng) classical text databases, containing approximately 10,000 traditional titles (plus 4,500 additional editions of the same titles) covering a wide variety of subjects from many historical periods—from the pre-Qin era through the Republican period. Full-text searchable with page images available for comparison. It has become the most widely used classical Chinese text database in the PRC. Note that OCR character conversion errors can occur; consulting image-based texts may be necessary. To access, select 'Ancient Classics' from the platform landing page, then choose the database and click 'jinru' (enter).
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Zhongguo suwen ku
When complete, this database will contain more than 10,000 pieces of Chinese popular literature across various genres—including bianwen, baojuan, shanshu, huaben, zhanghui xiaoshuo, zaju, chuanqi, zhugongdiao, and guci—all in full-text format alongside images of the original source pages (including manuscript fragments from Dunhuang). Each genre can be searched independently. Published by Erudition (Airusheng).
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Zhonghua jingdian guji ku
The Zhonghua Classics Database contains the standard punctuated versions of many important Chinese classical texts in philosophy, history, and literature (including biji), as published by Zhonghua Shuju and other major punctuated-edition publishers. The database also includes the 360-volume Quan Song Wen 《全宋文》 as e-books. In addition to browsing titles in full, the database has been optimized for simultaneous searching of character variants (defaults adjustable in advanced search), with especially useful tools for searching variants of biographical data and place names. Dictionary and chronology-converter functions are embedded and activate automatically when a character is selected in the main text. Access is via IP authentication; no individual registration is needed for basic reading and searching. For additional features—copying text (maximum 200 characters at a time via the pop-up copy function), making notes, submitting corrections, and saving searches—individual account registration using an email address is required. The original printed text is available for comparison by clicking the orange page numbers in the running text. Downloading is not possible. Works well with Chrome; some page-image display issues have been noted with Firefox.
Dictionaries
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Grand Ricci Online
Le Grand Ricci is to all purposes the most comprehensive bilingual dictionary of Chinese (into French) in the Western world. It covers three millennia of the Chinese language, from the Classics to the modern age, and is encyclopedic in its scope. The compilers were able to draw on the full range of French sinological expertise in completing the project, and has paid especially attention to specialized terms in a wide variety of fields (religion, medicine etc.) It contains 13,392 main entries (single characters) and 280,000 expressions (or Chinese words composed of a set of characters). Entries can be looked up by Chinese character, by romanization (pinyin), by radical and strokes, and by the total number of strokes.
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Ricci Dictionary of Chinese Law
Trilingual (Chinese, English, French) dictionary on Chinese law with approximately 24,000 legal terms. Includes ancient law. Part of BrillOnline Chinese reference library. Has separate versions in Traditional and Simplified Chinese characters.
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Thesaurus Linguae Sericae (TLS)
The Thesaurus Linguae Sericae (TLS) is an historical and comparative encyclopaedia of Chinese conceptual schemes, designed as a collaborative forum for the close reading of Chinese texts in cross-cultural conceptual history. It provides a corpus of classical Chinese texts—wherever possible with interlinear translations—linked to an analytic dictionary of the Chinese language. The Thesaurus was founded by Christoph Harbsmeier (University of Oslo) and is developed in cooperation with the Center for Informatics in East-Asian Studies (Kyoto University). It is hosted by the Heidelberg Centre for Transcultural Studies (HCTS) at Heidelberg University.
Dissertations and Theses
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Chinese Doctor and Master Dissertations / CNKI
Selected dissertations and theses from the PRC in all subject areas. Due to Chinese government intervention access is currently limited to Humanities subjects only.
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Chinese Electronic Theses and Dissertations (airiti library)
Selected dissertations and theses from various universities in Taiwan, as well as Hong Kong University, are available in this database. Starting dates vary; HKU starts in 1990, other institutions in the 2000s. The database has moved into the general AiritiLibrary platform, which also includes Taiwanese periodical literature. To retrieve theses specifically, searches should be limited to 'CETD'. Includes more dissertations than the free National Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations in Taiwan (NCL).
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Dissertation Abstracts (ProQuest Dissertations & Theses: Full Text)
Access to citations and abstracts for every title in the Dissertation Abstracts database, including those on East Asia. Dissertations written from 1997 forward are available full text; many earlier ones as well. The database includes citations to dissertations from 1861 to those accepted last semester. Citations for dissertations and master’s theses published from 1980 forward have abstracts.
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Wanfang xuewei lunwen
Wanfang’s Dissertations and theses database. This database includes more than 2 million dissertations and theses, and hence is much larger than the history and literature (doctoral) dissertations and (master) theses parts of the CNKI equivalent previously available. Note that you can narrow down your results not only by using the topical and chronological facets, but also by typing within the tab-looking grey boxes on top of your results: e.g., by typing 北京大学 in the 学校 box. As with all Wanfang databases, once on the Wanfang home page, you can move from database to database via tabs. The “xue shu lun wen” tab combines several databases into one mega-search, and you can also combine searches across databases using the advanced search option.
E-books (Contemporary)
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CADAL (China Academic Digital Associative Library)
CADAL (China Academic Digital Associative Library) is a government-sponsored cooperative project of some 120+ academic libraries (2020), about half of which are from China, to create electronic resources for the use of their patrons. The venture is led by and housed in Zhejiang University, and most major Chinese academic institutions such as Peking, Qinghua, Fudan and Nanjing universities were participants from the beginning. CADAL originally grew out of a China-American Digital Academic Library venture, but only from the mid-2010s a select group of overseas libraries have received access. The major resource created by CADAL is a collection of scanned books, both in and out of copyright: 240 thousand ancient texts (including the Xuxiu siku quanshu 续修四库全书), 180 thousand republican works, 155 thousand republican periodical issues, 40 thousand newspaper issues, 800 thousand post-1949 books, 690 thousand works in Western languages, 13 thousand special collection works, 4 thousand videos, 55 thousand audiobooks and 63 thousand images. The collection is constantly increasing. The titles are not full-text searchable; but tables of contents are provided for easy navigation. Lately CADAL has added some special sections for material connected to the Manchuria Railway 满铁 13 thousand titles, modern local gazetteers 17 thousand, material on overseas Chinese 侨批 50 thousand items, and oracle bones from various institutions scanned with Reflectance Transformation Imaging (RTI) technology. (In addition to the e-books database, the navigation bar also gives access to some other resources: calligraphic works ( shufa 书法), a literary timeline ( Zhongguo wenxue biannian shi 中国文学编年史), Chinese medicine ( zhongyiyao 中医药), and Audio ( yinpinku 音频库). Note that the video choice, available only in English, brings one to the main e-books database.) Access to the books is dependent on the copyright status of the book: while some free access is available, especially to the ancient texts, access to in-copyright books is restricted to registered users at participant libraries: one borrows parts of books, which need to be returned in order to have them become available to other users. Hence, one first has to register ( zhuce 注册), and in subsequent visits to log-in ( denglu 登录). For this please select 登录/注册 from the upper right of the CADAL home page. To register then click on 快速注册. Please note that it is not necessary to add a mobile phone number 手机号 in order to register and it is also not necessary to retrieve a verification code if one does not want to connect the personal account to a Chinese mobile phone number. The registration process can be solely finished via a valid email. After registration, the system will ask for an affiliation at the first login. Activities one performs when logged-in, including borrowing books, note-taking etc., are visible to all users from search pages etc.: hence, make sure to log-out especially on shared public computers. One is not logged out automatically, even not after days. To log-out, go to one's personal account page ( registeredname's CADAL in the English, registeredname 的 CADAL in the Chinese interface), and click on tuichu 推出. This account page is available in the top navigation bar, and is also the page from where one returns books, see one's borrowing history, etc. (One can choose to set the interface to English, but only a limited number of top-level screens have been translated.) Once logged in, and directed to one's account page, one can perform a simple search in the search box. On the resulting page, one can somewhat refine one's search by limiting the result to title or author, and by selecting some rough facets of categories (such as ancient books or republican-period books—note that all categories are listed, even if not applicable), tags ( biaoqian 标签 ) or publisher. Under a cover image of each result, one can choose to see more details on the book, or decide to read it by clicking on the book. If choosing to read it, one is brought to a reader interface where one can display the table of contents, navigate forward and backward within a book, and change the display from one page to two pages at a time and vice versa. Printing (by right-clicking, one page at a time) does not work very well—it may be better to take screen shots. Depending on the copyright status of the book, one will receive a request after viewing a couple of pages to check out the remainder of the chapter ( jieyue 借阅). One receives a message that borrowing was successful (if the item was not borrowed by someone else), and can continue to read. To return the chapter to the CADAL library, navigate to the borrowing page ( jieyue in the top navigation bar), where one can see the status of one's checking in-and-out. Click, if not yet selected, on the weihuan 未还 button, and then return chapters by clicking on guihuan 归还 after each chapter one has checked out. And remember to log-out (also possible from this page.) One can look at one's notes, tags, comments, messages etc. from the navigation bar, and there may be recommendations listed based upon one's readings.
