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Category: Asian Division

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Perry in Edo Bay: The Dawn of the U.S.-Japanese Relationship

Posted by: Anchi Hoh

(The following is a cross-post by Neely Tucker, Writing-Editor in the Library’s Office of Communications. It originally appeared on the Library of Congress Blog.) The Black Ship scrolls are a genre of Japanese paintings that captured the historic meeting of two alien cultures: That 1854 moment when U.S. Commodore Matthew Perry barged into Edo Bay …

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Centuries of Chinese Rare Books Go Digital

Posted by: Anchi Hoh

(The following is a post by Qi Qiu, Head of Scholarly Services, Asian Division.) To share the rich pre-modern Chinese resources of the Library of Congress with a wider audience, the Library has presented 1,000 rare books online. The Chinese Rare Book Digital Collection includes the most valuable titles and editions housed in the Library’s Asian …

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The Case of Frederick Starr’s “Missing” Ainu Book Collection

Posted by: Anchi Hoh

(The following is a post by Eiichi Ito, Japanese Reference Specialist, Asian Division.) Against a backdrop of increasing international awareness and recognition of indigenous groups through such milestones as the “United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples” in 2007, scholars in Japan and around the world have shown a growing interest in the study …

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Hindostan: A Propaganda Newspaper for South Asian POWs in Germany during World War I

Posted by: Anchi Hoh

(The following is a post by Jonathan Loar, South Asian Reference Librarian, Asian Division) On June 28, 1914, the assassination of the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie soon led to an unprecedented global conflict involving numerous nations and empires. Most people are probably familiar with World War I …

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Highlights of Tibetan Rare Book Collection

Posted by: Anchi Hoh

(The following is a post by Susan Meinheit, Mongolian and Tibetan reference specialist, Asian Division.) On July 25, 2018, the Asian Division welcomed 11 students from the University of Virginia’s Rare Book School summer class, “The History and Culture of the Tibetan Book,” for a special one-day field trip to learn about the Tibetan collection. Students …

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The Strange Tales from Liaozhai

Posted by: Anchi Hoh

(The following is a post by Jeffrey Wang, reference specialist for the Chinese Collection, Asian Division.) The “Strange Tales from Liaozhai” (Liao zhai zhi yi 聊齋誌異), written in classical Chinese, is a collection of short stories from the early Qing dynasty (1644-1912). It consists of 491 tales in 16 volumes, mostly stories about fox-fairies, flower-spirits, …