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So my name's Gordon Barrett, and I am a departmental lecturer in modern Chinese history and politics at the University of Oxford. I think one of the great benefits of having access to this digital resource is that I mean first and most fundamentally it's both useful as

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a teaching resource but also as a research tool. You can access it digitally so you can zoom, you can manipulate the document, you can move from page to page, but also you have the ability not just to download sections of the documents but the entire thing,

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and that includes if it's a whole book. Um, and in a in a easily usable and transferable format, a PDF, students can print it out, bring in copies on their own, and when we're going through the texts, for example, um, you know, we can be, they

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can be highlighting or making notes directly on, on the text itself. They can manipulate it, um, and, and work with it that way, um, or else if they're more comfortable working with it on the computer, they can do that as well, you know, using a PDF

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reader. One of the excellent things about China trade, politics and culture for students who are just starting off on a research project, I think particularly undergraduates who maybe haven't studied or worked with China extensively in the past is that it has a range of supplementary material

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that goes beyond what a lot of other databases have. And so my advice for any student. Starting off would be not to simply just kind of leap in and start searching terms willy nilly, but to actually maybe spend some time and look at some of the

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introductory essays. For example, Robert Bickers wrote an excellent one on the China Maritime Customs Service that sets the scene very, very well and gives a kind of idea of that deeper history and context of the material that's inside it. And even some of the alphabetical listings,

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for example, just to get a sense of what types of material is in there, and I think the fact that each, each item has within it a listings of particular keywords that go along with it, I think are quite useful, so it will be helpful for

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anyone starting off to take a look at those keywords and think, oh, these are some of the ways in the areas in which the material can be made use and be relevant. So I think one of the advantages um of using primary source material early on

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in an undergraduate's career is that it um well one it it allows them to to kind of, Look more closely at the process of doing history and to get to explore things for themselves. It's not just reading what other people have written and discovered, and then

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of course it's a great preparation for when they do, if they do go on to doing a dissertation or something like that, it means that they've had that early taste and have an idea of what they can do and what they can use. So the interesting

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thing about James Cantley's biography of Sun Yet Sun is that actually my decision that I used that in a in the modern Chinese survey course, the second time that I taught it actually as a result of a student's research project, she had found it in China

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trade politics and culture and had said, oh, I'd like to use this, can I use this for my project? said, yeah, it's a great source, you should go ahead with it. And um after it came out of the research project, I thought actually this is, this

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is a good useful source that might be good for other students to look at as well. So Yen in the Awakening of China was published, um, essentially concurrently with, with the revolution. I think it was published first in 1912, um, and the man, primary author on

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that was someone named Jan James Cantley who was a doctor who had supervised Sun Yat-sen during his medical studies. Cantly also knew Sun Yat-sen from later because of an incident in China involving the Chinese ligation and Sun Yat-sen getting into trouble in London and so. Um,

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this was a biography. It's very much written by by kind of a friend and supporter, very much pushing this image of Sun Yat-sen as kind of the father of the of the new Chinese republic and and a new nation. So I ended up introducing it as

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part of the um one of our seminars um when we were looking at the um the republican revolution that allowed us to talk a bit about representations of China. In the Western world and kind of the tropes and ideas, and again also more specifically what Sun

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Yat-sen kind of meant as a symbolic figure within the revolution, and then even further because that particular copy that's available as a PDF in the database had scans of the inner text as part of the SOAS collection. There's some inserts, some reviews, and also the fact

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that it was part of the London Missionary Society library, and so that was an opportunity to talk with students further about, OK, what does this mean as an object, you know, what can we think about the transmission and use of ideas and that kind of thing

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within the seminar context as well. There is such a breadth of material. I think one of the exciting things is that it isn't just, you know, one collection or one type of document that is is a simple stand out that there is, there's a lot of

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different directions that you can go in and so the SOAS collection. Um, is very, very exciting, but it's partly because there's such a range of, of, of material in, so you, you, if you are interested in missionaries and missionary work, you know that that can be

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one part of it, but that that material and the material associated with that can be used in many, many, many different ways and to develop many different types of projects. So I think that's, that's fantastic. I think I mean the other thing as well is having.

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Also material that's not just from collections in the UK but also places like New Zealand just mean that you've got a geographic breadth that either as a student or even as a researcher, it means that you have access to things at a click and of course

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the ability to download it, to zoom in close, you know, to to minutiae. I think that's particularly the case with some of the material also say from the reports from. The National Archives as well, the Foreign Office documents and things like that, so it's just there's,

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there's there's there's a number of different highlights, I, I would say, not just one.