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Cambridge Histories Online
This database contains full-text searching of all Cambridge Histories, usually with up to a year delay after the print publication. You can search in all or specific titles, and download individual chapters as needed. The Cambridge history of China, The Cambridge history of Japan, and The Cambridge history of ancient China are included.
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China Economy, Public Policy, and Security (皮书 pishu) Database
A database comprised of the volumes called pishu (皮书) from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS), published (often yearly) by the Social Science Academic Press (SSAP). This database should be especially useful for researchers in the economic, political and social sciences of China. The archive covers all pishu published by SSAP from 1991 onward, and new pishu are uploaded on a monthly basis, between 15-20 new volumes each month. You can search within all titles, or by series and/or thematic keyword (click on those headings). The seven series are China Society and Culture (国社会与文化), China Economic Development (中国的经济发展), China Regional Analysis - Provincial (中国地区分析 - 省级), China Regional Analysis - Municipal (中国地区分析 - 市政的), China Regional Analysis - Hong Kong/Macau/Taiwan (中国地区分析 - 香港/澳门/台湾), China Industrial Sectors (中国的工业部门), and Global Economy, Politics, Security (世界经济，政治，安全). Thematic keywords include advertising, ethnology, etc. The database also includes such titles as the Annual Report on Research on Japan (日本研究报告). Note that almost all titles are Chinese-only, although they do have English alternative titles.
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Open Books Hong Kong
Open Books Hong Kong is an open access initiative of the university presses of The Chinese University of Hong Kong, City University of Hong Kong, and The University of Hong Kong. A selection of peer-reviewed scholarly books published by these three university presses is made freely available to the public. Works focus on humanities and social sciences, primarily in Chinese, authored by Hong Kong and international scholars. New titles are released quarterly. All titles are licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
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Traditional Chinese Medicine Database (CNKI TCMD)
TCMD provides access to basic theories, clinical research, common diseases, diagnostics, treatment, rehabilitation, and the integration of TCM and western medicine. The database covers Chinese Herbal Medicine, Disease Diagnosis, and Treatment Knowledge and TCM Prescription. It includes access to TCM eBooks and videos and references to TCM resources in other CNKI databases (journal, conference proceedings, etc.). The database will open with English menus, but can be switched to Chinese. It includes Chinese and English content.
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iRead eBooks
iRead eBooks (華藝中文電子書) is Taiwan's largest Chinese-language e-book platform, published by Airiti Inc. It provides access to over 80,000 e-book titles in Traditional Chinese from approximately 3,000 publishers, covering philosophy, religion, natural sciences, social sciences, history, geography, literature, and the arts. The platform supports full-text search across the collection and is accessible via the Airiti Library interface, integrating Chinese academic e-books with other Airiti scholarly resources.
E-books (Republican)
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Books of Modern China (1840-1949)
Collection of 120,000 late Qing and Republican e-books from Shanghai Library including many rare titles. Books are full-text searchable. Database includes author biographies, and cross-references to other Shanghai Library databases (especially for late Qing and Republican journals and newspapers). Especially interesting for literature and cross-cultural studies. Download of single pages is possible. Database clusters similar titles which is especially useful for research on the history of translation of Western literature or scientific knowledge. The database is part of Shanghai Library’s Quanguo baokan suoyin 全国报刊索引.
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Fudan University Humanities Data Platform
The Fudan University Humanities Data Platform provides access to over 170,000 Republican-era e-books and more than 10,000 historical local gazetteers. Access requires creating a personal account and selecting an institutional affiliation, or alternatively using a CADAL (China Academic Digital Associative Library) account.
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Minguo wenxian daquan
This database is based on the Republican era collection of CADAL (China Academic Digital Associative Library). For this database the books, journals and newspapers from CADAL have been processed with OCR (optical character recognition) which allows full-text searching. Most of the search results from books and journals can be directly opened from 民国文献大全.
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Series of Geography, History and Customs of Manchuria-Mongolia DB
A collection of 200 volumes on geography, history and customs of Manchuria and Mongolia between late Chosen and 1945 published by Governor-General of Korea. Includes original text images in Japanese (searchable).
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Taiwan eBook
Taiwan eBook (臺灣華文電子書庫) is a digital preservation and access initiative created and maintained by the National Central Library (NCL) of Taiwan. The database digitizes Chinese language books published between 1911-1949 (the Republican period) held by libraries, research organizations, and government institutions throughout Taiwan. These works document various aspects of Republican-era history, culture, literati, geography, art, literature, society, politics, and economy.
Encyclopedias
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Encyclopedia of Taiwan Studies Online
Online encyclopedia in the Brill Chinese Reference Works series covering archaeology, history, linguistics, anthropology, sociology, political science, international relations, Indigenous studies, literature, gender studies, media, music, and art of Taiwan. Contains approximately 600 entries of 1,000–5,000 words each, authored by more than 300 scholars worldwide.
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Handbook of Formosan Languages Online: The Indigenous Languages of Taiwan
The Handbook of Formosan Languages provides a systematic coverage of the aboriginal languages of Taiwan and of the many ways in which they have been studied. It contains reference articles as well as grammar sketches of a wide-range of Formosan languages, including a few extinct languages. The handbook includes bibliographical references and indices and is illustrated with tables and maps.
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Zhongguo dabaike quanshu
China's first modern large-entry encyclopedia in the Chinese language, published by the Encyclopedia of China Publishing House. The third edition was launched online in 2014 as the Digital Zhongguo Dabaike Quanshu, incorporating multimedia and structured into professional, thematic, and popular sections. As of 2023 the platform hosts over 210,000 entries covering all major fields of knowledge with full-text search across articles, images, and multimedia.
Images
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China Art Digital Library
China Art Digital Library (中国艺术图书馆) is a CNKI-hosted image database containing over 780,000 art images drawn from more than 400 albums, museum catalogs, and exhibition publications. The collection spans traditional and modern Chinese art, including painting, calligraphy, sculpture, and decorative arts. Images can be searched by artist, medium, period, or exhibition, and results can be browsed alongside catalog descriptions.
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ChinaComx: Chinese Comics in Translation
ChinaComx Translations is an open-access digital project hosted by the Centre for Asian and Transcultural Studies (CATS) at Heidelberg University. The project publishes English and German translations of exemplary lianhuanhua (Chinese picture-story books) from the Mao and early post-Mao years (primarily 1970s–1980s), with one contemporary title from 2024. As of March 2026, fourteen translations are available, organized into five thematic categories: works adapted from classics of Chinese literature, tales of youth and socialist-patriotic ideals, science popularization lianhuanhua, transcultural texts and storylines, and contemporary lianhuanhua. Each translation includes high-resolution scanned images, transcribed original Chinese text, and the translation presented side by side, along with a scholarly introduction by the translator(s). Translations draw on the CATS-Seifert Collection of Chinese Comics at Heidelberg.
