Databases of Chinese Maritime Customs
In modern Chinese history, Chinese Maritime Customs Service preserved a lot of historical sources that covered trade, domestic affairs, industries, transportation, medicine, diplomacy, and climate and transformation of ecology. These publications of the Chinese Maritime Customs service were important to researches of modern Chinese history. The publications of Chinese Maritime Customs Service did not open to sell to all publics in the past Chinese society; therefore, peoples could not easily to obtain the hard copies publications of Chinese Maritime Customs Service. Most of the materials were only kept in the place where they were published. The Customs publications lacked completed and a thorough information. These Customs documents also lacked to arrange in large scale.
In current preserved imperial Maritime Customs documents, Stanley F. Wright, 1873-1953, a Commissioner of Imperial Chinese Maritime Custom Service wrote Documents Illustrative of the Origin Development and Activities of the Chinese Customs Service, Volume VII, which include List of Chinese Customs Publications, 1940. The document preserved relatively complete categories of Chinese Maritime Customs publications that provide an evidence for us to delineate a general outline of the Chinese Maritime Customs publications.
According to List of Chinese Customs Publications, 1940, and the collection of Chinese Maritime Customs documents, the MHDB team developed different databases and themes. Returns of Trade and Trade Reports is the largest and well-known Customs statistics and trade reports. Decennial Reports is the reports and reviews of each treaty port in China every ten years. Service List collected Customs staffs, who worked for Chinese Customs Service. Medical Reports are the reports that medical officers routinely reported disease and sanitary situation in Chinese treaty ports. Navigational Aids recorded the navigational and buoys information regarding costal and inner rivers in China. Other publications include various Customs publications that did not put into a specific category as above. In addition, there are two more special databases: Collected Maps and Tables of Chinese Maritime Customs, which include different types of maps and charts in the database, and Chinese Maritime Customs Bibliography, which provide individual pages for Customs publications and detailed information for the location of the publications. We encourage users to use the system for consulting purpose.
Through these topics databases, the databases provide a comprehensive and different interdisciplinary historical perspective such as economic history, cultural history, and medical history for historical research, and deepens interdisciplinary research on history, such as environmental history, history of science and technology. Based on the different characteristics of different primary sources, the databases developed new functions and digital tools and integrate them. For example, the systems provide “Word Cloud” and “Citation analysis” for Medical Reports, while the materials in Collected Maps and Tables of Chinese Maritime Customs and Navigational Aids can match the overlies of MHGIS. Also, the staffs’ information in Service List could complement to the system of Integrated Information system on Modern and Contemporary Characters(IISMCC).
The editing way of the Customs documents in the platform was that the MHDB team used the structure of the original documents to edit the title of the documents in each Customs publication. We used manual proofreading in the title part in order to increase the accuracy of word retrieval, and processed the content using OCR. The databases use title search as the default searching way. Although users could search the whole contents in the databases, the function could not guarantee the accuracy of searching results.
The MHDB team especially appreciate the helpful suggestions, materials from Professor Takeshi Hamashita of Toyo Bunko during the planning and constructing of the platform.
(From the original website.)