East Asian Studies: Primary Sources

Digital Archives of Cultural Heritage – by National Institute of Informatics, Japan
The site includes Digital archive of Toyo Bunko Rare books, Silk Road Maps, Stein Place name Database, Old Beijing Maps, Database of Ruins in Silk Road

237 gazetteers related to Chinese Buddhist history

Comprehensive collection of premodern Chinese texts

宋元明清漢傳佛教人物資料庫

The China Biographical Database is a freely accessible relational database with biographical information about approximately 422,600 individuals as of September 2018, 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. The image below shows the spatial distribution of a cross dynastic subset of 190,000 people in CBDB by basic affiliations (籍貫).

The University of Pittsburgh Library System, which holds the largest collection of artist Tsukioka Kōgyo’s (1869-1927) color woodblock prints outside of Japan, has digitized four complete sets that depict Noh theatre. This online collection comprises the largest digital representation of Kōgyo’s work freely available online. The set contains: Nōgaku zue 能樂圖繪 (Pictures of Noh), Nōgaku hyakuban 能楽百番 (Prints of One Hundred Noh Plays), Nōga taikan 能画大鑑 (A Great Collection of Prints of Noh Plays), and Kyōgen gojūban 狂言五十番 (Fifty Kyōgen Plays) and is available via the Kōgyo: The Art of Noh website at: http://exhibit.library.pitt.edu/kogyo/

The Artist
As the preeminent graphic artist of the Noh and kyōgen theatres, Tsukioka Kōgyo created hundreds of Japanese woodblock prints, paintings, magazine illustrations, and postcard pictures of Noh and kyōgen plays. Kōgyo also produced paintings and prints of flowers, birds, and even wartime scenes, but he is best known and remembered for his theatre paintings and prints. All the prints were published in Tokyo between 1897 and 1930.

Noh Theatre
Noh theatre, a well-known and long-established art form that originated in 14th century Japan, is a combination of dance and drama that plays on themes of the supernatural and the natural world.

The Collection
The online collection contains 632 digitized prints from the four sets, along with over 200 Japanese synopses of Noh plays with English summaries provided by P.G. O’Neill in his A Guide to Nō (Hinoki Shoten, 1964).

Over 100 Chinese painters from the 4th century to modern.

CHGIS provides a base GIS platform for researchers to use in spatial analysis or to visualize the historical divisions of China as digital maps.

晚清民國婦女雜誌庫
The focus is on four seminal women’s or gendered journals – a key genre of the new media-published between 1904-1937. They include Women’s World 女子世界 (1904-1907), The Women’s Eastern Times 婦女時報 (1911-1917), The Ladies’ Journal婦女雜誌 (1915-1931) and Elegance玲瓏 (1931-1937).