Asian Studies Resources

The AAA is "an independent non-profit organisation" dedicated to "document[ing] and mak[ing] accessible the multiple recent histories of art in the region." Their periodical publication, IDEAS, is also listed on this page.

The Asian Art Museum, located in San Francisco, "is home to one of the world’s finest collections of Asian art" and has digitized over 18,000 items in their collection. They additionally share a bibliography documenting their institutional publications.

Asian Historical Architecture is a website that aims to "promote a greater understanding and appreciation of Asian architecture through images and descriptive text."

"Over 2,750 Chinese propaganda posters are shown on this website, with information about their history, background and design." The posters are from "the collections of Stefan Landsberger (Leiden University, University of Amsterdam), the International Institute of Social History (IISH, Amsterdam, Netherlands), and an anonymous private collector."

"The East Asia Image Collection (EAIC) is an open-access archive of digitized photographs, negatives, postcards, rare books and slides under the general editorship of Paul D. Barclay, Associate Professor of History at Lafayette College, in partnership with staff at Digital Scholarship Services and Special Collections & College Archives." Scroll down to find a search box; scroll further to find collections of images related to various topics.

The Huntington Photographic Archive is a collection of photographic materials collected and created by John C. and Susan L. Huntington, former professors at Ohio State University. This institutional archive houses their research materials and is "devoted to providing pan-Asian documentation and resource materials for scholarly research and classroom teaching."

"Focuses on the generally underrepresented area of Asia in an attempt to make multi-media materials more widely available for specialists and non-specialists alike. IDEAS is the first multi-institutional, interdisciplinary, pan-Asian searchable database in the country."

Provides access to images and photographs held by the Library of Congress. Not all of the photographs have been digitized, but many have.

Focusing primarily on Asia, "Visualizing Cultures weds images and scholarly commentary in innovative ways to illuminate social and cultural history." From the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The Smithsonian National Museum of Asian Art houses thousands of "objects dating from the Neolithic period to today and originating from the ancient Near East to China, Japan, Korea, South and Southeast Asia, and the Islamic world."

The TFAI "specializes in the collection of audiovisual assets, with the mission of preserving, restoring, researching, and promoting these assets and making them available to the public." This resource links to their primary catalog; the language can be set to English in the upper righthand corner.

The Hong Kong Film Archive's mission and vision is to "collect and conserve Hong Kong films and related materials." They also have limited publications available for use. Not all materials are available in English.

China Historical GIS is a database of historical place names of Chinese dynasties. The project also is home to a small amount of maps and scholarly documents related to China, maps, and the field of cartography.

The Rare & Special e-Zone is the digital archival repository for the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. Featured among its collections are antique maps, primary historical materials, rare books and travelogs, and modern graduate theses and scholarship.

The University of Texas's PCL Map Collection is home to over 250,000 maps spanning the globe, including over 125 maps of Asia and Asian countries. The date range of the maps in the Asia collection covers the second half of the 20th century to the present day.

Virtual Shanghai is "a research and resource platform on the history of Shanghai from the mid-nineteenth century" to the present; among its collections are art pieces, historical artifacts and documents, and maps of Shanghai.

The David Rumsey Map Collection, housed at Stanford University, is home to over 150,000 historic maps and cartographic materials from around the world, over 121,000 of which have been digitized into this online collection. All the images in this collection are licensed under a Creative Commons License.