This guide is an in-depth listing of Chinese Studies resources available to students and faculty at the University of Minnesota.
On this page
Tools
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Buddhist Studies Time Authority Databases 時間規範檢索This tool, developed by the Dharma Drum Buddhist College, covers the period from 220 BC to 1912 AD. It can also convert years from the Chinese calendar into western, Japanese and Korean years, and from western to Chinese, Japanese and Korean years.
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Calendars and ErasA calendar converted that can be used for converting the calendars of different countries and historical periods.
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China Biographical DatabaseThe China Biographical Database is a freely accessible relational database with biographical information about approximately 515,488 individuals as of December 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.
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China Vitae 中國名人錄China Vitae is a resource of biographical information on more than 5000 Chinese leaders in government, politics, the military, education, business, and the media. China Vitae tracks the appearances and travel of approximately 500 leading Chinese officials.
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Chinese Iconography Thesaurus 中國圖像誌索引典The Chinese Iconography Thesaurus (CIT) is freely accessible and brings together sinology, art history and information studies to create the first alternative classification scheme, especially designed for the Chinese visual culture, with a complementary image archive.
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Classical Historiography for Chinese HistoryA scholarly bibliography compiled by Benjamin A. Elman, Professor of East Asian Studies and History at Princeton University.
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Song Research ToolsSong Research Tools is a guide to bibliographies, indexes, dictionaries, encyclopedias, atlases, chronologies and other resources relating to the study Chinese society during the Song Dynasty (960-1279). The online guide was edited by Dr. Hilde De Weerdt, and was based on the print reference work published by Prof. Peter Bol in 1990.
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清季職官表查詢系統A database that can be used for searching the names of the officials in the imperial court in late Qing dynasty.
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知識圖譜A knowledge graph database that includes different kinds of visualizations related to the Chinese literature.
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近現代人物資訊整合系統A biographical information system on modern people established by the Institute for Modern History, Academia Sinica, contains a great many digitized biographical sources in Chinese, English and Japanese.
Digital Collections and Projects
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CUHK Digitised CollectionsThe digital collection from Chinese University of Hong Kong Library (CUHK Library).
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Digital Repository at Hong Kong University LibraryDigitalRepository@HKUL is a gateway for the discovery of digitized materials from HKUL and individuals/organizations that have participated in partner projects with the Libraries. Digitized collections consist of photographs, manuscripts, posters, audio-visual recordings as well as other archival material from the Libraries’ rare and special collections
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Grand Secretariat ArchivesGrand Secretariat Archives (內閣大庫檔案) is a database that contains documents originally housed in the storerooms of the Grand Secretariat of the Qing dynasty (1644-1912). After 1949 these documents were kept at the Institute of History and Philology of Academia Sinica. The entire archive contains about 310,000 items. The collection, dating from the Ming dynasty to the Qing dynasty (1368-1912), encompasses a wide variety of subjects. For full content coverage, see "Grand Secretariat Archives - Inventory and History of Preservation". Also, portions of the archives had been published under title: Ming Qing dang an.
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Digital Silk RoadDigital Silk Road Project is a digital humanities research project about creating digital archives of cultural heritage based on collaboration between informatics and humanities.
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Digital Silk Road Project: Digital Archive of Toyo Bunko Rare BooksThe digital archive (image database) of basic references on Silk Road, including 245 rare books (82 authors : 72,591 pages) by the digitization of whole books from cover to cover.
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Dunhuang Collection at Fu Ssu-nien Library at Academia SinicaThe Fu Ssu-nien Library at Academia Sinica contains forty-nine manuscripts that appear to be from the fifth to the thirteenth centuries.
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International Dunhuang Project 國際敦煌項目IDP is a ground-breaking international collaboration to make information and images of all manuscripts, paintings, textiles and artefacts from Dunhuang and archaeological sites of the Eastern Silk Road freely available on the Internet and to encourage their use through educational and research programmes.
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The Research center for Digital Humanities, National Taiwan University 臺灣大學數位人文研究中心The center has already established 33 databases which comprise over 4,000,000 digital annotations (metadata), 30,000,000 images and 400 million words of original texts including Chinese documents from the Ming and Qing dynasties as well as old deeds of Taiwan. Also included are statistical reports and court archives from the period of Japanese occupation, archives of the Kuomintang (KMT) party, archives of the Taiwan Consultative Council and other institutes, newspaper clippings and old photographs.
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The Sogdians: Influencers on the Silk RoadsThe Sogdians: Influencers on the Silk Roads is a new digital exhibition that explores Sogdian art through existing material culture. It focuses on the golden age of the Sogdians, from the fourth to the eighth centuries CE, when Sogdiana flourished through trade and agriculture. Sogdian emigrant communities spread across China, South and Southeast Asia, and into the Central Asian steppe and Mongolia. By the Smithsonian's Museums of Asian Art.
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Yale Silk RoadThe collection serves as a multi-disciplinary resource with relevance to students and faculty working in the fields of art and archaeology, religious studies, history, East Asian languages and literatures, Central Asian and Islamic studies.
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漢リポ Kanseki RepositoryThis website provides access to the Classical Chinese texts available in the GitHub user account @kanripo (Kanseki Repository).
