EAL Home
PU Library
Main Catalog
Contact Us

普林斯頓大學葛思德東亞圖書館 ・ プリンストン大学東アジア図書館 ・ 프린스턴 대학교 동아시아 도서관

Basic Reference Works for Chinese Studies

Unannotated Bibliographies

The bibliographical works mentioned under General works for East Asian Studies should be complemented by

Yuan T‘ung-li, China in Western literature (1958) (Z3101.Y8 1958)

which gives Western-language books published from 1921 to 1957, and

John Lust, Index Sinicus (1964) (Z3101.L8)

which gives Western articles from 1920-1955.

For the Cultural revolution, an unannotated bibliography is the

Yongyi Song and Dajin Sun, The Cultural Revolution: a Bibliography, 1966-1996 (Z3108.A5S86)

For current subjects, see in addition to numerous electronic databases, the yearly

Bibliography of Chinese Studies (since 1982; Z3101.B56)

which selects articles on contemporary China in Chinese, English and German.

Some reasonably comprehensive, yet selective annotated guides to material in English are for China,

Wang, Area bibliography of China (Z3106.W286 1997)

and for Taiwan

B. Jacobs, Taiwan: a comprehensive bibliography of English-language publications (1984) (Z3116.J33)

For any modern or current subject, do not forget the list prepared by professor Lynn T. White, III at the Woodrow Wilson school. Note also that mainland China has begun to publish an enormous amount of useful more specific bibliographies in the last decades; please consult the bibliographer on those.

(back to table of contents)


Annotated Bibliographies and Research Guides

For guides to reference works in history in Western and Oriental languages, see first the very useful

Endymion Wilkinson, Chinese History: A Manual (1998, rev. ed. 2000) (DS735.W695 2000)

An earlier version was separately updated by the still useful, but largely unannotated

James H. Cole, Updating Wilkinson: an annotated bibliography of reference works on Imperial China published since 1973 (DS734.7.C64)

See also

Harriet Zurndorfer, China bibliography (1995) (Z3016.Z87 1995)

After that see for a more comprehensive work:

S.Y. Teng and Knight Biggerstaff, An annotated Bibliography of Selected Chinese Reference Works (3rd ed.) (1971) (Z1035.T32 1971)

For republican China there is the

J.K. Fairbank and K.C. Liu, Bibliography of modern China (1950) (Z3108.A5F3 1950)

which lists mainly Chinese works with extensive English notes. For Communist China, see the slightly outdated

Peter Berton and Eugene Wu, Contemporary China: a research guide (1967) (Z3106.B39)

which also lists Chinese works and the

James Wang, Cultural Revolution in China (1976; Z3108.A5W35)

For Taiwan, there is the annotated

Lee Wei-chin, Taiwan (Z3111.L43)

Finally, there is as the bibliography of bibliographies,

T.H. Tsien, China (1978) (Z3106.T87).

(back to table of contents)

Current Periodical Indexes

For the latest Chinese articles published in the PRC, see first the full-text China Academic Journals database (includes full text and/or full image articles from 8,000+ journals from first issue to date. Journals included are those still being published in 1994 and later). No usernames or passwords are necessary: users directly connected to Princeton servers are logged in automatically at http://china.eastview.com. Use the PDF format for downloading articles. A guide to using the database can be found here.

Indexes only, but to articles for most periodicals published since 1857, are available in the Quan guo bao kan suo yin index, compiled by the Shanghai Library. On the first screen, click on “用户登录” to gain access to the database search page; the periodical index you have access to (Pian ming) should have already been selected by default. Once a citation has been found, check the Princeton holdings to retrieve the article itself, or put in an ILL request. You cannot request the article from the Shanghai Library directly even it it looks that way from the display screen; however, our ILL office will have that possibility.