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Chinese Iconography Thesaurus
The Chinese Iconography Thesaurus (CIT / 中國圖像誌索引典) is an open-access bilingual indexing standard and image archive for Chinese iconography, developed under the leadership of Hongxing Zhang (Senior Curator, Victoria and Albert Museum) and published by Brill. The database currently contains 17,419 terminology concepts drawn primarily from pre-1900 Chinese historical catalogue records — including Shiqu baoji and Midian zhulin — and 12,893 artworks covering paintings, sculpture, prints, book illustrations, ceramics, and other applied arts made in China from 700 to 1900 CE. The CIT addresses the longstanding problem of cataloguing Chinese art using Eurocentric classification systems by providing controlled vocabulary rooted in Chinese cultural specificity, supported by five major collections: the V&A, Metropolitan Museum of Art, National Palace Museum (Taipei), Cleveland Museum of Art, and Harvard-Yenching Library.
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Chinese Posters
Chineseposters.net is a non-profit online archive presenting over 5,600 authentic Chinese propaganda posters drawn from the collections of Stefan Landsberger (Leiden University / University of Amsterdam), the International Institute of Social History (IISH, Amsterdam), and a private collector, together totaling over 7,000 pieces. The site is owned and maintained by the Chinese Posters Foundation (established 2011). Each poster entry is accompanied by biographical notes on artists and thematic context, with a searchable catalog, a gallery of 200 highlights, and over 300 thematic presentations. The archive has been online since September 2007; following the passing of co-founder Stefan Landsberger in September 2024, the site continues to be actively maintained by co-editor Marien van der Heijden.
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Dispersed Chinese Art Digitization Project (DCADP)
The Dispersed Chinese Art Digitization Project (DCADP), launched in 2019 by the Center for the Art of East Asia (CAEA) at the University of Chicago, seeks to document, preserve, and digitally restore Chinese artworks taken from their historical sites of origin and dispersed to collections worldwide during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The project places digitized objects back into their original historical and spatial contexts through collaboration between CAEA and Xi'an Jiaotong University, with participation from numerous museums and cultural sites internationally. The digital collection is accessible through the CAEA library interface at the University of Chicago.
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Dunhuang Academy's Digital Library Cave
Dunhuang Academy's Digital Library Cave (数字藏经洞 / Digital Cave 17) provides free access to over 60,000 high-resolution images of Dunhuang manuscripts and artworks from the famous Library Cave (Cave 17) discovered in 1900. Developed through a partnership between the Dunhuang Academy and Tencent, the platform aggregates materials dispersed across global institutions including the British Library, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Institute of Oriental Manuscripts (Russia), National Library of China, and other collections holding Dunhuang treasures. Cave 17 originally contained approximately 50,000 manuscripts and printed documents spanning the 4th–11th centuries CE, representing Buddhism, Daoism, Confucianism, Manichaeism, and secular texts in Chinese, Tibetan, Sanskrit, Sogdian, Khotanese, and other languages. Advanced features include crowdsourcing for transcription and annotation, AI-powered search, and OCR tools for text recognition; the resource is also accessible via a WeChat mini-program.
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East Asia Image Collection
East Asia Image Collection (EAIC) at Lafayette College documents the history of imperial Japan (1868-1945), its Asian empire (1895-1945), and occupied Japan (1947-1952). The collection includes images from Taiwan (台湾), Japan (日本), China (中国), Korea (朝鮮/조선), Manchuria (満洲国/Manchukuo), and Indonesia. The EAIC provides visual documentation of Japanese imperialism, colonialism, and the aftermath of World War II, including the American occupation period. Images cover military activities, colonial administration, urban development, cultural life, and everyday scenes from territories under Japanese control or influence. Materials include photographs, postcards, propaganda images, and other visual media that document both official narratives and lived experiences across the Japanese empire.
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Hedda Morrison Photographs of China
Hedda Morrison Photographs of China is a collection of 8,579 photographs and related materials held by Harvard-Yenching Library, Harvard University, documenting China from 1933 to 1946. Hedda Morrison (1908-1991), a German-born photographer based in Beijing, captured daily life, architecture, landscapes, religious sites, cultural practices, and social conditions across the Republican era and early wartime period. The collection spans urban and rural scenes across multiple regions and is accessible through Harvard's CURIOSity Digital Exhibits platform, with materials organized by creator, date, genre, and subject.
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Historical Photographs of China
Historical Photographs of China (HPC) is a free online database hosted by the University of Bristol containing over 21,000 images from 98 collections, primarily held in the UK, Europe, and private hands outside China. The resource was produced by a 2006–2021 project based in the Department of History at the University of Bristol that located, digitized, archived, and published photographs of modern China spanning the late 19th and early-to-mid 20th centuries. The collection covers urban and rural life, architecture, landscapes, cultural practices, political events, foreign settlements, and missionary activities, with each collection accompanied by detailed introductions and keyword tagging. The site remains accessible and actively maintained despite the original project's conclusion.
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National Palace Museum Collections
Portal to a range of free databases offered by the National Palace Museum (Taiwan), including specialized collections on bronzes, paintings, calligraphy, rare books, decorative motifs, genealogical documents, and Qing dynasty documents.
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National Palace Museum Open Data
This database gives free access to high-resolution images and related description articles of art pieces (painting, documents, calligraphy, ceramics, jades, curios, rare books and bronzes) in the (Taiwan) NPM collections. Descriptions can be viewed in Traditional Chinese and English. One can search by category, dynasty, gallery and multimedia (video or 3D Digital).
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Picture Gallery of Chinese Modern Literature (1833-1949)
Collection of more than 1 Mio. images extracted from late Qing and Republican books, newspapers and journals and organized in sixteen categories including: Photography, Painting, Calligraphy, Woodcut, Manuscripts, Comics, Maps, Sculptures, Musical Scores, and Epigraphy.
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Sidney Gamble photographs, 1906-2007
Sidney D. Gamble Photographs Collection (1906-2007) at Duke University contains over 5,500 photographs, over 20 films, and other moving images documenting China from 1908 to 1932, housed in the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library as part of the Archive of Documentary Arts. Sidney D. Gamble (1890-1968), a trained sociologist and amateur photographer, made four trips to China (1908, 1917-1919, 1924-1927, 1931-1932) — totaling approximately nine years in China — to conduct socioeconomic surveys while working as secretary for the Beijing YMCA. The collection includes contact sheets, hand-colored glass slides, 35mm duplicate slides, contact prints, negatives, and moving images (filmed 1926-1933) depicting urban and rural life, economic conditions, public events, agriculture, religious statuary, architecture, and the countryside. Also included are artifacts, scrapbooks, personal papers, and records of the Sidney D. Gamble Foundation for China Studies documenting exhibitions in the US and China (1980s-2000s). Additional images from Japan, Korea, and the western United States (circa 1906) are also included. As of 2019, many works entered public domain.
Legal sources
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China Business Reference (China BRef)
China Business Reference (ChinaBRef) provides access to hundreds of thousands of Chinese laws, regulations, and legal commentaries in both Chinese and English, covering commercial law, contract law, intellectual property, foreign investment regulations, and related areas. Content can be searched by keyword or browsed by legal category, making it a practical reference for researchers studying Chinese business law and regulatory frameworks.
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Foreign Law Guide
Bibliography of sources of foreign law organized by country. Each entry contains a brief description of the country's legal system with citations to primary sources of law both in print and electronic versions when available. At the end of each entry is a list of subject headings with citations to the relevant laws or statutes.