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识典古籍It's an open access ancient Chinese book platform operated by Peking University and ByteDance Open Lab for Digital Humanities
Late Qing and Modern China (1840-1949)
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Visual History ArchiveA fully streaming video collection of more than 55,000 primary source testimonies from the USC Shoah Foundation of survivors and witnesses of the Holocaust and other genocides, including the Armenian Genocide, the Cambodian Genocide, the Central African Republic Conflict, contemporary antisemitism, the 1994 Genocide Against the Tutsi in Rwanda, the Guatemalan Genocide, and the Nanjing Massacre. Note: only available remotely to UMN users.
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Asian Digital LibraryThe Asian Digital Library (BNA) covers different formats of historical documents including books, archive, periodicals, videos, and audios. It is based largely on the resources available both in the personal libraries of scholars, on public institutional sites, individual sites, document and archival funds or even on commercial sites.
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CHINA AND THE SOVIET UNION IN XINJIANG, 1934-1949This collection of Soviet records concerns the political and military turmoil in Xinjiang in the 1930s and 1940s. The records provide considerable details on the insurrection led by Ma Zhongying, Governor Sheng Shicai's relationship with Stalin, the establishment of the East Turkestan Republic (1944-1949) in northern Xinjiang, and Sino-Soviet relations, among other topics.
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China FamiliesBetween 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. On this site you can find information about men and women of many different nationalities, professions and ages, who lived and worked in China between the 1850s and 1940s.
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China Resources at the Yale Divinity School LibraryThe Divinity Library holds extensive manuscript and archival material related to missionary work and the Christian church in China. Records of nearly 400 former China missionaries and many organizations are represented, primarily from the years 1832 to 1950. T
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Historical Document Crowd Sourcing Platform 上海图书馆历史文献众包台Created by Shanghai Library. Includes some digitized archives.
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Hong Kong Government Reports Online (HKGRO)Hong Kong Government Reports Online (HKGRO) is a full-text image database providing online access to pre-World War II issues of four major government publications, namely, Administrative Report, Hong Kong Sessional Papers, Hong Kong Hansard and Hong Kong Government Gazette.
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Hoover Institute's Online CollectionsThe Hoover Institute has digitized some of its archival collections, including on modern China. These collections can be browsed on the website by region and language.
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Institute of Modern History Archives, Academia Sinica 近代史研究所檔案館This archive contain important historical records and serve as a major repository on modern Chinese history.
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Manchukuo related postcards of Harvard-Yenching LibrarySome 2400 cards are now digitized.
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Modern History Database 近代史數位資料庫Since 1997, The Modern History Institute of Academia Sinica has invested in the digitalization of its rare books, historical sources, and documents in the hope that digitalization and internet access could be used to promote research resources and education in modern and contemporary Chinese history.
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Pacific Rim Digital Library Alliance (PRDLA)The Pacific Rim Research Libraries Alliance, also known as PRRLA, focuses on cooperative ventures among academic libraries located around the Pacific Rim to improve access to scholarly research materials. The collections include books, archives, photos, videos, etc. Each collection can be viewed through individual institution website.
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Yale University Divinity Library Special CollectionsSpecial Collections at the Yale Divinity School Library include more than 6000 linear feet of archival material, archivally-treated pamphlet collections, and microform holdings.
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The Yi-Ta Incident, 1962During the “Yi-Ta Incident” (the Yili-Tacheng Incident or Ili-Qoqek Incident) of spring 1962, 60,000 Kazakhs and Uyghurs fled from Xinjiang in China's northwest into the Soviet Union. The incident both revealed and exacerbated tensions between China and the Soviet Union, leading to angry accusations on both sides. In the wake of the incident, China waged a fierce struggle against Soviet "revisionism" within Xinjiang and expelled all Soviet diplomats from the Uyghur Autonomous Region. This collection mostly consists of translated Chinese records from the Foreign Ministry Archives in Beijing (PRC FMA).
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抗日战争与近代中日关系文献数据平台A platform covers resources on the Anti-Japanese War and modern China-Japan relations. It includes books, archives, periodicals, newspapers, audios, videos, etc.
Post 1949
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BANDUNG CONFERENCE, 1955Leading representatives from twenty-nine newly independent African, Asian, and Middle Eastern countries came together for the Afro-Asian Conference in Bandung, Indonesia, from 19 April-24 April 1955.
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The Maoist (Socialist) Era in ChinaA very wide range of digitized material from post-1949 China can be found on or through the lists on Bannedthought.net, which also has pre-1949 and contemporary material.
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Virtual Museum of the Cultural Revolution 文革博物館This Virtual Museum of Cultural Revolution was built upon a proposal by the Editorial Board of Hua Xia Wen Zhai in the Spring of 1996. Since then, the editorial board has collected more than 1 million words' worth of materials. These works have come to us from scholars of the Cultural Revolution, readers' contributions, and articles we found scattered in all sorts of electronic and print publications.
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Virtual ShanghaiVirtual Shanghai began in 2000 as a collaborative project between the Institut d’Asie Orientale (CNRS-University of Lyon) and the Center for Chinese Studies of UC Berkeley. It contains a maps collection and an image and media collection focusing on Shanghai historical photographs.
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“LOCAL NATIONALISM" IN XINJIANG, 1957-1958At the end of 1957, the Xinjiang Party Committee announced the convening of an enlarged plenum, with the goal of exposing and criticizing so-called local nationalist deviations. Originally scheduled to last only a few weeks, the meeting dragged on for an extraordinary six months, only concluding in June 1958.
Last Updated: Nov 6, 2025 2:22 PM
URL: https://libguides.umn.edu/china_advanced