East Asian Images and Maps

Art and China's Revolution was an Asia Society exhibition in 2008 about Chinese art in the 1950s-1970s. 艺术与中国革命

The photographs from Columbia University in this exhibit were taken from 1944-1945 by Barney Rosset, a young American Army photographer. Rosset documented the Chinese Army in their pursuit of Japanese troops following the Battle of Henan-Hunan-Guangxi.

Rev. Carter D. Holton was an American missionary working in Northwest China from 1923 to 1949. Over 5,000 photos taken by him were digitized by Harvard-Yenching Library and can be browsed online.

An exhibition sponsored by Getty Museum.

A visual gallery of representative works of art of Chinese bronzes, calligraphy, painting, ceramics, jade, and carving.

The collection from UCSD includes propaganda posters created by various Chinese agencies from 1968 to1989.

The collection from Center for Research Libraries includes mass education materials published in Hong Kong and in Mainland China, particularly Shanghai, in the years 1947-1954 including cartoon books, pamphlets, postcards and magazines, on topics such as foreign threats to Chinese security, Chinese relations with the Soviet Union, industrial and agricultural production, and marriage reform, produced by both Kuomintang (Nationalist) and Gongchantang (Communist) supporters.

The images in this collection from Columbia University were assembled by Anne S. Goodrich (1895-2005) in 1931, when as a Christian missionary in Peking she became interested in local folk religious practices. She studied the paper gods in this collection for much of her life.

The images in this collection from UC Berkeley mostly are published during the Chinese Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) period.

The Harvard-Yenching Library's digital collection of propaganda posters from Manchukuo, the imperial Japanese puppet state established in Manchuria (northeast China) from 1932 to 1945.

Here you can find over 3,300 Chinese propaganda posters, with information about their history, background and design. You can browse a Gallery of 200 highlights, look at over 290 theme presentations, or search and browse by poster, artist and tags.

The collection from UCSD includes photographs contributed by Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars (CCAS) members of the 1971 and 1972 delegations, providing a lens through which to understand a young China and its people during the middle of the Cultural Revolution.

The collection “The Cultural Revolution in Images: Caricature-Posters from Guangzhou 1966-1977” showcases the two hundred and sixteen original posters from the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) Library. The posters are divided into two groups: Red Guards’ posters dated between 1966-1967; and images produced against the Gang of Four dated between 1976-1977.

By the time the Dianshizhai began publication, Shanghai was about to surpass Canton (Guangzhou) as a hub of trade with the West. It had also become one of three Chinese cities most likely to be mentioned in Western travel accounts and fiction. The images here, however, show Shanghai as Chinese writers and artists saw it.

The collection from the Bodleian Libraries and Oxford college libraries include some images of rare books, manuscripts, and other treasures from East Asia.

By Center for the Art of East Asia, University of Chicago.

A UMN collection of 1,260 Chinese art objects selected by the renowned ceramic scholars Harry Garrner and Margaret Medley from 75 museums around the world found in Chinese Art in Three-Dimensional Colour(donated by Mr. Jonathan R. Gross to the East Asian Library) published by the Asia Society for the Gruber Foundation in 1969.

By the Smithsonian's Museums of Asian Art.

This database is a collection of early (1896-1920) western postcards of China. It was created under patronage from the Institut d'Asie Orientale (IAO) in Lyon, France.

An online digital project designed and maintained by the University of Bristol. The project locates, digitizes, and publishes online photographs of China held, largely, in private hands outside the country.

HOLLIS Images is the Harvard Library's dedicated image catalog. It includes content from archives, museums, libraries, and other collections throughout Harvard University. It focuses on artistic and cultural materials.

An archive of Hong Kong related images that includes scenic photos, comics, pictures of pop stars, and more.

The Needham Research Institute (UK) has collected about 1,000 photos that were taken by Joseph Needham during this trip to China from 1942-1946, when he was preparing his project on the history of Chinese science and technology.

This collection contains visual sources of Japan in the modern world and early-modern China.

Modern Sketch stands out among the nearly 20 illustrated humor and satire magazines that proliferated in mid-1930s Shanghai. One can point to the remarkable openness and eclecticism of its content, and its inclusion of work by young artists who went on to become leaders in China’s 20th-century cultural establishment.

With more than thirteen thousand objects dating from Neolithic times (circa 7000–circa 2000 BCE) to the present, the Freer and Sackler collections possess one of the finest museum holdings of Chinese art in the world. In addition to containing numerous masterworks, the collections reflect all major periods and materials of artistic production. Special strengths include remarkable ancient jades and bronzes, early Buddhist sculpture, imperial and trade ceramics, lacquer, classical paintings, and calligraphy, all of which are among the greatest treasures of Chinese art outside of China.