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Lawinfochina/Chinalawinfo/Chinese Case Studies
Lawinfochina and Chinalawinfo are companion legal retrieval systems for the PRC: Lawinfochina provides the English interface and content; Chinalawinfo provides Chinese. Both are accessible from the same platform and link to each other. Included are: all laws adopted by the National People's Congress and its Standing Committee from 1949; all administrative regulations promulgated by the State Council from 1949; rules and orders from other agencies; important judicial interpretations and regulations impacting foreign-related activities; judicial cases from the Gazette of the Supreme People's Court (also in English); Sino-foreign tax treaties; and other legal news. The platform also includes a Chinese case studies database within Chinalawinfo.
Local Gazetteers (Contemporary)
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Wanfang xin fangzhi
Wanfang’s New Local Gazetteers database. This database searches full-text versions of new (i.e., post-1949) local gazetteers, which are also browsable by region or topic. Pages are readable and downloadable in pdf form in some 6 million small parts by navigating through the Table of Contents ( mulu ), by clicking on “ chakan yuanwen ” (read original excerpt) or “ xiazai yuanwen ” (download original excerpt). You can also read through the complete gazetteers on line, by clicking on “ zhengben yuedu ” (reading full volume). More advanced searching (Boolean searching, fuzzy searching) is available, and you can narrow down results by using facets or adding refinements to your search (and clicking “search within results.”) As with all Wanfang databases, once on the Wanfang home page, you can move from database to database via tabs. The tab for the New Local Gazetteers, is somewhat hidden though; it is listed only on the very upper menu, under the “More…” ( geng duo ) category.
Local Gazetteers (Historical)
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China Comprehensive Gazetteers
This China Comprehensive Gazetteers database has been produced in conjunction with the National Library of China. It includes 7,000 Chinese local gazetteers spanning eight centuries 1229-1949. Chinese gazetteers are a very rich resource available for researching China in multiple aspects, including its political history, literature, and religion, as well as the biographies of famous personages, its culture, economic development and, of course, its geography and natural history. Because of its varied content, organized to principles also varying from title to title, full-text search capabilities change the way they can be used. The titles included in this particular database (approximately 7,000 titles, 100,000 volumes) have for a large part been compiled using Optical Character Recognition. Because of this automated process, which occasionally produces errors, the 4,000 titles which overlap with the Zhongguo fang zhi ku database, are probably best used in the latter (with much stricter authority control.) However, the China Comprehensive Gazetteers database includes at least 2,000 additional full-text searchable titles.
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LoGaRT: Local Gazetteers Research Tools
LoGaRT (Local Gazetteers Research Tools) is a digital research platform developed by the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science for searching, analyzing, and collecting data from digitized Chinese local gazetteers (difangzhi 地方志). Rather than requiring scholars to browse individual volumes, LoGaRT treats all available digitized gazetteers as a unified conceptual database, enabling historians to ask large-scale comparative questions transcending individual volumes, geographical regions, and time periods. The platform provides access to two collections: the open-access Rare Local Gazetteers at Harvard-Yenching Library, and Erudition's commercial Zhongguo fangzhi ku (中國方志庫, available to MPIWG affiliates only). The project's research activities concluded in 2024 and LoGaRT is in the process of being transferred to the Berlin State Library (Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin) for long-term service provision.
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Zhongguo fangzhi ku
When complete, this database will include more than 10,000 pre-modern local gazetteers in the broad sense—covering not only jurisdictional gazetteers but also gazetteers of temples, mountains, and other entities. The database supports full-text searching by region, title, or period while preserving the original form of the source, including maps and tables, displayed side by side with the text. Downloading and printing are possible; individual note-taking is not available. As of 2021, three sets of 2,000 titles each of the planned five parts have been completed. Published by Erudition (Airusheng).
Magazines
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China Multilingual Journals
The CMJ (China Multilingual Journals) database includes journals published in China for foreign consumption: Qiushi (2009-, English), China Pictorial/ Ren min hua bao (1999-2006, English and Chinese), Jinmin Chūgoku (Japanese, 1953-2007), Beijing Review ( Peking Review ; English, German, French, Spanish, Chinese, 1958-), and China Today (English, German, French, Spanish, Chinese , 1952-2007). Images and news items can be searched for separate from articles.
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Longyuan qikan wang (Dragonsource)
Searchable database of current non-academic Chinese periodicals in literature, general culture, news and politics, popular science, economics and law, education, health and lifestyle, history and finance management. The database gives access to more than 3,000 titles, including Caixin-China Economics & Finance, VOGUE, Caijing, Sanlian Zhoukan, Zhongguo Zhoukan, Liaowang Dongfang Zhoukan, Wenwu Tiandi, ZhizuGQ .
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Mingbao Yuekan
Ming Pao Monthly (明報月刊) is a long-running Hong Kong literary and cultural magazine founded in 1966 by novelist Louis Cha (Jin Yong). It has served as a major platform for Chinese intellectual discourse, publishing essays, criticism, creative writing, and commentary on mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. This electronic archive covers the magazine from 1966 to 2000, providing full-text access to over three decades of cultural and political commentary.
Maps and GIS
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Chinese Civilization in Time and Space
Chinese Civilization in Time and Space (CCTS) is a Web-based GIS system developed by Academia Sinica's Center for Digital Cultures, integrating historical maps with full-text databases and place name databases covering China and Taiwan. The system includes historical map layers from Tan Qixiang's Zhongguo lishi dituji and the 1920s Shenbao atlas, with search functions for current and historical place names, gazetteers, and specialized thematic layers such as Han archaeological tomb sites. CCTS is particularly valuable for historical geography research, place-name verification, and integrating spatial and textual sources. Personal registration is recommended for saving map sessions and printing. Enter the GIS system by clicking on "Framework" from the Home page, and then by clicking on "Enter CCTS System." Before first use, one needs to download two special plug-ins available there. The Web-based GIS system follows standard ArcView procedures.
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Land Survey Maps of China, 1895-1944
Land Survey Maps of China (CHMap) provides access to 4,088 historical land survey maps from 1895-1944 (at 1:50,000 scale), produced by Chinese central and provincial governments and the Japanese Army's land survey department. Through a trilateral collaboration between Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, and Academia Sinica, the project provides access to large-scale maps with geographic coverage, with detail of terrain, settlements, infrastructure, and land use during the late Qing and Republican periods. CHMap's interface allows users to search by location, browse by region, compare historical maps with modern satellite imagery, and download high-resolution images.
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Mapping Global China
The Mapping Global China Initiative is an open-access geospatial platform offering data-driven analysis of China's international economic engagement, with particular focus on the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). The platform provides interactive maps, datasets, and research on Chinese infrastructure investments, energy projects, port acquisitions, soft power activities (Confucius Institutes, leader visits), and other dimensions of China's global presence, drawing on sources including the Reconnecting Asia Project, AidData GeoQuery, the Boston University Global China Dataset, and projects at NYU Shanghai and the University of Hong Kong. Each mapped project links to satellite imagery enabling before-and-after comparison of development sites. The platform also hosts research briefs, story maps, and community features for collaborative engagement with Global China research.
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Modern China Geospatial Database
Modern China Geospatial Database (MCGD) addresses the critical challenge of place name standardization in modern Chinese history by identifying and collecting all name variants under which locations were designated in historical sources. The database is particularly valuable for handling the bewildering variety of Western transliteration systems used to render Chinese place names (e.g., Shanghai variants: Shang-hae, Changhaï, Schanghai, Szang-hai, etc.), as well as historical Chinese names that changed over time. The MCGD search interface allows researchers to input place names individually or batch upload CSV files of multiple names. The search engine retrieves matches regardless of language or transliteration system, providing geo-coordinates, current Chinese names and pinyin, and all known historical designations.
