Library’s new catalogue opens 1,100 years of Chinese texts to 5C students

Students at the Claremont Colleges who spend their days and nights studying might be familiar with the Asian Library, nestled on the third floor of Honnold Mudd Library. Beyond being a perfect study spot, it is also a treasury of rare East Asian books, from Mahayana Buddhist sutras dating back more than 1,000 years to Chinese classics translated by Western missionaries in the Qing Dynasty. 

Published in July 2026, “An Illustrated Descriptive Catalogue of Chinese Ancient Texts in Asian Special Collections at The Claremont Colleges Library” is one of the largest-scale projects ever launched by the library’s Asian Library and Special Collections. Ranging from 781 C.E. to 1911 C.E., the end of the Qing Dynasty, the project collects, documents and catalogs the almost 16,000 volumes collected by Asian Studies Special Collections since its founding in 1936. 

For each volume, the catalogue records details such as its date, material, collectors’ seals and printing method, along with images. Editors usually rely on a book’s frontispiece, preface or postscript for precise dating, but one-third of the books in the collection lack this information. 

Hence, the library invited experts such as Guoqing Li of Ohio State University, Soren Edgren of Princeton University and Yanjie Hu of Tianjin Normal University to help determine each book’s criteria for authentication. These scholars’ work, which began eight years ago, culminated in the catalogue’s launch event on Oct. 22 in the library.

Xiuying Zou, head of the Asian Library and principal editor of this extensive project, noted that their contribution would not have been possible without support and donations from across the 7C community.

She also noted that this project has allowed academic communities, especially 5C students, to benefit from a “wealth of information.” 

The catalogue is a “finding aid … with many descriptions and visual images” that directs students who wish “to study the text and image of traditional East Asian [culture] and book history,” Zou said. The history it represents “is a mirror for the present and the future, [as] the wisdom never expires.”

For 5C students, that means a collection spanning more than 1,100 years of Chinese history is open and free to use, just a short walk away from their dorms. The catalogue gives students and faculty across all seven institutions a guide to what is on the shelves, whether they are writing a thesis, teaching a class or simply curious. 

As Zou and contributors from across the 7Cs describe, the books are not meant to sit untouched in special collections, but to be read, studied and put to new use.

As an international student, Zhiqiang (Eddy) Ji CG ’21 said he valued being able to walk into the library and handle centuries-old texts for free, without special credentials or fees.

“[They] allowed me to get close with the Chinese traditional culture,” he said.

One significant theme throughout the catalogue’s materials is the international exchange between China and the West. Ji, who now serves as a catalogue editor, said one of the collection’s most fascinating finds is the work of Western missionaries in China. 

To promote Christianity, many foreign missionaries tried to compile and translate biblical stories for Chinese readers. At the time, there was no official pinyin, or regulated phonetic system, to spell out the sounds of Mandarin Chinese in the alphabet. Pinyin, today’s official system, was not adopted until 1958.

“Because there is a lack of official pinyin, many missionaries attempted to create their own [romanization system] to make local dialects into written language, to teach both the Bible and native Chinese stories,” Ji said.

So how did these missionary works end up in Claremont? Many come from the North China Union Language School, a language immersion school originally founded in Beijing which was forced to relocate to California during World War II. According to Zou, these international joint efforts to preserve knowledge are a primary reason the Claremont Consortium became an important center of Asian Studies. 

Feng Xiao, associate professor of Asian languages and literatures at Pomona College, is one of the four key contributors to the catalogue. In addition to identifying different editions of books, Xiao has also personally donated a variety of Chinese rare books printed in Japan from his own collection to the library.   

Xiao said he believes the humanities are now at the center of academia because of the rise of AI, and that the library’s collections can be used in teaching to show students why. 

“[The collections are] good examples of the humanities [allowing] students to actually perceive the importance of the humanities,” Xiao said. 

Xiao plans to bring students to the library and has used the collection in his classes in the past — one notable senior thesis he advised last year, for example, analyzed 120 short stories collected in various Chinese rare books. 

“[The thesis helped us] be informed about things we typically don’t know [by using] new ways to look at old materials,” Xiao said.  

Beyond the 5C community, scholars at the event said that the catalogue can serve not only students interested in Asian Studies, but also a broader academic community. The catalogue can also serve as a valuable tool for comparative studies of art and printing history. A Japanese prints class at Scripps College, for example, has used materials from the library’s Special Collections for this kind of work. 

For Ji, working on the catalogue was a lesson in slowing down. 

“[The catalogue trained] my patience in studying the preservation of ancient texts and discovering foundational primary sources that could contribute to academic studies,” he said.

Ji said the catalogue was never about building the library’s reputation, but about supporting the Claremont community, especially encouraging students to be passionate and curious regardless of what they study. He hopes that, at the Asian Library, “there is always something for them to discover.”