*History: Primary Sources

"This collection contains video interviews with people who experienced China’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (1966-1976). The CR/10 (Cultural Revolution: 10) Project also includes interviews with young Chinese people born after the Cultural Revolution, who discuss how they learned of this historical incident. The Cultural Revolution lasted 10 years, and each interview lasts approximately 10 minutes, hence the name of the project, CR/10. Most interviews were conducted and recorded in person, while some were recorded via Skype. Most of the interviews were collected in the United States, while others were recorded in China, Canada, or elsewhere. Collection of interviews began in 2015 and continues to the present."

"Propaganda posters created by various Chinese agencies, 1968-1989."

Rich source of Chinese documents and other primary sources compiled by Australian National University

"Mass education materials published in Hong Kong and in Mainland China, particularly Shanghai, in the years 1947-1954. These cartoon books, pamphlets, postcards and magazines, on topics such as foreign threats to Chinese security, Chinese relations with the Soviet Union, industrial and agricultural production, and marriage reform, were produced by both Kuomintang (Nationalist) and Gongchantang (Communist) supporters."

"The Fine Arts Library and Harvard-Yenching Library holds rubbings of objects that date from the Qin Dynasty to the Ming Dynasty."

"The e-Asia project (2000–2011) was funded by the University of Oregon Libraries through the generosity of Nissho Iwai under the leadership of Robert Felsing, East Asian Bibliographer. By building a collection of digitized e-books and a database of full text web resources, e-Asia strove to contribute to the research and scholarship of East Asia. While the e-Asia project was based largely on resources held at the University of Oregon Libraries, its purpose was neither to duplicate nor displace printed traditional materials. Rather, by providing searchable full text, the digitalization efforts of e-Asia represented a new tool aimed at facilitating the information-gathering process. The content of the e-Asia Digital Library was migrated to Oregon Digital in 2018."

"The East Asia Image Collection (EAIC) is an open-access archive of digitized photographs, negatives, postcards, rare books and slides."

"The East Asian Collection includes historical images that present a visual archive of 20th century East Asian cultural heritage. Currently, the collection consists of images that document early 20th century China including the the Sino-Japanese Conflict (1937-1945), a visual history of Buddhist practices and temples in China, and other images of daily life in both rural and urban China. The completed project will be a valuable resource for research into this region and its history."

"This digital library gathers together a large body of primarily European and American images of the island of Taiwan – called "Formosa" by foreign visitors in the nineteenth century – and its various peoples, natural resources, wildlife, and built environment. These textual and visual representations, maps, and linguistic data were originally published in European and North American books and journals during the 19th century, but are not easily accessible to those interested in the history of Taiwan today."

"This project locates, digitizes, archives, and disseminates online photographs from the substantial holdings of images of modern China held mostly in private hands outside that country."

"Hong Kong Government Reports Online (HKGRO) is a full-text image database providing online access to pre-World War II issues of four major government publications, namely, Administrative Report, Hong Kong Sessional Papers, Hong Kong Hansard and Hong Kong Government Gazette. It contains a wide range of information, such as official notifications, proceedings of the Legislative Council, statistics, and reports of government departments and special committees, which are essential to students and scholars in conducting research on Hong Kong."

"Japan Center for Asian Historical Records (JACAR) is a digital archive of Asian historical records. JACAR has built and operates an online database for releasing Asian historical records, that are historical documents of Japan concerning to the modern Japanese relations with other countries, particularly those in Asia. The documents of the archive are provided by the National Archives of Japan, the Diplomatic Archives of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan, and the National Institute for Defense Studies of the Ministry of Defense of Japan."

"The Japanese Historical Text Initiative (JHTI)(link is external) is an electronic research database hosted by the Center for Japanese Studies of the University of California, Berkeley that is designed to aid research in Japanese history and literature ..."

"On February 24th 1943, Dr. Joseph Needham arrived in Southwest China. He had been sent by the British Council to aid the war effort there by facilitating the provision of laboratory equipment and scientific books and journals to Chinese scientists. He soon gained permission to establish the Sino-British Science Co-operation Office (SBSCO) (Zhong ying ke xue he zuo guan 中英科學合作館), also known as the Sino-British Science Co-operation Bureau, in Chungking (Chongqing), Szechuan (Sichuan) Province. By the time of his departure in April 1946, he had travelled extensively throughout Sichuan, Yunnan, and other parts of South, Southwest and Northwest China not under Japanese occupation, visiting universities and laboratories, factories and workshops, meeting people from all walks of life, especially scientists and other academics. He also took every opportunity to visit sites of historic interest and to take part in discussions with the scholars he met about his new passion - the history of Chinese science, technology and medicine - and began to collect books and other materials on the subject. During this period Dr. Needham took around 1000 photographs, many of which he shot on the often long and arduous journeys he undertook by truck to far-flung parts of the country. All of these photographs, as well as about 200 photographs from other sources and his travel diaries are available as high resolution scans on the Cambridge Digital Library (CUDL)."

"Ling long women's magazine, published in Shanghai from 1931 to 1937, was popular during a time of dramatic material, social, and political change in China. Today, the magazine offers researchers a unique glimpse into women's lives in Republican-era (1911-49) Shanghai. This site features Columbia University's collection of Ling long magazine, one of the most complete holdings outside China."

Documents political history of Japan from the opening of the country to the post-war period.

"The Old Hong Kong Newspapers Collection is a selective collection of major old Hong Kong Newspapers published from early Hong Kong to nowadays, aiming at preserving historical news reporting of Hong Kong for reference and research."