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The China Historical Geographic Information System, CHGIS
The China Historical Geographic Information System (CHGIS) is a comprehensive GIS database covering Chinese history from 221 BCE to 1911 CE (Qin through Qing dynasties), providing authoritative spatial and temporal data on populated places and historical administrative units across two millennia. CHGIS includes time-series data for changing administrative boundaries, place names, and population centers, with GIS-ready data available in multiple formats (shapefiles, KML, databases) with comprehensive metadata and documentation. The database underpins numerous other major digital humanities projects including the China Biographical Database (CBDB), World Historical Gazetteer, and Pelagios Commons, and offers a download interface and Placenames search API.
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The People's Map of Global China
The People's Map of Global China is an open-access interactive platform tracking China's complex and rapidly evolving international activities worldwide. Drawing on expertise from researchers and civil society organizations globally, the map provides in-depth, grounded knowledge about China's global imprint reflecting real-time developments. The platform features profiles of countries and individual projects (Belt and Road Initiative, resource extraction, infrastructure, telecommunications, ports, etc.), sortable by multiple parameters. Critically, the platform centers voices and perspectives from communities affected by Chinese projects. Users can filter by impact categories (human rights, environment, labor, debt, etc.), company involvement, financing sources, and geographic region. The map documents both positive developments (infrastructure improvements, economic opportunities) and negative impacts (debt burdens, environmental degradation, labor issues, displacement). This crowdsourced, continuously updated resource serves journalists, researchers, policymakers, activists, and affected communities seeking verified information about China's global economic footprint beyond official narratives.
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World Historical Gazetteer
World Historical Gazetteer (WHG) is an open-source platform for linking historical place records, now at version 3.2 and hosted by the Institute for Spatial History Innovation (ISHI) at the University of Pittsburgh. The platform provides a searchable index of over 2.2 million historical places drawn from 70+ published datasets, and a reconciliation index of 13 million records from GeoNames and Wikidata for linking new place data. WHG enables users to discover and link historical places through a web interface and API, build and publish gazetteer datasets using reconciliation tools, create place and dataset collections, and develop instructional lesson plans for historical geography teaching. The platform uses Linked Places Format (LPF) with temporal extensions to GeoJSON, supporting the linked open data ecosystem for historical research.
Newspapers
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East Asian Newspapers and Periodicals 1850-1950
The East Asian Newspapers and Periodicals 1850–1950 collection on the Internet Archive provides free access to 266 East Asian newspapers, journals, and magazines published in Chinese, Korean, and Japanese from 1850 to 1950. Major titles include the Shenbao (申報, founded 1872, Shanghai), the North-China Herald (1850–1941, Shanghai), the Chosun-ilbo (朝鮮日報, founded 1920, Korea), and the Manzhoubao (満洲報, 1922–1937, Dalian). The collection documents critical periods of East Asian history including colonial periods, wars, and social transformations across China, Japan, Korea, and Singapore.
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Late Qing and Republican-Era Chinese Newspapers
The Late Qing and Republican-Era Chinese Newspapers collection, published by East View Information Services and made openly accessible through the Center for Research Libraries (CRL) and its member institutions, contains 292 newspaper titles, 70,393 issues, and over 463,000 pages of full-text searchable content representing the press of more than twenty Chinese cities from 1911 to 1949. Unlike most digitized newspaper databases, the OCR-generated text is visible and copyable. The collection spans the collapse of the Qing Dynasty, the Republican period, the Sino-Japanese War, and the civil war, offering comprehensive coverage of Chinese political and cultural life through the founding of the PRC.
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Mobilizing East Asia
A tightly organized series of pivotal English-language newspapers, books and magazines reporting and commenting on developments in East and South-East Asia from the turn of the century to the early 1950s, showing the route from the first defeat of a major European power by an Asian nation to the calamitous defeat of that nation, Japan, systemic change in China and the onset of seismic upheaval in Asia. Materials, sourced from hard-to-find and in some cases unique originals, include Contemporary Japan , the Japan Advertiser Annual Review , the Japan News-Week , and the Shanghai-based Israel's Messenger . More material on Manchuria, including the Manchuria Daily News (1912-1940), is being added.There are gaps for many titles, some of which had only short runs, and therefore are difficult to find anywhere.
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NewspaperSG
NewspaperSG is a digital newspaper archive maintained by the National Library Board of Singapore (NLB). The Newspaper Catalogue lists all newspaper titles held by NLB, including those available for free online access and those available only on microfilm. Titles span Singapore and the surrounding region (Peninsular Malaysia, Sabah and Sarawak, Brunei, and China) and are published in Chinese, English, Malay, Tamil, and Japanese. The online collection includes nearly 100 titles with full-text search, covering dates from the mid-nineteenth century through the present. Recent issues (typically the most recent year) are available as preview only; older digitized content is freely accessible without registration. The archive is particularly strong for Singapore English-language newspapers such as The Straits Times (from 1845) and Chinese-language titles.
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Old Hong Kong Newspapers
The Old Hong Kong Newspapers collection, maintained by Hong Kong Public Libraries and accessible through their Digital Collection platform, provides digitized images of 14 major historical Hong Kong newspapers spanning from 1853 to 1991. Chinese-language titles include 香港工商日報 (1926–1984), 華僑日報 (1947–1991), 香港華字日報 (1895–1940), 大公報 (1938–1991), 遐邇貫珍 (1853–1856), and 循環日報 (1874–1886); English-language titles include the China Mail (1866–1961), Hong Kong Daily Press (1864–1941), and Hong Kong Telegraph (1881–1951), among others. The collection supports research into Hong Kong's historical development, society, and culture from the colonial era through the late twentieth century.
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WisersOne (formerly WiseNews)
WisersOne (formerly WiseNews and WiseSearch) is a comprehensive news database covering Greater China, updated daily with content from over 1,500 sources including all major Chinese and English newspapers from Hong Kong, Taiwan, and mainland China, as well as newswires, magazines, and broadcast transcripts. The archive contains over 88 million articles from 1998 to the present, with national titles (Renmin ribao, 21 shiji jingji baodao), regional papers (Nanfang ribao, Yangcheng wanbao), Taiwan titles (Pingguo ribao, China Post), and Hong Kong papers (Mingbao, South China Morning Post). The platform offers full-text search by keyword, region, or title, and browse functions organized by themed topic folders covering finance, technology, public health, international relations, and mainland-Taiwan relations.
Political Documents (Contemporary)
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China Government Gazettes
A collection of political newspapers, bulletins, announcements, regulations, proclamations, government reports, white papers, and leader speeches from Chinese central and local government publications. Subjects covered include politics, law, military and national defense, rural management and agriculture, industry, transportation, finance, education, science and technology, and tourism. In Chinese, 1979-present
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National People's Congress Database (PRC)
The National People's Congress (NPC) database of the People's Republic of China is a comprehensive collection of archives and documents of the National People’s Congress, from the 1st Session of 1st NPC to present. The collection includes: Deputy Lists, Agendas, Conference Updates, Documents and Reports, Resolutions and Statements, Leaders’ Activities, Selected Proposals, Suggestions of the Deputies, News Reports, Pictures, Press Conferences, Important Commentaries, Video Reports, etc. With complete, full-spectrum contents, it’s an authoritative database of NPC agendas, topics, resolutions and related reports. Coverage is from the 1st NPC onward; it includes text, photos and videos, and is updated regularly. The database works best with the Chrome browser.
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PRC Ministry of Foreign Affairs - Speeches archive (Chinese)
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the People's Republic of China website provides free access to an extensive archive of speeches, press statements, diplomatic communiqués, and official documents. The archive includes transcripts of ministry spokesperson press conferences, foreign minister speeches, bilateral agreements, and policy statements covering China's foreign relations from the 1980s to the present. Content is primarily in Chinese, with English-language materials available through a separate section of the site.
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PRC State Council Archive (EN)
PRC State Council Archive (EN) is the English-language portal of the Chinese government's official document archive, providing free access to White Papers, policy documents, and ministry statements in English translation. Materials represent the government's official narrative and policy framework, providing insight into how China presents its governance, development achievements, and policy priorities to international audiences. The archive is regularly updated with new documents as they are released.
