ONLINE RESOURCES

CONTENTS

  • DIGITAL TOOLS & GUIDES,  CROWDSOURCING, GRANTS
  • CENTERS for DIGITAL SCHOLARSHIP
  • DIGITAL CHINA, EAST ASIAN & ‘ORIENTAL’ STUDIES
  • DIGITAL TOOLS & GUIDES,  MS. TRANSCRIPTION PLATFORMS, CROWDSOURCING, GRANTS
  • DATABASES & RESOURCES on CHRISTIANITY IN CHINA & EAST ASIA (history, religions, texts etc.)
    • Bibliographic & Textual Databases
    • Current Journals
    • Publishing Series
    • Biographical Databases
    • Relational Databases (Biographies & Geography) & Other Databases
    • Visual Resources
    • Other resources
  • SINO-WESTERN RELATIONS: DIGITAL RESOURCES ONLINE & MICROFORMS
    • Textual Resources
    • Relevant collections (East Asia; missions; trade; diplomacy etc.)
    • Visual Resources
  • ASIA, THE ‘ORIENT’ & THE WORLD: DIGITAL RESOURCES ONLINE
  • INSTITUTIONS: Research Centers and Groups (Christianity-in-China; Chinese Religions; Sino-Western Relations; Mission studies)
  • INSTITUTIONS: Archives, Libraries & related Online Portals (Christianity-in-China; Chinese Religions; Sino-Western Relations; Missions)
  • WEBSITES (History & Culture; Global China; Biography)
  • DICTIONARIES
    • Chinese and Manchu 🀄
      • An Introduction to Chinese Electronic Dictionaries
      • Zdic 漢典
      • Kangxi zidian 康熙字典 (1716)
      • Dictionary of Chinese Character Variants 異體字字典     
      • The English-Chinese Dictionary Database (1815-1919)
      • Database of Hokkien 閩南話 Dictionaries and Textbooks
      • Early Cantonese Colloquial Texts: A Database 早期粵語口語文獻資料庫
      • Manc.hu – Resources for the Study of Manchu
    • English 🇬🇧
      • Lexicons of Early Modern English (LEME)
    • French 🇫🇷     
      • Dictionnaires d’autrefois   
      • Centre National de Ressources Textuelles et Lexicales (CNRTL)
    • Italian 🇮🇹       
      • Accademia della Crusca – Grande dizionario della lingua italiana
      • CNR – Opera del Vocabolario Italiano – Tesoro della Lingua Italiana delle Origini
      • Dizionario della lingua italiana di Tommaseo-Bellini       Lessicografia della Crusca in Rete  
    • Latin 🏛️         
      • Neo-Latin Lexicon         
      • Neulateinische Wortliste (NLW): Ein Wörterbuch des Lateinischen von Petrarca bis 1700  by Johann Ramminger
    • Portuguese 🇵🇹🇧🇷       
      • Corpus Lexicográfico do Português
      • Dieter Messner – Dicionário dos dicionários portugueses
      • Corpus Histórico do Português ‘Tycho Brahe’           
    • Spanish 🇪🇸     
      • Real Academia Española – Diccionario histórico de la lengua española
      • Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española by Sebastián de Covarrubias Horozco, 1611        

DIGITAL TOOLS & GUIDES,  MS. TRANSCRIPTION PLATFORMS, CROWDSOURCING, GRANTS

Making Methods Modern! Designed by historians, our software and services (Omeka, Zotero, Tropy etc.) make research, publishing, and cultural heritage work possible.

The Programming Historian was founded in 2008 by William J. Turkel and Alan MacEachern. Turkel published a blog post at the time, setting out their intentions for the project. Initially it focused heavily on the Python programming language and was published open access as a Network in Canadian History & Environment (NiCHE) ‘Digital Infrastructure’ project. In 2012, Programming Historian expanded its editorial team and launched as an open access peer reviewed scholarly journal of methodology for digital historians. In 2016 we added a Spanish Language publication to the initial English-language publication and in 2017 started publishing translated lessons under the title Programming Historian en español. In 2018 we hosted our first Spanish-language writing workshop and issued a call for new lessons in Spanish. In the same year we added a French language publication and launched Programming Historian en français in 2019. A year later, we were joined by a Portuguese-speaking team and launched Programming Historian em português in early 2021.

Definitions and resources for the Digital Historian on the AHA website.

By now a classic, Daniel Cohen and Roy Rosenzweig’s Digital History: A Guide to Gathering, Preserving, and Presenting the Past on the Web, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005, provides a plainspoken and thorough introduction to the web for historians—teachers and students, archivists and museum curators, professors as well as amateur enthusiasts—who wish to produce online historical work or to build upon and improve the projects they have already started in this important new medium.

Twenty essays from a wide array of notable scholars, each examining (and then breaking apart and reexamining) if and how digital and emergent technologies have changed the historical profession. 

IIIF is a set of open standards for delivering high-quality, attributed digital objects online at scale. It’s also an international community developing and implementing the IIIF APIs. IIIF is backed by a consortium of leading cultural institutions. Many of the images and audio/visual resources that are fundamental to research exist in silos, with access restricted to locally-built applications. IIIF gives you and your audience freedom to work across barriers.

  • Examine, compare, annotate, and share. IIIF enables easy use across repositories, with tools to aid research and presentation.
  • Publish once, reuse often. IIIF serves high-quality digital objects to your own site and others in many formats, without vendor lock-in.
  • Share your collections as widely as possible. IIIF is a cost-effective way to serve billions of digital objects with open-source, community-driven ethics.

Useful general links and definitions.

Historical Network Research (HNR) explores the challenges and possibilities of network research in historical scholarship and serves as a platform for researchers from various disciplines to meet, present and discuss their latest research findings and to demonstrate tools and projects. For more information,  visit http://historicalnetworkresearch.org/

SNAC (Social Networks and Archival Context) is a free, online resource that helps users discover biographical and historical information about persons, families, and organizations that created or are documented in historical resources (primary source documents) and their connections to one another. Users can locate archival collections and related resources held at cultural heritage institutions around the world. SNAC is an international cooperative including, but not limited to, archives, libraries, and museums, that is working to build a corpus of reliable descriptions of people, families, and organizations that link to and provide a contextual understanding of historical records.

Recogito is an online platform for collaborative document annotation. It is maintained by Pelagios, a Digital Humanities initiative aiming to foster better linkages between online resources documenting the past. Recogito provides a personal workspace where you can upload, collect and organize your source materials – texts, images and tabular data – and collaborate in their annotation and interpretation. Recogito helps you to make your work more visible on the Web more easily, and to expose the results of your research as Open Data.

ArcGIS StoryMaps helps you tell remarkable stories with custom maps that inform and inspire. A story can effect change, influence opinion, and create awareness—and maps are an integral part of storytelling. ArcGIS StoryMaps can give your narrative a stronger sense of place, illustrate spatial relationships, and add visual appeal and credibility to your ideas. Use our simple map maker to create custom maps to enhance your digital storytelling. Or add text, photos, and videos to your existing ArcGIS web maps and web scenes to create an interactive narrative that’s easy to publish and share. Create inspiring, immersive stories by combining text, interactive maps, and other multimedia content. Publish and share your story with your organization or everyone around the world. 

MARKUS: a reading and text analysis platform with a wide range of functionality, to mark text in Chinese and other languages, developed at Leiden University.

See also two text comparison modules COMPARATIVUS and PARALLELLS. (On the history of and concept behind these and related digital research projects, see “Creating, Linking, and Analyzing Chinese and Korean Datasets: Digital Text Annotation in MARKUS and COMPARATIVUS”).

Voyant Tools is a web-based text reading and analysis environment. It is a scholarly project that is designed to facilitate reading and interpretive practices for digital humanities students and scholars as well as for the general public. What you can do with Voyant:

  • Use it to learn how computers-assisted analysis works.
  • Use it to study texts that you find on the web or texts that you have carefully edited and have on your computer.
  • Use it to add functionality to your online collections, journals, blogs or web sites so others can see through your texts with analytical tools.
  • Use it to add interactive evidence to your essays that you publish online. Add interactive panels right into your research essays (if they can be published online) so your readers can recapitulate your results.
  • Use it to develop your own tools using our functionality and code.

Intelligent Character Recognition (ICR) is an extended technology of OCR (optical character recognition). OCR is designed to work on printed characters while ICR is focusing on hand printed characters. ICR is about hand written characters that are separated and written as single characters; the areas/zones where the characters are written have to be known = the fields of a machine readable form. ICR is NOT about “cursive handwriting.”

Kraken is a turn-key OCR system optimized for historical and non-Latin script material. Kraken is an optical character recognition package that can be trained fairly easily for a large number of scripts. In contrast to other system requiring segmentation down to glyph level before classification, it is uniquely suited for the recognition of connected scripts, because the neural network is trained to assign correct character to unsegmented training data. Kraken can be run on Linux or Mac OS X (both x64 and ARM).  There is a training tutorial at Training kraken. Kraken is developed at the École Pratique des Hautes Études, Université PSL.

Transkribus is a comprehensive platform for the digitisation, AI-powered recognition, transcription and searching of historical documents (in alphabetical languages). Transkribus can be trained to recognize exactly the documents you are interested in: Arabic, or English, Old German or Polish, Bangla, Hebrew or Dutch. General also information at their Wiki.  This report about language OCR recognition (2018) is useful too.

The purpose of eScriptorium is to provide as complete as possible a workflow for the production of digital editions. The first step in this is the transcription of primary sources, and this is the part that the team has been focussing on to date. This block in the workflow is now functioning and being tested on a wide range of scripts, and soon we will also have the annotation of images along much the same principles as those of the Archetype project, and the annotation of texts according to the TEI standard for adding philological, historical, linguistic, palaeographical and other information.

T-PEN is a web-based tool for working with images of manuscripts. Users attach transcription data (new or uploaded) to the actual lines of the original manuscript in a simple, flexible interface.

  • Is an open and general tool for scholars of any technical expertise level
  • Allows transcriptions to be created, manipulated, and viewed in many ways
  • Collaborate with others through simple project management
  • Exports transcriptions as a pdf, XML(plaintext) for further processing, or contribute to a collaborating institution with a click
  • Respects existing and emerging standards for text, image, and annotation data storage
  • Avoids prejudice in data, allowing users to find new ways to work

NewsEye, funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme, is a research project advancing the state of the art and introducing new concepts, methods and tools for digital humanities by providing enhanced access to historical newspapers for a wide range of users. With the tools and methods created by NewsEye, crucial user groups will be able to investigate views and perspectives on historical events and development and, as a consequence, the project will change the way European digital heritage data is (re)searched, accessed, used and analysed.

DeepL Translator is a free neural machine translation service launched in 2017 and developed by DeepL GmbH, based in Cologne, Germany, more accurate and nuanced than Google Translate. DeepL currently offers translations between the following 11 languages and 110 language pairs: Chinese (Simplified), Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Portuguese, Brazilian Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish. Additionally, approximations of language equivalence are proposed among all of those languages, using a two-step process via an English pivot.

The Zooniverse is the world’s largest and most popular platform for people-powered research. This research is made possible by volunteers — more than a million people around the world who come together to assist professional researchers. Our goal is to enable research that would not be possible, or practical, otherwise. Zooniverse research results in new discoveries, datasets useful to the wider research community, and many publications.

Oxford Semantic Technologies is a spin out of the University of Oxford and is backed by leading investors including Samsung Venture Investment Corporation (SVIC), Oxford Sciences Innovation (OSI) and Oxford University’s investment arm (OUI).

Its chairman and co-founder Dr. Adam Parr is a scholar of Chinese-Western relations and the Jesuit mission in China, and the author of  The Mandate of Heaven: Strategy, Revolution, and the First European Translation of Sunzi’s Art of War (1772), (Brill, 2019) on the Jesuit Joseph Amiot’s Art militaire des chinois, ou recueil d’anciens traités sur la guerre.

Oxford Semantic Technologies has developed a new graph technology called RDFox, which ingests data in the open standard RDF-triple format and can easily be converted to and from SQL or CSV sources. Rules are modelled with the industry standard Datalog language, and can operate incrementally.

The CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model (CRM) is a theoretical and practical tool for information integration in the field of cultural heritage. It can help researchers, administrators and the public explore complex questions with regards to our past across diverse and dispersed datasets. The CIDOC CRM achieves this by providing definitions and a formal structure for describing the implicit and explicit concepts and relationships used in cultural heritage documentation and of general interest for the querying and exploration of such data. Such models are also known as formal ontologies. These formal descriptions allow the integration of data from multiple sources in a software and schema agnostic fashion.

Guidance for all things PhD: graduate school, job market, grants, and careers.

This resource is no longer maintained, but has very rich materials up to 2019.

Since 2010, Dissertation Reviews has featured more than 1000 overviews of recently defended, unpublished doctoral dissertations in a wide variety of disciplines across the Humanities and Social Sciences. The goal was to offer readers a glimpse of each discipline’s immediate present by focusing on the window of time between dissertation defense and first book publication.

Each review provides a summary of the author’s main arguments, the historiographic genealogy in which the author operates, and the main source bases for his or her research. The reviews are also anticipatory, making educated assessments of how the research will advance or challenge our understanding of major issues in the field when it is revised and published in the future.

The site also offers excellent introductions to archival collections in many countries in the section FRESH FROM THE ARCHIVES. 

CENTERS for DIGITAL SCHOLARSHIP

CESTA is an internationally renowned digital humanities center based in Wallenberg Hall at Stanford University. Through collaboration with partners across campus, across the Americas, and across the world, CESTA’s research investigates pressing questions about human history, experience and endeavor. It explores places, global spaces, texts, textual artifacts, data visualization, digital curation, preservation and display, linked data and interoperability, and sustainability. 

Textual Optics Lab is a Digital Humanities Lab uniting a diverse group of scholars at the University of Chicago in literature and history. This includes the ARTFL-Project and the Chicago Text Lab. The lab’s projects centers on the concept and practice of scalable reading, drawing on a variety of qualitative and computational methods. Our goal is to merge these methods to develop a uniquely UChicago style of data-driven humanistic research. 

The Big Data Studies Lab (BDSL) at the University of Hong Kong conducts experimental research that rethinks the role of the humanities in the Zettabyte era. BDSL aspires to develop a global and balanced understanding of big data from a humanities perspective. Our international research team consults sources in English, Spanish, Korean, Chinese, Danish, Norwegian, and other languages. BDSL is committed to maintaining a high standard of research, with an emphasis on technological literacy and methodological rigor. Our objective is not hasty theorization but rather to empirically demonstrate our arguments through experiments and field research. 

DIGITAL CHINA, EAST ASIAN & ‘ORIENTAL’ STUDIES

The China Studies Virtual Events Clearing-house has been created to share information about upcoming online events with the broader China studies community. The clearing-house was created and is maintained by the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard University. You can use the catalog to view a list of all upcoming events, or search for events by keyword, institution, or speaker. Since many online events are being recorded for asynchronous broadcast, you may also want to search through past events. (Past events search is available in table view only.) For the time being, we are limiting the catalog to events sponsored by universities or China Studies centers.

