Open Databases for China Studies Resource Guide

This guide provides an overview of open databases and free resources with primary materials for China studies research. The guide was edited by Joshua Seufert (Princeton University Libraries) and Luo Zhou (Duke University Libraries) for the Luce/ACLS Digital Archives Mapping Project. This guide will be updated periodically, with an expanded directory to be released in winter 2025. If you would like to contribute to the Mapping Project, we invite you to suggest a resource here.

Cross-collection search and discovery

CrossAsia Integrated Text repository

CrossAsia is a portal for discovering primary and secondary materials in Asian Studies. A discovery service for full-text cross-database searching in a number of East Asian Studies databases and full-text search in printed books.

Chinese big sets in IVY-Plus Libraries

In recent years publishers in mainland China have printed large collections of primary and secondary print material. This spreadsheet, maintained by Joshua Seufert of Princeton Libraries, provides information on bibliographic and Ivy Plus holding information for large sets of primary source materials published in mainland China. The list is current through July 2024 and contains 2947 titles currently held by Ivy Plus Libraries. The OCLC library codes are :RBN Brown, CGU Chicago, ZCU Columbia, COO Cornell, DRB Dartmouth, NDD Duke, HUL Harvard (Main Library and Yenching), HFL Harvard Fine Arts, HVL Harvard Law, JHE Johns Hopkins, PUL Princeton, PAU Upenn, STF Stanford, YUS Yale, and CRL Center for Research Libraries.

ReCAP Chinese Journals public list

This spreadsheet provides holding information on 1350 Chinese periodicals that are archived by libraries of the ReCAP consortium. ReCAP includes Columbia University, Princeton University, Harvard University, and The New York Public Library. 

East Asian Gateway Service

The EAGS,  supported by the University of Pittsburgh Library System, focuses on free delivery of full-text Chinese academic publications to researchers. The EAGS delivers Chinese documents to any individual researchers for research and teaching purpose or non-profit organizations who cannot find the needed item in any U.S. libraries.

Academic articles (secondary sources)

National Center for Philosophy & Social Science Documentation 国家哲学社会科学文献中心 (中国社科院)

This open access platform includes nearly 2500 journals (期刊&集刊&辑刊), 20,000 Chinese rare books (high resolution scan but with water marks). (Institutions can request institutional IP based access)

Hong Kong Journals Online

This open access platform is a full-text image database providing access to selected academic and professional journals, both in English and Chinese, published in Hong Kong.

Chinese Periodicals Index 臺灣期刊文獻資訊網

Indexing titles of Chinese and Western language periodicals published in Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau, some have full text, some are index only, but searching journal titles will find them as open resources on their own platform.

PubScholar (Chinese)

Published by the Chinese Academy of Sciences, PubScholar is a free database for academic journal articles, pre-prints, patents and scholarly datasets. Content is mostly focused on the sciences and engineering.

Biblioteca Virtual de Macau 澳門虛擬圖書館

Free digital library for publications from Macao. Includes many journals of local academic institutions and e-books issued by government and educational institutions.

Recommended Subject Guides and Bibliographies

Chinese Historiography Bibliography

Research guide for Chinese Historiography compiled by Benjamin A. Elman

Xianggang wen xue zi liao ku

Hong Kong Literature Database = 香港文學資料庫

Modern Chinese Literature and Culture (MCLC) Resource Center

Collection of bibliographies in the field of contemporary Chinese literature and a directory of online resources and a blog on the same topics.

PRC History

Current book reviews, a number of journals focusing on the cultural revolution, like Remembrance 记忆, Yesterday 昨天, and Past Events 往事. It also links to a wide range of resources on PRC History that are freely available.

Zhongguo gaige kaifang shujuku 中国改革开放数据库

Detailed timeline of political events from 1978-2018. The events are listed with links to full-text of speeches, images, articles and oral history recordings. Full use of the website (downloading of articles, images etc.) requires setting up a personal account.

Ivy Plus Libraries Digital Projects on East Asia

A platform for Ivy plus member libraries to share their published and ongoing digital projects.