For Taiwan, see first the indexes at

Periopath/ Zhonghua minguo qikan lunwen suoyin WWW-ban

This database indexes close to 2 million articles in Chinese (and English) published in more than 4000 Taiwanese periodicals from 1970 to current; it is updated each quarter. Click on "進入系統" to enter the search page. Articles listed with the free icon have been scanned and are without copyright; they can be viewed, downloaded and printed with the HyView reader downloadable from the Home page (軟体下載). Articles with a pay icon are fee-based and not available to patrons; if not available in the East Asian Library, you can request them through InterLibrary Loan in the usual way. A more limited number of full text articles is available at the

Taiwan Electronic Periodicals Service

(Taiwan Electronic Periodicals Service). One can browse by title. Make sure to use the search button provided; the enter button will not give results.

For those who read Chinese and Japanese, mention should also be made of the

Tōyōgaku bunken ruimoku (yearly) (Z3001.K85)

which lists books and articles on Oriental studies (incl. Chinese and Korean studies) in many languages and is more up-to-date than the Bibliography of Asian Studies. It has only a limited number of Western citations, but it includes Western book reviews on Western books which are not indexed anywhere else. There is a similar guide to Japanese-language articles and books with authors and titles in English: the

Books and articles on Oriental Subjects published in Japan (yearly) (BJ2401/5071)

(back to table of contents)


Translations

For translations of modern Chinese literature, see

Bibliography of English translations and critiques of contemporary Chinese fiction, 1945-1992 (Z3108.L5L68)

(back to table of contents)

Names and Biographies

For names and biographies, next to the "normal" large encyclopedic dictionaries, use

Zhongguo ren ming da ci dian (R2257.6/2578.2, Chinese)

Song ren zhuan ji zi liao suo yin (R2259.5/3820.1, Chinese)

Repertory of Proper names in Yüan literary sources (Z3108.L5R32, Chinese)

Dictionary of Ming Biography (DS753.5.A84, English)

Eminent Chinese of the Ch‘ing period (DS734.U65, English)

Biographical dictionary of Republican China (DS778.A1B5, English)

Gendai Chūgoku jinmei jiten (latest ed., DS778.A1G46, Japanese).

and the

Who’s who in the People’s Republic of China (3rd. ed., DS779.28.W56q)

A handy reference to see whether a person has a nien-p‘u is

Zhongguo li dai ren wu nian pu kao lu (Z3106.H74)

(back to table of contents)

Yearbooks

For general statistics, see the

Zhongguo tong ji nian jian/ Statistical Yearbook of China (HA4631.C472; bilingual; earlier editions may be Chinese or English only)

Zhonghua min guo tong ji nian jian (HA4646.T86; Taiwan)

China also publishes many yearbooks per subject or administrative region, some in English. Try to look around or ask the bibliographer for the latest issues. Often statistical and textual materials are found in two different titles.

(back to table of contents)

Encyclopedias

Very useful, if the particular subject volume is available, is the

Zhongguo da bai ke quan shu (R9302/5642)

There is a reduced Chinese version of the Encyclopædia Britannica, augmented with China-specific entries, the

Jian ming Da Ying bai ke quan shu (AE5.E36312 1988)

For some cases, the Japanese and Korean encyclopedias mentioned under Japanese sources can be helpful too; they contain more information on East Asia than Western ones.

(back to table of contents)

Placenames

For historical place names see the

Zhongguo li shi di ming da ci dian (DS706.5 C483)

and the indexed atlases of Tan Qixiang,

Zhongguo li shi di tu ji (original, simplified character edition: R3080.1/0447; traditional character edition G2306.S1 C481)

(back to table of contents)

Official titles

For standard translations of official titles, see the

C. O. Hucker, Dictionary of Official Titles in Imperial China (CR4161.H82)

(back to table of contents)

Calendar

To convert dates, perhaps the easiest is

Zhonghua tong shi da li dian (3 vols., DS733.C486),

but it occasionally has mistakes. More accurate, but more cumbersome to use is

P. Hoang, Concordance des chronologies néomeniques chinoise et européenne (DS733.H63).

(back to table of contents)