Asian Studies Collection
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| Curator: Mr. Isamu Miura (tel. (909) 621-8916) |
| Staff: Ms. Grace Chen (tel. (909) 607-3970) |
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| The Asian Studies Collection office is located on the first floor of the Honnold building. Office hours are 1:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m., Monday through Friday. Reference assistance and check-out services are available during office hours. Reference assistance at other times may be available by appointment. The department developed from the 1930s to achieve its present holdings of more than 81,000 volumes. It is one of the most outstanding Chinese and Japanese collections of its size in the United States. In fact, the holdings are unique among West Coast academic collections. |
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| The Chinese Collection |
| The Chinese collection includes many basic reference books and unusual materials. The most distinguished of these is the collection of some two hundred titles of Chinese local gazetteers (fang-chin). Many works are no longer readily available, including journal titles published in the early 1900s. Numerous monographs are original editions of the Ch'ing period and the period of the 1920s and 1930s. Titles published on the Mainland before the establishment of the Communist regime and during the 1950-1965 period prior to the Cultural Revolution form an important part of the collection. |
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| The Japanese Collection |
| The Japanese collection consists of basic reference books, major literary works, histories, and biograhical materials. The Western language collection on the Far East includes some 7,500 volumes of scholarly journals, statistical reports, reference books, and monographs. |
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| The Asian Studies Collection |
| The Asian Studies Collection is enriched by three rare items. The first is a book on medical science, Su Wen Shin Yun Ch'i Lun Ao, in two volumes with the preface date 1099 and reprinted during the Ming dynasty. The second is an incomplete set of Chinese classics, Ch'un Ch'iu Shu Tz'u, and Ch'un Ch'iu Shih Shuo, also a Ming edition. The third is a manuscript set of the "Four Classics" (Ssu shu t'u shou) and amounts to nineteen stitched volumes bound in yellow silk covers and protected by four yellow covered cases. This handwritten copy is accompanied by illustrations drawn by hand and is the only copy in the United States and possibly the world. It was written by imperial order of the Ch'ing emperor Kuang-Hsu toward the end of his reign (1904 - 06), and took two years to produce two copies. One was submitted to the throne, the other is here. |
| Major acquisitions include the purchase in 1969 of the library of the late Richard G. Irwin, former Head of the East Asiatic Library at the University of California, Berkeley. The library is distinguised by its holdings in the field of Chinese and Japanese literature, literary criticism and bibliography. Another aquisition, the personal library of the historian P.K. Yu, Director of the Center for Chinese Research material, is distinguished by its holdings in the fields of modern history and historical criticism. Professor S. Y. Ch'en's library of Chinese and Japanese materials was given to Honnold Library for the Asian Studies Collection. Professor Ch'en was chiefly instrumental in establishing the Asian Studies Program at Pomona College. A major gift from Japanese art collector and appraiser Tomoo Ogita was presented to the collection upon his death in 1984. This gift contains more than 1,000 art monographs and nearly twenty-five serial titles in the Chinese, Japanese and English languages, and of limied availability in the past and not available at all at the present time. Another addition of sixty volumes of Chinese Communist publications on art and art criticisms was given by Joe E. McCaffree who collected the books in Hong Kong before the Cultural Revolution (1966 - 1970). |
| The Claremont Graduate School has also been instrumental in enlarging the Collection. The Oral History Program has forwarded to the department many archival materials, documents, diaries, Bibles and artifacts from retired Chinese missionaries in Claremont and Los Angeles. A portion of the Blaisdell Institute's special collection in Japanese on East Asian religion and intellectual history has been integrated into the Asian Studies Collection. |
| The California College in China Collection consists of about five hundred titles of works in history, literature and local gazetteers. They are original editions of the Ming and Ch'ing dynasties and the early 19th century. There are also fifty Chinese serial titles in original editions. Housed in the Special Collections Department is another notable group of books, calligraphy and rubbings: the Frederick McCormick Korean Collection given to Pomona College. Rare Korean Books printed with movable-type form an importnat part of this collection of Chinese classics, historical studies, the humanities and sciences, literary anthologies and rubbings of tomb memorials. |
