PROFESSOR ERIK ZšRCHER RETIRES; CONTINUES TO HEAD CHINA VISION

Professor Erik Zrcher (65), who since 1962 held the Chair for the Modern
History of the Far East, with special reference to the contacts between East
and West, at Leiden University, retired in October 1993. He is the author of
numerous publications, and is particularly known for his classic study The
Buddhist Conquest of China: The Spread and Adaption of Buddhism in Early
Medieval China (two vols., Leiden: E.J. Brill 1959). In 1969, he founded the
Documentation and Research Center for Contemporary China at the Sinological
Institute in Leiden.  

Professor Zrcher will continue to head the multi-media project he initiated
a few years ago: the "Visual Presentation of China's Cultural History"
(Chinavision). The aim of the project is to create a structured database,
named Chinavision, with 25,000 pictures on screen, each with an accompanying
explanatory text. The visual material comes from a collection of 25,000 slides
that the Sinological Institute has collected over the years. The slides are
being scanned into the computer to present a visual database and are filed
according to a specially developed classification system which will allow
users to find a particular picture/illustration easily. The collection is not
limited to pictures of people or buildings but includes items of daily use as
well as illustrations of social structures. One of the future applications of
the project, the first phase of which is expected to be finished by the end
of 1994, is computer-aided education.