The library’s rare Chinese book collection includes 5,300 titles, 2,000 of which will ultimately be included in the online portal

By Meilan Solly
SMITHSONIAN.COM
MAY 10, 2019 3:30PM

Illustration from woodblock-printed text on the life of Gautama Buddha (Library of Congress, Asian Division, Chinese Rare Book Collection)

A woodblock-printed set of 400 illustrations depicting the life and teachings of Gautama Buddha, painted silk scenes by Qing dynasty court artist Jiao Bingzhen, and 12 watercolors detailing indigenous life in Taiwan are among the 1,000 rare Chinese texts now available via the Library of Congress’ online catalogue.

All of the digitized texts—encompassing fields ranging from history to geography, philosophy, literature and classics—date to before 1796, the year after the end of the early Qing period. As the Chinese Rare Book Digital Collection portal explains, the majority of the titles date to the early Qing (spanning 1644 through 1795) or Ming (1368 to 1644) dynasties. Around 30 are even older, tracing their origins to the Song (960 to 1279) and Yuan (1279 to 1368) dynasties.

Some of the titles included in the collection are the only extant copies of their kind, meaning that the average researcher, student or history buff would never be able to study them in-person. The digitization effort, in the words of Qi Qiu, head of Scholarly Services at the Library’s Asian Division, “offer[s] users across the globe unprecedented access to the study of pre-modern China that would otherwise be off-limits due to physical distance or rarity of the items.”    [FULL  STORY]