Internet resources for Culture

Taiwan Cinema Yearbook is an annual publication of Taiwan
Film Ditial Archives (TFDA). The latest edition can be
downloaded in full-text on the TFDA webiste.

The history of Chinese bookbinding has always suffered
owing to a lack of material evidence. This site, by
combining textual descriptions with diagrams illustrating
binding techniques and photographs of the actual objects,
aims to give a comprehensive introduction to the different
kinds of Chinese bookbinding contained in the Dunhuang
collection of the British Library. Site contents: Some
characteristics of the Dunhuang booklets; Butterfly
binding (hudie zhuang); Stitched binding (xian zhuang);
The Chinese pothi (fanjia zhuang); Whirlwind binding
(xuanfeng zhuang); Concertina binding (jingzhe zhuang);
Wrapped-back binding (baobei zhuang); Bibliography.

This digital collection includes more than 200,000
photographs of art and architecture from throughout Asia.
The countries included in this collection are Afghanistan,
Bangladesh, China, India, Indonesia, Japan, Myanmar (Burma),
Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and Thailand.

The International Collections database showcases some of
the visual materials held by the Special Collections
Division
that focus on collections beyond the scope of the Pacific
Northwest region. In this digital collection we feature
selected photographs and postcards from Asia and South
America including scenes from China, India, Indonesia, the
Philippines, and Japan, 1870s-1930s. Represented are
historical events, typical street scenes and native people
in traditional dress.

The International Dunhuang Project is an international
digitization project that aims to promote the study and
preservation of manuscripts
and printed documents from Dunhuang and other Central Asian
sites through global cooperation. Beginning in 1994, IDP has
till now made tens of thousands of images together with
catalogues, translations, historical photographs,
archaeological site plans and much
more freely available to all on the Internet.

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.

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.

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.