This online magazine is run by a dedicated team of scholars, librarians, and students. We share our experience using digital tools in the Humanities, especially as it relates to our day-to-day workflow. Our name, The Digital Orientalist, may raise an eyebrow. We are all fully aware of the contentious meaning of ‘Orientalism’ and its relation to colonialism. We are of the opinion that enough years have gone by to pick this name up again, to convey in one word the relation between our fields of studies. In this sense we mirror similar initiatives like The Digital Classicist, The Digital Medievalist, The Digital Humanist, etc. As diverse as our fields of studies are, when it comes to digital solutions, there are many shared aspects. We therefore think we stand to benefit from talking to each other, to learn of best practices in other fields.

A list of digital things related to the field of Chinese studies curated by Kwok-leong Tang, the Digital China Fellow of the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, Harvard University.

In 2002, Taiwan’s government initiated the “National Digital Archives Program” to digitize various kinds of archives kept in both public and private institutions in Taiwan; in 2003, it launched the “National Science and Technology Program for e-Learning.” The two programs were officially merged together on January 1, 2008 to form the “Taiwan e-Learning and Digital Archives Program” (TELDAP). TELDAP aims to creatively promote national digital archives and e-learning applications; facilitate the development of Taiwan’s culture, society, industry, and economy; disseminate Taiwan’s experience in the global community to expand its visibility on the international stage; and sustainably manage national cultural assets as well as develop e-learning applications in industries, academic research, and education.

Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin (Berlin State Library) has been developing and running the platform CrossAsia for more than a decade. It was launched in 2005 to provide an easy to use and central point of access to the printed and electronic resources in the library’s collection relating to East, Central and Southeast Asia. The collection is partly funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG). Over the years, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin has continuously adjusted the objectives for CrossAsia, incorporating and in some cases anticipating the demands of academia and research – especially in the field of digital scholarship.

The heart of the website is a catalogue of early modern printed texts that attest to contact between Europe and the East, and that are held in Dublin research libraries. In the catalogue you will find a selection of 180 books about the East, covering a variety of genres, with a detailed description of each text that includes a bibliographical report, copy-specific information, images, and links to relevant online resources.

A comprehensive listing and description of English-, Chinese-, Korean-, Japanese-language and additional DATABASES available (only to PU subscribers) through the PU East Asian Library, and one of the very best introductions to online resources on East Asia anywhere. Contains detailed descriptions of the scope of each database. 

This guide provides an introduction to selected electronic resources for Chinese studies at Harvard.

Calendrical automatic conversion concordance from 1 CE to 2101 CE, in Chinese.

Concordance including the Ming (1368-1644) and Qing (1644-1911) dynasties, modern Japanese chronology since the Meiji era (1868-1989), the Manchukuo (1932-1945) and the Republic of China (1912-1989) calendars.

The “Encyclopaedia of Manuscript Cultures in Asia and Africa” (EMCAA) is an ambitious project aiming to fill a long existing gap in manuscript studies. Dealing comprehensively with the diversity of manuscript cultures in Asia and Africa, it will not only describe the state of research in the relevant fields but establish for the first time a reliable foundation for systematic, historical and comparative research in manuscript studies.

CHGIS is a free database of placenames and historical administrative units for the Chinese Dynasties. CHGIS provides a base GIS platform for researchers to use in spatial analysis or to visualize the historical divisions of China as digital maps.

The WebGIS Platform of Historical Maps of China, conducted by the history department of Shanghai Jiao Tong University (SJTUMAPGIS), is a combined GIS system and historical scholarship on historical maps of China to geo-reference scanned maps by ArcGIS and release them for public use. This is an open and nonprofit platform for sharing resources on Chinese historical maps.

BiogRef provides a distributed method for sharing metadata about online biographical information and integrating this metadata into searchable catalogs with direct links to electronic resources. This system currently provides access to a person names in the China Biographical Database (CBDB) and Dharma Drum Buddhist College (DDBC) Buddhist Studies Authority Database.

TextRef provides a distributed method for sharing metadata about online historical texts and integrating this metadata into searchable catalogs with direct links to electronic resources. This system currently provides access to a catalog of pre-modern Chinese texts available in various online database systems.

The Contemporary Chinese Village Gazetteer Data (CCVG Data) project, with the goal of creating an open dataset consisting of data selected from the University of Pittsburgh Library System (ULS)’s collection of Chinese village gazetteers. Village gazetteers record statistical data on individual villages, covering the years from 1949 to the present showing the history and development of Chinese villages (the village is the most basic administrative unit in China). The CCVG Data project, the first of its kind, offers scholars a dataset based on the ULS East Asian Library’s growing collection of Chinese village gazetteers, which currently numbers over 2,700.

The Modern History Databases (MHDB) integrates the Institute’s digital scholarly resources from our library, archives, the Hu Shih memorial hall, and the databases created by the MHDB team and through interlibrary cooperation. Users can directly search keywords from this page and browse all related information.

MCBD is a general-purpose database that collects a wide range of biographical information. It revolves primarily around individuals — they are at the center of the database, as well as institutions (any kind of organization: ministry, club, company, etc.), locations (any named human settlement), and events (any form of individual or collective action). The development and implementation of MCBD is based on Heurist, a web database interface that provides both a backend and a frontend for relational research data in the humanities. For an overview of the structure of the database, please consult our MCBD User Manual.

The development of the database relies on an on-going process of curating and mining biographical-data publications from before and after 1949 (biographical dictionaries, directories, etc.), as well as the incorporation of large datasets produced by the members of the team in previous research.  We are also incorporating the rich biographical data that we have extracted from Wikipedia and Baidu, and similar resources. At the time of initial public release, the data in MCBD has come mostly from the documents that the ENP-China team has been processing, especially newspapers and biographical dictionaries. The Institute of Modern History (Academia Sinica) generously shared the data from its 近現代人物資訊整合系統 database.

The Elites, Networks and Power in modern urban China project explores the transformative process of elites in China between 1830 and 1949. It focuses on three main urban areas which were the engines of change in modern China: Beijing/Tianjin, Guangzhou/Hong Kong, and greater Shanghai.  The project intends to challenge the China-centered and group-based approach dominant in the historical literature of the past two decades. The project envisions elites in urban China as actors whose status, position, and practices were shaped by the power configurations that developed over time and whose actions through institutions and informal/formal networks in turn were a determining factor in redrawing social and political boundaries. The project places the emphasis on the networks through which information, capital, and individuals circulated. It investigates the transnationalization of elites as a process that overstepped the limits of institutions and nation states.

 

This site is dedicated to making accessible the key documents, movies, blogs, and publications of a movement of Chinese people seeking to reclaim their country’s history. Unlike official government or university archives, the China Unofficial Archives is open, free, and accessible to anyone from any walk of life. The site is fully bilingual in Chinese and English, the international language of scholarship. The site is based on the following principles：

Neutrality: We do not endorse items in our archive. Our goal is to make information available. We do not promote a specific agenda.

Accessibility: We believe that public domain books, magazines, and films should be widely available, and that there is an inherent value in making different voices heard.

Public Service: We are a publicly registered non-profit organization. We do not charge fees or accept advertising.

Necessity for an Unofficial Archive: Since its founding in 1921, the Chinese Communist Party has made control of history its top priority. This is because control of history is the chief way that the party legitimizes its right to rule China: in its telling, history brought the party to power, and history has determined that only the Communist Party can run China. Any other versions of events are forbidden. The party promotes its version of history in two ways. One is to employ writers, videographers, and others who make museum exhibitions, write books and blogs, or film videos or full-length feature films. Most distort the Communist Party’s role in Chinese history by glorifying its accomplishments and erasing its shortcomings. The party also seeks to control history by limiting access to official archives. These measures deprive alternative versions of history public space in China. The China Unofficial Archive helps correct this imbalance. For decades, citizen historians have written or filmed their own versions of history. They offer a fuller and more nuanced version of history than Chinese Communist Party’s one-dimensional version of the past. The archive brings together these efforts–from the party’s early days before 1949 to current events, such as the government’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic. It allows users to sort the material by topic, era, creator, and format, giving users the chance to explore related materials.

The Team: The China Unofficial Archive is made up of an operational team that built and maintains the site, as well as an advisory board.

Building on earlier collaborations with historians at Cambridge University and the Second Historical Archives of China, this 2003-07 AHRC-funded project was designed to further understandings of the modern Chinese state, British imperial history, and the history of modern globalization in China, by focusing on the role the Chinese Maritime Customs Service and its staff played in these historical processes. The first step was to produce a new catalogue of the 55,000 files that make up the archives of the Chinese Maritime Customs Service held at the Second Historical Archives at Nanjing. In collaboration with Thomson Gale, 350 reels of microfilms of archival materials from the archive relating to the history of the Customs Service were also published. Project work also encompassed the creation of new reference datasets (notably a database of foreign and Chinese service-listed personnel), a guide to the history and structure of the Customs, and work on visual sources for Customs history, including an autumn 2007 exhibition at the Brunei Gallery, SOAS, and other locations.  Research students and research fellows associated with the project researched the life of foreigners employed by the Customs Service, patterns of consumption and its effects on the Chinese state, the Native Customs service, the Service under Inspector General L.K. Little etc.

This project explores spatial formats of China through visions and plans of infrastructural interconnectivity. The period investigated spans the establishment of the first Ministry of Communications in 1906 to the onset of the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937. Through an actor-centred analysis of the relevant ministries, polytechnic schools, and professional engineering associations, we demonstrate how different infrastructural visions of the nation state interact and constitute a fundamental dimension of territorializing space. As part of its work the project is responsible for the Chinese Engineers Relational Database (CERD) Web Interface. CERD is a database of engineers from the Chinese Republican period (1912–1949). You can use this web interface to access the prosopographic catalogue of persons, educational institutions, and companies.

The ICCM Database  (a database developed as part of the ICCM project ICCM) online offers the possibility of querying the database through two different but complementary tools: in SQL format with hyperlink navigation across entities (people, cultural objects, institutions, places, etc.) through pre-formatted reports, and using FileMaker online to access all source data.

Through the SQL query system you will be able to access tables of people, cultural objects (including books and technological artefacts), corporate entities, places and related information (such dates of birth and death, dates of publication, dates of establishment, latitude and longitude), and to retrieve information on any of the indexed items. A series of tools for performing more elaborate queries will be progressively made available.

This system provides three retrieval functions: place name, map and coordinates. Place name retrieval is used to query the evolution process of place names. The result page can be subdivided into three levels: brief list, chronology, and detailed list. The more the inner level, the more detailed information. Map search provides users with keywords to search for map information included in the system. Coordinate query can currently display the coordinates of ancient and modern locations of Ming and Qing political districts.

The aim of QingMaps is to create an interactive map analysis and research visualization tool for students and researchers. Three large atlases are now online and fully searchable: Kangxi 1721; Yongzheng 1728; and Qianlong 1770. Raw materials were taken with permission from Wang Qianjin 汪前进 & Liu Ruofang 刘若芳, 清廷三大實測全圖集, 3 Vols., Beijing: Waiwen chubanshe, 2007. QingMaps is evolving—in the project’s next phase, we are working to connect QingMaps to a number of existing platforms and to curricula at Leiden University and the University of Macau. Contact Mario Cams about the maps and the project, Juul Eijk if you want to help and Fresco Sam-Sin about the development and project management.

250 years of change in Beijing revived with maps and photographs. A digital version of the “Complete Map of Peking, Qianlong Period,”  with functions to overlay it on the current map.

The representation of China in maps evolved over the centuries. In this website, you can explore high quality images of all the 127 maps of China printed in Europe between 1584 and 1735. Their stories reveal how the different map-making traditions of Europe and China changed and influenced each other. This website accompanies “Regnum Chinae: The Printed Western Maps of China to 1735”, the first comprehensive reference work on maps of China printed in Europe. This is the fruits of a rigorous research project in HKUST Library in 2016-2021 conducted by Dr. Marco Caboara, and supported by the generous donation of Dr. Ko Pui Shuen. Researchers, scholars and collectors will find this research work valuable; at the same time, anyone with curiosity for maps, history and geography can enjoy navigating among the images and discovering the stories behind.

This system uses a large amount of map data accumulated by the “Map and Telemetry Digital Archives Project” of the Human Resources Research Center of Academia Sinica, combined with the Google Maps interface.

The National Platform for Common Geospatial Information Services was created by China’s Ministry of Natural Resources.  Its mapping interface is used in the fields of natural resources, ecological environment, public security, scientific research, education, transportation, agriculture, civil affairs and water conservancy, and offers real-time online updates of data at the national, provincial and municipal levels. It contains high resolution remote sensing images, and millions of items of surveying and mapping geographic information resources. The platform includes an application program interface for three-dimensional terrain.

Platform run by K&SS for creation of research maps, uploadable by individual researchers

The China Biographical Database is a freely accessible relational database with biographical information about approximately 491,000 individuals as of May 2021, primarily from the 7th through 19th centuries. With both online and offline versions, the data is meant to be useful for statistical, social network, and spatial analysis as well as serving as a kind of biographical reference.

Personal Names Authority Database (Ming & Qing), Academia Sinica, Institute of History and Philology

Database of Biographical Packets and Drafts from the Archives of the Qing Historiography Institute.

This database of Qing officials includes “central authorities,” “local officials,” and “chronology of officials,” with three types of search methods: “official system,” “tree browsing,” and “chronology of officials.” The database mainly uses: the Gran Secretariat Archives, the collection of palace memorials at the National Palace Museum in Taipei, the memorial copies of the Grand Council Archives, the biographical packets and draft biographies of the Qing History Office, and the “Complete Biographical Record of Qing Dynasty Officials” 《清代官員履歷檔案全編》 in the collection of the First Historical Archives of China, as  well as the “Qingshilu” 《清實錄》, the “General Canon of the Qing Dynasty” 《清朝通典, the “General Gazetteer of the Qing Dynasty” 《清朝通志》, the “General Examination of Documents of the Qing Dynasty” 《清朝文獻通考》,  the “Collected Statutes” 《會典》 of the Kangxi, Yongzheng, Qianlong, Jiaqing, and Guangxu Reigns, etc. [see below] to provide basic information for the study of Qing history and the dynastic official system.

清代職官資料庫內容包含「中央機關」、「地方職官」、「職官年表」，提供「職官體系」、「樹狀瀏覽」、「職官年表」三種檢索方式。本資料庫主要運用本所典藏內閣大庫檔案、臺北國立故宮博物院藏宮中檔奏摺、軍機處奏摺錄副檔、清國史館傳包、清國史館傳稿，以及中國第一歷史檔案館藏《清代官員履歷檔案全編》、漢籍電子文獻《清實錄》、《清朝通典》、《清朝通志》、《清朝文獻通考》、康熙、雍正、乾隆、嘉慶、光緒五朝《會典》、《清史稿校註》、縉紳錄、方志等史料，輔以今人整理《清代國家機關考略》、《清代中央國家機關概述》、《清代地方官制考》、《清代政區沿革綜表》、《清代職官年表》、《清季職官表附人物錄》等資料，梳理出清代職官制度之脈絡，提供清史研究基礎資料，服務學界。

This system is based on the “Record of Officials in the Late Qing Dynasty [1797-1911]” published by the Institute of Modern History of Academia Sinica and edited by Wei Xiumei. This system can query in different directions:

  • Organizational official system: You can query the organizational tree diagram of the official system of the central government, provincial civil affairs, banner affairs and vassal affairs.
  • Time query: Query all official posts and persons in office in a  year.
  • Official position query: Query the past staff of an official position based on the official position name.
  • Person’s name query: query his or her life and employment status according to the name of historical person.

