East Asian Collection

Occupying most of the second floor of Bostock library, the East Asian Collection focuses on modern and contemporary Chinese, Japanese and Korean materials in the social sciences and humanities.  With over 90,000 volumes (55,000 in Japanese, 32,000 in Chinese and 3,900 in Korean in 2006), and many databases in Japanese, Chinese and Korean, this expanding collection is recognized as a regional resource center for researchers and students in the field of East Asian studies.

Duke’s East Asian Collection supports programs in art history, business and economics, cultural anthropology, history, language, law, literature, philosophy, political science, psychology, public policy, religion and sociology.  Although the collection began with  a gift of 1500 volumes from James A. Thomas in the late 1920s, and noteworthy purchases of Japanese materials from the late 1960s, significant and systematic growth in East Asian materials, especially Chinese and Korean, dates from the 1990s. 

Building a collection in Chinese is a relatively recent undertaking. Duke has a longstanding cooperative collection development agreement with University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC), which held collection responsibilities for Chinese materials. This was modified in 1996 in response to the dramatic growth in East Asian studies programs on both campuses. Duke is concentrating on materials not collected in depth at UNC, especially popular culture and the contemporary social sciences. It has built a unique collection of popular magazines and newspapers, a sizeable collection of Chinese film and TV dramas (over 2000 titles), a strong collection of statistical yearbooks and core titles in literature and history.  UNC is strong in Chinese history, literature and religion.

The Japanese collection has focused its collecting on 19th and 20th century Japan, identifying a few areas of strength – modern art history, women’s and labor history, Buddhism, Japan’s colonial history, the modern novel, manga and anime and other forms of popular culture (advertising, and women’s magazines).  Premodern social, economic and legal history and Buddhism are well represented, and basic materials are collected in premodern history and literature. The collection also contains works in Japanese on Chinese art history, Daoism, the Japanese colonial experience, US-Japan relations, and the Olympics.

The Korean collection is quite recent and is composed of reference materials, Korean history, literature and film as well as materials to support Korean language teaching. It has been building a significant collection in Korean film (over 300 titles).

Duke’s Special Collections Library includes reports from missionaries, early British diplomats to Japan, the East India company papers, diaries and letters from merchants and seamen as well as items in such collections as the Stereographic card and postcard collections and materials related to advertising in the Hartman Center.  For Japan, it also has the Papers of General Robert L. Eichelberger (1886-1961), who commanded all ground occupation troops in Japan (1945-1948).   Recent acquisitions include materials relating to the Japanese student movement in the 1960s and the photographs taken by Sidney Gamble in China (1917-1932).