Rob Mayer and Cathy Cantwell’s blog. We have been on the faculty here at Oxford since 2002, and we work together. In this blog, we share, discuss and debate some of our research discoveries.

Sdílejte svá videa s přáteli, rodinou a celým světem.

The China Historical Christian Database (CHCD) quantifies and visualizes the place of Christianity in modern China (1550-1950). It provides users the tools to discover where every Christian church, school, hospital, orphanage, publishing house, and the like were located in China, and it documents who worked inside those buildings, both foreign and Chinese. Collectively, this information creates spatial maps and generates relational networks that reveal where, when, and how Western ideas, technologies, and practices entered China. Simultaneously, it uncovers how and through whom Chinese ideas, technologies, and practices were conveyed to the West. This project breaks new ground in providing quantifiable data about modern Sino-Western relations. Its intuitive interface generates visualizations, lists, and maps for use by the general public, students and teachers in secondary education and colleges, in the US and globally, with English and Chinese navigation. Advanced DH users have open access to its data for elaboration. BU’s digital infrastructure guarantees long-term sustainability, and CHCD’s international collaborations in the USA, Asia, and Europe help promote historical understanding between China and the rest of the world. The CHCD is hosted by the Center for Global Christianity and Mission at Boston University.

These web pages present the life story of Jan Palach, a student of the Faculty of Arts, Charles University in Prague who set himself on fire in Wenceslas Square on 16 January 1969. By this shocking act, he wanted to arouse the Czech public from lethargy following the August invasion of Czechoslovakia. Palach’s protest caused extraordinary reaction both in the Czech Republic and abroad. To this day, Jan Palach’s name is known worldwide. The above-mentioned events are introduced on these web pages in different ways. The pages contain historical texts, period photos, and archival documents. You may also familiarize yourself with Palach’s legacy through film, television and radio documentaries. The website is available in Tibetan language as well (among others).

The British Library has launched a beta-version Shared Research Repository for cultural and heritage organisations, after announcing a pilot project last year. The shared research repository is created in collaboration with our five project partners who are all UK cultural and heritage organisations: the British Museum, Tate, National Museums Scotland (NMS), MOLA (Museum of London Archaeology), and Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. The British Library and its project partners are all Independent Research Organisations, this means we undertake significant research, but research is not our main function; we share the need to make our research more discoverable, and the creation of the Shared Research Repository will transform how this research can be found and used. Our research Our organisations are research active, working with partners both nationally and internationally. Our research informs and supports almost every aspect of our work, be it curation, conservation, preservation, resource discovery, digital innovation or learning. Whether it’s a major exhibition or a new way to discover or understand a unique part of our collections, it has been enabled by staff research. The shared research repository allows open access to research undertaken by the five partners and the British Library, ensuring that research gains exposure, is discoverable, and is used by anyone to support and further their own research. The shared repository allows users to search across the combined content, meaning that common research topics and collaborative activities can be discovered and explored through a single search. Search the Shared Research Repository For example, a researcher exploring written scripts in historic documents may be interested in the digitised indexes of the British Library’s Hebrew manuscripts, the development of Pictish written symbols (NMS) and excavated Roman writing tablets as recorded by MOLA. Similarly, the scientific research on plant species by Kew staff might be complemented by fossil reports from NMS or interpretation of the plants presented in botanical drawings held by Tate or the British Museum. Material such as journal articles, conference papers, books and book chapters, reports, datasets, exhibition texts, images and blog posts all produced by our staff and research associates are now available to explore and download. Where the full item cannot be added, metadata about the research output is provided together with a link to the full item held elsewhere. The repository currently holds just a selection of outputs to give a flavour of our research activities, with many more to be added in the coming months. The British Library's repository The material in the British Library’s own repository relates to research around our printed, digital and heritage collections, our exhibitions, new forms of research, and our major role in library infrastructure activities. For example, our public exhibitions involve many hours of work to prepare, research and interpret collection items for the displays and gallery texts, and these form unique research outputs. Datasets generated through new forms of research include outputs such as XML transcriptions of ancient digitised texts used for training in optical character recognition. And library infrastructural activities include articles and reports written by our colleagues around book conservation, digital preservation and international co-operation. Find out more about collaborative research activities at the British Library, or download our latest annual Research Report. And start exploring the Library's research repository now. Shared repository The Shared Research Repository consists of individual repositories for each partner plus a shared layer offering a single point of access to the combined content. Each partner is responsible for depositing and managing their own content, while the overall repository service is managed the British Library and is currently a beta service. The next few months will see all partners continuing to add more research outputs, and we will assess the impact of making our research discoverable and available for use by researchers everywhere. If all goes well we’ll be looking at how we can extend the service both in the volume of content available, and the number and range of partner organisations including beyond the cultural sector. Do get in touch if you'd like to find out more.

