East Asian Library

Students using spaces in the Digital Learning Commons

Library Building and Department Hours

Alexander Library

169 College Ave

New Brunswick, NJ 08901-1163

Phone: (848)-932-7851

The East Asian Library, located on the second floor of Alexander Library, hosts collections in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean vernaculars.

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Tao Yang, East Asian Librarian

Special Resources

More About the Library

Though the Library's collection is comprehensive, its strength is in humanities and social sciences. The Chinese collection is particularly well developed. With its extensive holdings in dynastic histories, collectanea, and local gazetteers, the Chinese collection is particularly strong in history, (the Ming-Ching and Republican periods), classics, literature, religion, and philosophy. The Japanese and Korean collections focus on language and contemporary literature.

The library's special collections include:

  • Some 4,100 books and 2,000 volumes of journals in Chinese medicine from the private collection of the late Professor Kuang-chung Ho of the University of Singapore, Singapore. Most of the books offered by the late Professor Ho are in traditional thread-stitched binding. These books include two complete sets of Dynastic Histories, encyclopedias, compendium, commentaries on I-Ching, and works of individual writers. Some of the titles are block-printed rare books.
  • A unique collection of photographs of various locations and individuals in China that were released from Xinhua News Agency of Beijing. The black and white photographs (about 1,100) cover the period between 1960s and 1970s.
  • A microfilms collection consisting of over 4,000 reels of the text from rare books from the National Central Library of Taiwan.
  • Special Collections and University Archives (located in the basement of Alexander Library) houses the William Elliot Griffis Collection, which consists of more than 250,000 items that document the experience Westerners in Japan, the roots of Japanese-American relations, and the special friendship between Japan and Rutgers during the Meiji period (1868-1912).

The library has a comprehensive set of reference tools in Chinese and a limited collection of Japanese reference tools. Some reference works are also available in Chuang, Miao, Tibetan, and Vietnamese.