C.V. Starr East Asian Library
The C.V. Starr East Asian Library is a library at Columbia University, holding collections for the study of East Asia in the United States. It is one of the largest East Asian libraries in North America, consisting of over one million volumes of Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Tibetan, Mongolian, Manchu, and Western-language materials, almost 7,500 periodical titles, and extensive special collections. It is located in Kent Hall, on the university's Morningside Heights campus.
History
The library was established in 1902. Seth Low, president of Columbia University at the time, wished to start a Chinese library. The foundation for the library and the Chinese collection began with a donation by Empress Dowager Cixi of the 5,044 volume encyclopedia Gujin Tushu Jicheng, one of three copies of the book currently located outside of China. The Japanese collection began in 1927 by Professor Ryūsaku Tsunoda, who acquired some 5,000 volumes from the Japanese Imperial Household Agency, and the Korean collection began in 1931 with a donation of nearly 1,000 books by Korean students at Columbia.In the decades after its foundation, the library established materials exchange programs with almost every important university and government library and archive in Taiwan and China. Its relationship with the National Library of China in Beijing began in 1963, through which it was able to acquire, at significantly cheaper prices, materials that would have otherwise been impossible to access through its old method of buying books in Hong Kong and Japan. Over the duration of the exchange program, Columbia received copies of the People's Daily, the Red Flag, and the Beijing Review, a "complete set of Communist law books," in addition to transcriptions of opera performances, recordings of folk music and orchestral performances using Chinese instruments, and films of traditional Chinese paintings. However, these programs stopped in the early 2000s, when the Columbia University Libraries discontinued its exchange department.
In 1968, the library received a 6,000-item collection of rare Chinese books from General Li Hanhun, which on its own was described as "equal to the top institutional Chinese libraries in " in the 1960s. The books were smuggled out of China in 1949, and were mostly printed on rice paper using hand-carved blocks.
The library was gifted $1 million by the Starr Foundation in 1980, which were put towards the renovation of its Kent Hall facilities. In gratitude, the library was named for Cornelius Vander Starr.