"Sidney D. Gamble (1890-1968), an avid amateur photographer, began taking pictures in China during his first trip to the country with his family in 1908. He returned three more times between 1917 to 1932 and continued photographing the daily life of Chinese citizens. A sociologist and renowned China scholar, he traveled throughout the country to collect data for social-economic surveys and to photograph urban and rural life, public events, architecture, religious statuary, and the countryside. Gamble used a few of the photographs from his extensive collection in his scholarly publications and in slide lectures, the majority of images were never published or exhibited during his lifetime."

""Virtual Shanghai is a research and resource platform on the history of Shanghai from the mid-nineteenth century to nowadays. It incorporates various sets of documents: essays, original documents, photographs, maps, quantitative data, etc. The objective of the project is to write a history of the city through the combined mobilization of these various types of documents. The implementation of this approach relies on the use of digital and GIS technologies. On the research side, the platform offers various ways to step into the history of the city and follow its course at different levels over time. On the resource side, apart from providing original textual and visual documents, it develops a powerful cartographic tool for spatial analysis and real-time mapping."

"National Libraries from the various countries in ASEAN hold a great wealth of library resources that span the spectrum of formats – books, papers and manuscripts, maps, photographs, paintings and drawings, audio and video recordings, ephemera, and newspapers."

Collection of primary sources including tribunal transcripts, images, and maps

"The Cornell Modern Indonesia Project (CMIP) was initiated in the 1950s by faculty members in Cornell's Southeast Asia Program who were committed to making contemporary analyses of Indonesia and translations of its important documents available to scholars and students. The 75 titles in this series are divided into four categories: Interim Reports, Translations, Monographs, and Bibliographies. These works capture the drama of Indonesia's political and social evolution through the twentieth century: its struggle for independence from the Dutch under the leadership of Sukarno, reactions to the Japanese Occupation, the development of its civil government, its civil insurgencies, and the conditions that prevailed throughout the long dictatorship of General Suharto. A few other works in this series, such as Benedict Anderson's Mythology and the Tolerance of the Javanese, reflect on earlier Indonesian history relevant to the modern nation."

"The National Archives of Singapore (NAS) is the official custodian of Singapore's collective memory. Ranging from government files, private memoirs, historical maps and photographs to oral history interviews and audio-visual materials, the NAS is responsible for the collection, preservation and management of Singapore's public and private archival records."

"The Southeast Asia Digital Library (SEADL) exists to provide educators, students, scholars and members of the general public with a wide variety of materials published or otherwise produced in Southeast Asia. Drawn largely from the collections of universities and scholars in this region, SEADL contains digital facsimiles of books and manuscripts, as well as multimedia materials and searchable indexes of additional Southeast Asian resources. Nations represented in the collection include Brunei, Cambodia, East Timor, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam."

"The 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."

"The Visions collection includes the written and photographed experiences of Europeans and Americans who traveled to Southeast Asia during the period of imperialism."

"The Virtual Vietnam Archive currently contains 7 million pages of scanned materials.Types of material include documents, photographs, slides, negatives, oral histories, artifacts, moving images, sound recordings, maps, and collection finding aids."

An online archive of Singapore's newspapers

"The Afghanistan Digital Library will retrieve and restore works published in Afghanistan between 1870 and 1930; the long-term objective is to collect, catalogue, digitize and provide access to as many of this period's publications as possible."

"Folklorists de Caro and Jordan interviewed Britons who lived and worked in pre-independence India as colonial administrators, civil servants, missionaries, soldiers, forestry officials, and engineers. Many interviews focus on daily life in India and the contact of cultures and cultural identity."

"The Cambridge South Asian Archive is an unusual collection of materials, covering a period of over 200 years, include 600 written collections, 900 maps, 100,000 photographs, and 80 collections of cinéfilms. Together they paint a rich and unique picture of the Raj and the early decades of post-colonial South Asia. In the main, the collection consists of private papers, photographs and drawings, books, ciné film and tape recordings. Full details of the collection are given in Cambridge South Asian Archive. The films and oral history collections are available online by clicking on the sections below. The photograph collection is in the process of being digitized and will be made available online in stages, as the work progresses."

"The Digital Colonial Documents Project (India) is intended to promote study of the rare seminal documents which were influential in the formation of the notions of nation, state and culture during the colonial period. The project makes available rare colonial documents as searchable internet documents."

"The Digital South Asia Library provides digital materials for reference and research on South Asia to scholars, public officials, business leaders, and other users."

"This feature on the 'Medical History of British India' provides an entry into the history of disease and its prevention in 19th and 20th-century British India, including veterinary medicine and animal husbandry."

"Welcome to SAOA. South Asia Open Archives is a free open-access resource for research and teaching - a rich and growing curated collection of key historical and contemporary sources in arts, humanities and social sciences, from and about South Asia, in English and other languages of the region. SAOA's collection currently contains hundreds of thousands of pages of books, journals, newspapers, census data, magazines, and documents, with particular focus on social & economic history, literature, women & gender, and caste & social structure."

"The Library holds the greatest collection in the world of material relating to Australia and the Australian people. It ranges from the earliest European works about the Great Southern Land to the most current publications."

"The New Zealand Electronic Text Collection comprises significant New Zealand and Pacific Island texts and materials held by Victoria University of Wellington Library. This encompasses both digitised heritage material and born-digital resources."

"Scattered across a vast expanse of water as wide as the continental United States are over twenty-one hundred islands that make up the cultural region known as Micronesia. The area includes three major archipelagoes: the Marshalls, Carolines, and Marianas. (Culturally, Micronesia includes Kiribati and Nauru, but the separate political history of these countries excludes them from the archives discussed here.) Having passed through colonial rule by the Spanish, Germans, and Japanese, the islands of Micronesia became a United States administered United Nations strategic trusteeship following World War II. This new arrangement was named the Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands (TTPI)."