This authoritative search system for personal names in the Archives of the Institute of Modern History at AS is the beginning of the establishment of database of diplomatic and customs administration personalities.  There are currently about 1,800 diplomatic figures and about 3,000 from the custom services. The database offers also a “Chinese-English Comparison of Titles and Titles of Modern Chinese Customs Institutions” and a “List of New Customs and Related Institutions’ Establishment”.

The China Government Employee Database – Qing Jinshenlu(CGED-Q JSL) consists of records of officials in the jinshenlu, a publication that appeared every three months and listed almost every civil office including information about the holder’s name, place of origin, ethnicity, location of post, job title, and other details. positions ranged from high offices in the Six Ministries (六部) and other central government units down to low-level offices in county administrations. Nominative linkage of the records of the same official in different editions has proven straightforward, allowing us to construct and study career histories. Each edition lists 13,000-15,000 employees. Lists of military officials from the zhongshubeilan typically record 7000-8000 military officials each.

想按姓名搜索特定的官員嗎？請查看搜索網頁.
To search for a specific official by name, see the Jinshenlu search page. 

DOWNLOAD SITES

The CGED-Q Jinshenlu 1900-1912 and the  1850-1864 Public Releases are available for download at three different servers. Choose the one that is most convenient:

 

The Integrated Information System on Modern and Contemporary Characters (IISMCC) collects entries on Chinese famous individuals, their biographies, official posts, sources, oral history. The database includes personages extending from the Mid-Qing until the Republic of China, covering around 133,000 figures. The database includes the following resources: the Index of Persons in the Modern Historical Documents Full-Text Database, Who’s who in Shanghai, Biographical Data in China, Chien Chen Yang’s A Collection of Taiwanese Elites, 1915~1942, Japanese Who’s who in China, the Personal Name Authorities Database constructed by the Archives of IMH, and more.

On the China Families site you can find a growing body of information about men and women of many different nationalities, professions and ages, who lived and worked in China between the 1850s and 1940s. These records have been drawn from government department lists, legal and diplomatic records, cemetery lists, and during research undertaken for a number of projects on the history of modern China and of the foreign relations of China. Between 1843 and the early 1950s tens of thousands of foreign nationals lived in China. They worked for foreign companies, municipal administrations, the Chinese Maritime Customs Service (also known as the Imperial Maritime Customs), as diplomats and missionaries, or served in foreign armies and navies. The largest concentrations of foreign residents were in the cities of Shanghai and Tianjin, but there were smaller communities in many of the cities that were opened by treaty to foreign trade and residence, and which were known as Treaty Ports. More lived in the British Crown Colony at Hong Kong. Missionary societies were present much more widely across the country, and as well as evangelical activity, were engaged in education and medical work. After 1938, some 30,000 Jewish refugees came from central and eastern Europe. Large numbers of Russian refugees (‘White’ Russians) also came to the city. These treaty ports had been opened through agreements that had been negotiated in the aftermath of wars between Britain and China (in 1839-42), and Britain, France and China (in 1857-60. Originating in warfare, they were maintained by force, and it was not until the 1930s and 1940s that China was able to start to regain its sovereignty and overturn these impositions. For more on this history, and for hints about searching for records of these communities, see my article, republished here with permission from the Genealogists’ Magazine, 33:2 (2020) on ‘The British and the Chinese Treaty Ports’. Through China Families you can search for the names of people you think might have lived in China. The site is still under development, and in time some of the sets of records will be enriched with new information. Please use our contact form to let us know what you think of our site. We are also very happy to receive suggestions for new links to other resources. Our sister site, Historical Photographs of China, provides free access to over 22,000 digitalised photographs of China that were shared with us by China families, and which might help you visualise the times and places in which the men and women whose details are recorded here lived and worked.

Introduction to Chinese genealogical study and resources.

The Chinese Genealogy Knowledge Service Platform 中國家譜知識服務平台 is the most comprehensive online genealogy catalog. It contains bibliographical information, locations, and availability, though a considerable proportion is not correct.  There are three levels of availability for genealogies held at the Shanghai Library: unavailable, internally available, and externally available. The institution holds 30,000 genealogies, with half of them “internally” available on site at the reading room. Within the 15,000 internally available genealogies, 8,565 are externally available online: http://wrd2016.library.sh.cn/channel/stjp/.

The Henan Genealogy Research Association (full name: Family Name Culture Research Association Genealogy Committee, 河南省姓氏文化研究会家谱委员会) is  a research association approved by the Civil Affairs Department of Henan Province with more than 120 members, both professional experts and enthusiasts about genealogy culture. The site offers editing and printing service for genealogies as well.

This site offers some geographic and statistical breakdown of genealogies in China.

Local gazetteers (difangzhi 地方志) are major primary sources for the study of China’s local history. An estimated 8,000 titles of local gazetteers dating from the tenth to the twentieth century are still extant, covering nearly all populated regions of historical China (including Taiwan). The Local Gazetteers Research Tools (LoGaRT) at the the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science aims to set up visualized and analyzable spatio-temporal layers on the WebGIS platform.

Collection of US AMS Army Maps of China from 1940s-50s at the Library of the University of Texas at Austin. They also have been studied and used for geo-referencing by Academia Sinica in Taiwan.

Legalizing Space in China project, endowed by the French National Agency for Research (ANR). This website aims at providing students in Chinese legal history with basic materials for research (section 1), as well as with up-dates about our research work on the making (section 5). It also presents the progresses of our translation of Qing code (section 2), in relation with practice and space (sections 3 and 4)

  1. Resources on Chinese legal tradition
  2. Ming and Qing codes with translations
  3. Judicial Cases
  4. Mapping Legal spaces
  5. Research on the making

This interactive platform will guide you to discover the history of the Holy See’s Sacred Congregation of the Council – the SCC – one of the great dicasteries of the Roman Curia founded in 1564 and whose activity and influence reaches to the present day. Through our numerous integrated scientific projects and varied electronic resources, you can learn about the actors, practices, and places of SCC and have access to rich opensource databases.

Bibliographic Database on the Congregation of the Council: An online interactive bibliographic database on the history of the Congregation of the Council, its legal competencies and the existing historiography on this dicastery. You can approach these topics thanks to an online database of more than 2,300 specialised works on the Congregation of the Council. The database is composed of works of legal doctrine and academic literature published between the 16th century and today and is continuously updated.

The History of the Congregation of the Council in Global Context: Through an interactive timeline on the history of the Congregation of the Council you can access important and unpublished data on the competencies, personnel and modus procedendi of the dicastery. The history of the SCC from its origins to the present day is displayed in the context of the history of the Papacy and the Roman Curia, Church History and Global Legal History.

Mapping the activities of the Council Congregation in Rome: A geographical contextualization of the activities and notable locations of the Congregation of the Council in Rome between the 16th and 20th centuries.and around the world. On the basis of a dataset created from unpublished documents, scholarly literature and texts of legal doctrine, you can display the official seats of the congregation, the places where its members operated and assembled, where its archives were kept, and follow its evolution over time against the backdrop of the profound changes that affected the eternal city.

Thesaurus of the Legal Language of the Congregation of the Council: An online thesaurus for understanding the legal language employed by the SCC in the performance of its duties between the 16th and 20th centuries in the specific legal-historical context. Through a structured list of headwords, you can enhance your knowledge of legal concepts and practices, traditions and rituals, typologies of documents, roles and functions of the personnel of one of the great dicasteries of the Roman Curia.

 

ECPO – Early Chinese Periodicals Online 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. Currently, we are adding to these a selection of literary and art magazines, in cooperation with a new partner, the University of Washington.

The Maoist Legacy Database (MLD) is a digital archive focusing on national, provincial, and local policies in the decade following the death of Mao Zedong in 1976. The archive also includes numerous, related items from the pre-1976 period, as well as transcripts from oral history interviews with contemporary witnesses, and English translations of key documents. All items in the database have been rendered full-text searchable and individually curated by the project team to include important metadata. 

DATABASES & RESOURCES on CHRISTIANITY IN CHINA & EAST ASIA (history, religions, texts etc.)

Bibliographic & Textual Databases

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

The Chinese Christian Materials in Chinese Database is the database version of the China National Social Science Foundation Major Project “Chinese Christian Literature Bibliography Collation and Research,” which was jointly organized by Guangxi Normal University Press (Shanghai) Co., Ltd. Research and Development and Shanghai University’s Religion and Chinese Society Research Center. The database provides a bibliography of Chinese Christian literature collected from all over the world, including not only purely theological writings, but also education, medical charity and other social activities and undertakings of Christians or Christian institutions, some textual materials on purely secular subjects by Christians and Christian institutions (such as literature, history, philosophy, social science, natural sciences, music, fine arts, etc.), commentary from Chinese people and materials against Christianity. The database divides the collected data into six categories: Catholicism before 1840, Catholicism in the late Qing Dynasty, Late Qing Dynasty, Catholicism in the Republic of China, Protestantism in the Republic of China, and Eastern Orthodox.

Contains around 2,550 records with the following information:

Author Author (in Chinese) Year Title Title (in Chinese) English title Place Published Publisher Type of work Location Catalogue

The Chinese Recorder was the longest-running English-language journal published in China in the 19th century, from 1868 until 1941, when it ceased publication due to the outbreak of the Pacific War. The journal was originally founded as a platform for missionaries to China to exchange information and discuss their missionary work, and to facilitate mutual understanding of Chinese culture and the implementation of their work. The Center for Christianity and China Studies and the Publishing Center of National Taiwan University have collaborated to re-publish the journal and to develop a web-based indexed image database, the Chinese Recorder Index Search Engine (CRISE; CRI Search Engine), which allows researchers to search for the full text of the article online through the internet and to access it by keywords. The system automatically categorizes and links all kinds of information related to keywords through post-categorization, making this set of the journal  much more useful than other similar historical materials and an indispensable tool for research.

The Chinese Recorder can be accessed via the China: Trade, Politics and Culture, 1793-1980 (Adam Matthew Digital) database (by subscription; for BU users, see the AM Explorer link above). For a list of issues freely available online, see the Yale University Library’s section “Mission Periodicals Online: Chinese Recorder.”

The American Context of China’s Christian Colleges project is investigating the interaction between the China Christian colleges and American liberal arts colleges between 1900 and 1950. Funded by the Luce Foundation, the project is based at Wesleyan University and directed by Prof. Ellen Widmer of the Department of Asian Languages and Literatures [now at Wellesley College]. Through meetings held in 2002 and 2003 and the development of a website, the project explores the relations between the Christian colleges of China and the small, liberal arts colleges in America that supplied many of their faculty and certain of their core ideas.

Online Resources; American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions; Microfilms; Context and Background; Research Guides and Bibliographies.

Website: https://www.timetoast.com/timelines/chinese-bibles

Website: https://thedigitalbiblelibrary.org/

The Digital Indipetae Database collects the indipetae, letters written by Jesuits to their Superior General in application for the extra-European missions, usually called the “Indies.” In Latin, applying for the Indies was petere Indias; from this are derived the expressions indipetae (the letters) and indipeti (the applicants). After the Suppression (1773) and the Restoration (1814) of the Society of Jesus, the tradition of writing these petitions continued.  Users can search the letters of both the Old and the New Society by a number of facets — the full text, a sender’s name or location, the date a letter was sent, the destination desired, and the names of saints quoted among the others. The database also hosts scans of the original letters that are housed at the Archivum Romanum Societatis Iesu and other Jesuit archives. 

Digitized open access Christianity materials (mostly China) from the collections of the Harvard-Yenching Library and other Harvard libraries.

The Documentation of Chinese Christianity program is the Hong Kong Baptist University Library’s preservation program in collaboration with the Yale Divinity Library. It was established in 2012 on the model of the HKBU-Yale project of “Denominational Periodicals in Hong Kong, 2010-2011”. The program is funded by the Latourette Initiative for the Documentation of World Christianity, and aims to preserve and make accessible books, periodicals, reports and archival materials that document Chinese Christianity by digitization and microfilming. Beginning in mid-2015, projects were funded by the Hong Kong Baptist University Library and other institutes. Our project partners include Christian churches, publishers, institutions and organizations.

Special Collections & Archives, Hong Kong Baptist University Library.

Special Collections & Archives, Hong Kong Baptist University Library

Special Collections & Archives, Hong Kong Baptist University Library.

Special Collections & Archives, Hong Kong Baptist University Library.

Special Collections & Archives, Hong Kong Baptist University Library. Covers 1950 to 1976.

A rich repository of source materials on the work of the globally influential Church Missionary Society (CMS) organization, founded in 1799 as an Anglican evangelical movement and is still active today. This varied archive includes records of both the CMS and the many other missionary societies which became associated or amalgamated with it. Access is is by PAID INSTITUTIONAL SUBSCRIPTION.

The rich and diverse publications of the Church Missionary Society (CMS) shed light on key events since the beginning of the 19th century. With active mission stations in every continent, the published journals, letters and reports represent a truly global perspective on not only evangelism and mission history but conflict, colonialism and globalization.

Founded in 1799 as an Anglican evangelical movement, the CMS has been active across the globe, proving one of the key agents of evangelism in the non-Western world. The publications featured in Church Missionary Society Periodicals were key in promoting the work of the society, fundraising and reporting from a great number of countries. Access is is by PAID INSTITUTIONAL SUBSCRIPTION.

China and the Modern World: Missionary, Sinology, and Literary Periodicals, 1817–1949 is a collection of seventeen English-language periodicals published in or about China during a period of over 130 years extending from 1817 until 1949, when the People’s Republic of China was founded. This corresponds to the periods of the late Qing Dynasty and the Republican Era (1911-1949), when China experienced radical and often traumatic transformations from an inward-looking imperial dynasty into a globally engaged republic with modern approaches to politics, literature, education, public morality, and intellectual life. Access is is by PAID INSTITUTIONAL SUBSCRIPTION.

Periodicals included are The Chinese Recorder (1867–1941, including its predecessor, The Missionary Recorder), The West China Missionary News (1899–1943), The China Mission / Christian Year Book (1910–1939, including The China Mission Hand-book and A Century of Protestant Missions in China), Educational Review: continuing the monthly bulletin of the Educational Association of China (1907–1938), Canton Miscellany (1831), Chinese Miscellany (1845–1850), The Chinese and Japanese Repository (1863–1865), Notes and Queries on China and Japan (1867–1869),  The China Review: or Notes and Queries on the Far East (1872–1901), The New China Review (1919–1922),  Indo-Chinese Gleaner (1817–1822),  Bulletin of the Catholic University of Peking (1926–1934, before it became the Monumenta Serica), The Yenching Journal of Social Studies (1938–1950),  The China Quarterly (1935–1941), T’ien Hsia Monthly (1935–1941),  The China Critic (1928–1946),  and The China Year Book (1912–1939).

When searching, make sure to use period-appropriate spellings: Tsai Yuan-pei instead of Cai Yuanpei or Ts’ai Yuan-p’ei.

UCLA ONLINE ARCHIVE KOREAN CHRISTIANITY

This virtual archive on Korean Christianity provides primary sources, especially documents and images of Protestantism in early modern and colonial Korea. At the same time it introduces contemporary scholarship on the history of Korean Christianity with book reviews, recent articles, and bibliography.