Newspapers (primary sources)

Late Qing and Republican-Era Chinese Newspapers

This database collects 292 local Republican newspapers covering the period of 1911-1949. The newspapers are full-text searchable. Different from most other databases the OCRed text is visible in this database and can be copied. Included are: 東南日報 (Shanghai), 華北新報  (Beijing), 華光日報 (Nanchang), 立報 (Shanghai), 南京晚報 (Nanjing), 羣力報 (Jiaodong (Shandong), 時事新報 (Shanghai), 實報 (Beijing), 蘇州明報 (Suzhou), 鐵報 (Shanghai), 武漢日報 (Hankou), 西南日報 (Chongqing), 新華日報 (Hankou), 新申報 (Shanghai), 中山日報 (Guangzhou), 中央日報 (Shanghai).

Bilingual Database and Annotated Bibliography of Cantonese Popular Periodicals of the Early Twentieth Century 二十世紀初省港澳通俗刊物雙語資料庫

Until the end of the first half of the last century, there existed between the cities of Guangzhou, Hong Kong and Macau, a constant sharing of authors, cross-border advertisements, overlapping distribution networks and common cultural icons. By building on the works of previous researchers and librarians, we have collected information about popular periodicals stored in various databases, libraries in Hong Kong, Macau and the United Kingdom and private collections to put together the 80 entries found on this site and which together offer a rich expression of a ‘Cantonese cultural region’.

Old Hong Kong Newspapers

The collection provides digitized images of old Hong Kong newspapers from the library, which are accessible through the Multimedia Information System of Hong Kong Public Libraries.

East Asian Newspapers and Periodicals 1850-1950

From Internet Archive, The collections here include 266 East Asian (plus Singapore) newspapers, journals, and magazines published in Chinese, Korean, and Japanese languages from 1850-1950.

Digital Archives, History

Archives of the Institute of Modern History, Academia Sinica

The online system of the Archives of the Institute of Modern History (AIMH), Academia Sinica, provides readers with catalog search and digital image viewing. The documents housed in the Archives can be roughly grouped into five categories: Foreign Ministry Collection (1861-2009), Economic Ministry Collection (1903-1980), Personal Papers, Other Organizations, and Historical Maps. Half of them have been digitized; 60 percent of these digitized items can be directly viewed online through this system, while the rest can only be viewed in the on-site reading room. For those seeking to view items not yet digitized, applications to view original copies can also be made through this system.

Digital Library of Qing Archives

Digital Library of Qing Archives of the National Palace Museum (NPM) in Taibei integrates the former Grand Council Archives Database = 清代宮中檔奏摺及軍機處檔摺件, the Qing Historical Figures Database = 大清國史人物列傳及史館檔傳包傳稿資料庫, and the Index to Qing Archival Volumes Database = 清代文獻檔冊目錄資料庫 as well as other holdings of Qing archives at the NPM. The new database is free and does no longer require usernames and passwords.

Modern History Databases (MHDB) 近代史數位資料庫

Maintained by the Institute of Modern History, Academia Sinica, offers cross-database search and retrieval across 18 databases of historical and literary documents and publications from the Qing to Republican periods. Cross-database search is free with registration, but results (and retrieval) are often improved by searching within constituent databases.

Chinese Historical Christian Database

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.

Maoist Legacy

The Maoist Legacy Collection at the University of Freiburg holds several thousand original documents, handbooks, and personal dossiers from the 1950s until the 1980s. It ranks among the most comprehensive collections worldwide on the question of how a communist dictatorship has attempted to address injustices and atrocities committed in its own name. The main focus of the collection is devoted to the immediate post-Maoist period in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when dozens of millions of “unjust cases” were revised in the People’s Republic of China under the new leadership around Hua Guofeng, Deng Xiaoping and Hu Yaobang. Today, over 5,000 documents of the collection have been annotated and digitized for further research Due to privacy laws, currently the vast majority of individual case files cannot be made available in digitized format.

China Unofficial Archives

CUA is an online repository of works by PRC-based individuals who produce independent magazines, books, and documentary films. These works seek to challenge the government’s monopolistic vision of the past by offering new interpretations of Chinese history based on different political, ethnic, or gender perspectives. Launched in late 2023, the archive holds more than 850 such items. They are offered free as open-access downloads. Each item has a bilingual introduction explaining its significance and are searchable by tags based on creator, era, topic, and format.

Xinjiang Documentation Project

The Xinjiang Documentation Project is a multi-disciplinary research project based at the Institute for Asian Research in the School of Public Policy and Global Affairs at the University of British Columbia and the Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies Department at Simon Fraser University. The Project collects, preserves, assesses, and makes available documentary information on the extrajudicial detention of Uyghurs, Kazakhs, and other ethnic groups in Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, Northwestern China. Our scope and priorities are: making key documents available, assessing their reliability, presenting the material for the general public, and giving a platform to share the lived experiences, providing regular updates on the ongoing situation in the region, and organizing periodic speaker series.

