HIST 137: Material Culture in China

1648-1913 CE | Shipping records, correspondence, newspapers, rare books, maps, visual material

1682-1926 CE | Speeches, reports, catalogs, journals, correspondence, periodicals

An initiative of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute at Columbia University, this site includes a large number of primary source materials on China dating from 4000 BCE to the 20th Century.

From Fordham University, this site contains information and primary sources on Buddhism, Confucianism, and the countries of East Asia throughout their history.

University of California, Berkeley: "This project explores the sudden appearance in the 10th c. of a meritocratic culture that transformed Chinese elite society and constituted the ideological foundation of China's famous civil service exams."

From University of Wisconsin-Madison, the East Asian Collection includes historical images that present a visual archive of 20th century East Asian cultural heritage. Currently, the collection consists of images that document early 20th century China including the the Sino-Japanese Conflict (1937-1945), a visual history of Buddhist practices and temples in China, and other images of daily life in both rural and urban China.

Provided by the National Palace Museum in Taiwan, this site contains a variety of image and text databases; many covering biographical studies, historical archives, digital images of relics and paintings from Taiwan and China.

The Digital Collection provides free and open access to over 800,000 images from the Library’s collections. These digital images include photographs, posters, documents, maps, manuscripts and other source materials in many academic fields. These resources can cover China and other countries in Asia as well.

U.S. project aimed at providing public access to digital holdings (maps, manuscripts, monographs) as a public digital library.

Hamilton Library, University of Hawaii at Manoa: This site features digitizing photographs, drawings, and paintings in books published from the early 20th century and before.

This database was developed by The Kyoto University Library. It contains 295 digitized documents from the Qing and the Republican periods, most of them are personal trade documents and official files.

This database, constructed by the Institute of Modern History, Academic Sinica contains four archival collections that can be searched, diplomatic files, economic files, maps, and personal documents.

Digitized photographs taken by amateur photographers from 1870-1950.

This is part of Library of Congress's "World Digital Library" project. Religion, history, geography, government administration, literature, medicine, technology, and early translations of European books into Chinese are represented in the collection. These documents can also be viewed on an interactive map.