Serica Project

The Serica Project aims to locate, identify, and list all the pre-modern Chinese holdings and other materials considered to be "special" in the Bodleian and other Oxford libraries. Between October 2011 and September 2015 it was funded by generous donations from Mr Nicholas Coulson and the Tan Chin Tuan Foundation in Singapore.

Its website is designed to give an overview of the extent and nature of these resources, and to present the bibliographic data in a way that is readily comprehensible to Chinese readers. Specimen pages (shuying 書影) of many of the editions are provided (following the model of comparable sites in China and Japan), as well as links to those works that have been digitised.

Following my dismissal on the grounds of age in September 2017, the Library lost interest in the project and suspended its updating in November 2021. The database continued to be accessible on the Library’s website, but only as a crippled relic of its former self: incomplete, occasionally inaccurate, and failing to give access to everything that has now been digitised. Moreover, the specimen pages, invaluable to Chinese bibliographers and numbering several thousand, had for some reason been discarded in their entirety. It was finally taken down in October 2024.

Fortunately, in anticipation of this I had downloaded the entire dataset and have therefore been able to replicate the resource here as best I can. Respecting the generosity of the donors, I continue to work on it in the hope that I can complete it in due course. The classified menu can be used to get some idea of the nature and size of the collection, and full-text searching of the site using the Google search console is possible if not entirely satisfactory: the resource has been designed not as a searchable catalogue, but rather to answer the question what have you got".

David Helliwell
30 November 2024