Republican Era Material

Early Chinese Periodicals Online (ECPO)

Hosted at the University of Heidelberg, ECPO collects newspapers and other periodicals from the late Qing and Republican era. So far the emphasis has been on Chinese Women’s Magazines in the Late Qing and Early Republican Period and Chinese Entertainment Newspapers (Xiaobao 小報).

Modernhistory.org.cn Kangzhan wenxian shuju pingtai = 抗战文献数据平台

Even though this free database by the Institute of Modern History of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences is mainly focused on the Sino-Japanese War and Sino-Japanese relations, it gives access to a wide range of resources from the Republican Period. These include archives, books, newspapers, journals, communist publications, audio recordings, photographs and even musical scores. 

Taiwan eBook 臺灣華文電子書庫

Free eBook database for Chinese language books published between 1911 and 1949.

Global Image Catalogue of Ancient Chinese Book Collections 全球漢籍影像開放集成系統

The first global digital image retrieval platform for ancient texts has completed its first phase, with a compilation of image data from over 90 Chinese ancient text databases worldwide, totaling 170,000 entries (approximately 136,918 works and 32,654 volumes). The core function of the system is to provide one-stop access to and reading of ancient text edition images.

Oral History

Telling stories: Linguistic diversity in Hong Kong

Free database of speech samples and translations of the many languages and varieties that have been historically spoken or are in use in present-day Hong Kong

The Memory Project

This oral history collection has 739 interviews of survivors of the Great Famine that devastated rural China between 1958 and 1961. Officially known in China as the “Three Years of Natural Disasters” or “The Difficult Three-Year Period,” the Great Famine caused the death of between 20 and 43 million people. More recently the project has also covered the Great Leap Forward of 1958-1960, the Land Reform and the Collectivization of 1949-1953, the Four Cleanups Movement in 1964, and the Cultural Revolution of 1966-1976.

Digital Humanities Tools and Data Sets

Chinese Religious Text Authority

The Chinese Religious Text Authority (CRTA) provides reliable bibliographic and academic information about Chinese religious texts, focusing on texts produced prior to 1949. The Chinese Religious Text Authority (CRTA) provides reliable bibliographic and academic information about Chinese religious texts, focusing on texts produced prior to 1949. The Chinese Religious Text Authority aims to connect bibliographic information across collections, archives, and private libraries in order to map out detailed webs of relationships among producers, publishers, and distributors of religious texts. In this first phase of the project, we focus on a corpus of pre-1949 Chinese Religious texts included in major reprint collections. The data generated from this open-access, international, collaborative project has the potential to reveal formerly undiscovered associations.

Contemporary Chinese Village Gazetteer Data 数字村庄

Open dataset consisting of data selected  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.

LoGaRT: Local Gazetteers Research Tools

The Max Planck Institute: LoGaRT is a software for searching, analyzing, and collecting data from digitized Chinese local gazetteers. It provides historians with a bird’s-eye view on a collection of gazetteers beyond browsing and reading individually. The philosophy behind LoGaRT is to treat all the digitized gazetteers available as a conceptual database for historical inquiries. Thus, LoGaRT allows historians to ask larger-scale questions that are not necessarily bounded by geographical regions, time periods, or individual efforts. There are many collections of digitized Chinese local gazetteers with differing quality and licensing conditions. Currently, two high-quality collections are accessible via LoGaRT: Rare Local Gazetteers at Harvard-Yenching Library and Erudition’s Zhongguo fangzhi ku (中国方志库).

DocuSky數位人文學術研究平台

DocuSky Collaboration Platform is an online platform created by the Digital Humanities Research Center at National Taiwan University that hosts datasets, digital tools, and learning resources for digital humanities research.

China.AidData.org

Rigorous evidence from AidData’s uniquely comprehensive data and analysis about the changing nature, scale, and scope of China’s overseas development program, its planet-scale impact, and how its perceived in the Global South.

Photographs and Visual Media

Sidney Gamble photographs, 1906-2007 (Duke)

5500+ photographs and 20+ films from Gamble’s four trips of totally nine years in China.

