China, America and the Pacific is a collection of digitized primary sources depicting, from a primarily Western perspective, the history of North American trade and cultural interactions with China from the 18th through the early 20th century. The collection also covers Pacific trading centers such as Hawaii.
The collection includes a variety of materials, such as ships' logs, which are records of commodities and trading information; manuscript sources, including family and business papers of merchants, shipping dynasties, shipbuilders, shipmasters and supercargoes; newspapers; printed books; visual material, including paintings, illustrations and photographs; historic maps; and ephemera, including Clipper ship cards. The original materials are held by libraries and museums in the United States and Canada, the Massachusetts Historical Society and the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts.