The RELiCTA database (Repertory of Early Modern Linguistic and Catechetical Tools of America, Asia, and Africa) is to be seen against the backdrop of an interdisciplinary research project “Evolving views on the world’s languages in a globalizing world (1540-1840): information growth, conceptual shifts, scholarly networks in the circulation of linguistic knowledge” which was carried out at the Faculty of Arts of the University of Leuven (KU Leuven), in close collaboration with the Center for the Historiography of Linguistics. It focused on the study of the activities of missionary linguistics in the Americas and in Asia, in the period 1500-1800 approximately.

Current Journals

The aim of Mission Studies is to enable the International Association for Mission Studies to expand its services as a forum for the scholarly study of Christian witness and its impact in the world, and the related field of intercultural theology, from international, inter-confessional and interdisciplinary perspectives.

The peer-reviewed journal Social Sciences and Missions provides a dedicated forum for the exploration of “mission” from a social scientific perspective (history, anthropology, sociology, political science and social geography). While the journal originally focused on Christianity, it now has a broader appreciation of “mission” as a concept. Specifically, for the journal “mission” is not a theological category, but rather a type of social action and a modality of religious intervention in social space.  Social Sciences and Missions accepts articles in English and in French.  It is a continuation of Le fait missionaire (since 2007).

The International Journal of Asian Christianity (IJAC) is a peer-reviewed journal dedicated to the scholarly examination of Christianity in Asia and of Asian Christian diaspora in the West and elsewhere. While other major Asian religions such as Buddhism, Hinduism and Islam have received great deal of international scholarly attention, Christianity is relatively neglected as a subject of study. This journal intends to rectify this neglect by providing a multidisciplinary forum for the examination of Asian Christianity from sociological, anthropological, comparative religion, religious studies, theological, historical and similar perspectives and link such studies to emerging trends in the social sciences such as migration studies, identities, minorities, secularization, fundamentalism, development, and the political roles of religion.

总目录（前十六期）Contents of All Volumes (1–16)

Journal published by the Nordic Forum of Sino-Western Studies, Vellikellontie 3 A 4, 00410 Helsinki, Finland, with co-Publisher: Collaborative Innovation Center for Confucian Studies

The “Journal of Chinese Christian Studies” is co-edited and published  by  the Center for Christianity and China Studies in Los Angeles, USA and the “Religion and Chinese Society Research Center” of Shanghai University, China.

The Center for Christian and Chinese Studies in Los Angeles was established in 2006. Since its establishment, the center has actively carried out contacts and cooperation with Chinese domestic academic circles, and jointly promoted research on Christianity and China-related topics. In October 2007, the center invited more than 30 experts from home and abroad to hold an academic conference on “Review and Prospect of Sino-Western Cultural Exchange-Commemorating the 200th Anniversary of Morrison’s Visit to China” in the conference hall of a university in Los Angeles. After the conference, we published the conference proceedings in Shanghai People’s Publishing House. Since that conference, we have cooperated with a university in China (including Hong Kong and Taiwan) to hold academic seminars on Christian and China-related topics every year. Conference papers have also been compiled into a collection and published in Shanghai People’s Publishing House. In 2013, the center decided to establish the semi-annual “Journal of Chinese Christian Studies”, hoping to provide an international academic platform for the study of Chinese Christianity in China.

The Research Center of Religion and Chinese Society of Shanghai University, China was established in 2001 (formerly known as the Research Center of Religion and Peace), and was renamed “Religion and Chinese Society Research Center” in 2005. The research on the history of Christianity in China is the core direction. Other research directions include the study of Taoism, Buddhism and folk beliefs, the study of religion and international affairs, and the study of religious sociology. The center is currently engaged in the publication of the semi-annual journal of “Research on the History of Christianity in China”, the “Religion and History” series, the holding of the “Religion and Society” high-level forum series, and the “Christianity and Chinese and Western Culture” young doctoral forum. In 2013, he co-edited and published “Journal of Chinese Christian Studies” with the Center for Christianity and China Studies in Los Angeles, USA.

Yearbook of Chinese Theology (2015-2021), now the Journal of Chinese Theology, is an international, ecumenical and fully peer-reviewed series for Chinese theology in English. It is designed to meet the growing demand for the studies of Christianity as an academic discipline in the Chinese context in the area of Biblical Studies, Church History, Systematic Theology, Practical Theology and Comparative Religions. The Yearbook also features articles exploring wider issues in church and society. The main focus of the Yearbook/JCT is on the interdisciplinary, contextual and cross-cultural studies of the above five disciplines. 

The Zeitschrift für Missionswissenschaft und Religionswissenschaft (ZMR; Journal for Mission Studies and Religious Studies) has been published since 1911 and is the oldest Catholic mission science journal. It is the organ of the Internationalen Institut für missionswissenschaftliche Forschungen (IIMF; International Institute for Mission Studies Research). The editor in charge is Prof. Dr. Mariano Delgado, Director of the Institute for the Study of Religions and Interreligious Dialogue at the University of Freiburg in Switzerland. The ZMR  appears every six months with a length of 160 pages per issue.

Publishing Series

The primary focus of this new peer-reviewed monograph series will be the study of Christianity in East Asia. It will reflect “local” (i.e. Chinese, Japanese and Korean) themes as well as comparative perspectives that explore the historical, cultural, and religious connections that mark the interactions between these countries. Subject matter may include but is not limited to: church history, cultural anthropology, historical linguistics, history of science and medicine, global history, and comparative studies. The series will also include critical studies of primary sources related to the history of Christianity in East Asia and/or critical translations of those sources, with accompanying commentary and critical apparatus. Influential works in the field hitherto published only in Japanese, Chinese, or Korean respectively will be carefully selected, translated into English, and made available to an international audience with the aim of promoting scholarly dialogue beyond local linguistic constituencies. 

This series features titles that offer new perspectives on the vast and expanding field of Chinese Christianities in all its diverse forms, providing a forum for cross-disciplinary conversation. Books are welcome from a variety of disciplinary approaches, including but not limited to historical, theological, social scientific, and sinological perspectives.

This series addresses Christianity in China from the time of the late Ming and early Qing dynasties to the present, and includes a number of disciplines—history, political science, theology, religious studies, gender studies and sociology. It covers the presence of the Catholic Church, the Protestant Churches and the Orthodox Church in China. While Chinese Protestant Churches have attracted much scholarly and journalistic attention, there is much unknown about the Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church in China. There is an enormous demand for monographs on the Chinese Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church. 

The early modern period was witness to an incipient process of transculturation through exploration, mercantilism, colonization, and migration that set into motion a process of globalization that continues today. The purpose of this series is to bring together a cultural studies approach – which freely and unapologetically crosses disciplinary, theoretical, and political boundaries – with early modern texts and artefacts that bear the traces of transculturalization and globalization in order to deepen our understanding of sites of exchange between and within early modern culture(s). This process can be studied on a large as well as on a small scale, and this new series is dedicated to both. Possible topics of interest include, but are not limited to: texts dealing with mercantilism, travel, exploration, immigration, foreigners, enabling technologies (such as shipbuilding and navigational instrumentation), mathematics, science, rhetoric, art, architecture, intellectual history, religion, race, sexuality, and gender.

Studies in Christian Mission publishes scholarly monographs and edited volumes in the history of transcultural missionary movements from the sixteenth century onwards, Roman Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox and Evangelical/Pentecostal. It particularly welcomes proposals that position the study of so far unexplored episodes of mission within wider discussions of the social and cultural factors within missions, of colonialism and post-colonialism, of nationalism and transnationalism and of the tensions between localized and global forms of Christianity. 

An extraordinary pattern of state and empire building across Eurasia and the Atlantic basin in the early modern period inaugurated a new era in world history characterized by ongoing cross-cultural engagement among peoples from around the globe. The monographs and edited collections published in the Empires and Entanglements in the Early Modern World series will pursue particular historical themes that illuminate these interactive dimensions in the early modern world. These studies either take a comparative approach to commensurate historical developments in various parts of the world or examine trans-regional patterns and forces that brought together different societies and communities. This series seeks to go beyond essentialist approaches that treat regions and oceans as self-contained, insular cultural spaces to stress interconnectedness in a paramount age of imperial expansion. We therefore welcome proposals and manuscripts on cultural, religious, intellectual, and environmental themes that show connections and conjunctures across territories and oceans or undertake comparisons within particular regions and maritime basins.

This series proposes a new geography of Global History research using Asian and Western sources, welcoming quality research and engaging outstanding scholarship from China, Europe and the Americas. Promoting academic excellence and critical intellectual analysis, it offers a rich source of global history research in sub-continental areas of Europe, Asia (notably China, Japan and the Philippines) and the Americas and aims to help understand the divergences and convergences between East and West.

European Expansion and Indigenous Response is a peer-reviewed book series that seeks to understand the process of European expansion, interchange and connectivity in a global context in the early modern and modern period, in Africa, the Indian Ocean, Central and East Asia and the Pacific Rim. This series will provide a forum for varied scholarly work – original monographs, article collections, editions of primary sources translations – on these exciting global mixtures and their impact on culture, politics and society in the period from the Portuguese navigators of the late fifteenth century until the end of ‘Company’ rule in British India in the mid-nineteenth century. 

Columbia Studies in International and Global History seeks to present some of the finest and most innovative work coming out of the current landscapes of international and global historical scholarship. Grounded in empirical research, the titles in the series transcend the usual area boundaries and address questions of how history can help us understand contemporary problems, including poverty, inequality, power, political violence, and accountability beyond the nation-state. The series includes a wide range of topics and historical epochs, and it offers a combination of trade and scholarly books dealing with wider themes from global and international perspectives. It covers processes of flows, exchanges, and entanglements—and moments of blockage, friction, and fracture—between not only “the West” and “the Rest,” but also parts of what has variously been dubbed the “Third World” or the “Global South” itself. Scholarship in international and global history remains indispensable when seeking to get a better sense of current complex regional and global economic transformations. Such approaches are vital in understanding the making of our present world.

Biographical Databases

A group of China scholars under the coordination of the Overseas Ministries Study Center (OMSC) in New Haven, Connecticut, in October 2005 considered how to narrow the gap between current reference materials and contemporary Chinese Christian demography. They decided to begin by founding the Biographical Dictionary of Chinese Christianity (BDCC), an electronic database modeled on the Dictionary of African Christian Biography (DACB). Under the direction of BDCC Project Manager Dr. Yading Li, and with significant help from OMSC/DACB, and especially Dr. Jonathan Bonk, and Ms. Michele Sigg, the BDCC website was designed and launched by June 2006.

This is the online version of the bio-bibliographical collection by Adrian Launay, Mémorial de la Société des Missions- Étrangères. Premiere Partie 1658-1912: Table Alphabetique avec additions et rectifications. Deuxième Partie 1658-1913: Notices biographiques – Bibliographies- Notes Bio-Bibliographiques – biographies – addition et rectifications – Titres archiépiscopaux et épiscopaux des archevêques et évêques de la Société. Noms chinois, annamites et malais des missionaires (complement de la liste de la première partie). 2 vols. Paris: Séminaire des Missions-Étrangères, 1916.  The online database also contains information culled by MEP archivists in recent years after 1916. This resource is curated by the MEP Archives and the France-Asia Research Institute (Institut de recherche France-Asie, IRFA), the new (2019) research institute of the Paris Foreign Missions (Missions étrangères de Paris, MEP).

This work contains the research of various historians who independently collected and investigated data on Catholic bishops and priests in China over decades. The main research focus is the data of the bishops’ consecrations. This data includes the dates and places of consecration as well as the names of the principal consecrators and provides a general overview of the apostolic succession in China. Additional biographical information completes each bishop’s data. Priests who were either named bishops but did not receive consecration, or who were named ordinaries without the episcopal dignity (e.g., apostolic prefects) were also included. A distinction between Roman nominations and nominations of bishops of the Catholic Patriotic Association (CPA) was specifically not made. The work on China by Father Isidore Perraud, C.S.Sp. (1907-1992, France) forms the basis of this work. Over many years he collected data and facts as well as numerous photos, paintings and engravings of bishops in China. His research (~ 1950-91) includes data from all Chinese bishops since 1307 and also includes the appointed bishops of the CPA. Biographic data which Father Perraud assembled is mostly without any references. However his data still functions as a basis and was substituted by footnotes only when the author used additional references or used other data.

  • The Ricci 21st Century Roundtable – Ricci Institute for Chinese Western Cultural History at Boston College

This pioneering biographical database on Christianity in China is now partly unresponsive for technical reasons, but still partly available. For captures of historical webpages see the Wayback Machine’s Ricci Roundtable data, 1998 to 2016 captures: 18,777 capture(s) from 1998 to 2016 | Site stats

Relational Databases (Biographies & Geography) & Other Databases

The China Historical Christian Database (CHCD) quantifies and visualizes the place of Christianity in modern China (1550-1950). It provides users the tools to discover where every Christian church, school, hospital, orphanage, publishing house, and the like were located in China, and it documents who worked inside those buildings, both foreign and Chinese. Collectively, this information creates spatial maps and generates relational networks that reveal where, when, and how Western ideas, technologies, and practices entered China. Simultaneously, it uncovers how and through whom Chinese ideas, technologies, and practices were conveyed to the West, with English and Chinese navigation. Advanced DH users have open access to its data for elaboration. The CHCD is hosted by the Center for Global Christianity and Mission at Boston University. The CHCD is still in BETA phase.

The DRH – Database of Religious History, began as one of the flagship initiatives of the Cultural Evolution of Religion Research Consortium (CERC), based at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. It now continues as an independent academic initiative, based at UBC but involving partners and collaborators from all over the world. It is intended as a platform for unprecedented academic collaboration, reflecting a commitment to rigorous, scholarly standards and a deep appreciation for interdisciplinary work in the sciences and humanities.

Visual Resources

Between 1927 and 1951 millions of Christian posters entered the Chinese market. The Boston University Center for Global Christianity & Mission, funded by the Henry Luce Foundation, is pleased to make hundreds of these rare images digitally accessible and searchable for the first time.

Other resources

ISAC – Initiative for the Study of Asian Catholics

The Initiative for the Study of Asian Catholics is a collaborative project hosted by the Asia Research Institute of the National Singapore University to foster social scientific research on Catholics in contemporary Asia. With the aim of facilitating dialogue and contributing to already existing research in the Philippines, Hong Kong, India, and other places, this new platform intends to expand and deepen conversations investigating the lived realities, the socio-cultural contributions, and challenges faced by Asian Catholics at the local, national, and regional levels. While this Initiative takes a multidisciplinary approach, it particularly encourages research on contemporary Asian Catholics from the perspectives of anthropology, art, environmental studies, economy, gender studies, political sciences, and sociology.

SINO-WESTERN RELATIONS: DIGITAL RESOURCES ONLINE & MICROFORMS

Textual Resources

Bibliotheca Sinica 2.0 explores Sino-Western encounters by ways of texts and images published before 1939 and is intended as an extension of the bibliography Western Books on China in Libraries in Vienna/Austria, 1477-1939. Bibliotheca Sinica 2.0 aims to provide information on digitized books on China (published up to 1939) freely available in digital repositories (see: references) all over the world.

The Macao Virtual Library is a virtual book site established and managed by the Macau Foundation. Users can access it through computers or mobile electronic devices to download and read a variety of books and journals mostly in Chinese and Portuguese about Macao anytime and anywhere. 無須註冊、無須安裝閱讀軟體，點撃 “線上閱讀” 便可免費閱讀全文  – No need to register, no need to install reading software, click on “online reading” [orange button] to read the full text for free. To download some of the titles, one needs to register for free.

