Quantitative Analyses of The Religious Book Market in Qing China Based on CRTA Data
Quantitative Analyses of The Religious Book Market in Qing China Based on CRTA Data
The CRTA open-access database (https://crta.info/wiki/Main_Page) has, per January 2026, descriptions of nearly 6,000 editions of religious texts, mostly for the 1550-1940 period. This corpus, which will keep expanding continuously, already allows for pilot surveys of quantitative approach to this literature. In this Quantitative History Webinar, Vincent Goossaert of École Pratique des Hautes Études will introduce the nature of the data and present some of the ways in which mapping this corpus can give us new insights about late imperial religious print culture. It will look, among other things, as genres, authorship, types of publishing institutions, and geographical and temporal distribution. In a second part, the webinar will focus on a particular subset of the data, therefore books produced through spirit-writing, and present a more focused analysis of this dataset.
Discussant: Jiechen Hu, Associate Professor, Department of Religious Studies, School of Philosophy, Fudan University
Date: February 5, 2026
Time: 16:00 – 17:30
16:00 (Hong Kong/Beijing/Singapore)
03:00 (New York)|00:00 (Los Angeles)|08:00 (London)|17:00 (Tokyo)|19:00 (Sydney)
Language: English
The Quantitative History (QH) Webinar Series aims to provide researchers, teachers, and students with an online intellectual platform to keep up to date with the latest research in the field, promoting the dissemination of research findings and interdisciplinary use of quantitative methods in historical research. The QH Webinar Series, now entering its sixth year, is co-organized by the Centre for Quantitative History at the HKU Business School and the International Society for Quantitative History in partnership with the Hong Kong Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences. The Series is now substantially supported by the Areas of Excellence (AoE) Scheme from the Research Grants Council of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, China (Project No. [AoE/B-704/22-R]).
Conveners: Professors Zhiwu Chen & Chicheng Ma
