China Comprehensive Gazetteers Available

Nov. 10, 2017. Princeton users now have access to the China Comprehensive Gazetteers database. Produced in conjunction with the National Library of China, East View’s China Comprehensive Gazetteers database presents a vast collection of Chinese local gazetteers spanning eight centuries 1229-1949.

Chinese gazetteers are a very rich resource available for researching China in multiple aspects, including its political history, literature, and religion, as well as the biographies of famous personages, its culture, economic development and, of course, its geography and natural history.  Because of its varied content, organized to principles also varying from title to title, full-text search capabilities change the way they can be used. This particular database contains approximately 7,000 titles (100,000 volumes), which have for a large part changed into full text using Optical Character Recognition. Because of this automated process, which occasionally produces errors, the 4000 titles which overlap with the Zhongguo fang zhi ku database, are probably best used in the latter (with much stricter authority control.) However, the China Comprehensive Gazetteers database includes at least 2,000 more full-text searchable titles.

A search guide is available.

 

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