Structured datasets extracted from 41 early gazetteers held by the Institute of History and Philology at Academia Sinica and  2,000 later gazetteers will be made available here.

Gazetteers

Local gazetteers are massive repositories of data pertaining to mountains and rivers, roads and bridges, administrative divisions, taxes and population, agricultural production, disasters and epidemics, notable local people, government officials, public and private schools, tombs and monuments, religious sites, selected writings of local authors, and a host of other topics. They were first introduced at the prefectural level (about 350 prefectures), were slowly adopted by counties (about 1300), and eventually were even written for some towns and religious sites. Authors of gazetteers focused primarily on the amassing of data rather than interpretation of events, and the categories of information they collected remained fairly consistent since the twelfth century. Individual researchers have used gazetteers to gather information on particular topics, such as natural disasters, examination candidates, and religious sites. However, systematic, national-level studies based on gazetteer data are very rare because the process of manually collecting data is extremely laborious, cannot be easily altered once begun, and is difficult to replicate in related studies.