FIRST DRAFT NOT FOR CITATION WITHOUT PERMISSION.doc

FIRST DRAFT: NOT FOR CITATION WITHOUT PERMISSION International Workshop on Biographical Databases for China’s History Session 1: Friday, Nov. 21, 2008, 9.30-10.00 Appendix to Endymion Wilkinson, The Nature and Scope of Chinese Biography Revision 1 Endymion Wilkinson Appendix: Inventory of Biographical Materials (Revision 1) In order to proceed from the known to the unknown, the inventory goes backwards in time, starting from the present. Twentieth Century China Biographies and indexes of biographical data are available for at least 100,000 twentieth-century persons. Full tables of incumbents in official posts of the various governments and party congresses etc. are also available, as are numerous excellent reference works. There seems little point in listing a sampling here. Databases Database of Republican Bankers Database for Republican Era (1911-1949) Scholars and Bibliography China Vitae Central Committee Database Pre-20th Century Eighteen different kinds of sources are listed, and tentative quantitative estimates of the number of those with biographies or biographical details given under each. A 19th heading lists English-language biographical dictionaries of the period in question. The 20th heading indicates when a monograph on biographical sources is available, and the 21st lists databases. As we go back in time fewer and fewer sources are extant. Those that survive tend to do so in summarized or quoted form and they tend to concentrate more and more on the upper levels of the social and political elite. The exceptions are chance finds or archaeologically excavated data. For ease of presentation I divide biographical sources into three types: (1) those generated by the state; (2) those not generated by the state; and (3) those that are a mixture of the two. Qing The key to the prosopographical richness of the Qing is that more sources survive from the mid eighteenth century to 1912 than for all of the rest of Chinese history up to the Qing put together.