Digital Sinology

Looking for something fun to read? Shuge.org has a whole mess of interesting old Chinese books, all totally free to download.

So if you want ethnography of minority groups (This is a pretty hot topic)

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Military manuals (Like many of these this is a Qing text, although many of them are re-prints of earlier material)

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Or just a pornographic fan (Most Qing dynasty porn seems to have come from Japan)

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(Take that Randall Munroe!)

If you like these sorts of things, this site is for you. Most of this seems to come from the Harvard-Yenjing collection, and it is good to see them, willing or not, fighting the good fight to open up digital sources even to those not associated with a major university.  While I enjoy the site a lot, it is a sad  reminder of how digital sources are re-creating the intellectual divide that was eroded in my younger days by photocopies and Interlibrary loan. Today, again, if you are not part of the academic elite you are just a frog at the bottom of well, struggling to see all the things that others can see without any struggle at all. It is good to see someone democratizing knowledge.

 

Thanks to the FB group for the reference.

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