In the past half a century, China has transformed from an underdeveloped and inward-looking country to a major player in world politics. The country asserts itself more boldly on the world stage; not only in relation to nearby countries and places such as Taiwan, Japan, and other countries that share…

Close to twenty thousand pages of new material have been added to the online collection of unofficial poetry journals from China in the Leiden Digital Collections. Produced “outside the system,” these journals are hugely influential yet very hard to find. To address this paradox, Leiden University Libraries…

The Chinese Special Collections are part of the Asian Library. Items can be consulted at the Special Collections Reading Room.

Overview of databases, reference works and websites for research in International Studies

Overview of databases, reference works and websites for research in Chinese Studies

Library exhibitions, both online and physical, give an idea of the breadth of our collections.

The main focus of the Islamic World Special Collections is on the Middle East and North Africa, with smaller holdings from Indonesia, the Indian Subcontinent and Central Asia as far as Xinjiang, China.

The Asian Library holds the largest collection on Indonesia worldwide, and some of the foremost collections on South and Southeast Asia, China, Japan and Korea.

The Middle Eastern Special Collections form the nucleus of the entire range of Oriental heritage collections of Leiden University Libraries.

Overview of databases, reference works and websites for research in Cultural Anthropology

Leiden University Libraries (UBL) has received a donation from Dr. Freerk Heule to digitise and publish an internationally unique collection of unofficial (minjian) poetry journals from China. These poetry journals are produced outside the official infrastructure for literature in China for literature…

Leiden University Libraries (UBL) recently participated in the Pagode-Europeana-China project as an associated partner. As a result, almost two hundred items related to China from the UBL Special Collections are now available via the Europeana website. The UBL was the only library to participate in…

Leiden University Libraries has made a large number of unofficial poetry journals from China accessible online in its Digital Collections. This opens up thousands of pages from an internationally unique collection of unofficial Chinese poetry for teaching, research, and the general public, including…

Leiden University has library locations in Leiden and The Hague. Are you having trouble finding anything, or do you have a question? Our library staff is glad to help you. You can find them at the information desks, and around the library.

The Centre for Digital Scholarship offers training, events and presentations for members of Leiden University on the many different aspects of digital scholarship.

Overview of databases, reference works and websites in western languages for research in Comparative Philosophy

Leiden University Libraries (UBL) has donated over 3000 historic photographs and prints on the Dutch East Indies, China, Japan, Singapore and Suriname to Wikimedia Commons, the image database of Wikipedia.

2017 was the Leiden Asia Year. Leiden has had connections with Asia and built up extensive knowledge of the continent over many centuries. This Leiden-Asia link has been in the spotlight for the past year.

Leiden University Libraries (UBL) has been able to acquire an extraordinary Chinese manuscript at auction in Hong Kong. It concerns an Imperial Edict (dated 1582) from the Ming dynasty period, at one time part of the former collection of well-known sinologist and author of detective-novels Robert van…

Leiden University Libraries (UBL) has been able to acquire an exceptional two-volume Miao album. The acquisition was made possible by the Rombouts Fund for Chinese collections. The extraordinarily well-preserved work contains 70 full-page paintings on silk, depicting non-Chinese peoples in the area…

Welcome to the Sub-guide for North Korea. This Sub-guide is designed for students looking to locate, access and use a wide variety of scholarly and non-scholarly sources which are either (1) published or produced in North Korea or (2) about North Korea. This Sub-guide is a part of the General Subject…

On May 15th, from 15.15 to 17.00 in the Vossiusroom, Leiden University Libraries will host a program on web-archiving and digital archives of Chinese communities in the Netherlands and Indonesia.

Overview of databases, reference works and websites for research in Art & Art History

Leiden University Libraries (UBL) recently acquired a major collection of 19th-century photographs on South East Asia. The collection comprises more than 3,700 photographs of the Netherlands East Indies and mainland South East Asia, including Singapore, Myanmar, Penang and Malacca. The photographs are…

With support of several companies, including Brill Publishers and private foundations, Leiden University Libraries and the Scaliger Institute welcome around 15 to 20 Fellows and guest per year to consult and examine material in the Special Collections. The Scaliger Institute received a large number…

Katarzyna Cwiertka, Leiden Professor of Modern Japan Studies, was already the recipient of a VENI and a VIDI grant. Now she has also been granted a VICI, worth 1.5 million euro, for her research project Garbage Matters: A Comparative History of Waste in East Asia. ‘I want to do something that hasn’t…

The exhibition 'A Buddha in the Backyard: Asia as a Source of Inspiration' shows how we surround ourselves with elements from Asian cultures and gives a glimpse into the rich Asia collections of Leiden University. The exhibition runs from January 26 to May 9 and is on display in the exhibition hall…

Overview of reference works, journals and website for research in Politics and International Relations of Japan

How do we view friendship? And how have writers throughout the ages described that unconditional bond of trust in poems and literature? It's Poetry Week! And you guessed it; this year's theme is 'Friendship'. For this reading list, we went through our collections in search of the many ways friendship…

Gathering and distributing patient data can make an important contribution to containing the coronavirus. But if we want to be successful, we need better data. With this objective in mind, Leiden data stewards have joined the Virus Outbreak Data Network (VODAN).

UNESCO has recognized an international set of fifteen manuscripts about Ferdinand Magellan's first circumnavigation of the globe and the three Hikayat Aceh manuscripts as World Heritage. The manuscripts are inscribed in the global UNESCO Memory of the World Register. This list contains documentary heritage…

Several of the most important manuscript collections in the Leiden University Libraries (UBL) Special Collections, comprising 443 extremely rare and often unique volumes, have been made available in Open Access via Digital Collections. The available manuscript collections include the private collections…

More than 2000 objects from the Middle Eastern collection at Leiden University Libraries (UBL) have been made available online through Digital Collections. These collections mostly consist of written works in Arabic, Persian, Turkish, Hebrew, Aramaic, and Syriac, but also contain printed works and the…