The Macau-China Digital Library has been created by the China Observatory/Observatório da China  in collaboration with the National Library of Portugal,  and it is supported by UCCLA (União das Cidades Capitais de Língua Portuguesa) and sponsored by the Macau Foundation. The Macau-China Digital Library holds Portuguese reports written between the 16th and 19th centuries on the history of Macau and its role in the world. It also contains texts about all the continents reached and the seas sailed by the Portuguese with occasional information on Macau or China. The content is freely available and accessible through three different search methods: 1) Name of authors; 2) Title; 3) Date of publication. The Library is in continuous development, and  its interface can be consulted in Portuguese, Chinese, English and French (the website navigation of the Observatory is in many more languages).  Currently the Digital Library makes available about 200,000 pages of complete books and manuscripts, periodicals, maps and critical editions.

The Memory of Macau Project (in Portuguese and Chinese) is a project promoted by the Macau Foundation, which aims to preserve and perpetuate Macau’s history and culture by collecting and making available via digitalization scattered historical and cultural materials of Macau. The project includes a variety of valuable historical and cultural materials, including archival pieces, periodicals, documentaries, maps, calligraphy and painting, photographic records, postcards, philately, songs, interviews, etc., that can be viewed in various forms of multimedia, i.e., through text, image, audio or video.

The RC, collected at this site online, is published yearly since the 1980s by the Macau Cultural Institute in Chinese, Portuguese,  English and International multilingual editions, and contains articles and images on the history and culture of Macau, China, East Asia and global history.

Digitized corpus of Spanish documents on China, 1555-1900. The Project, created by now retired Prof. Dolores Folch (Universitat Pompeu Fabra,  Escola d’Estudis de l’Àsia Oriental, Barcelona) and her collaborators Manel Ollé Rodríguez, David Martínez Robles and Anna Busquets Alemany,  was active between 2000-2006, and has since then not been further curated. Contains a number of carefully transcribed archival sources, especially from the 16th century.

The project aims to gather and make available on a digital platform, constantly updated, unpublished documentation in Latin and Portuguese about China from the 16th to 18th centuries, written by Portuguese or related persons of other nationalities. After exhaustive inventory, transcription and translation into Portuguese of the texts written in Latin, the documents will be edited online in their original language and accompanied by the respective translation. A wide selection of sources will later be published in English and Chinese. This platform will also include studies by researchers, consultants and other collaborators.

The Conimbricenses Project,  launched online in 2018 by the University of Coimbra’s Instituto de Estudos Filosóficos (IEF), under the direction of Prof. Mário Santiago de Carvalho and the coordination of Dr. Simone Guidi, will give access  to a large collection of information, accurate entries, updated bibliographies, and direct links to the digital version of the most important philosophical documents related to Coimbra. A section is dedicated to the Chinese translation of the Aristotelian commentaries known as  Conimbricenses, in part 3 “Coimbra in Early Modern China”  of the section ENCYCLOPEDIA.

Transforming the East researches Jesuit readings of the Chinese classics and their dissemination in Early Modern and Enlightenment Europe (ca. 1590-1773). The project connects scholars at the University of Sydney, Sun Yat-sen University, and Nanjing University interested in the ways in which Jesuit missionaries to China translated a number of the Confucian Classics into Latin and other European languages. It aims to analyse early Western attempts to understand Chinese literature and philosophy and to document which texts were translated and how they spread to Europe. By mapping Europe’s first encounter with Chinese thought, this website contributes to the history of Sino-European intellectual encounters and to the philological analysis of Jesuit translations.

The “Eurasian Latin Archive” project was born for the creation of a digital library consisting of Latin texts and documents from medieval and early modern times concerning East Asia, including a specific “Latin Silk Road” section dedicated to Latin or Latin-Chinese texts. The Eurasian Latin Archive will be provided with digital mining tools for textual and thematic analysis. Aim of the collection is the comparative language analysis, both internal with other Latin texts from different eras and areas, and with non- Latin texts with homogeneous subjects. Materials will be available via a platform that includes tools for language and semantic analysis, which is in the design phase to date within the Das-MeMo project, started March 2018. The platform is inspired by the Alim project, whose “Asian Collection” is the starting point for the Eurasian Latin Archive.

Website on Latin studies in China and home of the Chinese and English language Journal of Latin Language and Culture 拉丁语言文化研究, run by Prof. Michele Ferrero 麦克雷 SDB, Beijing Foreign Studies University – 北京外国语大学.

Microfilmed collections on Sino Western relations, produced before the advent of digital online collections, and available at major research libraries. Research guides are available online.

This is a wide collection of information — archive guides, primary sources, digitized materials –- selected to assist lay people and undergraduate students, as well as established scholars and graduate students. Most sources to date focus on the period from the beginning of the nineteenth century to the formation of the People’s Republic of China. In the future we plan to include all aspects of institutionalized medicine in China from the nineteenth century to the present, including Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM). 

Relevant collections (East Asia; missions; trade; diplomacy etc.)

CHINA INLAND MISSION, 1865-1951: From the School of Oriental and African Studies, London

CHINA THROUGH WESTERN EYES: Manuscript Records of Traders, Travellers, Missionaries and Diplomats, 1792-1942

CHURCH MISSIONARY SOCIETY ARCHIVE

 CHURCH OF SCOTLAND MISSIONARY ARCHIVE: From the National Library of Scotland Part 1: Missions to India and China, 1829-1933

EAST INDIA COMPANY FACTORY RECORDS: Sources from the British Library, London

EAST MEETS WEST: Original Records of Traders, Travellers, Missionaries and Diplomats to 1852

JAPAN THROUGH WESTERN EYES: Manuscript Records of Traders, Travellers, Missionaries and Diplomats, 1853-1941

KOREAN MISSION RECORDS: Papers of the Korean Mission, 1889-1986, from Birmingham University Library

MISSIONARY PAMPHLETS: The Alexander Duff Collection of Missionary Pamphlets

PACIFIC ISLAND CULTURE AND SOCIETY: The Papers of Reverend George Brown (1835-1917), Methodist Missionary, from the State Library of New South Wales

SCOTTISH MISSIONARY AND PHILANTHROPIC REGISTER, 1821-1842: From the Centre for the Study of Christianity in the Non-Western World

SCOTTISH MISSIONARY ARCHIVES: Parts 1 to 4

WOMEN MISSIONARIES: From the National Library of Scotland: Part 1: Papers of the Women’s Association for Foreign Missions, 1885-1930 (Church of Scotland)
Part 2: Papers of the Ladies’ Society for Female Educaation in Africa and India, 1878-1904

WOMEN’S MISSIONARY ARCHIVES: Sources from the Centre for the Study of Christianity in the Non-Western World, Edinburgh

Visual Resources

The University of Bristol’s Historical Photographs of China project was launched in 2006, and it aims to locate, digitize and publish online through its open access platform, now part of the University of Bristol’s Library Special Collection ,historical photographs of China mainly in the hands of families who formerly had connections to China. The team borrowed collections, made copies and returned the originals. For a variety of reason, these materials form an important surrogate for materials lost during the course of China’s tumultuous twentieth century. They also provide records of its historic built environment, culture, society and politics. The platform cover materials which range in date from 1857 to 1967, but which are mostly concentrated in period 1880s-1930s.

Visualizing Cultures was launched at MIT in 2002 to explore the potential of the Web for developing innovative image-driven scholarship and learning. The VC mission is to use new technology and hitherto inaccessible visual materials to reconstruct the past as people of the time visualized the world (or imagined it to be). Topical units to date focus on Japan in the modern world and early-modern China. The thrust of these explorations extends beyond Asia per se, however, to address “culture” in much broader ways—cultures of modernization, war and peace, consumerism, images of “Self” and “Others,” and so on.

This online exhibit currently includes the Chinese student list of Phillips Academy (Andover, Massachussets) in history and their profiles; interactive data visualization based on the information of Chinese students who attended or graduated from 1879 to 1995; the historical context of the century-long stories between Phillips Academy and China; and a collection of students’ work based on the archive from CAMD Scholarship and “Silences and Gaps” course.

    ASIA, THE “ORIENT” & THE WORLD: DIGITAL RESOURCES ONLINE 

    The Department of Nestorian Studies of the Kazakhstan Archeological Institute of the Kazakhstan Academy of Sciences was founded in June 2017 in follow up to the recent developments in Nestorian archeology within the territory of Kazakhstan. The primary goal of the Department of Nestorian Studies is to create infrastructure which will facilitate the research and development of the Nestorian history of Kazakhstan and Central Asia, recruit the top experts in the field as well as promising young Kazakhstan students, and creating the best possible atmosphere for them to conduct research and publish findings.

    A website created for a special issue of the Journal of Jesuit Studies (2018), edited by Robert Batchelor.

    The collaborative research project Encounters with the Orient in Early Modern European Scholarship (EOS) is a major, joint research entreprise is funded by HERA (Humanities in the European Research Area) under the Cultural Encounters scheme. The project  documents the scholarly encounter with the Orient between 1580 and 1800. It  describes how the exchange of knowledge and of ideas between Europe and the Orient was organised and structured. It follows and compare the conceptual transformations which this encounter has initiated in Biblical studies, the study of religions, in the teaching and learning of Arabic and other Oriental languages, in literature and poetry, and in historical and anthropological thinking. Hence it documents the change from a religious to a cultural perspective on Oriental societies.

    Medieval and Early Modern Orients (MEMOs) is an AHRC-funded decolonial project that seeks to further knowledge and understanding of the early interactions between England and the Islamic worlds. Through our pages and our blog we hope to create an accessible space to reveal the exciting discoveries of researchers as they navigate the seas of history and literature, and investigate the intersecting webs of our pasts.

    People in Motion: Entangled Histories of Displacement across the Mediterranean, or PIMo, explores common forms of displacement and dispossession across the Mediterranean from the fifteenth century to the present. Charting similarities – and significant differences – in the experience and representation of human movement, our research seeks to understand the emotional drivers and significance of dislocation for individuals and communities during the period between the expulsion of Jews from Spain and the Lausanne Treaty. With a focus on people – and the ideas, objects, and writing that accompanied them – our goals include evaluating the ways and degree to which these historical events and experiences continue to shape contemporary representation of migration and displacement in the modern world, and to build a functional and highly-creative interdisciplinary network of collaborators from around the world who will continue this conversation after the life of the grant. Giovanni Tarantino (Action Chair) and Katrina O’Loughlin (Vice-Chair)

    The purpose of “Studies on Manuscripts and Documents of East-West Exchanges” is to investigate and study exchanges between the West and the East including China. In particular, this research project will focus on literature written in minority languages (Persian, Syriac, Sogdian, Arabic, Manchu, Armenian, etc.) that are lesser known, but important in clarifying the exchange of civilizations. To this end, literature on East-West exchanges is first classified and collected (collectio) by theme, period, and language, then compared (collatio). Finally, this project connects and expands (connexio)the literature to well-known Greek, Latin, and Chinese literature on East-West exchanges. Thus, this project sheds new light on the study of East-West exchanges, as follows: 1) Sino Hellenica: documents on Silk Road trade since ancient times; 2) Pax Mongolica: historical documents on the medieval Mongol Empire; 3) Sinacopa Jesuitica: documents on exchange between China, Korea, and Europe (‘Sinacopa’ = Sina-Corea-Europa) through early modern Jesuit priests.

    The digitization of Michele Ruggieri’s Atlas of China was carried out with a Metis DRS 2A0 scanner, at 300 ppi color; the maps and manuscript descriptions are compressed in JPEG 2000 format – as are all the images available for consultation through the IMAGO online service of the Archivio di Stato di Roma. Already available in the past on the IMAGO website in digital format, these maps are now presented in the coherent and ordered whole in which they appear in the critical edition of Michele Ruggieri’s Atlas of China, edited by Eugenio Lo Sardo (Istituto Poligrafico e Zecca dello Stato, Rome 1993).

    The transcriptions of the descriptive sheets taken from the aforementioned edition are now also accessible, digitized at 400 ppi with a Metis DRS A1book scanner and then compressed into PDF and DJVU formats in which they are available to users. We have in fact associated the most commonly used PDF format with the DJVU version which also allows the possibility of textual research obtained by OCR (optical character recognition).

    The Marega Collection at the Vatican Library can be divided into four major categories: (a) seventeenth to nineteenth century documents from the Usuki Domain’s Office of Religious Affairs related to Christianity (about 11950 records), (b) historical materials related to Japanese Christians from 18th to 19th century, purchased at used bookstores and the like (394 records), (c) the publication draft for Mario Marega’s Zoku Bungo kirishitan shiryō and his memos, survey notes, and autobiographical manga (about 2236 records), and (d) materials added from late 1950s to 1960s. The collection has been catalogued and digitized and is available through the Database of the Fondo Marega at the National Institute for Japanese Literature in Tokyo.

    The Italian Institute for Africa and the Orient (IsIAO) was created in 1995 from the merger of the Italian Institute for the Middle and Far East (IsMEO), founded in 1933 by Giovanni Gentile and Giuseppe Tucci, with the Italian-African Institute (IIA), heir to the Italian Colonial Institute (ICI), founded in 1906. IsIAO was closed in 2012.

    The IsIAO Library consists of an extremely important documentary patrimony for African and Oriental studies, with over 200,000 volumes, 2,500 periodicals, approximately 1,000 valuable Oriental manuscripts, 1,500 xylographic prints, 3,000 maps and 100,000 photographic prints. Of particular interest are the Giuseppe Tucci fonds, the Emilio Dubbiosi fonds, the Maurizio Taddei fonds and the Photo Library of the Ministry of Italian Africa.

    Thanks to a collaborative project between the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Roma and ISMEO – Associazione Internazionale di Studi sul Mediterraneo e l’Oriente (International Association for Mediterranean and Oriental Studies), as part of a multi-year MIUR grant for “Studies and research on the cultures of Asia and Africa: tradition and continuity, revitalization and dissemination”, IsIAO materials are now available to scholars once again.

    They can be requested through the ermes system and can only be consulted in the specially designated room at the National Library during the following hours: Tuesday 8:30-13:30; Wednesday 8:30-13:30; Thursday 8:30-13:30. If they are not available in digital format, the documents belonging to special catalogued funds (Tucci Tibetan Fund, Tucci Sanskrit Fund, Eritrea-Ethiopia Photographic Fund) can be consulted by appointment, to be arranged by email with the collection heads.

    Contacts: Telephone: 06-4989373; Mail: biblioteca.isiao@gmail.com

    Global Sea Routes (GSR) is a relational geospatial database aimed at the representation of European sea routes on a global scale in the modern and contemporary ages, in order to understand how world interconnectedness, in terms of maritime passage times from European ports to overseas destinations, evolved over four centuries (1500-1900).

    This project of virtual reconstitution of the Compagnie des Indes collection aims to make available to researchers, from a unique database progressively and methodically structured, the references and digitized images of documents kept in multiple institutions in France, with their associated research tools.

    ACTD aims to be an innovative information system, a platform for sharing and disseminating tropical knowledge, while enhancing and optimizing research and bringing the scientific community and civil society closer to tropical issues and its scientific heritage, thus increasing knowledge of the culture and history of Portuguese-speaking countries. It includes materials on Asia and Macau-China from the Goa Archives.