Hedda Morrison Photographs of China (Harvard)

6000+ photographs by Hedda Morrison during her life in China in 1933-1946

East Asia Image Collection (Lafayette College)

The EAIC documents the history of imperial Japan (1868-1945), its Asian empire (1895-1945) and occupied Japan (1947-52). Images of Taiwan 台湾, Japan 日本, China 中国, Korea 朝鮮, Manchuria 満洲国, and Indonesia are included.

Historical Photographs of Chin (University of Bristol)

21,000 images mostly from collections in the UK and Europe

Biographical Databases

China Biographical Database Project (CBDB) 中國歷代人物傳記資料庫

A freely accessible relational database with biographical information about 535,181 individuals as of February 2024, primarily from the 7th through 19th centuries.

Modern China Biographical Database

MCBD is a freely accessible relational database that aims at recording all the historical actors active in China in the Late Qing and Republican periods (1830–1949), regardless of their origin, nationality and the duration of their presence in China. MCBD currently holds data on more than 75,000 individuals, with information on 20,000 positions and 6,000 curricula/degrees, as well as 10,000 institutions and 14,000 companies. A major feature of MCBD is to present individuals under all the forms their name took, both in Chinese and in all sorts of transliterations in Western-language sources. 

Treasury of Lives

The Treasury of Lives is a biographical encyclopedia of Tibet, Inner Asia, and the Himalayan region. In development since 2007, it provides accessible and well-researched biographies of notable individuals who are deceased and who were native to the region. Most essays are peer reviewed. Content is enhanced by a dynamic map.

Party/State Documents

PRC State Council Archive (English)

This is a free resource by the Chinese government giving access to White Papers and Ministry Documents in English translation.

Xi Jinping Speeches Database 习近平系列重要讲话数据库

This is a free resource provided by the state-owned People’s Daily newspaper.

Party History Ebook Archive

Provided by the Chinese research Institute for Chinese Communist Party History this database gives access to the collected works and speeches of Party leaders and document collections such as the 建党以来重要文献 and 建国以来重要文献 series.

Digital Manuscript and Rare Book Collections

National Library of China e-resources 中国国家图书馆数字资源

The National Library of China (NLC) has opened 21 databases on its 中国古籍保护网 to the public. The following databases are accessible through the NLC:

• 数字古籍 Digital Rare books
• 数字方志 Digital Gazetteers
• 中华寻根网 China genealogical database – includes bibliographic information on almost 30,000 家谱, and gives reading access to more than 2,000. Over 6,000 gazetteers are also linked into this system
• 赵城金藏 Zhaocheng Jin Tripitaka – this Buddhist canon was printed between about the ninth year of the Huangtong era of Xizong of the Jin dynasty and is therefore referred to as Jin Tripitaka. 
• 年画撷英 Chinese New Year prints
• 碑帖精华 Rubbings database – database allows full-text searching of the transcribed rubbings. Where available the date of the making of the rubbing is included in the database. Particularly strong for the Tang and the Qing
• 宋人文集 Collected works of the Song (focuses on first editions).
• 甲骨世界 Oracle Bones – two sub-databases containing images of original oracle bones and rubbings of oracle bones).
• 西夏文献 Tangut texts – mostly of Buddhist nature. The texts are cataloged by Chinese titles
• 西夏论著 Tangut Studies Bibliography
• 前尘旧影 Historic photographs
• 徽州善本家谱 Collection of Huizhou Jiapu
• 中华医药典籍资源库（测试版）Classical works of Chinese Medicine (Beta)
• 法藏敦煌遗书 Dunhuang collections of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France (BNF)
• 云南图书馆古籍 Yunnan Library Rare Books
• 天津图书馆古籍 Tianjin Library Rare Books
• 上海图书馆家谱 Shanghai Library Jiapu collection
• 东文研汉籍影像库 Rare books from the Toyo Bunko
• 哈佛大学善本特藏 Shan ben from Harvard Yenching Library
• 中华古籍善本联合书目 Chinese Shanben Catalog – 图录 of 3,481 editions of 善本 in Chinese and international collections.

