East Asian Collection • 芝加哥大學 東亞圖書館 • シカゴ大学 東アジアライブラリ • 시카고 대학교 동아시아 도서관
About the East Asian Collection
The East Asian Collection of the University of Chicago Library contains materials primarily in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, as well as a sizable archival collection of rare books in these languages and in Tibetan, Mongolian, and Manchu. The Collection traces its history to the founding in 1936 of the Far Eastern Library, which was created in support of the newly launched Chinese studies program on campus. From the 1950s to the 1970s the Library’s holdings grew significantly under the direction of Dr. Tsuen-Hsuin Tsien, and the Collection attained a level of distinction that it has not since relinquished. The Japanese and Korean sections were established within the Collection in 1958 and 1988 respectively, and each has grown to become a notable repository in its own right. Today all three collections are regarded as being among the most comprehensive and dynamic in North America.
Current highlights include:
Chinese studies collection: A pre-1949 Chinese newspaper collection of more than 200 titles on microfilm, and important Chinese literary classics and exegeses in Manchu and Chinese.
Japanese studies collection: Extensive runs of rare twentieth-century popular magazines such as Fufu seikatsu, Garo, Goro, Kitan kurabu, and Shonen kurabu.
Korean studies collection: Digitized primary sources including the Postcard Collection of Colonial Korea, North Korean Stamp Collection, contemporary North Korean periodicals, and historical Korean textbooks.
The offices of the CJK subject specialists are located on the 5th floor of the Joseph Regenstein Library. While the 5th-floor stacks are mostly dedicated to East-Asian-Collection materials, many more East-Asian-Collection materials are housed elsewhere in the Library. See “Locations of East Asian Materials.”
Research Guides
About the Chinese Collection
The East Asian (EA) Chinese Collection was established in 1936, the year in which the UC East Asian Collection was founded. At that time, the Chinese Collection consisted of 3,000 volumes, including Herrlee G. Greel’s personal gift of 2,100 volumes. In 1939 Greel applied for, and received, a $25,000 grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, with which he purchased 70,000 volumes of Chinese books within a few years. From 1943 to 1944, the Chinese Collection was further enhanced through a purchase from the Newberry Library. The Newberry Chinese collection includes Ming and Qing rare books, as well as Buddhist Sutras. Besides Chinese language materials, it also includes Manchu, Mongolian and Tibetan texts. Ever since the 1950s, under the direction of Dr. Tsuen-Hsuin Tsien, the Chinese Collection has continued to develop rapidly in quantity as well as quality, and has been recognized as one of the leading Collections in North America.
The Collection is especially strong in classics, history, art and art history, philosophy, and classical and contemporary literature. The strengths are also found in the holdings of pre-modern local gazetteers (地方志) and collectanea (叢書). Major collectanea include the Si ku quan shu, Si bu cong kan, Cong shu ji cheng, and Gu jin tu shu ji cheng. Sustained effort has been devoted to collecting primary resources in order to support research and curricular developments. These resources include a pre-1949 Chinese newspaper collection of more than 200 titles in microfilm format, the most comprehensive collection of its kind in North America, as well as a collection of about 1,000 titles of Chinese rare books and manuscripts produced between AD 800 and AD 1795. In the last number of years, the collection has continuously sought to collect large sets of primary resources in fields such as history, literature, and art and art history. Last year, an E-book database was created for the collection, representing a total of more than 2,000 titles selected from a pool of more than 12,000 offered by CNKI.
The University of Chicago Library also holds significant materials in English and other Western languages on China Studies. The Western-language materials are shelved within the general collection. An excellent collection on Chinese films is held by the East Asia Film Library, which features a total of more than 3,600 items, located in, and managed by, the Center for East Asian Studies.
About the Digital Collections
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Established in 2003 by the Department of Art History and directed by Wu Hung, the Center for the Art of East Asia (CAEA) aims to facilitate and support teaching and research in the rapidly growing field of East Asian art at the University of Chicago.