Collection of interviews with established scholars in the fields oh humanities and social sciences maintained by Cambridge University Streaming Media.

The « Elites, Networks and Power in modern urban China » project explores the transformative process of elites in China between 1830 and 1949. It focuses on three main urban areas which were the engines of change in modern China: Beijing/Tianjin, Guangzhou/Hong Kong, and greater Shanghai. The project intends to challenge the China-centered and group-based approach dominant in the historical literature of the past two decades. The project envisions elites in urban China as actors whose status, position, and practices were shaped by the power configurations that developed over time and whose actions through institutions and informal/formal networks in turn were a determining factor in redrawing social and political boundaries. The project places the emphasis on the networks through which information, capital, and individuals circulated. It investigates the transnationalization of elites as a process that overstepped the limits of institutions and nation states. The key methodological issue that the project addresses is breaking through existing limits of access to historical information that is embedded in complex sources and its transformation into refined, re-usable and sustainable data for contemporary and future study of modern China. It proposes a step-change in the study of modern China reliant upon scalable data-rich history to deliver precise historical information at an unprecedented scale from heretofore untapped sources – as well as reshaping the analysis of existing sources – to create a new dimension in the study of the transformation of elites in modern China.

The ERC-funded ENEP-CHINA project proposes a step-change in the study of modern China reliant upon scalable data-rich history. It will deliver precise historical information at an unprecedented scale from heretofore untapped sources – as well as reshaping the analysis of existing sources – to create a new dimension in the study of the transformation of elites in modern China. It will deploy an array of cutting-edge digital methods— including data mining, sampling, and analysis within an integrated virtual research environment. To establish the validity of this approach, the project focuses on the three urban areas (Shanghai, Beijing/Tianjin, Canton/Hong Kong) that had the most profound impact on the course of modern Chinese history. The project will challenge the China-centered and group-based approach dominant in the historical literature of the past two decades. The project envisions elites in urban China as actors whose status, position, and practices were shaped by the power configurations that developed over time and whose actions through institutions and informal/formal networks in turn were a determining factor in redrawing social and political boundaries. The project will place the emphasis on the networks through which information, capital, and individuals circulated. It will investigate the transnationalization of elites as a process that overstepped the limits of institutions and nation states. The key issue that the project will address is breaking through existing limits of access to historical information that is embedded in complex sources and its transformation into refined, re-usable and sustainable data for contemporary and future study of modern China.

The China Historical Geographic Information System, CHGIS, is a free database of placenames and historical administrative units for the Chinese Dynasties. CHGIS provides a base GIS platform for researchers to use in spatial analysis or to visualize the historical divisions of China as digital maps.

Collecting the memories of the pioneers of Tibetan Studies.

The site for articles on all aspects of historical Manchu archery. For years I put heart and soul into this site, writing articles in weekends and after office hours. Since 2016 I quit my day job to dedicate myself full-time to antique arms at www.mandarinmansion.com. Most of my more recent writing is done there now, but I haven't forgotten about the subject yet!

e Ming Shi-lu (明實錄) (also known as the Veritable Records of the Ming Dynasty) is a collective name for the successive reign annals of the emperors of Ming China (1368-1644). Each of the shi-lu comprises an account of one emperor's reign, and was compiled after that emperor's death on the basis of a number of sources created during the reign. These collected texts, which run to close to 40,000 pages of unpunctuated, manuscript Classical Chinese constitute one of the most important primary texts of the Ming dynasty, and contain a wealth of materials unrecorded in other sources. Among the unique materials contained within the Ming Shi-lu (MSL) are a wide range of references to polities and societies which today we consider to be parts of "Southeast Asia". Given the annalistic nature of the MSL and the difficulties of searching such a huge corpus, many of these have long remained unknown. This work identifies all of the references to Southeast Asia contained within the MSL and provides them to readers in English-language translation. In addition to the more obvious Southeast Asian polities of maritime and mainland Southeast Asia, this database also includes references to the many Yunnan Tai polities which have subsequently been incorporated within the Chinese state. The fact that many of these references predate European sources on Southeast Asia underlines their importance to historians of the region.

The Aftermath project is a large scale attempt to understand the legacy of the Imjin War (1592-1598), also known as Toyotomi Hideyoshi's Invasions of Korea.

