East Asian Studies


Muller's Digital Dictionary of Buddhism (DDB) is a compilation of Buddhist terms and texts--as well as names of temples, schools, and people--found in East Asian Buddhist canonical sources. The dictionary project, which began in 1986, is thought to be the most comprehensive compilation of Buddhist terms available in English today.

DuXiu is a Chinese database with a discovery search system of more than 3 million Chinese bibliographic entries and 2 million scholarly resources in all subjects and formats (books, journal articles, newspapers, theses, conference proceedings, videos, and webpages).

Transcripts of foreign broadcasts and news that have been translated into English by the Foreign Broadcast Information Service, a U.S. government agency.  This fully searchable digital edition is the United States' principal record of political and historical open source intelligence. The dates of coverage are 1941 to 1996.

Fuzoku gaho is the first graphic magazine published in Japan, published from Feb. 1889 to Mar. 1916. This online version contains 518 issues, including special issues on the Sino-Japanese War, the Russo-Japanese war, etc. This is extremely rich graphic magazine, containing more than 6600 illustrations (2,000 are colored) and more than 3000 photographs. (Restricted to 2 simultaneous users.)

Provides a combination of indexing, abstracts, images, and full text for scholarly and general interest journals embracing all academic disciplines and spanning at least 25 years.

CHANT is an on-going project of collections of Chinese ancient texts. KU Libraries have access to the following contents in CHANT: Database of Bronze Inscriptions (Jin wen 金文); Excavated Wood/Bamboo and Silk Scripts (Zhu jian bo shu I, II, III 竹簡帛書 I, II, III ); Database of Traditional Chinese Texts: Xian Qin Liang Han, pre-220AD (先秦兩漢), and free vocabulary dictionaries.

Click "For IP User Only" to access.

The Scripta Sinica is one of the largest Chinese full text databases which encompass all core materials of Chinese history and Chinese classics. The database has been compiled since 1984, by the Institute of History and Philology, Academia Sinica in Taiwan. Please click on 授權使用 (Authorized users) to access the source.

IRDB, which superseded JAIRO in April 2019, harvests the metadata of academic resources (journal articles, theses or dissertations, departmental bulletin papers, research papers, etc.) accumulated in academic institutional repositories in Japan. The accumulated metadata are searchable in IRDB as well as other academic platforms, such as CiNii, NDL Search, and Open AIRE.

English Version

Consists of fully searchable and browsable databases including English-Japanese and Japanese-English dictionaries, Encyclopedia Nipponica and Encyclopedia of Japan, articles published in a weekly magazine Ekonomisuto, collection of Tōyō bunko series and other visual and sound databases. (Restricted to 2 simultaneous users.)

When using this database and other optional databases provided by the distributor of JapanKnowledge Lib (i.e., Nihon rekishi chimei taikei and Kokushi daijiten), please open a different browser to login smoothly. Internet Explorer and Google Chrome are recommended browsers, though other browsers can be used.

The Japanese Historical Maps Collection of the East Asian Library contains about 2,300 early maps of Japan and the World. Represented in this online collection are a selection of maps and books from the collection.