New database access: Gu ji fa xian

November 6, 2019

Princeton users have now access to Guji faxian a new discovery service for digitized Chinese rare books.

This portal does not provide any digital images itself but collects information about digitized Chinese rare books from libraries in China, the US and Europe. The individual entries link back to the original scans hosted by the various institutions. Clicking on “检索” without a search term allows browsing the entire database via a simplified 四库 classification adding maps, gazetteers and congshu as browsing categories. Currently the portal lists about 100,000 editions.

Access to the discovery service is available on the University network, via VPN or off-site through the link above.