A special project to include into the online Princeton catalog newly made full and extensive catalog records for the close to 100 Manchu items belonging to the original Gest Collection of the East Asian Library, has recently concluded. Previously, the only access was through a pdf of copied title cards with unromanized brief information, that circulated among the increasing number of Manchu scholars. The latter include He Bian from the EAS and History Departments in Princeton, Nicola di Cosmo at the Institute for Advanced Study, and several past and current Princeton graduate students, including in particular Mårten Söderblom Saarela.
The Manchu items were collected as part of the Gest Collection from several sources. Most books have brief handwritten cataloging notes in them written by Nancy Lee Swann, the second curator of the collection, who was likely the first female PhD in Chinese Studies (Columbia) in North America. She had been hired when the collection was still at McGill University, and followed the collection when it was transferred to Princeton. She had taken Manchu courses, and handwrote the titles, in Manchu and, wherever applicable, Chinese script only, on these paper notes.
The items were then further described on manual catalog cards in 1984 by Professor Guan Dedong from Shandong University, in Chinese with Manchu titles, all unromanized, and therefore only filed for staff members by call nr. They were not systematically added to the main title and author card catalogs. A Xerox copy of these cards, transferred into a PDF file, was the one that circulated among the originally small group of Manchu scholars in the West.
In the summer of 2025, an FPUL grant recipient, Elvin Meng, a graduate student at Chicago, used his grant to create extensive notes on all Manchu works in the Princeton collection, including transliterations and many very detailed bibliographic notes. It is his notes that, with some further annotations by Martin Heijdra, formed the basis of the new electronic catalog records created by Princeton’s rare books cataloger Joyce Bell. Elvin Meng also reported on some of the more unique examples of his findings on the Manchu Studies Group blog.
In addition to the purely Manchu works, the collection includes many multilingual works, as well as some Mongolian items; records for those too have all been newly created or, if already present under their Chinese title, updated. The Manchu titles can be found together by the search
--Taken from Martin Heijdra, Princeton University Library
Published on 2026-09-11 by shuqi