    ACTD Section: Arquivo Histórico do Estado da Índia / Directorate of Archives and Archaelogy, Government of Goa

    The following documentation was microfilmed long ago from the Arquivo Histórico do Estado da Índia / Directorate of Archives and Archaeology, Government of Goa for the Filmoteca Ultramarina Portuguesa (FUP): Acórdãos; Assentos de Câmara; Assentos do Conselho de Estado; Cartas Patentes; Cartas Patentes e Alvarás; Cartório geral do Estado da Índia; Convento de Santo Agostinho – Goa; Foral de Salsete; Leis a favor da Cristandade; Livros dos Assentos dos termos da entrega da governança do Estado da Índia; Livros dos Autos; Livros de Damão; Livros de Diu; Livros de Macau; Livros de Moçambique; Livros das Monções; Livros dos Reis Vizinhos; Livros dos Segredos; Namoxins do Tombo das Ilhas; Provisões e Alvarás a favor da Cristandade; Provisões, Alvarás e Regimentos; Provisões dos Vice-reis; Regimentos e Instruções; Registo das cartas régias; Registo das cartas dos reis e governadores; Relação de Goa; Tombos dos bens dos pagodes das Ilhas; Tombo de Chaúl e Diu; Tombo de Damão.

    The ACTD has so far (2021) digitized and made available microfilms of some of the Macao Books (Livros de Macau; so far digitized 22 vols., from 1777 to 1829) and some of the Books of the Neighboring Kings (Livros dos Reis Vizinhos); and the entire (2) Books of Secrets (Livros dos Segredos).

    Macao Books: A total of 64 books dating from 1747-1830 were microfilmed. Books 1 to 5 and 8 were not microfilmed; so far digitized 22 vols., from 1777 to 1829.

    Books of Neighboring Kings: Twenty-two books were microfilmed that include copies of the correspondence viceroys and governors of India to neighboring potentates and other foreign personalities, between 1619 and 1842. The microfilms are difficult to read, given the precarious state of preservation of the originals. Of these books, the following are catalogued document by document in the FUP Bulletins: No. 1 – Bulletin No. 11, p. 45-164; No. 2 – Bulletin No. 11, p. 165-296; No. 3 – Bulletin No. 13, p. 527-605. The documents from the following books were published in full in the FUP Bulletins: No. 4 – Bulletins nos. 35 to 37, p. 305-422; No. 5 – Bulletins nos. 38 to 40, p. 83-333; No. 6 – Bulletins nos. 41 to 43, p. 107-304; No. 7 – Bulletin No. 46, p. 157-418.

    Books of Secrets: Only two books were microfilmed. They contain documents, considered secret at the time, such as inquiries to noblemen, routes of the armadas of India on their return trip, regiments, and preventive measures against the Dutch and English. They are dated from 1635 to 1715. Both books are catalogued document by document in the FUP Bulletin No. 6, pp. 221-426.

    CU – Conselho Ultramarino 1530-1833:  062 Macau 1587-02-16/1833-12-30

    Catalogue: Santos, Isaú, Macau e o Oriente no Arquivo Histórico Ultramarino. 2 vols Macau: Instituto Cultural de Macau, 1997. Volume I;  Volume II. 

    Livros das Monções, 1653-1785

    Digital copies of the Monsoon Books series held at the AHU are available online in the Digitarq database (https://digitarq.ahu.arquivos.pt/details?id=1146102 ) This set of 16 Livros das Monções, with production dates between 1653 and 1785, was incorporated into the AHU in 2001 by transfer from the Centro de Estudos de História e Cartografia Antiga do Instituto de Investigação Científica Tropical, along with other documentation previously in the custody of the Centro de Estudos Históricos Ultramarinos. It consists of correspondence between, on the one hand, the kings of Portugal and central colonial administration bodies in Lisbon, such as the Conselho Ultramarino and the Secretaria de Estado da Marinha e dos Domínios Ultramarinos, and on the other hand, the viceroys and governors of the Portuguese Indian State in Goa, sent in several copies and bound later in Goa. It includes lists of documents, instructions, letters, information received in Goa between June and September and, conversely, copies of documents sent from Goa (replies and accounts), between December and March and also correspondence and information received in Goa from other parties related to the State of India among which Mozambique, Macau, China and Timor. Several books have an index and pencil annotations mainly by CEHU researcher Alexandre Lobato. In Portugal there are 62 other codices in the National Archives – Torre do Tombo. The Directorate of Archives & Archaeology, Panaji – Goa holds the remaining collection of Monsoon Books (about 500); some have been microfilmed in the 1950s-60s, and mf. copies are in Lisbon, as part of the Filmoteca Ultramarina Portuguesa (FUP).

    INSTITUTIONS: Research Centers and Groups (Christianity-in-China; Chinese Religions; Sino-Western Relations; Mission studies)

    The Center for Global Christianity and Mission at the School of Theology, Boston University, conducts research and produces scholarly resources on Christian engagement across cultural and religious boundaries; explores the implications of World Christianity for faith, ministry, and cross-cultural mission and outreach; develops and nurture an interactive community of scholars and activists who reflect critically on what it means to be a global church. Several RESEARCH DIGITAL PROJECTS advance the work of CGCM, including resources on Chinese and Korean Christianities.

    The Ricci Institute for Chinese-Western Cultural History at Boston College (located at the University of San Francisco from 1984 to 2021) is an internationally renowned research center for the study of Chinese-Western cultural exchange. With a focus on the Jesuit missions of the 16th-19th centuries and the history of Christianity in China and East Asia, the Institute supports research in a diverse range of interests: in Chinese and East Asian history and relations with Europe, on the influences of China and Europe on each other, on religion and culture and philosophies of East and West, and on the sciences, technology, astronomy, cartography, and medicine. Visiting scholars from around the world meet here to examine these and many other topics in languages as widespread as Latin, Portuguese, Italian, French, or Spanish to Chinese, Japanese, Korean, or Manchu. The Institute regularly hosts meetings, symposia, conferences, and workshops, and every Summer visiting scholars and research fellows-in-residence speak at weekly research seminars on their topic of study.

    The China Christianity Studies Group (中國基督宗教研究學會) is a group of scholars from diverse fields and disciplines who share academic interests in Christianity in China, past and present. The CCSG is an affiliate organization of the Association for Asian Studies and the Renaissance Society of America.

    Institute of Modern History, Academia Sinica 中央研究院近代史研究所

    “Western Learning and China” is a very broad field that can encompass almost all aspects of modern Chinese history, and therefore the degree of participation of colleagues within the Institute is relatively high.  Colleagues have been able to develop different research topics in this field over the years, which has the potential for long-term development.

    「西學與中國」是一個很廣泛的領域，幾乎可以包含中國近代史所有面向，因此所內同仁可以參與的程度也相對高，在此框架內未來可能發展的研究議題也較多，此對於以少數經費支持的研究群從事嘗試性學術活動是一項優點。多年來同仁可以在此領域中發展不同的研究課題，具有長期發展的潛力。 
       

    The Center for Research on Global Catholicism supports scholarship on the ways and means by which Catholicism migrated across time and space to become a global religion, entangled with imperial ambitions, in excess of official intentions, mobilized by material objects, affective relationships, politics, theologies, epidemics and more.

    The objectives of the Center for Research on Global Catholicism include:

    • Capitalizing on scholarly expertise at SLU and in St. Louis to advance knowledge and understanding of global Catholicism
    • Facilitating connections between local archives and research scholars
    • Supporting scholars working in the field of global Catholicism by providing resources, community, and opportunities for collaboration

    The predecessor of the Center for the Study of Religion and Chinese Society at Shanghai University (CSRCS, 2011) was the Religion and Peace Research Center established in 2001 and renamed the Religion and Society Research Center in 2005. The Center focuses on the study of the history of Chinese Christianity, but also on contemporary Christianity and other religious studies. At present, the Center has 19 researchers (including guest researchers). It publishes the collection Religion and History and co-publishes the semi-annual “Chinese Christian Studies” and “Chinese Studies and Western Studies”. It has organizes numerous meetings, such as the Ming and Qing Catholic research workshops, the Christianity and China Modernization Forum, the Chinese literature and Chinese Christianity research meetings, and the Religion and Charity forums. Since 2017, the Center has established long-term friendly cooperative relations with Meiji University in Japan, Chuo University in South Korea, and Chungyuan University in Taiwan. In 2018, the Center also established a Zen Culture Research Center to carry out academic research activities related to Buddhist Zen culture.

    Inaugurated on August 1, 2008, Fu Jen Academia Catholica consists of five Fu Jen academic institutes or centers. They are the Institute of Scholastic Philosophy, Institutum Historiae Ecclesiae (天主教史研究中心), Center for the Study of Science and Religion, Monumenta Serica Sinological Research Center, and John Paul II Institute for Research into Dialogue for Peace. Presently, the research areas of the Catholic academy cover science and religion, scholastic philosophy, Chinese Catholic history, sinology, literature, peace and justice, ethics, aesthetics, and art.

    As an ecumenical research institution, the Study Centre is committed to further the study of Chinese religions and culture and to disseminate the fruits of research and theological reflection to local clergy and laypeople as well as Christians and academic communities worldwide. The Centre publishes the journal Ching Feng. The objectives of the Study Centre are :

    • to deepen the understanding of the religions and culture of China (including Hong Kong);
    • to undertake interdisciplinary research of historical and contemporary Chinese Christianity in its religious, cultural, social and political contexts;
    • to promote ongoing dialogue, and mutual understanding, between Christianity and other religious and cultural traditions in Asia;
    • to contribute to the development of indigenous and contextual theology among Chinese Christians.

    The Chinese University of Hong Kong is committed to promoting cultural exchanges between East and West. Courses related to Catholic studies were offered since the founding of the religious studies program. In 2005, with a generous donation from the Catholic Diocese of Hong Kong, the Centre for Catholic Studies was established under the Department of Cultural and Religious Studies to further develop Catholic studies in the University. After more than a decade of steady development, the Centre for Catholic Studies has turned a new page in 2019 with the transfer of management to the Hong Kong Community of the Society of Jesus, whose prioritized apostolic works include higher education and academic research.

    Aims:

    • Promoting academic research related to Catholic studies;
    • Providing opportunities to young and new scholars of Catholic studies;
    • Enhancing academic exchanges among scholars of Catholic Studies worldwide;
    • Disseminating knowledge of Catholic culture.

    The France-Asia Research Institute (Institut de recherche France-Asie, IRFA) is  the new Research Institute of the Paris Foreign Missions (MEP) since 2019. The archives and library contain materials on China, besides many other Asian countries (see this old  1999 description of the China archives for some general info; for updated practical info see website). Contact: IRFA – Institut de recherche France-Asie, Marie-Alpais Dumoulin, Directrice, 28 rue de Babylone F – 75007 Paris, Tel. +33 (0)1 44 39 91 30, email: directrice@irfa.paris

    The East-West Cultural Exchange Research Center of Central China Normal University was formally established in 2001. Its predecessor was the Research Center on the History  of Missionary Universities in China, established in 1994. Under the leadership of Professor Zhang Kaiyuan, the center has made remarkable achievements in the research of East-West cultural exchanges and international academic dialogues, and has held many domestic and international academic seminars. After many years of hard work, the center has now built a documentation center featuring the research of Chinese Christian history. Central China Normal University also specially established the “Zhang Kaiyuan Academic Fund for Eastern and Western Cultural Exchanges” in 2001 to promote academic exchanges and dialogues between Eastern and Western cultures.

    The GECEM project (Global Encounters between China and Europe: Trade Networks, Consumption and Cultural Exchanges in Macau and Marseille, 1680-1840) project is funded by ERC (European Research Council)-Starting Grant scheme under the EU Framework Programme for Research and Innovation (Horizon 2020), with Prof. Manuel Perez Garcia as the principal investigator. The project was awarded in the ERC-Starting Grant Call of 2015. The GECEM starts on 1 July, 2016, and it will end on 30 June 2021;  the host institution is the University Pablo de Olavide (UPO) of Seville (Spain).

    Early modern nautical rutters (sailing directions) are the earliest Western documents that testify to the stable and regular lived experience of traversing the earth’s oceans on a global, planetary scale. Using these exceptional, yet poorly known sources, the main objective of this project is to write a narrative of the scaling up of a scientific description of the earth in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, from the lived experience of traveling and observing the earth in long-distance sea voyages. As a preliminary task, a systematic search, identification and classification of the information contained in early modern Iberian rutters and ship’s logbooks will be performed. This will be followed by an extensive multidisciplinary study aiming at radically improving our present knowledge of the historical process that led to the formation of global concepts about the earth.

    Since its establishment in 1999, the Hong Kong and Macau History and Culture Research Center of the School of Arts and Sciences of Jinan University has conducted research on Hong Kong and Macau history and culture. The Center was re-launched in 2014 with three units (Hong Kong Macao History and Culture; ‘Macaology’; Documentation), better integrating the existing research forces, and using the geographical advantages of the University’s location in Guangzhou.

    The CCCM is a research center in the area of social and human sciences, whose projects have promoted international and intercultural relations between Portugal/Europe and China/East Asia. In recent years, two main CCCM projects related to the history of Sino-Portuguese relations stand out, one already completed and the other one in progress, centered on the work of two figures who played a prominent role in the context of the relations between Portugal/Europe and China during the Ming and Qing dynasties. The first is Tomás Pereira (1646-1708), a Portuguese Jesuit missionary who, over the 36 years he lived in Beijing (1673-1708), achieved renown as a cultural mediator between Portugal and China, as a consequence of his proximity to the emperor Kangxi (r. 1661-1722).  The second is Álvaro Semedo (1585-1658), another Portuguese Jesuit who, like Pereira, had a long experience in China (between 1613 and 1658, with interruptions) and an in-depth knowledge of Chinese language and culture. Among Semedo’s extensive documental corpus, the book he published in 1642 in the Spanish language, Imperio de la China i Cultura Evangélica en él, quickly became a bestseller in 17th century Europe, with six editions being published in four different languages (besides Spanish, also in Italian, French and English). 

    Asia Lusitana aims is to promote an intelligent discussion on the socio-cultural, economic, political, and religious interactions that took place between the peoples of Europe and the peoples of Asia and Eastern Africa within the framework of the Portuguese empire, from the Ethiopian and the Monomotapa empires up to Japan. AL’s point of view is primarily historical, but is also related to the other human and social sciences such as linguistics, anthropology and religious studies. While AL members have a special interest for the early modern period, they are also concerned in a scholarly way with the late modern times and the post-colonial legacy of the Portuguese presence in Asia.

    The Center on Religion and the Global East (CRGE) at Purdue University is dedicated to advancing the social scientific study of religion in East Asian societies, East Asian diasporas, and religions originated in East Asia that are spread around the world. The Center on Religion and Chinese Society (CRCS) was started in 2008 to advance scholarship and dialogue on Chinese religions. In 2020, we expanded our focus to religion in the Global East. CRGE strives to deepen scholarly understanding of religions through research projects and scholarly exchanges, and to building bridges among scholars in the West and East and between scholars and the public through media, symposia, lectures, and publications.

    The Centre for the Study of World Christianity (formerly, the Centre for the Study of Christianity in the Non-Western World) exists to advance high-quality scholarship in Christianity as a polycentric faith whose adherents are now far more numerous in the majority world than in Europe or North America. It has the primary post-graduate focus of the School of Divinity’s keen interest in the history and contemporary reality of Christianity as a world religion.

