Unofficial poetry journals from China

Leiden University Libraries has made a large number of unofficial poetry journals from China accessible online in this collection with  thousands of pages from an internationally unique collection of unofficial Chinese poetry for teaching, research, and the general public, including literary criticism and polemics.

Presentation
“Unofficial or “underground” poetry publications—especially journals, but also one-off multiple-author anthologies and individual collections—play an important role in contemporary Chinese culture. They are comparable to Soviet-Russian samizdat publications, and to the “little magazines” often associated with early modernism in the West.

The Leiden University collection is internationally unique. It was built by Maghiel van Crevel, who donated it to the library in 2006 and has continued to add new acquisitions. The help of Chinese poets and scholars has been invaluable throughout.

The journals are hugely influential but difficult to access. In order to address this paradox and to advance research, teaching, translation, and use by the general reader, Leiden University Libraries is working to digitize the collection, in collaboration with the Fudan University Library. A first set of key items was digitized with the generous support of Freerk Heule.

For some quick tips on using the collection, watch this video.

The year of publication for each item should be accurate in most cases, but publication dates at the level of month and day are approximations at best, made in order to satisfy the system’s input requirements.

The material in this collection is in copyright. If you hold the rights to materials in our digitized collections that are unattributed, please let us know. Click on this link for our Notice and Takedown Policy.”

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Unofficial poetry journals from China