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Party History Ebook Archive
Provided by the Party History and Literature Research Institute of the CPC Central Committee (中共中央党史和文献研究院), this database gives access to collected works and selected speeches of Party leaders from Marx and Engels through Xi Jinping, important Party and government document series including 建党以来重要文献选编 and 建国以来重要文献选编, major research outputs in Party history, and classical Marxist texts in Chinese translation. The platform also hosts annals and biographies of major leaders (Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai, Deng Xiaoping, and others) and the 100-year chronology of major CCP events. It serves as the authoritative repository for official CCP historical and ideological texts, providing essential access to primary sources for researchers studying PRC political history and party ideology.
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Party and Government Documents in English (PR of China)
The Party and Government Documents in English (PGDiE) is a unique collection of official documents in English, covering various levels of Chinese government, Communist Party of China (CPC) and National People's Congress (NPC) from authoritative sources from 1921 onwards. Featured contents include documents on the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution; the Taiwan Question, the National Congress of the CPC, Five-year plans, The First session of the First National People's Congress, reports on the Work of the Government, government communiqués, government White Papers, and Policies and Activities of the Foreign Ministry. The White Papers include also documents in other languages than English (Chinese, French, Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese.) Some of the English material is machine-translated.
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Xi Jinping Speeches Database
Xi Jinping Speeches Database (习近平系列重要讲话数据库) is a comprehensive free resource provided by People's Daily (人民日报), the state-owned official newspaper of the Communist Party of China. The database systematically collects and organizes Xi Jinping's speeches, writings, books, articles, policy documents, news reports, and related white papers. Materials are available in both Chinese and English. The database covers Xi's major speeches on topics including China's development path ("Chinese Dream"), economic reform, anti-corruption campaigns, environmental protection ("ecological civilization"), foreign policy ("Belt and Road Initiative", "community of shared future for mankind"), military modernization, Party governance, ideological work, and national rejuvenation. Content spans Xi's tenure from becoming General Secretary in 2012 through the present, documenting the evolution of "Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era" (formally enshrined in Party Constitution in 2017).
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Xinjiang Documentation Project
The Xinjiang Documentation Project is a multi-disciplinary research initiative based at the Institute for Asian Research in the School of Public Policy and Global Affairs at the University of British Columbia and the Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies Department at Simon Fraser University. The project collects, preserves, assesses, and makes available documentary information on the extrajudicial detention of Uyghurs, Kazakhs, and other ethnic minorities in Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, northwestern China. Its scope includes making key primary documents available, assessing their reliability, presenting material for general audiences, amplifying the lived experiences of detained individuals, providing regular updates on the ongoing situation in the region, and organizing periodic speaker series.
Statistics and Data
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China Economic and Social Data Platform
The China Economic and Social Big Data Research Platform is a CNKI product that enables cross-yearbook indicator searches and online map generation using statistical data from officially published Chinese statistical yearbooks. The platform aggregates provincial, municipal, and county-level data from national and regional yearbooks, allowing researchers to track economic and social indicators over time and download data for further analysis.
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China Global Development Dashboard
China Global Development Dashboard (formerly China.AidData.org) tracks China's global overseas development finance through systematic research by AidData, a research lab at William & Mary. The platform documents over 31,750 projects totaling more than $2.17 trillion in tracked commitments across Africa, Asia, Latin America, and other regions, covering loans, grants, technical assistance, and other forms of development cooperation. Data is downloadable and accompanied by interactive visualizations and analytical reports, enabling researchers, policymakers, and journalists to study patterns in Chinese development finance and assess the scope of China's global development activities.
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China Historical Christian Database
The China Historical Christian Database (CHCD) is a comprehensive digital humanities project that quantifies and visualizes the place of Christianity in modern China from 1550 to 1950. The database documents the locations and personnel of Christian institutions including churches, schools, hospitals, orphanages, publishing houses, and other missionary establishments throughout China. For each institution, CHCD records both foreign missionaries and Chinese workers, creating detailed spatial maps and relational networks. These visualizations reveal patterns of how, when, and where Western ideas, technologies, and practices entered China through Christian missionary activity. Simultaneously, the database uncovers reverse flows, showing how and through whom Chinese ideas, technologies, and practices were conveyed to the West. CHCD serves as a powerful research tool for scholars studying Sino-Western cultural exchange, the history of Christianity in China, modernization, education, medicine, and transnational networks during the late imperial and Republican periods. The platform's mapping and network analysis capabilities enable new discoveries about the complex relationships between Christianity, modernization, and cultural exchange in Chinese history.
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China Premium Database (CEIC)
The CEIC China Premium Database is a leading macroeconomic and financial time series platform covering over 300,000 data series for China running back to 1949. It covers national accounts, government and public finance, demographic and labor market statistics, inflation, foreign trade, foreign direct investment, financial markets, and industry-sector data. The database includes subnational data at provincial, municipal, and county levels for over 200 cities, as well as comparable data for Brazil, India, Indonesia, and Russia. Data can be exported in multiple formats and visualized through built-in charting tools.
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China Yearbooks (CYFD CNKI)
China Yearbooks Full-text Database (中国年鉴网络出版总库, CYFD) is the largest yearbook database in China, providing full-text access to over 5,200 national, provincial, regional, local, and industry-specific yearbooks published by authoritative sources including national ministries, professional publishing houses, and local governments. Coverage focuses on the post-1978 period, with some titles extending back further. Entries are indexed down to individual tables, charts, and images, making it possible to locate specific statistical or descriptive passages without reading entire volumes.
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Contemporary Chinese Village Gazetteer Data
Contemporary Chinese Village Gazetteer Data (数字村庄 / Digital Village) is an open dataset developed by the East Asian Library of the University of Pittsburgh that extracts structured data from selected Chinese village gazetteers covering 1949 to the present. As of November 2022, the dataset covers 2,601 administrative villages across China's provinces, with records including demographic, economic, social, and governance data compiled from a customized data-entry platform. The dataset is freely downloadable in CSV format, and an interactive map providing village-level administrative information accompanies the download. This is the first project of its kind to systematically extract quantitative data from village gazetteers at scale, making it particularly valuable for comparative and longitudinal research on Chinese rural development, collectivization, agricultural reform, and village-level change across the PRC period.
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EPS China Statistics
EPS China Statistics is a large-scale statistical data platform comprising over 100 datasets covering China's population censuses, macroeconomy, financial markets, industry, trade, natural resources, and social indicators. The database has a particularly strong focus on subnational data at the city and county level. Users can create charts and maps and download data in multiple formats (Excel, JPEG, PDF). The platform contains over 1.2 million time series with an annual increment of more than 30 million data points.
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National Bureau of Statistics of China
The National Bureau of Statistics of China (NBS) website provides free access to official Chinese government statistical data, including monthly, quarterly, and annual series on national accounts, population, employment, prices, trade, and industry. The site hosts the full run of China Statistical Yearbooks and population census data, with regional breakdowns by province and municipality. Data are available in both Chinese and English. The NBS is the primary authoritative source for official PRC macroeconomic and social statistics.
Subject Guides and Bibliographies
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Ancient and Early Medieval Chinese Literature Online: A Research Guide
Reference guide on Chinese literature from ca. 700 B.C.E. to the early seventh century C.E. Alphabetically organized, it contains entries on major and minor writers, literary forms and Chinese literary terms. Includes detailed bibliographic and source information.