A Korean history bibliography compiled by Kenneth R. Robinson. University of Hawaii. Older website.

Database of East Asian old manuscripts (In Korean)

Morris Rossabi is a Senior Research Scholar, at the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, and an Associate Adjunct Professor, Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, Columbia University. He is also a Distinguished Professor of History, Queens College, The City University of New York. Professor Rossabi is a historian of China and Central and Inner Asia. He teaches courses on Inner Asian, East Asian, and Chinese history at Columbia. During the 2008–2009 academic year, he received an honorary doctorate from the National University of Mongolia. He and Mary Rossabi are involved in an oral history of 20th and 21st century Mongolia, which has led to the publication of Socialist Devotees and Dissenters; A Herder, a Trader, and a Lawyer; and The Practice of Buddhism in Kharkhorin and its Revival (National Museum of Ethnology, Osaka, 2010, 2012, and 2013). In 2006, he was named chair of the Arts and Culture Board of the Open Society Institute (Soros Foundation). He is the author of Herder to Statesman (Rowman and Littlefield, 2010); The Mongols and Global History (W. W. Norton, 2011); The Mongols: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2012); A History of China (Blackwell, 2013); Modern Mongolia: From Khans to Commissars to Capitalists (University of California Press, 2005); Khubilai Khan: His Life and Times (University of California Press, 1988), chosen as a main selection by the History Book Club; and China and Inner Asia (Universe Books, 1975). He is the editor of China among Equals (University of California Press, 1983), Governing China’s Multi-Ethnic Frontiers (University of Washington Press, 2005) and Eurasian Influences on the Yuan (NIAS Press, 2013), and a contributor to several volumes of the Cambridge History of China. A collection of his articles has been published as From Yuan to Modern China and Mongolia (Brill, 2014). He has helped organize exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Cleveland Museum of Art, and the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco. He was on the advisory board of the Project on Central Eurasia of the Soros Foundation. The author of numerous articles and speeches, he travels repeatedly to Central Asia and Mongolia, where he teaches courses on Mongolian and East Asian history.

This page provides access to some of the resources incl. bibliographies formerly hosted on the now-closed website of the AHRC-funded History of the Chinese Maritime Customs Project. You may have been redirected here from that site (www.bristol.ac.uk/history/customs) and its subfolders — so please rest assured that you are in the right place.

The Chinese Foreign Policy Database enhances the ability of contemporary observers and historians to gain broader perspectives on Chinese policies. Curating 1000s of documents from Chinese and international archives, it offers insights into China’s foreign policy since 1949 and its relationship to ideology, revolution, the economy, and traditional Chinese culture. The Database is generously supported by the MacArthur Foundation and the Henry Luce Foundation.

