The University of Heidelberg “Cluster of Excellence” Asia and Europe in a Global Context: Shifting Asymmetries in Cultural Flows (http://www.asia-europe.uni-heidelberg.de/en/home.html) is proud to provide open access to two important on-line resources, the Thesaurus Linguae Sericae (TLS) and Modern Chinese Scientific Terminologies (MCST).

TLS is a large and complex database of – as yet mostly – pre-Buddhist (i.e. pre-third century C.E.) Chinese, which provides detailed and sourced information on grammatical functions and synonyms of lexemes. Attached and linked is a large variety of texts, dictionaries, and translations. It has been developed by Christoph Harbsmeier (Oslo) with a large team of Chinese, Japanese, European and American collaborators. We have begun to expanding it to include Buddhist Chinese. You reach TLS via http://tls.uni-hd.de/

MCST is a database on the development of Chinese science terminology (in a relatively wide sense, going well beyond the hard sciences) during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Like TLS, it is source-based (not collated from dictionaries). Originally funded by the Volkswagen Foundation, it has been developed by a team in Göttingen and then Erlangen led by Prof. Michael Lackner with massive input from, above all, Profs. Iwo Amelung and Joachim Kurtz. You reach MCST via http://mcst.uni-hd.de/ or via the link to “related databases” in TLS.

Among the “related databases” three give access to further important on-line resources hosted by the Institute of Chinese Studies, Heidelberg. These are the
- Electronic Index to the Early Shenbao 申報 (1872-1898),
- the subject index to the Daoist Canon, and
- the index to the titles and authors in the Daoist Canon.

The Electronic Index to the Early Shenbao is a subject index to the editorial matter of the early years of the most important early Chinese-language newspaper, Shenbao. As the editorials of Wang Tao’s Hong Kong paper Xunhuan ribao were reprinted in the Shenbao during the first years – and are the only place where they survive, because the Hong Kong paper for these years is lost - , the Index includes these as well. This Index has been compiled by Andrea Janku, now at SOAS, and Nany Kim, Tuebingen/Heidelberg.

The subject index to the Daoist Canon ( Daozang. Travaux d’index) provides sourced access to a very wide range of subjects, such as names, places, temples, titles, rituals, gods, or instruments. Is has been compiled by a large team of Daozang specialists headed by Prof. Kristofer Schipper. Available only in the form of a large pack of microfiches, it is now available to researchers for relatively easy use.

The index to the titles and authors in the Daoist Canon offers a scan of Kritofer M. Schipper, Daozang suoyin. 道藏索引, Shanghai : Shanghai shudian chubanshe, 1996.