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Bibliography of Asian Studies
The Bibliography of Asian Studies (BAS) contains more than 700,000 records on all subjects (especially humanities and social sciences) pertaining to East, Southeast, and South Asia published worldwide from 1971 to the present. Through the 1991 printed version, the BAS included citations to western-language periodical articles, individually authored monographs, chapters in edited volumes, conference proceedings, anthologies, and Festschriften, etc. Since 1992, newly published individual monographs are no longer being added to the database, and users seeking monographs are urged to consult other general resources and databases. The online BAS contains the full data of all printed editions of the BAS issued from 1971 up to the 1991 edition (published 1997), as well as thousands of entries compiled since. To quickly bridge the gap in coverage from 1991 to the present, the BAS staff have identified the most important 100+ periodicals in Asian Studies, and have given these high priority for indexing to make their coverage as up-to-date as possible. For any particular journal, full information on years of coverage should be provided through the Journal Title Browse function, although this part seems often out of sync with the rest of the database. You can search by phrase in specified field, can combine searches, and can specify your desired display, with or without diacritics; a downloadable font is provided. You can limit your searches to specific countries. Subject searching is also provided, but subject ranges are broad and have changed over the years.
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Bilingual Database and Annotated Bibliography of Cantonese Popular Periodicals of the Early Twentieth Century
The Bilingual Database and Annotated Bibliography of Cantonese Popular Periodicals of the Early Twentieth Century (Phase I) documents popular periodicals from the Cantonese cultural region—spanning Guangzhou, Hong Kong, and Macau—from approximately 1907 to the 1950s, with 80 annotated entries organized by category and location. Categories include children's publications, film, current events, literature and arts, women and family, martial arts, dance halls, hometown magazines, and comics. The project draws on periodicals from international databases and libraries in Hong Kong, Macau, and the United Kingdom, as well as private collections, and reflects the shared cultural networks connecting cities of the historic Cantonese cultural region.
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Chinese Big Set Table of Contents database
On the Chinese mainland publishers have over the years preferred to publish large collections of primary and secondary print material. The Chinese Big Set Table of Contents database tries to address this problem. It provides searchable indexes for 2,500 large sets from 130 different publishers from mainland China. The covered book sets were published 1985–present, but the database is most comprehensive for 2015–present. The table of contents (ToC) information can be searched and the ToCs can be downloaded in PDF format.
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Chinese Christian Texts Database
The Chinese Christian Texts Database (CCT-database), initiated by the late Professor Erik Zürcher and developed by Ad Dudink and Nicolas Standaert at KU Leuven, is a referential research database of primary and secondary sources concerning cultural contacts between China and Europe from 1582 to c. 1840, covering religion, philosophy, science, and art. The database contains approximately 1,050 Chinese primary sources (printed books, manuscripts, pamphlets, and maps), approximately 4,000 European primary sources, and over 11,000 secondary sources linked to primary sources where applicable. It is multilingual with extensive search capabilities and detailed bibliographical information including content descriptions, call numbers in major library collections, and notes on author and text history; thematic categorization follows the Handbook of Christianity in China: Volume One (635–1800). Access is free.
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Chinese Religious Text Authority
The Chinese Religious Text Authority (CRTA) is an open-access, international collaborative digital humanities project providing reliable bibliographic and academic information about Chinese religious texts produced prior to 1949. CRTA connects bibliographic information across collections, archives, and private libraries worldwide to map detailed webs of relationships among producers, publishers, and distributors of religious texts, with over 6,230 entries as of April 2026. The first phase focuses on pre-1949 Chinese religious texts included in major reprint collections. By creating a comprehensive bibliographic authority system, CRTA enables researchers to discover formerly unknown associations between texts, publishers, distributors, and religious communities, serving as critical infrastructure for scholars of Chinese religions studying textual transmission and the networks of religious text production and circulation in modern China.
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Chinese Theater Collaborative
Chinese Theater Collaborative (CTC) is a teaching and learning resource for modern iterations of traditional Chinese theater, developed by Ohio State University in collaboration with the Advanced Institute for Global Chinese Studies at Lingnan University. The site is organized around iconic plays tracing their afterlives across theatrical, filmic, print, and other media forms, with modules examining works such as Orphan of Zhao, Story of the Western Wing, Mulan, and Peony Pavilion. For each play, the site provides introductory pages on historical context, plot, characters, and theatrical conventions; separate modules for different early modern and modern productions showing adaptation and reinterpretation over time; and texts (scripts, librettos), images (performance photographs, costume designs, stage sets), and video clips documenting specific productions. As of 2025, the platform continues to expand with new modules added through annual Summer Translation Collaborative workshops.
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Chinese big sets in IVY-Plus Libraries
In recent years publishers in mainland China have printed large collections of primary and secondary print material. This spreadsheet, maintained by Joshua Seufert of Princeton Libraries, provides information on bibliographic and Ivy Plus holding information for large sets of primary source materials published in mainland China. The list is current through July 2024 and contains 2947 titles currently held by Ivy Plus Libraries. The OCLC library codes are :RBN Brown, CGU Chicago, ZCU Columbia, COO Cornell, DRB Dartmouth, NDD Duke, HUL Harvard (Main Library and Yenching), HFL Harvard Fine Arts, HVL Harvard Law, JHE Johns Hopkins, PUL Princeton, PAU Upenn, STF Stanford, YUS Yale, and CRL Center for Research Libraries.
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Chugoku kankei ronsetsu shiryō sakuin
Searchable index of articles on China appearing in Japanese academic journals, including many less commonly-indexed periodicals. Published by Nichigai Associates, the database covers a broad range of disciplines and includes reduced-image copies of the indexed articles. The printed multi-volume collection Chugoku kankei ronsetsu shiryō sakuin (中国関係論説資料索引) has been published since the 1970s and is a standard reference tool for Japan-based China scholarship.
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Classical Historiography for Chinese History
Classical Historiography for Chinese History (中國經典文獻工具書錄) is a research guide compiled by Benjamin A. Elman, Professor of East Asian Studies and History at Princeton University, with contributions from collaborators at Fudan University, Academia Sinica, the University of Houston, and Princeton University. Originally developed from bibliography courses at the University of Pennsylvania (1975–1977), the guide provides annotated references to classical Chinese historiographical sources and sinological reference works. All entries are alphabetized within each section and romanized in Pinyin following Library of Congress guidelines. The entire site is searchable. The guide is hosted in Princeton University Library's LibGuides East Asian Studies Portal and was last revised in October 2022.
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CrossAsia Fulltext Search
The CrossAsia Fulltext Search is built from textual resources hosted in the CrossAsia Integrated Text Repository (ITR) and is open to all users. Its aim is to help users find texts and sources relevant to their research questions by performing comprehensive fulltext searches across databases. Currently searchable: approximately 538,309 titles (books and issues) with 86.4 million pages archived in the CrossAsia ITR. The search interface offers two modes: a 'guided' search (Type A), in which hits are grouped and displayed by book and ranked by number of pages with hits; and an 'explorative' search (Type B), in which both fulltext and metadata are searched simultaneously and results are ranked by index score. In addition to fulltext search, CrossAsia also provides the CrossAsia N-gram Service, which publishes character frequency datasets for selected collections, and the CrossAsia ITR Explorer and CrossAsia ITR Newspaper Explorer, which enable analysis and visualization of data stored in the ITR. The ITR continues to grow with more fulltexts being added continuously.
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DocuSky
DocuSky (數位人文學術研究平台 / Digital Humanities Scholarly Research Platform) is a comprehensive online collaboration platform created by the Digital Humanities Research Center (DHRC) at National Taiwan University. The platform serves as an integrated environment hosting datasets, digital tools, and learning resources specifically designed for digital humanities research. DocuSky provides researchers with tools for text analysis, data visualization, corpus building, and collaborative research projects. The platform supports multiple Chinese text analysis functions including full-text search, concordance, statistical analysis, and network visualization. Researchers can upload their own corpora, use shared datasets, and apply various analytical tools without requiring advanced programming skills. DocuSky has been widely adopted by digital humanities researchers in Taiwan and internationally for projects in classical Chinese literature, historical documents, religious texts, and linguistic studies.