This website presents more than 4400 handwritten Tibetan legal documents with about 18800 images as results of two former research projects. I carried out these projects together with various colleagues between 1999 to 2005. In the first project, supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) and the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Technische Zusammenarbeit (GTZ), we had labors carried out on a project dealing with legal documents originally stored at Kundeling Monastery in Lhasa in collaboration with the Archives of Tibet Autonomous Region, Lhasa. During two years, in 1999 and 2000, more than 2700 documents of various formats, from very small to very large, including paper sheets with a length of several meters and book formats with many pages, were digitally recorded and are presented here as digital copies. The shooting of such a large number of images by the specially trained staff within the time available to us was made possible by the establishment of a digitization workshop and a standardized procedure. The technical equipment at that time already guaranteed a high resolution, which allows sufficient image details and enlargements for many investigations afterwards, including paleographic studies. However, the standardized procedure based on a fixed camera position and focal distance did not allow for time-consuming close-ups. Most of the documents were recorded with a Leica S1 Pro, a scanner camera for stationary use with a resolution of 26 megapixels. The scanning time for a full scan was 185 seconds. To speed up the work towards the end of the project, a second camera, a Nikon Coolpix with a resolution of 3.34 megapixels, was installed. It was used exclusively for small formats. A great portion of the digitized material has been transliterated in a Tibetan dBu-can based typed form in text files. This was done by members of the archives in Lhasa. The archives provided us with up to nine local staff members who were then paid by the project, including personnel for the technical maintenance of the equipment. Two German project members, Gregor Verhufen and Joachim Karsten, as well as myself were repeatedly on site for longer stays to carry out various tasks such as material procurement, hardware and software installation, maintenance work, technical inspection of the new computers, setting up the database, training of the staff, adaptation of the software, etc. Joachim Karsten also acted as German-Chinese translator when dealing with authorities and Chinese colleagues. At Bonn university, the German project staff was busy entering short descriptions of the documents into the database. This work still went on in 2001 after the cooperation in Lhasa had come to an end. At that time, Namgyal Nyima and Gregor Verhufen were working for the project at Bonn University. Gregor Verhufen did all programming work based on HTML code as well as the design presentation of the original website. Moreover, he extracted all seals stamps so that they could be viewed separately and accessed through a separate database. All other programming work to structure the website, including the implementation of the search options for the annotated information, the full-text search in the Tibetan texts and the conversion of the Tibetan texts from the proprietary Word format to Unicode, was done by Jan Ischebeck. Between 2002 and 2005 another project on Tibetan Legal Documents, supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, was initiated to digitize various collections, foremost the holding of the Library of Tibetan Works and Archives (LTWA) in Dharamsala, India. In addition, several German collections have been digitized: the private collection of the philatelist Kurt H. Dahnke † that contains correspondence between Nepal and Tibet mainly from the 19th century, the private collection of Andre Alexander (1965-2012) that contains private documents from Lhasa town, and documents of the Staatsbibliothek Preußischer Kulturbesitz in Berlin, which have been described in detail by Hanna Schneider (Verzeichnis der Orientalischen Handschriften in Deutschland 11, part 16‒17: Tibetischsprachige Urkunden aus Südwesttibet (Spo-rong, Ding-ri und Shel-dkar). Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2012). In sum, through this project almost 1800 documents became easily accessible. Several people contributed to the project. Saadet Arslan sifted through the documents and did the actual digitizing using a scan camera. Afterwards she did the graphical processing, numbering, labelling, corrections and so on. Namgyel Nyima extracted the essential information of the documents and transferred them to a database. Further he did some examinations on the terminology and the proverbs contained in the documents. Gregor Verhufen installed the digitization workshop, created the original design of the websites, looked for the technical equipment and extracted the seals imprinted on the documents for the separate database. Blo bzang skal bzang, Klu sgrub mang thos, and bsTan ’dzin bzod pa from the Library of Tibetan Works and Archives in Dharamsala transliterated the Tibetan handwriting into the Tibetan dBu-can script to make the documents searchable. The time and financial budget available and the personnel capacity of both projects did not allow the texts to be transliterated twice and independently by two different groups in order to keep the error rate as low as possible. It is therefore the responsibility of each user to critically review the transliteration and compare it with the document images. The same applies to the entries in the separate database, which contains a short description of the respective document. For many years the database was used by colleagues all over the world. It always operated smoothly without problems. Nevertheless, the programming of a database must be updated after some time. It was not easy to obtain funding for this. But it was even more difficult to find someone who was able and willing to do the job. The only thing that could be done was to regularly back up the raw data. Towards the end of 2018, a security gap in the database was identified during a large-scale scan of university websites, which led to the University Computer Centre of the University of Bonn taking the server with the database offline. The attempt to solve the problem by awarding a contract failed. Therefore, I am very grateful to my sons Robert and Sebastian for taking on the task this year. Without their great commitment and extensive programming knowledge the database could not be put online now. Instead of trying to close the vulnerability, they reprogrammed the database from scratch. Not only was the structure of the database changed and brought up to date. They also unified and merged different tables and linked them to the rest of the database. A unified search was added. The text search now also works with Tibetan characters and is cross-collection. Furthermore, the option to edit both, documents and seals, was implemented, as well as the possibility to add new documents to the database. To allow for future changes and additions, a user-system was created that assigns individual writing permissions to users. Finally, I want to thank Elin Kanstinger for creating the background image of the website. During the next years the content of the database has to be checked carefully and many corrections and supplements have to be made. It is my great hope that this can now happen step by step. Moreover, I plan to edit selected documents and publish them in book form.

The Japanese Historical Text Initiative is a digitized, searchable database of important Japanese historical documents and their English translations.

Online resources for better understanding the Japanese grammar and syntax. | Ohio State University

The Mongol Invasions of Japan website is devoted to understanding the Mongol Invasions of Japan in 1274 and 1281 through interactive maps, digitizations of handscrolls on the Mongol attacks, and guided views of the content.

MARKUS - is a reading and text analysis platform with a wide range of functionality Markus was selected as a runner up in the category Best Tool or Suite of TOOLS in the DH2016 awards

The History of Yuan (Yuán Shǐ), also known as the Yuanshi, is one of the official Chinese historical works known as the Twenty-Four Histories of China. This website includes its entire digitized edition. Commissioned by the court of the Ming dynasty, in accordance to political tradition, the text was composed in 1370 by the official Bureau of History of the Ming dynasty, under direction of Song Lian (1310–1381). The compilation formalized the official history of the preceding Yuan dynasty. Under the guidance of Song Lian, the official dynastic history broke with the old Confucian historiographical tradition, establishing a new historical framework.

