The East Asian Library's collection of Chinese rubbings is second in number, outside of East Asia, only to that of the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. The nucleus of the collection, over 1,500 items, was acquired in 1950 from the estate of Mitsui Soken, a wealthy Japanese bibliophile, and includes albums of rubbings once owned by noted Chinese connoisseurs of the nineteenth century. Other important acquisitions were made through purchase from Chinese scholars and dealers and through the bequest of Professor Woodbridge Bingham's collection. The library's holdings are especially rich in albums of models of calligraphy (fa-tieh 法帖) and bronze inscriptions, but monumental inscriptions on stone are also well represented. About half of the inscriptions date from before the year 1000. A few of the rubbings range in size from one or two inches to up to forty feet in length. Among the many rare items, there are a number of rubbings that are not recorded in the catalogs of Chinese or Japanese libraries and museums and may, therefore, be unique.
At the end of the 1980's, Raymond Tang, the Head of EAL's Chinese collection, recognized the need to catalog the rubbings. With help from then director David Shively and Christa Chow, EAL secured funding and invited specialists in rubbings from Academia Sinica, Taipei, to come to Berkeley and catalog the rubbings. Under the direction of Professor Mao Han-kuang, a leading authority, two staff members, Ms. Keng Hui-ling and Mr. Kuo Chang-chen, completed the catalog records in 1992. Ms. Ju Yu-shiou, also of Academia Sinica, contributed to the cataloging during 1991. Preservation care was provided by Ms. Nancy Harris and assistants of the Library's Conservation Department, repairing tears and split seams, and enclosing most of the materials in acid-free boxes and portfolios. The cataloging and conservation care were made possible by two grants from the United States Department of Education under its program (Title IIC) for strengthening research library resources. The Library is most appreciative of this financial support, without which the cataloging and preservation care of the collection would not have been possible.
Deborah Rudolph of the UC Berkeley Department of East Asian Languages entered the catalog records into a Filemaker database, fixing errors and providing a consistent style. Ms. Rudolph also wrote the Description field in English to summarize the important information from the Chinese catalog record. Howie Lan of the UC Berkeley Instructional Technology Program and Mark Miller of the UC Berkeley Department of East Asian Languages later converted this database from Macintosh format to a Unicode spreadsheet, which was then imported into GENDB by John Hassan of the UC Berkeley Library Systems Office. After further editing to remove the errors of the conversion process, Lynne Grigsby-Standfill of the UC Berkeley Library Digital Publishing Group shephered the export of the database into the current web format.
Dan Johnston and his team at the UC Berkeley Library Digital Imaging Lab created all of the images of the rubbings seen on this site.
The project could not have been brought to its current state without the dedicated effort of the above-mentioned people as well as Jean Han, Bernie Hurley, Rick Beaubien, Yu-lan Chou, Peter Zhou, Xiuzhi Zhou, Sarah Grew, Jiro Marubayashi, Amy Yang, Brooke Dykman, and others.