卢沟桥事变（七七事变）后的1937年8月，南满洲铁道株式会社（满铁）为了在华北地区扩张势力，在天津设立北支事务局（次年1月迁至北京）。与此同时，日本陆军总司令部为牵制关东军势力，并强化华北占领体制，筹建了北支那开发株式会社。在此背景下，1939年4月，“华北交通株式会社”(以下简称“华北交通”)以中日合资中国特殊法人的名义，在北京正式成立。华北交通为避开关东军的影响，不受满铁的管理，而直接归属于日陆军省军务课主导的北支那开发株式会社。“华北交通写真”指华北交通株式会社（1939-45）所藏35,000多张宣传报道用的库存照片。以往驻中国的日本“国策企业”当中，相关库存照片能如此清晰完好地保存下来的实例，极为罕见。这批珍贵的照片在战后混乱时期委托京都大学保管，今藏京都大学人文科学研究所。

This is a digital museum initiated by Academia Sinica collaborating with other Taiwan museums. It includes photos and images of museum collections from different subjects and categories.

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.

A UMN collection taken from the YMCA Archives, this collection of 717 black and white photos taken by YMCA employees in China between 1896 and 1949 were digitized and cataloged in this project.

The collection from UCSD includes Chinese Independent Film Festival posters and ephemera from the Li Xianting Film Fund Archive and REEL China Film Festival that occurred during 2004 to 2016.

The collection from University of Hawaii at Manoa includes photographs taken during the late 1920s and early 1930s by John B. Shackford during his travels and tenure as an English teacher in southern China.

A Duke University collection. Sidney D. Gamble (1890-1968), an avid amateur photographer and a sociologist, traveled throughout the country to collect data for social-economic surveys and to photograph urban and rural life, public events, architecture, religious statuary, and the countryside.

The 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.

The collection from Harvard-Yenching Library includes photographs of Japanese occupation of Shanghai and Nanking between 1932 and 1938.

Virtual 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.

Created by UNESCO and the Library of Congress, the World Digital Library provides free online access to world cultural treasures. Includes manuscripts, maps, rare books, musical scores, recordings, films, prints, photographs, and architectural drawings from a variety of countries.

An online Chinese art museum focusing on Chinese paintings and calligraphy.

A digital gallery by Taiwan Minister of Culture. It covers collections from museums and institutions across Taiwan.

The National Library of China photo collection has 3074 sets of photos, recording the history of events, people, architecture, clothes, etc.

Kunyu wanguo quantu 坤輿萬國全圖 (Complete Geographical Map of Ten Thousand Countries), is the oldest surviving map in Chinese to show the Americas. It is a xylograph (wood block print) on six panels of fine native paper (made with bamboo fiber), each panel measuring approximately 608.33 mm x 1820 mm (2 feet by 5.75 feet). Li Zhizao (1565-1630), a Chinese mathematician, astronomer and geographer, who worked on the project with Ricci, may have engraved the map. It was printed by Zhang Wentao of Hangzhou, possibly an official printer of the Ming court.

This collection consists of more than 180 maps, charts, pictures and atlases. It has samples of almost all maps of China produced by European cartographers from the 16th to 19th centuries, vividly recording the long history of cross-cultural exchanges between China and the West. By the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.

A database of information, maps, drawings, prints and paintings of locations related to the Dutch East India Company (Verenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie, VOC) and the Dutch West India Company (West-Indische Compagnie, WIC). It contains 118 images of Chinese maps.

The Big Ten Academic Alliance Geoportal provides discoverability and facilitates access to geospatial resources. The resources in the portal are selected and curated by librarians and geospatial specialists at ten research institutions in the Big Ten Academic Alliance. The resources include GIS datasets, web services, and digitized historical maps. Learn more about the research institutions involved and the sources of the geospatial records.

The main objective of the CHGIS project is to create a flexible tool, in the form of a documented database of places and administrative units in China, which can be used to investigate any sort of geographically specific data related to the country.

More than 1000 Chinese Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) maps from the UMN East Asian collection.

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.

A collection of historical maps of China from the David Rumsey Historical Map Collection.

The collection from the Bodleian Libraries and Oxford college libraries include some images of rare books, manuscripts, and other treasures from East Asia.

The Library of Congress houses hundreds of original hand-drawn survey maps of the Chinese continent and the Korean Peninsula created by Japanese Army officers in the 1880s. This database provides images of these maps.
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Digital historical maps of Manchukuo.

This is a map collection from Harvard University. Most of the maps have free online access. It covers the maps of China, Japan, Korea, & Vietnam

The Library of Congress has a large collection of maps from China, 560 of which have been made available for viewing online. They are dated from 1500 to the present.

OldMapsOnline developed out of a love of history and heritage of old maps. The project began as a collaboration between Klokan Technologies GmbH, Switzerland and The Great Britain Historical GIS Project based at the University of Portsmouth, UK.

A collection of historical maps of China held by Perry-Castañeda Library at the University of Texas at Austin. Links to recent maps and map data portals are also available on this page.

This is a map project developed by the Academia Sinica. It contains thousands of Chinese maps dated before 1949, not only held in Taiwan (most of them were taken to Taiwan before 1949), but also maps held in the Academy of Science, Japan.

A collection of western maps mostly on China acquired by the Toyo Bunko in 1917. It also includes some maps on Japan, Korea, Southeast Asia and Asia.