China Biographical Database

The China Biographical Database (CBDB) is a relational database on Chinese historical figures from the 7th to 19th centuries. The database provides biographical information (name, date of birth and death, ancestral place, degrees and offices held, kinship and social associations, etc.) of approximately 360,000 individuals up until April 2015. CBDB was originally started by the late Chinese historian Robert M. Hartwell. Hartwell first conceived of using a relational database to study the social and family networks of Song dynasty officials. Aware of the lack of large dataset research in social and economic history of medieval China, he took the first step to collect large sets of data himself and generate meaningful answers to historical changes through data analysis. One important legacy of Professor is program of massive data which he structured around Before his death Professor Hartwell bequeathed the program, which by then consisted of more than 25,000 individuals, a bibliographic database of over 4500 titles, and multiple geo-reference tools to the Harvard Yenching Institute. Later, Michael A. Fuller, Professor of Chinese Literature at UC Irvine, started to redesign the application. Professor Peter K. Bol at Harvard also has disseminated extensive digital information for quantitative analysis. As a joint project of Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard University, Institute of History and Philology of Academia Sinica (中研院歷史語言研究所), and Center for Research on Ancient Chinese History at Peking University (北京大學中國古代史研究中心), the database has been greatly expanded in temporal and coverage scope. CBDB uses wide range of biographical sources to collect information about individuals.