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East Asian Gateway Service
The East Asian Gateway Service (EAGS) was established in October 1998 and has been financially supported by the University of Pittsburgh Library System since October 2001. The EAGS is a pioneer in developing transcontinental interlibrary partnerships, focusing on free delivery of full-text Chinese and Korean language academic publications to researchers. Chinese documents are available to any individual researcher or non-profit organization for research and teaching purposes who cannot find the needed item in any U.S. library. Korean language materials are available to University of Pittsburgh faculty and students only. The service is reciprocal, as ULS provides document delivery service of English language materials to Chinese and Korean partner libraries. The EAGS has succeeded in providing research support to thousands of China scholars in the United States and researchers in China. The EAGS has partnerships with libraries in mainland China, Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan, and Korea, covering 40 states in America and serving more than 130 colleges and universities.
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Frog in a Well
Frog in a Well is a collaborative academic blog and resource guide for East Asian history, maintained by an international community of scholars. The site offers curated subject guides and links to primary source collections primarily aimed at researchers and students working with English-language materials or with limited access to commercial databases. The China-focused section currently hosts three subject guides: the history of Taiwan, the history of Shanghai, and missionary perspectives on China. Additional guides covering Japanese and Korean history are also available on the platform. The blog section features scholarly commentary and discussion of East Asian history topics, and remains actively updated as of 2026.
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Greater China Archival Resources
The Greater China Archival Resources Web Archive, curated by the Ivy Plus Libraries Confederation, collects websites belonging to established physical archives, archival societies, and archival projects from or about the Greater China region. Because local archives operate under the guidance of provincial and municipal archival bureaus, the archived websites cover not only collection holdings but also policies, news, reports, and research related to archival management across China's provinces, cities, and special administrative regions. The archive preserves born-digital content from Chinese archives and documents changes to these sites over time, creating a stable reference resource that captures shifting access conditions and institutional developments.
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Hong Kong and Macau Index to Chinese Periodicals
Hong Kong and Macau Index to Chinese Periodicals (HKInChiP) is a bibliographic index to Chinese and bilingual academic and cultural journals published in Hong Kong and Macau, with a focus on humanities and social sciences. Developed by the Chinese University of Hong Kong Library in 1999 (originally as the Index to Chinese Periodicals of Hong Kong), the database expanded to include Macau periodicals through collaboration with the University of Macau Library in 2005, and was relaunched on a new platform with the current name in 2025. Most journals are indexed from 1980 onwards; the earliest title in the database dates to 1853. In addition to bibliographic citation data, the database provides links to full-text images of certain articles.
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Ivy Plus Libraries' Digital Projects on East Asia
Ivy Plus Libraries' Digital Projects on East Asia is a LibGuide hosted by Duke University Libraries that serves as a shared platform for Ivy Plus consortium member libraries to publicize their published and ongoing digital projects related to East Asia. Participating institutions include Brown, Cornell, Columbia, Dartmouth, Duke, Harvard, Johns Hopkins, Princeton, Stanford, University of Chicago, University of Pennsylvania, and Yale. The guide provides project listings and contact information for East Asian librarians at each institution, and is updated periodically (most recently April 2025).
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Japanese-occupied China Collection - Stanford University Library and Hoover Institution
The Japanese-occupied China Collection Online Bibliography is a freely accessible digital resource developed by Stanford University's East Asia Library and the Hoover Institution, cataloging primary source materials from the period of Japanese occupation in China (1932–1945). The bibliography covers newspapers, archival documents, and publications primarily in Chinese held at Stanford, with introductory overviews of key topics, highlights of rare and unique items, and recommended scholarly readings on wartime and occupied China.
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Modern Chinese Literature and Culture (MCLC) Resource Center
The MCLC Resource Center is the online companion to the print journal Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, maintained by Kirk A. Denton at The Ohio State University. It houses extensive bibliographies of mostly English-language materials on modern and contemporary Chinese literature, film/media, visual arts, music, education, and culture, as well as online articles, book reviews, and a blog. The Resource Center also hosts a Video Lecture Series featuring leading experts on modern Chinese literature and culture. Back issues of the print journal (with a one-year lag) are available through JSTOR.
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Oxford Bibliographies: Chinese Studies
Oxford Bibliographies: Chinese Studies is a peer-reviewed reference resource offering expert-curated, annotated bibliographies on topics spanning Chinese history, literature, philosophy, politics, religion, art, and society. Each entry is written by a leading scholar in the field and combines an overview essay with a selective annotated bibliography pointing to essential primary and secondary sources. The resource covers both pre-modern and contemporary China and is organized into discipline-spanning subject modules, maintained and published by Oxford University Press.
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PRC History Group Resource List
The PRC History Group is a scholarly network focused on the history of the People's Republic of China, now operating as H-PRC on the H-Net platform (https://networks.h-net.org/h-prc). The network hosts scholarly discussions, announcements, and publishes the PRC History Review, which contains research articles, roundtable discussions, and reviews of recent scholarship. The site also links to freely available Chinese-language journals focusing on the Cultural Revolution and other PRC topics, including Remembrance (记忆), Yesterday (昨天), and Past Events (往事). The group welcomes scholars, students, and others with serious interest in PRC history.
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Policy Commons
Policy Commons is a discovery platform for the research output of international organizations, think tanks, intergovernmental organizations (IGOs), and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) worldwide. The platform aggregates policy research, reports, and working papers on topics including economics, international relations, governance, and public policy. For China studies researchers, it is useful for locating policy documents and think-tank analyses from international bodies and NGOs concerning China and East Asia.
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Princeton Chinese Archival Handbook Collection
Geographic interface to the collection of Chinese archival handbooks 档案馆指南 at the East Asian Library of Princeton University.
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ReCAP Chinese Journals public list
This spreadsheet provides holding information on 1,350 Chinese periodicals archived by member libraries of the ReCAP (Research Collections and Preservation Consortium). ReCAP is a 501(c)3 not-for-profit corporation incorporated in 2000 that preserves collections and enables resource sharing among its member libraries: Columbia University, Harvard University, The New York Public Library, Princeton University, and Yale University. The spreadsheet lists journal titles, ISSN numbers, coverage dates, and holding information by institution, and is intended to help researchers identify which ReCAP member library holds a given Chinese periodical.
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Zhongguo yanjiu faxian
Previously known as Guji faxian 古籍发现 and Quanwen faxian 全文发现, this database started as a discovery service for digitized Chinese rare books, collecting information about editions from libraries in China, the United States, and Europe. Individual entries link back to the original scans hosted by the respective institutions. Clicking on 检索 without a search term allows browsing the entire database via a simplified Sibu 四库 classification with maps, gazetteers, and congshu as additional browsing categories. Currently the portal lists about 100,000 editions. More recently the database integrated material from the previous Zhongguo yanjiu wangluo ziyuan daohang 中国研究网络资源导航 and provides an easy-to-navigate overview of many free and freely registerable databases in Chinese Studies available on the Internet.
Videos and Films
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Socialism on Film: The Cold War and International Propaganda
Socialism on Film: The Cold War and International Propaganda is a streaming video archive published by Adam Matthew Digital, featuring films produced in and about communist states during the twentieth century. The collection covers countries including the USSR, China, Vietnam, Korea, Cuba, East Germany, and much of Eastern Europe, offering a view of Cold War events through the socialist lens. Films were sourced primarily from the British Film Institute and span propaganda films, documentaries, and newsreels. The collection is organized thematically and includes contextual essays alongside the films.
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World Newsreels Online
World Newsreels Online is a streaming video collection of international newsreels produced between 1929 and 1966, including footage from Japan, France, the United States, the Netherlands, and other countries. All items are accompanied by transcripts, with non-English content translated into English. The collection covers key events of the mid-twentieth century including World War II and the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945), comprising nine distinct newsreel series — including France Actualités, Nippon News, and The March of Time — totaling over 500 hours of content.