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The Eastern Miscellany (东方杂志), launched in Shanghai by the Commerical Press (商务印书馆) on March 11, 1904, is one of the earliest and most comprehensive Chinese magazines in the 20th century. After being suspended in 1948 and relaunched in 1999, it is now providing full access to its half-century digital database of a rich wealth of texts, pictures and resources for historical studies. Many of the articles within the archive of the Eastern Miscellnay are concerned with China’s relationship with other parts of the world, including diplomacy, education, commerce, fashion, movies and advertisement. The Chinese-language database is now accessible on a payed subscription basis at  http://em.refbook.com.cn/. 

The Eastern Miscellany is a literary hub for such groundbreaking thinkers such as Liang Qichao (梁启超 one of the forerunners of modern Chinese journalism and leading advocate of constitutional monarchy), Cai Yuanpei (蔡元培 educationist and chancellor of Peking University), Yan Fu (严复 scholar and translator who first introduced Darwin to China), Lu Xun (leading Chinese writer and critic and one of the founders of modern Chinese literature) and Chen Duxiu (co-founder and first chairman of the Communist Party of China). Having witnessed the demise of the Qing Dynasty, the founding of the Republic of China, the end of the first World War, rise of the Communist Party of China, the Japanese invasion of China and the Second World War and the Civil War of China, it is valued by historians as an “ultimate resource and archive center” for modern Chinese history, and lauded as “magazine of magazines”. 

Columns of Eastern Miscellany first started from digests and then developed into a wide range of topics including editorial, social comment, royal decree, domestic and civil affairs, diplomacy, military, education, finance, industry, communications, commerce, religion, records, documents, research, translations and fiction.  The digitized database now contains the entire collection of this magazine with altogether 819 editions in 44 volumes, covering a total of 30,000 articles, 12,000 pictures and 14,000 advertisements.   

A glimpse of some of the titles of this significant magazine gives us a sense of how the Chinese people, or the literari, looked at their world of that time:

In commemoration of the 600th anniversary of Danti, Albert Einstern and His Theory of Relativity, History of British Labour Movement, Constitution of the Provisional Government of the Republic of China, New Educational Systems in Hamburg, On the Necessity of Establishing Meteorological Observatories, Special Edition on Agriculture and Farmers in China, Paintings of Houhan Dynasty, Poems in Ancient Meters, Women and the Profession of Dentists, and the Annual Amount of Heroin Consumed by Hollywood Stars.