— Reconstructing China’s Cultural Landscapes Across Millennia
Beyond emperors and dynasties, China’s history lives on in stone inscriptions and local chronicles. Together, these firsthand sources reveal the landscapes, communities, and everyday lives often overlooked in official histories, offering a richer picture of China’s past.
China Bronze and Stone Rubbings Collection (Pre-Qin to the Early 21st Century)
History Carved in Stone, Worlds Revealed in Words
88,700 Rare Original Rubbings | Phase 9 Now Available!
What lies beyond the calligraphic beauty of a stone inscription? A forgotten famine, the founding of an academy, the rebuilding of a temple—each may preserve a fragment of local life that official histories have left untold.
The newly released Phase 9 adds approximately 6,900 rare rubbings, focusing on northern China, particularly Shanxi and surrounding regions. Highlights include a Ming-dynasty poetic inscription by Wang Guoguang at Qinglian Temple and a Qing-dynasty stone engraving of Su Shi’s On Jade (Yu Lun), alongside records of local governance, education, disasters, bridge construction, and religious life.
Across nine phases, the collection contains approximately 88,700 original rubbings, 118,700 images, and 86.64 million Chinese characters, spanning the pre-Qin period to the early 21st century and drawing on collections in China and overseas.
Unlike conventional epigraphic databases based primarily on secondary records, this collection is grounded in original rubbings. Each entry includes the original image, a full transcription, and descriptive metadata, supported by three rounds of scholarly verification, a four-level classification system, and character-level full-text search.
Notably, approximately 80% of the materials date from the Yuan dynasty onward (based on the first eight phases), filling important gaps in traditional epigraphic collections. These sources support research in history, archaeology, paleography, calligraphy, socioeconomic history, religion, ethnology, and local studies. All nine phases may be purchased individually, with perpetual access or annual subscription options.
China Digital Local Chronicles Library ( Pre-Qin to 1949)
A Land and Its People, Lives Across Millennia
—12,000 Rare Geographical Works Tracing China’s Local Past
Local chronicles reveal far more than geographical and administrative history. They bring to life the communities, traditions, and changing landscapes of China across the centuries.
The database brings together rare and unique editions, annotated copies, and volumes with scholarly colophons from libraries, archives, museums, and private collections worldwide. Covering the pre-Qin period through 1949, it contains 12,000 titles, 150,000 volumes, 10 million pages, and approximately one billion Chinese characters, including 4,500 fully searchable titles.
Its holdings include over 8,000 general and local gazetteers and 3,700 specialized geographical works covering mountains, rivers, water management, temples, gardens, ethnic communities, travel, frontier regions, and territories beyond China, along with related geographical and cartographic literature.
The collection features manuscripts, handwritten copies, woodblock prints, movable-type editions, and lithographs from the Song through the Republican period. These varied editions enable scholars to trace regional change, compare textual variations, and examine how local knowledge evolved over time.
Covering population, local economies, transportation, education, religion, customs, disasters, and environmental change, these sources support historical geography, local and socioeconomic history, environmental studies, religious studies, ethnology, and urban history. Eleven search criteria, including title, author, full text, table of contents, edition type, and publication year, facilitate precise research and textual comparison.
