Descriptive Bi-Lingual Catalogue of Chinese Books: In the Collection of the Asiatic Society, Calcutta

The Asiatic Society has a number of very valuable works in its Chinese collections. They cover almost all subjects relating to Chinese civilization and material culture more especially in the fields of Science, History, Geography, Language and Literature, Philosophy, Religion including Buddhism/Manners and Customs, Biography, Traditional Medicines etc. As already mentioned in the Bi-Centenary Souvenir (1784-1984) of the Asiatic Society, some of these books are rare even in China. The Society’s Chinese Collections is more than 200 years old. Such treasures of Chinese literature in the Asiatic Society has remained unknown to the Scholars as they have not been catalogued. Moreover most of the books were kept in a haphazard manner on account of the language problem, e.g. pages of some books being clubbed with other works and particular volumes were mixed up with unrelated volumes. A descriptive Bilingual catalogue of all the Chinese works available in the Society’s collections is now offered to the scholars, giving a short note against each work numbered 1 to 92. This will give a general idea of the books and its contents. Apart from the notes, there is another heading, ‘Appendix’, No. A-J, which gives a short translation of the book referred to. While preparing the catalogue, it has been found useful to give both Chinese and Romanized names of each work along with English rendering so that scholars accustomed to different dialects do not face any problem. The Romanized pronunciation of each Chinese character (or word) has been given as adopted by the Government of People’s Republic of China in 1958.