La China de España : elaboración de un corpus digitalizado de documentos españoles sobre China de 1555 a 1900

The main objective of this article is to present the research project “China in Spain : a digitized corpus of Spanish documents on China from 1555 to 1900” (CHE), directed by doctor Dolors Folch i Fornesa, director of the Escola d'Estudis de l'Àsia Oriental (School of East Asian Studies). The main target of the CHE project has been to locate, transcribe, digitize and publish in web format an important amount of the Spanish sources on China from the 16th to the 19th century. This project –whose results can be freely consulted through a website (http://www.upf.edu/asia) created specifically to give greater diffusion of the research– has allowed and it will allow to open a multiplicity of lines of research on China focused on different knowledge areas. Throughout the research a special attention has been put into two main lines of investigation. In the first place the information that was generated from the Philippine islands: information from the governors, the members of the “cabildo” (Town Hall), the Manila High Court, or the religious orders that were implanted there. Secondly, the texts related to China that were generated and/or were published directly in China, Iberian Peninsula or Mexico. The main objective of the research has been to show these sources –especially the unpublished ones but also those which where already published but which it has been difficult to consult–, and place them at the disposal of the international community in the original language in which they were written, Spanish.