Early Chinese Periodicals Online (ECPO)

INSTITUTION

University of Heidelberg

ACCESS

open access

URL

http://www.ecpo.uni-hd.de/

DESCRIPTION

Early Chinese Periodicals Online (ECPO) is an open-access research platform developed by Heidelberg Research Architecture (HRA). ECPO joins together several important digital collections of the early Chinese press and puts them into a single overarching framework. So far, the ECPO project has focused on a body of rich but heretofore undervalued materials—women’s and entertainment magazines.. The platform provides comprehensive access to over 300 publications comprising approximately 435,000 entries including 300,000 scans, 85,000 records, and 50,000 agent names from Republican-era magazines and newspapers. ECPO combines extensive approaches (comprehensive catalogs of periodicals with basic metadata) and intensive approaches (cover-to-cover digitization with detailed content analysis and structured metadata). Collections include Chinese Women's Magazines in the Late Qing and Early Republican Period (WoMag database - four influential magazines published 1904-1937), Chinese Entertainment Newspapers (Xiaobao 小報), and selections of literary and art magazines. The platform provides fully bilingual metadata in Chinese and English, making it accessible to scholars beyond Chinese studies. All bibliographic data is available through the ECPO API in MODS XML format, and metadata is published on heiDATA, Heidelberg University's research data repository.

SOURCE LIST

ACLS Open Database Resource Guide

LAST MODIFIED

2026-01-16