This guide is intended for students and researchers studying China at the University of Oxford, although students and researchers from any field may find it useful.
Use this guide to find out about books and online resources for Chinese, including ebooks, ejournals and bibliographic databases.
Trial access end date: 13 May 2022
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The archives of the Grand Secretariat were originally kept at the Grand Secretariat Storehouse in the Ch’ing imperial palace. They were removed from the Storehouse when it underwent renovation in 1909. After the overthrow of the Qing, these archives changed hands several times, and were, at one point, even sold to a paper recycling factory. Eventually, the Institute of History and Philology of the Academia Sinica, purchased them from Li Sheng-to, a book collector, in1929 thanks to the efforts of Fu Ssu-nien, the Institute’s first director.
There are over four thousand Ming(1368-1644) documents and more than three hundred thousand volumes of Qing (1644-1911) archival materials in this collection, including imperial decrees, edicts, memorials, tribute document, examination questions, examination papers, rosters of successful examination candidates, documents from the offices of the Grand Secretariat, documents from the offices for book compilation, and old documents from Mukden. Memorials make up the bulk of these documents.
Trial access end date: 21 May 2022.
Please select ‘Ancient Classics’ option after login.
The database includes 10,000 titles of essentials of pre-modern Chinese works, in total 170,000 volumes, 12,500 editions and 1,700 million characters.
Please send feedback to mamtimyn.sunuodula@bodleian.ox.ac.uk.
Oxford has a wide range of ebooks for Chinese studies and printed books, including the main science collection in the KB Chen China Centre library. For more detailed info about our book collections visit our book page and e-Book page of this guide.
Oxford subscribes to many bibliographic databases. They can be used to locate journal articles, conference proceedings, books, patents, images, data and more. You can find some of the key databases for Chinese studies below, but take a look at other pages of this guide for more titles.
