The Library of the Sinological Institute at Leiden University

By Joyce Yung-tzu Wu

In 1930, the Sinological Institute was established by Prof. J.J.L. Duyvendak, whose aim it was to make it the centre of all Chinese studies in the Netherlands. At that time, the Sinological Institute library was small, containing about 850 Chinese titles and 500 books in Western languages. However, most major ts'ung-shu were included.
Since then, the Institute has changed beyond recognition, not only in size but in its national and international functions. One important development in this growth was the foundation within the Institute, in 1969, of the Documentation and Research Center for Contemporary China, to augment the traditionally classical and philological features of the Institute. To accommodate growing demand, in 1981 the Institute was moved to a new building, an integrated whole including office and classroom facilities, reading and audio- visual rooms, and a central temperature-controlled compactus.
The collection has grown and diversified to the point that it can now be called a general research collection for the humanities and social sciences. At present, it comprises nearly 240,000 volumes of Chinese books and some 29,000 Western-language books on China. There are current subscriptions to over 900 periodicals and some 20 newspapers. Photographic and visual documentation are supported by a collection of more than 30,000 slides.
Until the 1960s, the accent in acquisition policy was on the traditional humanities. As Leiden had an important exchange relationship with the National Library of China in Beijing, so that the Sinological Institute library was one of the few Western European libraries to have extensive holdings of mainland Chinese publications of the 1950s and 1960s. Since then, the massive reprint projects undertaken on Taiwan have made it possible for the Institute's library to fill many gaps in its holdings on traditional Chinese literature and history. The founding of the Documentation and Research Center for Contemporary China made it imperative to start large-scale acquisition of contemporary materials relevant to the social sciences.
Funding has been a problem, especially in view of the avalanche of new publications in recent years. Occasionally, however, the Sinological Institute has been able to acquire special grants enabling it to purchase unique items of lasting importance. One of these was for the Commercial Press reprint of the Ssu-k'u ch'uan shu and Hsu-hsiu Ssu-k'u ch'uan shu; another was a grant from the Dutch Ministry of Education making possible the purchase of a full set of the new local gazetteers being compiled and published on the Chinese Mainland. Chinese authorities have also contributed to the Institute's growth. For example, in recent years we have been favoured with substantial gifts from the Government Information Office, Executive Yuan, Academia Sinica, and from the National Central Library in Taiwan.

The six special collections
The Van Gulik Collection: one special acquisition which has attracted attention throughout the sinological world in recent years is the Dr. Robert Hans Van Gulik Collection. Dr. Robert Hans Van Gulik (1910-1967), the Dutch diplomat and sinologist, is known both for his scholarly publications and as the author of the "Judge Dee" detective novels that have become world famous. From in the mid-1930s, Van Gulik's diplomatic career enabled him to live and travel extensively in the Far East. He spent the war years in Chungking, China. His passionate love for things Chinese was reflected both in the beautiful Oriental decor of his residence and in his phenomenal personal collection of Chinese books.
This collection, comprising more than 2,500 titles in nearly 10,000 volumes, includes many basic reference works and ts'ung-shu, but it is particularly strong on literature, fine arts, music and popular novels. In the last category, it includes some very rare folk novels, some hand-copied during the Ming Dynasty. Van Gulik, as a connoisseur of art, also collected noteworthy paintings and calligraphy. His interest in music (he himself was an accomplished performer on the Chinese flute, ch'in ) is reflected in some 50 titles on Chinese music. The Van Gulik collection was acquired more than fifteen years ago, and there is a special room for it in the Institute library. Cataloguing is still not complete, though work is in progress. Completion of the catalogue for this collection, which includes extremely rare items and Chinese incunabula, is clearly a priority for the near future.
Rare Book Collection: this collection, comprising more than 200 titles, includes many Ming edition books, some early Ch'ing edition books and manuscripts. Some of these editions are the only examples of their kind in the world.
Go Collection: this collection comprises 273 titles in nearly 2,000 volumes, which are all thread-bound books. Most of them were printed in the late 19th and early 20th Century. It was collected by an overseas Chinese family in Indonesia, the Go family. Gazetteer Collection: this collection, comprising several thousand titles of books on local history (ti-fang-chih), includes more than 900 titles of the new gazetteers that have been published on the Chinese mainland since the 1980s. In 1991, the library received a special grant from the Dutch Ministry of Education, making possible the purchase of a full set of the new local gazetteers. Jesuit Mission in China Collection: for research and teaching purposes, the library collects materials on the early (17th Century) Jesuit Mission in China and the Chinese reaction to it, from Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana in Rome, Hsu-chia-hui Library in Shanghai, China, and other libraries throughout the world. The collection comprises some hundreds of titles. Clan Genealogies (tsu-pu) Collection: this collection consists of several hundred titles. The library has begun collecting clan genealogies from overseas Chinese in the Netherlands. Originally from Fu-chien and Kuang-tung, they immigrated to Indonesia where their families lived for a number of generations. After World War II, some members of these overseas Chinese families emigrated to the Netherlands. Their family histories are very rich sources of information about contemporary historical events and their impact on the lives of those members who migrated as well as a record of the social changes which took place. The library aims to expand this collection, and family histories of all overseas Chinese are welcome.

Technical integration
The Sinological Institute library must devote many of its resources to fulfilling the bread- and-butter needs of Dutch scholars and students. One of its main tasks is to provide the material base for the teaching and research activities of the Leiden University department of Chinese. The department runs one of Europe's leading Chinese-language training programmes; the programme both in Classical and Modern Chinese includes relevant courses on history, literature, thought, and society, and an optional management programme intended for students opting for an extra-academic career in business, diplomacy, or related fields. The total number of undergraduates is now some 300. Some classes specifically on the use of Chinese source and reference materials are taught in the library itself.
Contrasting with these purely "local" needs are the rather different demands posed by international scholarly contacts and exchanges. Individual students and professors from all over the world make regular use of the Institute's collection; institutional relations include cooperation agreements with bodies such as the Taiwan National Science Council, and with a number of sister universities: National Taiwan University; Amoy University; and Beijing University. Students from other European countries who are in Leiden on Erasmus Fellowships rub shoulders with students and scholars from China.
Probably the main challenge currently faced by the Institute library is the need to ensure technical integration in an international context. The Dutch national library system makes a great deal of use of the Pica nation-wide shared cataloguing system. In 1994, the Faculty of Arts, University Library, Pica, and the Sinological Institute library came up with a plan of action for the development of an online catalogue for Chinese materials, and applied for financial aid from NWO, the Dutch Organization for Scientific Research. At the beginning of 1995, the grant was approved by NWO. Pica has started to develop ChinaBase for the library. ChinaBase is the name for a database-in-development for bibliographic descriptions of Chinese-language material. As an independent database, ChinaBase will be linked to the Online Shared Cataloguing System (GGC). The final result will be that ChinaBase will hold title descriptions like the ones in the GGC, with all data relevant to the book made out in characters. For every description an extra "shadow description" is made, in which all characters are replaced by their transcription. The user who searches for a title in ChinaBase by entering a search string in characters, gets the title description in characters, plus the possibility of seeing the title in transcription, and vice versa.
Since August 1995, titles have been entered into ChinaBase. ChinaBase will be used not only for cataloguing but also for acquisition, lending, searching etc. We hope to complete the system in 1996.

The Library of the Sinological Institute
University of Leiden
P.O. Box 9515
2300 RA Leiden
The Netherlands
Tel. : +31 (0)71 5272533
Fax : +31 (0)71 5272615

Joyce Yung-tzu Wu is Librarian at the Sinological Institute of Leiden University