Historic Chinese Newspapers Collection

ProQuest's Historical Newspapers: Chinese Newspapers Collection (1832-1953) provides access to 12 English-language Chinese historical newspapers from 1832 to 1953. Significant content includes the influential North China Herald (1850-1941), which served as the official gazette of the British Supreme Court for China and Japan; the China Weekly Review (1917-1953), the pioneeering weekly published by American journalist Thomas Millard; the Chinese Recorder (1868-1941), the leading missionary paper; and the China Press (1925-1938). Other content published in Canton and Peking round out the representative collection of titles from the era. The result is approximately 15,000 issues of titles from the China Coast published during the 19th through mid-20th centuries.

Content is sourced primarily from microfilm holdings filmed by ProQuest (from early film of Bell & Howell), with additional content sourced from microfilm from the New York Public Library.

The titles digitized in this product are fairly widely held in print and microfilm by academic libraries, in some cases filmed by multiple institutions (both commercial and academic). There is also considerable overlap of content in other digital efforts. The North China Herald is also offered commercially in digital form by Brill, and the Chinese Recorder is available in Adam Matthew Digital's "China: Trade, Politics and Culture, 1793-1980." Other titles, such as the China Weekly Review and the Chinese Repository are available in whole or in part in HathiTrust.

Despite the duplication of content with other sources, the aggregation of titles--particularly the lesser-known shorter-run titles--may be useful sources for those working on the foreign community within China in the republican period.