Asian Studies Resources: Databases

Chinese Buddhist texts, including editions of the Tripitaka. Includes an online reader and a lexicon tool, among other resources.

Covers about 20,000 titles of Chinese periodicals published in Republican era. Consists of 11 series.

A collaborative digitization project, sponsored by the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation which includes Chinese rare books from four libraries: the Library of Congress, Princeton University, Harvard University, and the Fu Ssu-Nien Library of the Academia Sinica in Taiwan. Freely available.

Down to the Countryside Movement digital project at Dartmouth College contains 575 images plus some oral history.

This freely accessible resource is funded by the National Social Science Foundation of China and developed by the National Library of China, the National Archives Administration of China, and the Institute of Modern History of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. It contains more than 5 million pages of various types of documents including manuscripts, books, periodicals, newspapers, photos, audio and video, and other formats of materials. Site available in Chinese language only. Scholars need to create an account (free) in order to download materials.

Movie Pictorials magazines of Old Shanghai collection provides access to more than a dozen Shanghai film publications from the 1920s and 1930s.

The Late Qing databases includes more than 300 journals (270,000 articles, approximately all those published).

Integrated database the Institute of Modern History, Academia Sinica, Taiwan. MHDB integrates the Institute's digital scholar resources from library, archive, Hu Shih memorial hall, databases found by MHDB team and interlibrary cooperation. Users can directly search keywords from this page and browse all related information.

Thousands of academic Chinese social science and humanities journals, including those published by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, had been pulled out of commercial databases are freely available in the National Social Sciences Database (国家哲学社会科学学术期刊数据库).

All issues from 1946 of the Chinese national newspaper Ren min ri bao (People's Daily) until present are available on-line to Vanderbilt users.

Sinological periodicals published in Taiwan (mostly from the Academia Sinica)

more than 250 academic journals from the humanities & social sciences published in Taiwan and continues to add new titles.

Official newspaper of the Kuomintang and one of the world's oldest Chinese language newspaper since 1928.

Part of Late Qing and Republican-Era Chinese Newspapers (1928-1948)

The Customs’ Gazette, published by order of the Inspector General of Customs of China in Shanghai, provided quarterly reports on trade that were prepared and submitted by various custom houses based across the country. This statistical and narrative information provided the central Chinese government with an in-depth analysis on trade. But, the Gazette also provided insights into local and regional economic and social conditions, policing of customs and trade, and conditions at Treaty Ports.

This collection replicates all the minutes of meetings held by the Board of Directors of the Shanghai Municipal Council from July 1854 to December 1943. A wide range of topics were discussed at these board meetings, such as sanitation, transportation, telecommunication and postal service, taxation, urban planning, gas supply, street lighting, rickshaw operator management, animal protection, and police system. The minutes taken from July 1854 to December 1906 are handwritten while the rest are typewritten.

Authoritative bibliographies on a wide variety of Chinese topics.

The Municipal Gazette provides a unique window into the workings of the Shanghai International Settlement during the period of revolution, the Republic, internationalization of Shanghai, national uprising, and world war.

Published every weekday bilingually in Japanese and English for over 100 years, The Rafu Shimpo [L.A. Japanese Daily News] is the longest running Japanese American newspaper in the United States.

Full text of the Taishō Shinshū Daizōkyō (大正新脩大藏經).

he American Presbyterian Church was committed at its inception to the belief that it is a missionary church and that every member is a missionary. The establishment in 1837 of the Presbyterian Church’s Board of Foreign Missions signaled the beginning of a worldwide missionary operation destined to embrace some fifteen countries in four different continents The records offered here provide invaluable information on social conditions in Korea and on efforts to spread the gospel during the nineteenth century. Documenting the church’s educational, evangelical, and medical work, these are records mainly of incoming correspondence from the mission field and outgoing correspondence from the Board headquarters.

Searchable Korean Movie Database on films, people, images, articles, criticisms, scenarios, and publications

Korean classic films from the one made in the 1940s during the Japanese colonial rule to the ones made today and independent films. KMDB VOD provides well-known Korean films from 1930 to 1990 including some quite classic films, documentaries and national videos as well as independent films.

The Korean Film Archive collects and preserves moving image materials as cultural heritage. In addition, the Archive has a specialized film library to provide easier digital access to film-related information

Korean classic films with Engish subtitles at Youtube provided by Korean Film Archive

Free Korean drama

Includes texts and (when available) English translations of the Kangyur and the Tengyur, Tibetan translations of Indian Buddhist texts.

Includes the Tibetan Digital Library (Kangyur, Tengyur, and Sungbum) and the Sanskrit Library, among other resources.

"[A] multilingual corpus of historically important texts," including the Pāli Tipiṭaka (in Pāli with English and Thai translations), the Kanjur Buddhist Sūtras in Tibetan, among other collections.

Founded as the Tibetan Buddhist Resource Center, the Buddhist Digital Resource Center preserves and makes accessible Tibetan Buddhist texts as well as the texts of other endangered Buddhist literary traditions.

Pali Tipiṭaka (collection of the Buddha's teachings) in varying scripts.

Texts and the scans of some manuscripts from the Sanskrit Buddhist Canon.

Buddhist ande other texts in Gāndhārī, from manuscripts, inscriptions, coins, and documents. Site includes a Dictionary of Gāndhārī, a Bibliography of Gāndhārī Studies, and a Catalog of Gāndhārī Texts.

Includes epic, religious, poetic, and other texts in Sanskrit, Pali, and other Indian languages.

Collects in one place digital versions of manuscripts and rare print editions from various libraries in Myanmar.

Inscriptions from South and Central Asia, focused on the Gupta period (circa 320-550).

Includes image collections, maps, and texts like the Tibetan Buddhist canon and Collected Tantras of the Ancients.