2 replies to this topic

[Mark Yong]

Does anyone know of any websites that have repositories of scanned images of old Chinese documents (e.g. newspapers, letters, notices) dating back to the 19th or early-20th century, when Classical Chinese was still used as the medium for writing in Chinese? I am interested to see how Classical Chinese was used in such documents, prior to the advent of Modern Mandarin as the written standard. Even documents that originated from Japan, Korea or Vietnam that were written in Classical Chinese are welcome!

[Brian L. Kennedy]

Here is a link to a set of late 1800s and early 1900s Chinese language newspapers published in California.

http://cprr.org/Muse...Newspapers.html


take care,
Brian

[madalibi]

Does anyone know of any websites that have repositories of scanned images of old Chinese documents (e.g. newspapers, letters, notices) dating back to the 19th or early-20th century, when Classical Chinese was still used as the medium for writing in Chinese? I am interested to see how Classical Chinese was used in such documents, prior to the advent of Modern Mandarin as the written standard. Even documents that originated from Japan, Korea or Vietnam that were written in Classical Chinese are welcome!

International treaties were an important genre of Chinese documents in the 19th century. There must be scans of some of them somewhere, but if all you need to study is the language itself, transcribed texts can probably help you as well. This page in Chinese provides the text of most treaties that the Qing signed with foreign powers:

http://cyc6.cycnet.c...aoyue/index.jsp

The text of each treaty (in simplified characters) is preceded by a short intro on the circumstances that led to the signing of the treaty.