Chinese Rare Book Digital Collection, Library of Congress

The Chinese Rare Book Digital Collection draws from the 5,300 titles of Chinese rare books housed at the Asian Division of the Library of Congress. The online presentation includes nearly 2,000 digitized rare titles. The Chinese Rare Book Digital Collection includes the most valuable titles and editions housed in the Library’s Asian Division, some of which date back to the 11th or 12th century and are the only extant copies in the world. This new digital collection brings together printed books, manuscripts, Buddhist sutras, works with hand-painted pictures, local gazetteers, and ancient maps. These materials encompass a wide array of disciplines and subjects in classics, history, geography, philosophy, and literature. The majority are editions from the Ming dynasty (1368-1644) and early Qing dynasty (1644-1795), while nearly 30 titles are Song dynasty (960-1279) and Yuan dynasty (1279-1368) editions.

Harvard Yenching Chinese Rare Books

The Harvard-Yenching Library’s Chinese Rare Book collection includes Chinese books from the 13th to 19th centuries covering classics & history, philosophy, collectanea, and unique manuscripts. ​​The collection is composed of:

• 1,500 Song, Yuan, and Ming block-print books (including duplicates), and 188 of them cannot be found in any of the major libraries in China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, or Japan
• Roughly 1,500 manuscripts (including holographs)
• Song, Yuan, and Ming encyclopedias (leishu), including Sancai tuhui 三才圖會, Shantang sikao 山堂肆考, and Tang leihan 唐類函
• Nearly 2,600 gazetteers, including 720 rare editions printed from the Ming through the Qianlong period
• Banned books and women’s writing

Chinese Text Project

The goal of this site is to present accurate and accessible copies of ancient (in particular pre-Qin and Han dynasty) Chinese texts in an organized and searchable format, and to make the best possible use of modern technology to aid in the study and research of these texts, so making them accessible to the widest possible audience.

Buddhist Digital Resource Center 

BDRC developed the Buddhist Digital Archives (BUDA) as a collaborative platform for Buddhist texts in order to benefit the Buddhist community and BDRC’s many users in academia. With new features and an innovative design, BUDA greatly improves access to a vast collection of Tibetan Buddhist works, as well as to collections of Sanskrit, Chinese, Pali, Burmese, and Khmer materials. It is open source and as open access as possible. Resources are made available by both BDRC and its partner collections. BUDA was made possible by a generous grant from The Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation.

Zhongguo xieben wenxian shuzi ziyuan ku 中國寫本文獻數字資源庫

Operated by the China Academic Digital Associative Library (CADAL) this database includes Dunhuang manuscripts (images included are mostly from China and the UK, but are supposed to increase over the next years) as well as collections of other local manuscripts (currently mostly contracts). The database is freely available. Please note that the image viewer of the database works best with the Edge and Chrome browsers.

GIS and Spatial Research

The China Historical Geographic Information System, CHGIS

Launched in January 2001 to establish a database of populated places and historical administrative units for the period of Chinese history between 221 BCE and 1911 CE.

Land Survey Maps of China, 1895-1944

CHMap provides quick access to 4,088 land survey maps of China produced by either China’s central and provincial governments or the land survey department of the Japanese Army during the late 19th and the early 20th centuries. They are the first maps that provide accurate and large-scale outlooks (1:50,000) to a wide geography of proper China. In CHMap, users can access these land survey maps digitized by Shanghai Jiao Tong University and hosted at Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, as well as those hosted at Academia Sinica.

Modern China Geospatial Database

The Modern China Geospatial Database (MCGD) seeks to provide an all-encompassing series of datasets for the spatial analysis of modern China. The purpose of MCGD is to identify and collect all the name variants under which locations in China were named in historical sources. In particular, this includes the amazing variety of transliteration systems through which Westerners designated place names (e.g. for Shanghai: Shang-hae, Changhaï, Schanghai, etc.). The MCGS Search interface can be used to identify and locate place names. User can search place name individually or they can upload a list of place names as a CSV file. The search engine will retrieve any name, in Chinese or any transliteration system, and provide the geo-coordinates, along with the current name in Chinese and pinyin, as well as all known designations.

Mapping Global China

The Mapping Global China project is designed to offer a distinctive view of China’s global economic endeavors through data-driven analysis and research. Our project includes maps, datasets, and studies on China’s international engagement, such as the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Our resources compile information from a variety of credible sources, which range from the Reconnecting Asia Project Database to the Hong Kong Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Hong Kong, AIDDATA GeoQuery, the Boston University Global China Dataset, the Australian Strategic Policy/International Cyber Policy Center, and projects compiled by NYU Shanghai. Each project is connected to satellite imagery that allows users to examine the transformation of areas before and after project development.