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Ivy Plus Libraries' Digital Projects on East Asia

Published Projects on China

China Christian Colleges and Universities Image Database

This database provides detailed description and more than 7,500 digital images of photographs and films held in the archives of the United Board for Christian Higher Education in Asia and the Lingnan University Board of Trustees, which are held at the Yale Divinity Library. The database is an important resource for the study of education, medical work, architecture, and society in China during the first half of the twentieth century.

Divinity Library Photographs

This collection consists of photographs from manuscript and archival collections held at the Divinity Library. Currently the photographs in this collection relate primarily to missions and world Christianity. They include the Divinity Library's contributions to the International Mission Photography Archive hosted by the University of Southern California, as well as photographs previously delivered by the Library's China Colleges and Universities Image Database. The photographs date from 1855 to 1978.

Yale Silk Road

The Yale Silk Road Database presents over 11,000 images of major sites in the Silk Road region taken during faculty site seminars led by Mimi Hall Yiengpruksawan (Professor, History of Art) under the auspices of the Council on East Asian Studies at Yale University in the summers of 2006-2010. Photographs included in this collection were taken during faculty site seminars in Gansu, Ningxia, and Xinjiang Provinces in 2006, seminars in Sichuan and Yunnan during the summer of 2007, visits to Liao Dynasty sites in Shanxi, Liaoning, Hebei, and Inner Mongolia during the summer of 2008, a program along the Tarim Basin and in northern Xinjiang during the summer of 2009, and a program for educators in Gansu, Qinghai, Sichuan, and Tibet Extension during the summer of 2010.

The Nanking Massacre Project

The project provides access to first hand accounts and photographs from Westerners who remained in Nanking after the Japanese invasion. These resources do not provide a comprehensive understanding of what occurred in Nanjing during 1937-1938, but the observations made by these men and women provide an important historical lens to complement additional research.

Peter Parker's Lam Qua Paintings Collection & Peter Parker Papers

Peter Parker, medical missionary and diplomat to China, Parker attended Yale College, graduating in 1831, and remained in New Haven to study theology and medicine, earning his M.D. from the Medical Institution of Yale College in 1834. In January of the same year he was ordained to the Presbyterian ministry in Philadelphia, one month before departing for Canton as the first Protestant medical missionary to China. One year after his arrival, with assistance from American and British benefactors, he opened the Ophthalmic Hospital at Canton. Parker specialized in treating diseases of the eye, particularly cataracts, but also performed general surgical operations including the removal of tumors. He is probably best known for the introduction of anesthesia to China in the form of sulphuric ether. Parker worked with Lam Qua, the Western trained Chinese painter, who did portraits of patients at the Canton Hospital with large tumors or other major deformities.

Chinese Rare Books at Yale database

The Chinese Rare Books at Yale database aggregates information about Chinese rare books and manuscripts held in the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library. There are 439 works represented in the database and each record contains extensive bibliographic data and notes, an image of the first page of the text, and a link to the catalog record in Orbis, Yale’s online catalog. The database is intended to provide enhanced access to Yale’s holdings of Chinese books published prior to the end of the reign of the Qianlong Emperor in 1796. Two rare editions from the Republican period are also included. The records can be accessed by dynasty for a chronological overview.

Illustrations of China and its people

This four-volume collection of photographs by John Thomson (1837-1921) has been digitized in its entirety by the Beinecke Library. The photographs were taken between 1868 and 1872. They document all aspects of Chinese life. 

Published Projects On East Asia

Day Missions Collection from Divinity Library: Annual Reports and Periodicals

The Day Missions Collection developed from a core of materials donated by Professor George Edward Day in 1891. The collection originally focused on institutional histories, missionary biography, the annual reports of missionary societies, periodicals, and works prepared by missionaries for the use of the peoples of mission fields, as well as related literature in areas such as ethnology, geography, comparative religions, and linguistics. The Annual Reports list and database. The Periodicals list and database.

The Henry A. Kissinger Papers, Parts II and III

The papers consist of correspondence, memoranda, writings, speeches, photographs and other material that document the career of the diplomat, author and foreign policy expert and scholar Henry A. Kissinger.  Dr. Kissinger served as United States secretary of state from 1973 to 1977 and as assistant to the president for national security affairs (national security advisor) from 1969 to 1975. Part I, housed in the Library of Congress, consists of materials primarily documenting Dr. Kissinger’s  government career and includes copies of records from his government service.

Ongoing Projects

The Ten Thousand Rooms Project

The Ten Thousand Rooms Project (廣廈千萬間項目) is a collaborative workspace for pre-modern textual studies being developed at Yale University with the support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Building on the Mirador Viewer developed by Stanford University, the platform allows users to upload images of manuscript, print, inscriptional, and other sources and then organize projects around their transcription, translation, and/or annotation.

The Kan'ichi Asakawa Epistolary Network Project

Kani'chi Asakawa (1873-1948) was the first professor of Japanese history and the head of the East Asia Library at Yale.  Asakawa was an influential scholar in the field of comparative feudalism and the close contact with many of Japan's most prominent public figures. By visually delineating the relationships of Asakawa and many intellectuals and public figures over the globe, the project will be beneficial to researchers who are interested in not only Asakawa, but other important figures in Japan and the world during the first half of the 19th century.