We’ve made it possible to search the database of records for Qing officials that we are constructing from the 缙绅录, which was a sort of personnel directory published every three months (!) during the Qing, and listed approximately 13,000-15,000 officials each time, depending on the edition. We also have some editions of 中樞備覽 which list military officials. To learn more about the China Government Employee Database – Qing (CGED-Q), including our plans for the future, please visit our project page. We also have a paper in Chinese describing the database.
If you would like to look anyone up, perhaps an ancestor who served as an official, or someone you are already conducting research on, please give it a try: http://vis.cse.ust.hk/searchjsl/. Note that at present, it doesn’t work with Firefox.
All we ask is that if you have additional information on whoever you search for, please provide some details and your contact information in the form that shows up below the search results. We are particularly interested in years of birth and death, and names of ancestors.
We were inspired to do this because we had already begun fielding informal requests from people who asked us if we could find their ancestors, and wanted to make this more widely available.
Fu Siwei, a PhD student in computer science who is working with us on visualization of these and other historical databases, did this search facility as a side project. Lawrence Zhang, Bijia Chen, and other members of the research group provided a lot of feedback on various iterations.
Right now we’re only allowing for lookup of individuals. Following our standard practice, we will begin making the data publicly available, period by period. Our first release will be of late Guangxu and early Xuantong material, sometime in 2018.
Disclaimers and caveats
We’re still entering data. Right now our coverage of the early 20th century and late 19th century is the most complete. Coverage before the middle of the 19th century is pretty spotty.
It’s in Chinese, and for the search, you need to enter traditional Chinese, since that’s the way the original data is.