Eminent Chinese of the Ch'ing Period

Eminent Chinese of the Ch'ing Period (1644–1912) (ECCP) is a biographical dictionary published in 1943 by the United States Government Printing Office, edited by Arthur W. Hummel, Sr., then head of the Orientalia Division of the Library of Congress.^[1] Hummel's chief collaborators were Dr. Tu Lien-che (杜聯喆) and Dr. Fang Chao-ying (房兆楹), Chinese scholars who were married to each other.^[2] The work was republished in 2018 by Berkshire under the name Eminent Chinese of the Qing Period: 1644-1911/2.^[3]

Pamela Kyle Crossley, professor of Chinese history at Dartmouth College, wrote free software to either search and read the articles online or to download the text for offline use. Since the original work uses the Wade-Giles system, which is now unfamiliar to many readers, the software also supplies pinyin romanization.^[2] Crossley is also author of the historiographical preface to the new pinyin edition of the work published in 2018,^[3] which changed the book’s title from "Ch’ing" to "Qing".^[4]

The two volumes in approximately 1100 pages comprise some 800 biographical sketches on leading figures of the Qing dynasty (1644–1912) in China. The articles cover Han Chinese, Manchu, Mongol, and other Inner Asian figures, as well as some Europeans. Each article includes a short list of sources and secondary scholarship. There are three indices—personal name, book names, and subjects.^[5]