The collection comprises roughly 500 posters dating from 1962 to 1988, with the majority dating between 1965 and 1981. They cover a range of topics and images, from barefoot doctors to Isaac Newton.
Ann Tompkins began the collection in 1965–70, while living in Beijing. She acquired more on subsequent visits to the People’s Republic. Lincoln Cushing presented the posters to the East Asian Library in 2006. The posters have been described as possibly the largest collection of posters from this period in this country.
Researchers wanting an overview of the collection are referred to Cushing and Tompkins, Chinese Posters: Art from the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, in the East Asian Library’s reference collection, and to Chinese Political Posters 中国政治宣传海报. The collection is fully cataloged in UC Library Search.
The East Asian Library owns just over 2,700 Chinese rubbings of reliefs and engravings, both textual and pictorial. While some of the inscriptions date back to the Zhou dynasty, most of the rubbings date to the Qing. Half of the collection is comprised of rubbings from the Teihyōkaku collection of Mitsui Takakata (Sōken) and acquired by the Library in 1950; the other half derives from a variety of sources. One of the more outstanding items in the collection is Fuzhai cun gu yu lu, ten albums compiled by the Qing antiquarian Chen Jieqi, of rubbings executed by him or his associates, often with handwritten notes.
Researchers wanting an overview of the collection are referred to Bokelai Jia zhou da xue dong ya tu shu guan cang bei tie, in the East Asian Library’s reference collection. The collection can also be searched through the database Chinese Rubbings Collection 金石拓片.
Wen shi zi liao is an irregularly issued series of first-person accounts of the social, economic, and political changes that occurred between the waning of dynastic China and the establishment of the People’s Republic. The East Asian Library currently holds close to 6,000 titles in the series.
The collection is kept on reference and is non-circulating; all holdings can be located by title, author or keyword through UC Library Search. Quan guo ge ji zheng xie wen shi zi liao pian mu suo yin 全国各級政协文史资料篇目索引 further helps with locating information by event, time, region and person.