    The following fields are of particular interest:

    • Tracing the complex historical trajectories and socio-cultural processes which have led to the current reality of Christianity as a majority-world religion.
    • Analysing and interpreting the past patterns and contemporary processes of theological contextualisation and construction employed by Christians in and from Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Pacific in the appropriation and re-shaping of the faith in diverse socio-political and religious contexts.
    • Exploring the significance for contemporary religion and society of the current global diaspora of African and Asian Christianities.

    Within the University of Edinburgh, the Centre has close co-operative links with: the Centre of African Studies, the Centre for South Asian Studies, the Scottish Centre for Chinese Studies, and the HRH Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Centre of the Study of Islam in the Contemporary World.

    The International Association has become an avenue for Catholic missiologists to do research on the missionary situations in the Church today in the light of the teachings of the Church particularly the Second Vatican Council. The present contexts of doing mission have also impacted on the missiological research and practice of its members who are involved in the ongoing efforts towards new evangelization. From 2010 until the present, more than 200 Catholic missiologists from all over the world, who have doctorates and licentiate degrees in missiology and who are at the frontiers of missionary work and education, have taken part in the life of the Association.

    The Cambridge Centre for Christianity Worldwide is a research and teaching centre in Cambridge, England dedicated to study, reflection, and practical engagement with the global nature of Christianity in the twenty-first century. The Centre’s library and archives encourage students and visitors to dig deep into the history, theology, and contemporary manifestations of global Christianity.

    From its inception in 1983, OCMS has been committed to cutting edge mission scholarship by global mission and ministry leaders with an emphasis mission in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. With flexible residency requirements and part-time study framework, the OCMS/MU Programme is designed to allow those engaged in mission and ministry to remain embedded in their ministries while pursuing their research degree. As a collaborative partner of Middlesex University, the OCMS/MU Programme is able to offer accredited Master of Philosophy (MPhil) and Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) degrees. OCMS graduates can be found worldwide, as leaders, scholars, and practitioners. OCMS alumni are having a significant impact on the people and institutions they serve.

    The Association’s purpose is to conduct study, training and research programmes related to the cultures and countries of Asia and Africa and their interactions with the Mediterranean basin.

    The Italian School of East Asian Studies (ISEAS) assists Italian researchers in Japan in all fields of humanities and social sciences. It currently enjoys the generous support of the Embassy of Italy in Tokyo and a number of Italian universities and research institutions (University of Naples “L’Orientale”, “Sapienza” University of Rome, University Ca’ Foscari Venice, University of Turin, University of Naples “Federico II”, University of Naples “Parthenope”, University of Salerno, University of Milan “La Statale”, ISMEO – International Association of Mediterranean and Oriental Studies) in collaboration with the Italian Cultural Institute in Tokyo. The School has an official collaboration agreement with the École française d’Extrême-Orient, with which it shares facilities, and with the Institute for Research in Humanities of Kyoto State University. It is part of the European Consortium for Asian Field Study, a network of 23 centers connected to the main European institutions for research on Asia, and as an Italian contribution it is among the European research centers in Japan. It is open to researchers of all nationalities, upon presentation of a detailed project, with preference given to subjects linked to the institutions that support it.

    The research group was established in 2008 and represents one of seven research groups at the Department of Archaeology, History, Cultural Studies and Religion at the University of Bergen. The members of the group are engaged in research on various aspects of transnational nexus and interaction. This includes transactions and exchange of goods and services, the movement of people and transfer of culture and ideas. In short, we are looking at historical and cultural processes in the 19th – 21st centuries that expedite as well as halts, and that are causes as well as consequences of internationalisation.

    This project investigates how artworks were employed in the process of negotiating sanctity with the Roman Curia in the age of Iberian hegemony (1500–1700). As the cult of the saints was among the key conceptual battlegrounds in the conflict between the Catholic church and the Protestants, in the post-Tridentine period, saints came to fulfill spiritual, ideological and propagandistic purposes. Investigating the negotiation of sanctity between Rome and geographically distant areas participates in ‘globalizing’ the history of early modern art, to challenge established perspectives on Roman Catholicism, colonialism, and the early modern world at large.

    Despite its enormous extent and significance, Neo-Latin literature, i.e. the Latin literature written from the Renaissance to the present day, is little studied and poorly represented in academic institutions. The Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Neo-Latin Studies (LBI) intends to make up for this shortcoming by its exclusive dedication to Neo-Latin literature (with a focus on the 16th to the 18th centuries) and by a fresh approach: many studies have tended to look at Neo-Latin from the perspective of other disciplines such as classics, history, or the modern languages, which has cemented a misconception of the inferior nature and backward orientation of Neo-Latin literature. The LBI, by contrast, programmatically focuses on those aspects of Neo-Latin literature which can be understood as a dynamic element of early modern culture and which have made a significant contribution to the emergence of Europe as we know it today. 

    The Society for Neo-Latin Studies (SNLS) was founded in 2004 and is the national organization in the UK for all scholars interested in literature of the early-modern period written in Latin. SNLS organizes regular conferences, panels, lectures and events for graduate students and hosts a selection of Neo-Latin texts (which can also be used for teaching) on its website. It aims to foster dialogue among scholars from different disciplines working on Neo-Latin literature, put Neo-Latin in the interdisciplinary context of early-modern studies, support the next generation of scholars and encourage teaching of Neo-Latin literature.

    The Project Mapping Religious Diversity in Modern Sichuan: A Spatial and Social Study of Communities and Networks aims at discussing dynamics and paradigms of religious diversity in Sichuan in the Qing and Republican period.

    INSTITUTIONS: Archives, Libraries & related Online Portals (Christianity-in-China; Chinese Religions; Sino-Western Relations; Missions)

    The Mundus Gateway is a web-based guide to more than four hundred collections of overseas missionary materials held in the United Kingdom. These materials, comprising the archives of British missionary societies, collections of personal papers, printed matter, photographs, other visual materials and artefacts, are held in a large number of libraries, record offices and other institutions in England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales. The Mundus Gateway makes it easier for researchers to locate these collections and obtain sufficient information about their contents to enable effective planning of research visits

    This collection was created from several different accessions and several different sources. All patrons must get permission from the United Church of Christ’s Wider Church Ministries department for use of all A.B.C.F.M. material. Please obtain that permission in writing before asking to use these collections. Copyright: requests for permission to publish material from this collection should be discussed with the archivist or librarian. Processed April 1997 by archive staff.

    The archives of the ABCFM, located at Harvard University’s Houghton Library, contain the official reports from ABCFM missionaries, who were located in all parts of the globe during the 19th and 20th centuries. Personal correspondence and photographs often remained in individual families and are found in numerous repositories.

    Collections held by the Congregational Library archives include:

    For more information on the ABCFM, see the Congregational Library card catalog. The Congregational Library holds a large collection of ABCFM printed pamphlets arranged by the country. The Congregational Library also has a microfilm copy of the ABCFM archives; see Papers of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions: Documents Administered by the Houghton Library of Harvard University. Guide to the Microfilm Collection (Woodbridge, Ct. : Research Publications International, 1994) for a name and missionary substation index to the microfilm. Note that this index is a quick source of birth and death dates and missionary lists. The Panopolist and Missionary Herald periodicals printed letters and reports received by the ABCFM headquarters. Note that the Congregational Library maintains a fairly complete card personal name index to these periodicals and that each volume of the periodical contains an extensive personal name and geographic name index. For photographs of the ABCFM offices while they were located in Congregational House, contact an archivist.

    The ARCA (Archives du monde catholique) is a place for safeguarding and promoting documentation on the Catholic world and Christian life in Wallonia and Brussels in the 19th and 20th centuries. It forms a specialized archive repository, which has the status of a documentary platform attached to the Religions, Spiritualities, Cultures, Societies (RSCS) Institute of UCL and of a specialized library agreed with the UCL Libraries.

    KADOC is the Interfaculty Documentation and Research Centre on Religion, Culture and Society at KU Leuven. Established in 1976, KADOC is not only one of the leading cultural heritage institutions in Belgium, but also an international centre for the study of  the interaction between religion, culture and society in the 19th and 20th centuries. It preserves and discloses an impressive collection of archives, data, and heritage that has emerged from the interplay between religion, culture and society in a Belgian, European and global context. In 2019 KADOC heritage collections contained 34,5 current kilometers of archival units, 300.000 books, and 16.500 periodicals. These KADOC collections have an important European and even global dimension: they document interactions between Europe and the Americas, Asia and Africa that were intermediated by missionaries, political movements, churches, NGOs and migrants, and have shaped the world we live in. Political and social developments such as the development of civil society, the welfare state, democratization, European integration, and secularization are documented in the collections of political movements and politicians with a European/international profile, trade unions, NGOs, and religious congregations. KADOC stimulates international research in its collections by organizing international conferences, by launching networks with European universities and partner-institutions, by publishing innovative studies, and by hosting junior and senior researchers from across the world.

    The Maryknoll Mission Archives, founded in 1990, is the official repository for all corporate records and manuscripts produced by the three expressions of Maryknoll: the Catholic Foreign Mission Society of America, known as the Maryknoll Fathers and Brothers (founded 1911); the Maryknoll Sisters of St. Dominic (founded 1912); and the Maryknoll Mission Association of the Faithful, known as the Maryknoll Lay Missioners (founded 1994). Maryknoll Mission Archives centralizes, collects, organizes, preserves, protects, and makes available for research the legacy of Maryknoll’s participation in the worldwide mission of the Church.

    In 1921 the Passionists responded to the 1919 mission encyclical Maximum Illud by sending missionaries to Hunan, China. Departing the United States in late 1921, the first group arrived in 1922, and for the next 33 years to 1955, 80 Passionists from both St. Paul of the Cross and Holy Cross Provinces served in the Yuanling Diocese, Western Hunan. This was during an era of high political and social drama in China, as the Chinese Nationalists, Communists, and Japanese fought for control in the region.

    When the first CICM missionaries (Congregatio Immaculati Cordis Mariae, or the Congregation of the Immaculate Heart of Mary; also known as Scheut Missionaries, from the founding place-name in the suburbs of Brussels)  set foot on Chinese soil in the late 19th century,  they engaged in a missionary enterprise which would lead them far beyond the traditional missionary field.  Not specifically trained for great intellectual endeavors when they left their homeland, but ending up at the edges of the Chinese empire,  among minority peoples and languages,  the missionaries became self-made linguists,  ethnologists or geographers.  The level of excellence which they built up through this forced cultural immersion,  is reflected in the documents and books which they collected during nearly one century and which have now found their way back to Belgium.

    The Verbiest Institute is committed to upholding the memory of these scholars,  by keeping their libraries together and making them accessible to external readers. The Library presently holds about 31,000 volumes and is still expanding. It does not intend to keep up to date in all its branches. Some subjects will no longer be covered, such as Chinese oracular script, while a limited number of areas of interest have been set apart for special attention, viz.  Chinese frontier studies, particularly Inner and Outer Mongolia; history of the Church in modern and contemporary China;  Chinese-language scholarship on Christianity;   and State and Religion in East Asia. The library will also be the repository to an  number of unfinished projects, bequeathed by individual scholars for the explicit use by future generations of bona fide research students.  These will be made accessible upon prior agreement and on a strictly ad hoc basis.

    The library specializes in humanities and religious sciences, in the history of the missions, and more specifically on the history of the Paris Foreign Missions (writings and biographies of the MEP missionaries). Volume and types of circulating documents: 15,000 books and 1,400 maps and plans. A collection of more than 30,000 volumes of religious studies that can be consulted in-house only. An Asian collection of approximately 20,000 volumes (including a rich linguistic and cartographic sector) to which researchers can have access by appointment. Fields: Geography. Religion. Languages and linguistics. History. Asia. Missions.

    WEBSITES (History & Culture; Global China; Biography)

    WHAT: 8.4 million original biographical articles based on digitized microfiches from the biographical archives of the K. G. Saur publishing house. 250,000 biographies from 300 new sources will be added from fall 2017 until 2021.

    WHO: Original sources on 6 million historical personalities. Men and women, families and groups from all sectors of society and of all professions, from the sciences, politics, culture and economics.

    WHERE: From all countries and regions of the world. Addition of entries for North America, Spain, Portugal, South America, France, Italy, UK, the Benelux countries and Germany in the 2017 update.

    WHEN: Biographical information from the 4th millennium BC to the present. Published in reference works from the 16th century until today.

    No single library or search engine provides biographical information on so many historical personalities. The World Biographical Information System Online provides a detailed and authentic picture of people’s achievements, feats, curiosities and peculiarities. From 2017 on, direct scanning will improve the quality of the sources. Three tried and tested search options (Basic, Biographical and Bibliographical Search) allow for a simple and precise research in the Online Reference. Access is is by PAID INSTITUTIONAL SUBSCRIPTION.

    Archives included in WBIS:

    African Biographical Archive
    American Biographical Archive, incl. Canadian Biographical Archive
    Arab-Islamic Biographical Archive
    Australasian Biogr. Archive
    Baltic Biographical Archive
    Biographical Archive of the Soviet Union
    Biographical Archive of Christianity
    Biographical Archive of the Ancient World
    Biographical Archive of the Benelux Countries
    Biographical Archive of the Middle Ages
    British Biographical Archive
    Chinese Biographical Archive
    Czech and Slovak Biographical Archives
    French Biographical Archives
    German Biographical Archive
    Greek Biographical Archive
    Hungarian Biographical Archive
    Indian Biographical Archive. India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka
    Italian Biographical Archive
    Japanese Biographical Archive
    Jewish Biographical Archive
    Korean Biographical Archive
    Polish Biographical Archive
    Russian Biographical Archive
    Scandinavian Biographical Archive
    South-East Asian Biographical Archive
    South-East European Biographical Archive
    Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Archive
    Turkish Biographical Archive

    The Electronic Biographical Dictionary (DB~e) of the Spanish Royal Academy of History is a digital environment for accessing the largest database of content on personalities in the history of Spain, an immense wealth of information available for the first time in electronic format. More than 50,000 character files -many of them biographed for the first time- have been structured in standardized fields. The systematization of the data includes chronological dates covering more than 2,500 years of history, from the 7th century B.C. to the 20th century, and worldwide geographic scopes, with special attention to all the territories that, in addition to the Peninsula, were part of the Spanish Administration.

    Website: https://www.asiaworldsfairs.org/

    Beginning with the 1851 “world’s fair” in London’s Crystal Palace, Asia has been prominently represented in universal expositions. These expositions served as a stage that displayed a complex history of conflicts, contradictions, and engagements of Asia with the world.

    • The European Jesuit Libraries Provenance Project: Jesuit Books and Libraries in Europe, 1540s-1770s

    This is the largest census of books owned by European Jesuit institutions prior to the suppression.  It includes both texts currently held in libraries and information from pre-1773 inventories, and is an ongoing project created by Kathleen Comerford (Georgia Southern University).

    DICTIONARIES

      Chinese and Manchu 🀄

      This article (+ LINKS) provides an overview of Chinese electronic dictionaries, followed by a detailed annotated list of the main digital lexica, resources, and reference tools currently available. As usual, when dealing with digital resources, the examples discussed here will soon become outdated. We will therefore first provide a set of general guidelines on how to evaluate and compare electronic dictionaries and related reference tools before discussing the applications themselves.

      zdic.net is the most comprehensive free online Chinese-Chinese dictionary, containing detailed definitions and a wide variety of lexical data (character stroke animations, radicals and subcomponents, Mandarin putonghua pronunciations with sound files, variant graphic forms, encoding data, and input sequences) for virtually every Chinese graph in Unicode CJK character set. Entries from the classical Kangxi zi dian, Shuo wen jie zi and Song ben guang yun dictionaries are provided, as well as sample paleographic forms, pronunciations in various dialects, and single-word English translations for each graph. Entries are in simplified Chinese, though the search function accepts a wide variety of graphic forms.

