East Asian Libraries at Berkeley

The East Asian library at UC Berkeley has carefully built one of the two most complete academic collections of East Asian materials in the nation. A new building is under construction to provide a new home for the entire collection.

The library includes over 800,000 volumes and is expanding at the rate of 20,000 volumes annually. It is ranked first among academic libraries in the United States in Japanese materials, third in Korean, and fourth in Chinese. Its total holdings in Chinese, Japanese and Korean rank among the top three East Asian collections in the nation, together with Library of Congress and Harvard-Yenching Library.

The Center for Chinese Studies Library, a branch of the East Asian Library, holds more than 55,000 volumes and serves as the leading academic resource for research on contemporary China in the nation.

Noteworthy special collections include:

• The Ho-Chiang Collection of Buddhist Scriptures, which contains many medieval manuscripts written in gold or silver.
• The Asami Library of some 4,000 volumes of classical Korean imprints.
• The Murakami Library of 8,000 volumes, almost without rival even in Japan, which contains writings of the Meiji Period (1868- 1912), many of them first editions.
• Holdings in Tibetan consisting of xylographs printed in Tibet before 1949, including a corpus of Tantric texts of the Nying-mapa Sect spanning ten centuries of composition.
• The Mitsui Library of some 100,000 volumes includes 2,500 early Japanese woodblock printed maps; 7,000 Japanese manuscripts; and a collection of Chinese rubbings considered the second most important of its kind in the Western world. A selection from the Japanese Historical Map Collection is available online.
• The Soshin and Motoori collections, rich in xylographic editions of Tokugawa and early Meiji period texts.
• The Rare Book Room is devoted primarily to Chinese imprints before 1644 and Japanese imprints before 1660.