In conjunction with May as Asian/Pacific American Heritage Month, a new display titled “Celebrating the Art and Literature of Jade Snow Wong (1922-2006)” is open to the public in the Library’s Thomas Jefferson Building until June 5, 2023. This blog introduces several display items that showcase the career of this pioneering Chinese American ceramist and author.
The Yongle Encyclopedia (Yongle dadian), completed in 1408, was premodern China's, and perhaps the world's, largest reference work. The Library of Congress holds 41 unique volumes, which have been fully digitized and made available online. This post traces the compilation, transmission, near loss, and contemporary preservation of this momentous work. We invite book-lovers to enjoy in high resolution its exquisite calligraphy and illustrations.
This blog celebrates the New Delhi Overseas Operations Field Office’s 60th anniversary, looking to the office’s past, present, and future operations of acquiring and processing library materials in multiple South Asian languages and formats.
This blog post features the Asian Division's recently digitized Mangyan Bamboo Collection from Mindoro, Philippines, and a new research guide on the collection.
This blog post highlights the Library of Congress Asian Division’s “Collection of Wartime Messages from China to the American People (1943-1945) and Other Materials.” The collection is made up of items related to the Second Sino-Japanese War, among which are 2,100 rarely seen hand-written letters, booklets, and scrolls in Chinese that were created in wartime China.
(The following is a cross-post by Joshua Kueh, Southeast Asian Reference Librarian, Asian Division. It originally appeared in the blog, From the Catbird Seat.) On Saturday, December 3, 2022, the Library of Congress will host an evening with 2021 Nobel Peace Prize laureate, Maria Ressa. A journalist with extensive experience in Asia, Maria Ressa is …
While staff work is what allows researchers to conduct research, their presence in the Library is foundational to the creation of the culture at the Library. This blog is an abbreviated version of a longer virtual interview with Shantha Murthy, a librarian and cataloger working in the Middle East and South Asia Section (MESA) of the Acquisitions and Bibliographic Access (ABA) Unit, with a particular focus on serials (magazines, newspapers, etc.) from South and Southeast Asia.
Thomas Wilson Haskins, a young American legation official in Beijing, accompanied the U.S. Minister, William W. Rockhill on a journey to meet the 13th Dalai Lama in 1908. The recently digitized collection includes Haskins’ handwritten diary of the meeting, photographs of Wutai Shan and diplomatic life in Beijing in the early 1900s, and a transcript of an interview with Elizabeth Gowan Haskins Workman, his fiancée who had travelled to China to join him.