      • Kangxi zidian 康熙字典 (1716)  

      Version 1 (zdic) 

      Version 2

      Kangxi zidian 康熙字典 “Dictionary of the Kangxi reign (1662-1722)” is the largest character dictionary of traditional China. It was compiled on imperial order by Zhang Yushu 張玉書 (1642-1711) and Chen Yanjing 陳延敬 (1638-1712), but was only finished in 1716. The Qing-period 清 (1644-1911) compilers made use of older dictionaries, expecially the Ming-period 明 (1368-1644) dictionaries Zihui 字彙 by Mei Yingzuo 梅膺祚 (fl. 1615) and Zhengzitong 正字通 by Zhang Zilie 張自烈 (1597-1673). It consists of 12 “collections” (ji 集) of which each is divided into three parts. It makes use of the 214 radicals system established in the Zhengzitong. Each character is attributed to a radical. The radicals are arranged according to the number of brush strokes. Below the radical levels characters are arranged according to the residual stroke number left after subtracting the radical. The Kangxi zidian contains 47,035 characters in total and was the largest dictionary before the compilation of the Zhonghua da zidian 中華大字典 in 1915. This large number comes into being because all character variants from ancient times on are recorded. For each individual character, the locus classicus is provided. 

      [Source:  http://www.chinaknowledge.de/Literature/Science/kangxizidian.html ]

      The dictionary contains about 100,000 Chinese characters, based on the standard fonts announced by the Taiwan Ministry of Education, and presents the corresponding variants of characters found in the literature. The dictionary is written in HTML, presented in CSS, and interactive via JavaScript. 

      The English-Chinese Dictionary Database covers records compiled between 1815 and 1919 and represents an early period English-Chinese character dictionary. The material was edited and completed by foreign missionaries and linguists the likes of Robert Morrison, Samuel Wells Williams, Walter Henry Medhurst, Wilhelm Lobscheid, Inoue Tetsujirō, Kuang Qizhao (Kwang Ki-Chaou), Yan Huiqing, Herbert Allen Giles, and Karl Ernst Georg Hemeling. The database houses a twenty-four volume character dictionary of which fourteen volumes have been completely entered, including eleven volumes of the English-Chinese character dictionary along with three volumes of the Chinese-English character dictionary which together contain approximately 113,000 entries for English words and 18,000 entries for Chinese words, corresponding to 1.68 million entries of Chinese-English explanations, sample sentences, and so forth. The remaining ten volumes provide only image browsing. The rich text corpus in this multivolume set is an important tool for the study of the transformations in modern Chinese language and for examining the locus of Chinese-Western cultural exchanges.

      [Sebestyen Hompot, University of Vienna, Austria]

      Hokkien (a.k.a. Minnan 閩南話, Southern Min, Taiwanese) is a variety of Chinese spoken in the southern part of Fujian province (China), Taiwan and by a large number of overseas Chinese all over Southeast Asia. Hokkien dictionaries and textbooks have been published since the 16th century in a number of locations and in a variety of languages (Classical Chinese, Dutch, English, Hokkien, Japanese, Latin, Mandarin, Spanish) for purposes such as education for locals, Christian missionary work and colonial administration.

      Introduction

      In the nineteenth century, a number of Western scholars compiled dictionaries and textbooks on the spoken language for the teaching of Cantonese. Seven of them have been extracted and are available for retrieval in this electronic database. The database is the result of the following research projects of the Research Grants Council of Hong Kong: “The Evolution of Modern Cantonese – A Study of Early Cantonese Spoken Language Materials – The Cantonese Language: Its Past as Reconstructed from Early Colloquial Texts” (Project Code: HKUST/CUHK6055/02H).  The Database is now available on the Internet for use by fellow scholars. When using the database for statistical analysis or writing papers, please state in your text that the material is drawn from the database. The database contains errors and omissions, so please exercise your own judgment when using it.

      Edited by Dr. Fresco Sam-Sin, Manchu Lecturer, Leiden University. Curated tools to satisfy Manchu study and research needs, including wordlists and lexikon.

      This site was developed to assist Christian translators find appropriate Chinese translations for English terms related to the subject of Bible, theology, church history, philosophy, ancient near-eastern archeology and other religions.  This website provides translations of more than 30,000 terms and names.  One goal of this site is to attempt to standardize translations of terms, especially names. 

      English 🇬🇧

      Lexicons of Early Modern English (LEME) is a historical database of monolingual, bilingual, and polyglot dictionaries, lexical encyclopedias, hard-word glossaries, spelling lists, and lexically-valuable treatises surviving in print or manuscript from about 1475 to 1755.

      French dictionaries of the 17th, 18th, 19th and 20th centuries. Use the search box below to simultaneously query Jean Nicot’s Thresor de la langue française (1606), Jean-François Féraud’s Dictionaire critique de la langue française (1787-1788), Émile Littré’s Dictionnaire de la langue française (1872-1877) and the Dictionnaire de L’Académie française 1st (1694), 4th (1762), 5th (1798), 6th (1835), and 8th (1932-5) editions. Enter one word, accents optional (eg., parlement or humanité).

      Créé par le CNRS, le Centre National de Ressources Textuelles et Lexicales (CNRTL) est adossé au laboratoire Analyse et Traitement Informatique de la Langue Française (ATILF / CNRS – Nancy Université). Son objectif est de réunir au sein d’un portail unique, le maximum de ressources informatisées et d’outils de consultation pour l’étude, la connaissance et la diffusion de la langue française.

      Il corpus contiene attualmente tutti i volumi del GDLI in una versione provvisoria e sperimentale, perfettibile mediante il lavoro di revisione che tutt’ora prosegue presso l’Accademia, come è necessario per un’opera di questa mole. Si è comunque deciso di mettere immediatamente lo strumento (realizzato a tempo di record) nelle mani degli studiosi, benché presenti non pochi difetti. Infatti per ora la ripulitura è stata minima, ed è stata svolta in forma automatica all’interno del flusso della digitalizzazione. Sono state indicizzate tutte le forme individuate da una procedura che ha utilizzato la trascrizione prodotta dal sistema OCR (Finereader), avendo prima ricostruito l’unità delle parole sillabate nei cambi pagina (perché potessero essere individuate dalle procedure di ricerca). Restano da rivedere manualmente, prima di tutto, i lemmi e le parole e frasi in caratteri greci, che non sono stati letti dall’OCR. Tale lavoro è stato affidato, con apposita borsa di studio, alla dott.ssa Canzani, che ha già operato sulle parti in greco per l’edizione elettronica delle Cinque Crusche. Si sta allestendo un sistema per l’individuazione automatica dei lemmi, che presenta non pochi problemi: vi collabora anche l’ILC di Pisa, che ha un apposito accordo con l’Accademia della Crusca. Sarà necessaria una revisione manuale dei testi, la quale richiederà molto tempo.

      Per quanto il testo elettronico presenti molte debolezze, l’approdo finale di ogni ricerca è la riproduzione in facsimile dell’originale a cui si rimane quindi, anche in questa edizione, del tutto fedeli, consentendo oltretutto, grazie ai sistemi di ingrandimento a video, una lettura comoda di un testo di non sempre facile accesso nella versione cartacea per le dimensioni ridotte dei caratteri. Nella ricerca si possono certamente perdere alcuni risultati di forme “occultate” dagli errori commessi dall’OCR ma, una volta arrivati alla pagina, il consultatore può attingere appieno a tutte le preziose informazioni del dizionario. Ai fini della consultazione, sono state implementate tre modalità di ricerca: una ricerca libera per parola, che estrae tutti i contesti in cui si trova almeno una delle parole inserite, una ricerca in sequenza, che consente di individuare porzioni di testo (compresi i segni interpuntivi), e una ricerca per voce, che individua automaticamente la pagina di inizio di una data voce. Le prime due ricerche sono fulltext. I risultati della ricerca indicano il volume di appartenenza, il numero di pagina, il primo e l’ultimo lemma contenuti nella pagina. Il risultato viene evidenziato all’interno di un contesto breve. Accanto al risultato, sono presenti i pulsanti che permettono di ampliare la porzione di testo visualizzata, o di accedere alla pagina in formato PDF e facsimile JPG. Oltre che alla modalità di ricerca aperta, è possibile accedere anche all’elenco delle forme indicizzate (in ordine alfabetico o ordinate per frequenza) e all’elenco degli autori citati (con rimando alla pagina dell’indice che contiene i dati a essi relativi). L’elenco delle abbreviazioni consente di accedere alle occorrenze indicizzate per l’abbreviazione selezionata.  Infine, una sala di lettura permette di accedere a uno scaffale digitale in cui possono essere sfogliati i volumi per immagini. Ogni scatto è collegato alla trascrizione in formato PDF della pagina relativa.

      È pubblicato qui in corso di redazione il Tesoro della Lingua Italiana delle Origini (TLIO), prima sezione cronologica del vocabolario storico italiano. Una selezione delle stesse voci viene stampata nel Bollettino dell’OVI; la versione in rete può essere aggiornata rispetto alla versione a stampa. Nuove voci vengono aggiunte con periodicità bimestrale. A luglio 2021 il TLIO conta oltre 46.200 voci (di cui 40.457 pubblicate online) su un totale stimato di 57.300 (oltre l’80%). La redazione non procede in forma strettamente alfabetica, perciò nuove voci saranno intercalate fra quelle già presenti. Sono però quasi complete le voci della prima parte del segmento alfabetico. Il lemmario viene aggiornato continuamente, tenendo conto dell’avanzamento della redazione e della lemmatizzazione, ed è perciò sempre aperto. Per ulteriori precisazioni è possibile consultare il database della redazione, con l’avvertenza che, pur essendo aperto al pubblico, è uno strumento di lavoro interno. Il TLIO si basa sul corpus testuale dell’italiano antico dell’OVI, di cui è possibile la consultazione integrale.

      Alle pagine web dell’Accademia della Crusca, accanto alle cinque Crusche fiorentine, si trova la versione elettronica del Dizionario della lingua italiana di Tommaseo, interrogabile attraverso un motore di nuova concezione realizzato da Daniele Fusi. Il testo del Dizionario è stato offerto dalla casa editrice Zanichelli di Bologna nel quadro di un accordo di scambio e collaborazione con l’Accademia della Crusca.

      Con la Lessicografia della Crusca in Rete l’Accademia della Crusca pubblica sul web il contenuto delle cinque edizioni del Vocabolario degli Accademici.

      Il lavoro di informatizzazione, già realizzato per la prima edizione, è stato esteso alle successive tre (1623, 1691, 1729-1738), così da permetterne l’interrogazione in modo sistematico e rapido, con ricerche avanzate che consentono di selezionare sezioni specifiche di ogni edizione del Vocabolario (definizioni, esempi, parole greche e latine, forestierismi, locuzioni, proverbi, parole dell’uso vivo, fonti); ma anche di confrontare costantemente le diverse edizioni. Sarà così possibile seguire con precisione le tappe evolutive del lavoro lessicografico degli accademici e insieme i cambiamenti dell’italiano da loro registrati nel corso dei secoli. Il progetto prevede anche una banca dati per immagini delle cinque edizioni: le circa 20.000 pagine complessive potranno essere così “sfogliate” in rete come veri e propri volumi virtuali, ma si potrà anche accedere ai vari lemmi con un apposito motore di ricerca che individuerà automaticamente la pagina relativa alla parola ricercata, in una specifica edizione o in tutte, consentendo così ancora una volta un confronto proficuo per cogliere l’evoluzione delle singole voci dalla prima (1612) all’ultima edizione (1863-1923). La banca dati attualmente in linea è tuttora in fase di revisione. Ci scusiamo per eventuali malfunzionamenti e imprecisioni: vi saremo grati di qualunque segnalazione vorrete inviarci a lessicografia@crusca.fi.it 

      The Morgan-Owens Neo-Latin Lexicon is the home of the largest repository of Neo-Latin vocabulary culled from literary sources. The Lexicon supports the work of scholars of Medieval, Renaissance, and Contemporary Latin and provides a unique tool for students, instructors and practitioners of active Latin. In addition, the site contains a small but growing vocabulary of Classical Greek words for the modern world.

      The aim of the Neulateinische Wortliste (NLW) is to work through parts of the vocabulary of the Latin language between 1300 and 1700. Neo-Latin is understood here as that stage in the development of the Latin language which begins with the return to the Latin of antiquity contained in the name of the ‘Renaissance.’ Thus, on the one hand, the NLW is first of all a documentation of the failure of efforts to return the Latin language to ‘the’ ancient level, and on the other hand, it is evidence of the continuing vitality of a language in which there have been no ‘native speakers’ for a long time. 

      O Corpus Lexicográfico do Português é um projecto de investigação da Universidade de Aveiro e do Centro de Linguística da Universidade de Lisboa, que trabalha sobre o texto antigo, particularmente sobre o texto dicionarístico, promovendo a sua edição e o tratamento em base de dados. A memória textual de referência (séculos XVI a XIX) abrange como objecto principal os dicionários e as publicações de tipo paralexicográfico, incluindo os textos metaortográficos e as colectâneas de provérbios.

      • Dieter Messner – Dicionário dos dicionários portugueses 

      Institut für Romanistik der Universität Salzburg, 1992-in progress. PRINT. See: https://www.cervantesvirtual.com/obra/el-dicionrio-dos-dicionrios-portugueses-0/ 

      O Corpus Histórico do Português Tycho Brahe é um corpus eletrônico anotado, composto de textos em português escritos por autores nascidos entre 1380 e 1978. Atualmente, 88 textos (3.544.628 palavras) estão disponíveis para pesquisa livre, com um sistema de anotação linguística em duas etapas: anotação morfológica (aplicada em 58 textos, num total de 2.280.819 palavras); e anotação sintática (aplicada em 27 textos, num total de 1.234.323 palavras).

      El Diccionario histórico de la lengua española (DHLE) es un diccionario nativo digital que persigue describir en su integridad (en el eje diatópico, diastrático y cronológico) la historia del léxico de la lengua española. Una característica definitoria de este repertorio radica en su voluntad de analizar la historia del léxico en una perspectiva relacional, atendiendo a los vínculos etimológicos, morfológicos y semánticos que se establecen entre las palabras. El DHLE ha sido concebido desde sus orígenes como una base de datos léxica electrónica (y diacrónica), lo que permite elaborar sus artículos de acuerdo con un criterio de organización del trabajo por campos semánticos (o voces relacionadas por su significado) y familias léxicas.

      • Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española by Sebastián de Covarrubias Horozco, 1611

      https://archive.org/details/A253315/page/n14/mode/2up  PDF file

      Recent critical edition on paper and DVD:

      https://www.rae.es/obras-academicas/obras-linguisticas/tesoro-de-covarrubias 

      La aparición en 1611 del Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española, de Sebastián de Covarrubias, constituye un hito en la historia de la lengua y la cultura españolas, pues es el primer diccionario monolingüe del castellano.