Internet resources for China

A Digital Archive of Documents & Photographs from
American Missionaries Who Witnessed the Rape of
Nanking. The project is from the Special
Collections of the Yale Divinity School Library.

The North China Herald is the prime printed source for the
history of the foreign presence in China from around 1850 to
1940s. No other newspaper existed over such an extended
period, and covers it in such incredible depth and variety.
The fully text-searchable North China Herald Online will be
one of the primary resources on a period which continues to
shape much of China’s world and worldview.

The PRC History Group is a network of scholars with
interests in the history of the People Republic of China. It
manages H-PRC, an H-Net channel that hosts scholarly
discussions in addition to distributing news and
announcements of interest to PRC historians. The Group also
distributes and archives Chinese-language journals as well
as the Group’s own English-language PRC History Review,
which contains research articles and roundtable discussions
on recent scholarship in PRC history.

The Red Brush project is a collection of texts in Chinese
from a wide range of writings from Imperial China, by and
about women writers. The website for this collection is
available in both English and Chinese.

The Tibetan and Himalayan Library (THL) is a publisher of
websites, information services, and networking facilities
relating to the Tibetan plateau and southern Himalayan
regions. THL promotes the integration of knowledge and
community across the divides of academic disciplines, the
historical and the contemporary, the religious and the
secular, the global and the local. Data includes text,
audio-video, images, maps, immersive objects, reference
works, and interpretative essays.

The Tibetan Buddhist Resource Center (TBRC) contains more
than 9,615 works (25,115 volumes totaling over ten million
digital pages), making this online repository one of the
most extensive collections of Tibetan literature.

The Thesaurus Linguae Sericae (TLS) is designed as as a
collaborative forum for discussion on the close reading of
Chinese texts. It provides a corpus of classical Chinese
texts, links the texts incorporated with an analytic
dictionary of the Chinese language, and also systematically
organises the Chinese vocabulary in taxonomic hierarchies of
synonym groups. TLS develops a system of rhetorical devices
for the analysis of Chinese texts.

This project focuses on the Lienü zhuan (Categorized
Biographies of Women) of Liu Xiang (77-6 B.C.), the
earliest extant book in the Chinese tradition solely
devoted to the moral education of women. The book consists
of biographical accounts of female role models in early
China and became the standard textbook for women’s
education for the next two millennia. This digital archive
serves as a publicly accessible tool for scholarly
exploration of early woodblock editions of the Lienü zhuan
held by the National Library of China, as well as other
early Chinese sources offered here in Chinese and English
translation.

The Trans-Asia Photography Review is an international
refereed journal devoted to the discussion and research of
historic and contemporary photography from Asia. The journal
aims to bring together the diverse perspectives of curators,
historians, photographers, anthropologists, art historians
and various others in order to investigate as fully as
possible the still nascent field of Asian photography.

Fritz Weiss – a German consul to China – lived and
travelled in China from 1899 to 1917, with diplomatic
postings in various cities such as Chengdu (Sichuan) and
Kunming (Yunnan). From 1911 he was accompanied by his
wife, Hedwig Weiss-Sonnenburg. This exhibition reveals
impressions from the time in which the Weisses were in
China, during the years of upheaval between the end of the
Qing dynasty and the beginning of the First World War. The
pictures were taken by Fritz and Hedwig Weiss during their
travels by ship and on land, in cities and in secluded
minority territories, as well as in their daily lives.

Robert Hegel's book True Crimes in Eighteenth-Century
China: Twenty Case Histories presents a sample of crime
reports from eighteenth-century China in English
translation. All are capital crimes. Since all capital
crimes might carry the death penalty, detailed reports of
all levels of investigation had to be forwarded to the
Emperor for his final decision on sentencing. Capital
crimes required investigation and review at local,
prefectural, provincial, and central levels of the
imperial Qing period (1644-1911) administration. These
reports include information about the victims and what
happened to them, testimony from the accused and various
witnesses, and official correspondence between judicial
officials about the crimes. This project is a supplement
to Professor Hegel's book, an archive of the cases
transcribed in the original Chinese.

It is the virtual home of the University of California, San
Diego Modern Chinese History program. It is a useful
resource of a wide variety of materials, ranging from book
reviews to information about visiting Chinese archives. The
site stopped updating itself in 2010.

Following the successful completion in August 2002 of a
project funded by the Research Support Libraries Programme,
there now exists a UK Union Catalogue of Chinese Books
containing records from the British Library, Cambridge,
Durham, Edinburgh, Leeds, Oxford and SOAS. Particular
attention has been paid to the development of a simple and
intuitive search interface, enabling readers to gain rapid
access to the required information through the entry of
minimal search terms.

Dr. Joseph Needham was sent by the British Council to
Southwest China in February 1943, to aid the anti-Japanese
war effort there. He stayed until April 1946, by when he
had travelled extensively throughout Sichuan, Yunnan, and
other parts of South, Southwest and Northwest China that
was
not under Japanese occupation. He took over 1,000
photographs during the period, which have been digitized
and
made available online by the Needham Research Institute.

Wen shi zhe xue bao, an academic journal published by the
National Taiwan University , focuses on the study of
Chinese
literature, arts, history, philosophy, archaeology and so
on. The journal publishes two issues every year in May and
November. Full text articles of the latest issues are now
available online for free at
(http://homepage.ntu.edu.tw/~bcla/index_ebook.htm), while
the table of contents of each issue can be browsed at
(http://homepage.ntu.edu.tw/~bcla/content.htm).

Yizhige is an e-book portal of Chinese classic literatures
that makes accessible contents of classic books and supports
full-text search across the classic titles.