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[MUSIC PLAYING] GORDON BARRETT: So my name is Gordon Barrett and I am a departmental lecturer in Modern Chinese History and Politics at the University of Oxford.

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So 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 a teaching resource but also as a research tool.

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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, and in an easily usable and transferable format as a PDF. Students can print it out, bring in copies on their own. When we're going through the texts,

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for example, they can be highlighting or making notes directly on the text itself. They can manipulate it and work with it that way. Or else if they're more comfortable working with it

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on the computer, they can do that as well, using their PDF reader. One of the excellent things about China, Trade, Politics & Culture for students who are just starting off on a research

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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 that goes beyond what a lot of other databases have.

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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

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of the introductory essays. For example, Robert Bickers wrote an excellent one on the China Maritime customs service that sets the scene very, very well

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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, for example, just to get a sense of what types of material

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is in there. And I think the fact that each item has within it listings of particular keywords that go along with it, I think, are quite useful.

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So it'll be helpful for 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.

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So I think one of the advantages of using primary source material early on in an undergraduate career is that it-- well, one, it allows them to look more closely

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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.

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And then, 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

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and what they can use. So the interesting thing about James Cantlie's biography of Sun Yat Sen is that actually my decision, I use that in the Modern Chinese Survey course the second time

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that I taught it, actually, as a result of a student's research project. She had found it in China, Trade, Politics & Culture and had said, oh, I'd like to use this.

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Can I use this for my project? So yeah, it's a great source. You should go ahead with it. And after it came out of the research project,

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I thought, actually, this is a useful source that might be good for other students to look at as well. Sun Yat Sen and The Awakening of China was published essentially concurrently

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with the revolution. I think it was published first in 1912. And the man, primary author on it, was someone named James Cantlie, who

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was a doctor who had supervised Sun Yat Sen during his medical studies. Cantlie also knew Sun Yat Sen from later, because of an incident in China involving

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the Chinese legation and Sun Yat Sen getting into trouble in London. And so this was a biography that's very much written by a friend and supporter,

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very much pushing this image of Sun Yat Sen as the father of the new Chinese Republic and a new nation. So I ended up introducing it as part of one of our seminars

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when we were looking at the republican revolution. That allowed us to talk a bit about representations of China in the Western world and the tropes and ideas, and again, also more specifically, what

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Sun Yat Sen 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,

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there's some inserts, some reviews, and also the fact that it was part of the London Missionary Society library. And so that was an opportunity to talk

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with students further about, OK, what does this mean as an object? What can we think about the transmission and use of ideas and that kind of thing within the seminar context as well.

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There is such a breadth of material. I think one of the exciting things is that it isn't just one collection or one type of document that is a simple stand out,

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

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that can be one part of it. But that material and the material associated with that can be used in many, many, many different ways and develop many different types of projects.

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So I think that's fantastic. I think, I mean, the other thing as well is having also material that's not just from collections in the UK but also places like New Zealand just

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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, the ability to download it, to zoom in

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close, to minutia. 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.

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