Chinese-English dictionary and corpus. The History of Yuan (Yuán Shǐ), also known as the Yuanshi, is one of the official Chinese historical works known as the Twenty-Four Histories of China. This website includes its entire digitized edition. Commissioned by the court of the Ming dynasty, in accordance to political tradition, the text was composed in 1370 by the official Bureau of History of the Ming dynasty, under direction of Song Lian (1310–1381). The compilation formalized the official history of the preceding Yuan dynasty. Under the guidance of Song Lian, the official dynastic history broke with the old Confucian historiographical tradition, establishing a new historical framework.

Stručné dějiny dobývání Tibetu je otevřený projekt zaměřený na historické cesty západních objevitelů do Střední Asie, zejména do Tibetu. Cílem není poskytnout vyčerpávající informace (podrobnější informace o jednotlivcích lze najít např. na Wikipedii), ale uvést často oddělená historická fakta do souvislostí, poskytnout základní osnovu pro případné další bádání v této oblasti. Nezasvěceným snad může tento přehled posloužit k snazší orientaci v příslušné literatuře, podat základní představu o chronologických souvislostech a v neposlední řadě se může pokusit eliminovat nepřesné a nejednotné přepisy tibetských, mongolských, čínských, popř. jiných cizojazyčných slov a názvů. Máte-li zájem, můžete se do projektu zapojit. Na několika místech se zde zmiňují i místa ležící mimo Tibet, popř. osoby, které Tibet nikdy nenavštívily. Jde o případy, které s touto problematikou nějakým způsobem souvisejí a ve kterých přesné „zaškatulkování“ není možné nebo je ke škodě věci. V neposlední řadě stojí za zmínku, že náš úhel pohledu (myšlena pozice českého čtenáře), je svým způsobem výhodný, protože je nám nyní dostupná jak západní literatura, tak i prameny z bývalého Sovětského svazu, které jsou v některých případech v anglofonní oblasti málo známé. Vždyť ani slavný (a nesmírně sečtělý) Hedin nevěděl zhola nic o Cybikovovi, který došel do Lhasy přibližně ve stejné době, kdy on o to léta marně usiloval. Jednotlivé výpravy jsou svým způsobem nesrovnatelné, svoji roli zde sehrál čas i účel cesty. Stovky let přitahovala tato nepřístupná, v Evropě téměř neznámá země, misionáře, vojáky, obchodníky, vědce i dobrodruhy. Stejně zajímavé jsou i osudy lidí, kteří se do Tibetu dostali nedobrovolně, jako uprchlíci nebo trosečníci. Nebylo jich mnoho a pokud tato místa navštívili v průběhu staletí další Evropané, pak o svých cestách nezanechali žádné zprávy. První zprávy o Střední Asii souvisejí s nájezdy Mongolů do Evropy, a přinesli je vyslanci papeže, kteří se vrátili z návštěvy u dvora mongolských chánů (cca 1240). Jak vyplývá z jejich zpráv, nebyli jedinými křesťany a Evropany u mongolského dvora. Byli však první, kdo o své cestě podal zprávu. Také skutečnost, že v srdci mongolské říše bylo nestoriánské křesťanství běžným jevem, svědčí o tom, že země Střední Asie měly kontakty se západním světem už mnohem dříve. Archeologické objevy v Chara-Choto (Kozlov) dokazují obchodní kontakty s kulturou starověkého Řecka. Tibeťané zpočátku nijak nebránili příchozím ze západu v cestě do vnitrozemí ani do samotné Lhasy. Přirozená nepřístupnost země byla spolehlivou ochranou až do 19. století, kdy koloniální tlak Británie a Ruska způsobil, že Tibet se stal pro západní svět "zakázanou" zemí. Po celou druhou polovinu 19. století byl cizincům neprodyšně uzavřen a každý pokus o proniknutí na jeho území byl zároveň hrou o život (proto byla např. přesná zeměpisná poloha hlavního města Lhasy zjištěna až tajným měřením indických geodetů v britských službách koncem 19. století). K postupnému obratu došlo až na začátku 20. století a pro tibetskou civilizaci to mělo neblahé důsledky. Proroctví o posledním dalajlámovi se nadevší pochybnost právě naplňuje.