Over 30.000 pages of new material have been added to the digital collection of unofficial poetry journals from China at Leiden University Libraries, the online archive of a groundbreaking cultural tradition of our time. Key agents of emancipation and renewal after the Mao era, these journals are influential but hard to find. Leiden University Libraries is making its unique collection of this material freely accessible online, for viewing and downloading. In addition to journals, the collection also contains unofficially published books, both individual collections and multiple-author anthologies.

Click here for a web lecture on unofficial poetry publishing in China, with abundant visuals.

Click here for a video tutorial on using the digital collection.

Read on for more on the latest upgrade of the digital collection.

The underground

This latest upgrade contains more gems of work that is rooted in underground poetry scenes in various places in 1960 and 1970s China. These include monumental works by Huang Xiang and Ya Mo, out of Guizhou province; the Wild Grass Poetry anthology (野草诗选) by Chen Mo, Sun Lu and others, out of Sichuan province; and early individual collections by Mang Ke, Bei Dao, Jiang He, and Duoduo, out of Beijing (with this edition of Mang Ke’s collection bound in the Today (今天) journal cover). Wild Grass Poetry in particular, and the community that produced it, have gone almost entirely unstudied inside and outside of China. An outline of the contours of this group is found in in Michael Day’s China’s Second World of Poetry: The Sichuan Avant-Garde, 1982-1992 (see note 50 on p47–48). Those who want to know more can now access over 400 pages’ worth of Wild Grass poetry, with an introduction by Chen Mo.

Comrade poetry

Another highlight is the 2001 Internet Poetry anthology (2001年度网络诗歌) edited by Mu Cao, China’s first openly gay poet. The inside cover is graced by the expression “comrade poetry” (同志诗歌), meaning gay poetry or queer poetry. This sits alongside exhortations to “care for the underclass” (关注底层)—which Mu Cao knows from close by, as one of China’s countless rural-to-urban migrant workers—and to “care for your humanity” (关注人性). By no means all of the poetry in this volume qualifies as gay or queer, but the anthology sounds a note of subversion and transgression throughout and linkage to the LGBTQ+ community is visible in the list of websites at the end of the book. Most if not all are long gone, but who knows what the Wayback Machine may have salvaged.

Migrant worker literature

In addition, our digital holdings in migrant worker poetry, aka battler poetry (打工诗歌), now include collections by Xiao Hai, Li Ruo, and Xu Liangyuan, all members of the Literature Group that has convened since 2014 at the Migrant Workers Home in Picun, on the outskirts of Beijing; and a set of issues of New Worker Literature (新工人文学), launched at the Home in 2019 with Fan Yusu as editor-in-chief. Poetry remains the signature genre of unofficial publishing in China today, but we have erred on the side of generosity for publications that feature other genres as well. This includes the newly added New Worker Literature and various other publications by the Picun Migrant Workers Home that have been part of the collection since 2022, such as The New Worker (新工人), The New Worker Quarterly (新工人季刊), and other works in the Migrant Workers Home’s Literature Group series.

A community archive by proxy

The collection as a whole now contains an array of works from over four decades of unofficial poetry publishing in the PRC. It documents the creativity and energy of the many poets and editors who have joined this DIY literary tradition, starting from the days of the Cultural Revolution. Ever since the early 1990s, Chinese poets, editors, and scholars have played a key role in helping us build both the the physical collection (accessible in the Leiden University Libraries Special Collections reading rooms) and the digital collection. They have donated and contextualized the material, made introductions to grow the network, and publicized our efforts on social media. They continue to do so today, as memories are sparked by long-lost publications in writers and readers who have, in some cases, not seen this work for decades.

All this makes the collection something like a community archive by proxy, dependent on its community and persistent in service to that community and to those who want to learn about it. Accordingly, in addition to unofficial (Chinese) poetry publishing per se, interest in the project—from poets and poetry aficionados, librarians, translators, students and teachers and researchers—is also motivated by the way this collaboration works in practice: from communications with the community to technical questions raised by material that does not fit regular library classifications, and so on.

As the collection grows and the conversation with the community expands, it becomes ever clearer that the collection can lay no claim to anything resembling completeness or full systematicity. As is true for many archives, its development over time is shaped by all manner of contingent factors such as personal networks, the positionality of the various actors involved, and chance. That said, the collection is representative of the tradition it helps safeguard and disseminate. It offers a wealth of material that allows users to discern key dimensions of unofficial poetry from China.

Acknowledgments

The help and guidance of Chinese poets, editors, and scholars has been invaluable throughout. The digital collection was first established with pilot funding from Leiden University Libraries (UBL) in 2019. A generous gift from Dr. Freerk Heule has since enabled it to truly take off. For expanding the digital collection we have benefited greatly from collaboration with our colleagues at the Fudan University library. The actual building, maintenance, and publicizing of the project at UBL is made possible by the support and critical feedback of many UBL colleagues including Aurea Sison, Mick Rubingh, Liesbeth van Wijk, Erik Weber, Guus Janssen, the Special Collections team, and the Management Team.

Prospects

The next upgrade of the digital collection is planned for 2024. Beyond that, further additions will be made in due course, depending on funding. If you can help us find new material and/or potential sponsors, or if you would like to support the project yourself, please get in touch.

Read on for some tips on accessing the material and a full list of the material that is now available online. Enjoy!

Sincerely,

Maghiel van Crevel and Marc Gilbert

TIPS FOR ACCESSING THE DIGITAL COLLECTION

The material is best viewed on a computer. Functionality on mobile devices is limited. Loading the images can take some time.

Click here if you prefer a video tutorial, or read on.

The easiest way to access the digitized journals is from the collection page. To see the full set, click ‘Show all items’ and then sort by ‘title’. Click the image of the journal of your choice and check the ‘Year’ dropdown menu to find the available issues per year (see this example). Alternatively, to go to a given journal directly from the collection page, input its full title in the search field (use simplified characters or disaggregated pinyin).

Once you are ‘inside’ the individual issue of your choice, there are various options for viewing (single page, two pages, thumbnail grid), for enlarging, and for downloading at the issue or page level. For an overview of all available issues of the journal in question, use the IIIF Advanced Viewer (see below).

For optimal viewing and enlarging, especially for material that is difficult to read or other questions to do with the materiality of the journal in question, click on ‘IIIF Advanced Viewer’ (tutorial here) and make sure to check out the various options for image manipulation (top left corner). The material may need a few seconds to come into full focus. The Viewer is available from inside individual issues, but also at the level of a journal’s title record. This will give you a full overview of the title in question (see this example; open the ‘Fei Fei 非非’ folder and click on the year and the issue of your choice).

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TITLES CURRENTLY AVAILABLE ONLINE

The material that is currently available online is listed below loosely by founding date (journals and book series) or year of publication (individual collections and multiple-author anthologies). Some of the years are approximations.

《今天》（1978）http://hdl.handle.net/1887.1/item:3166766

《今天丛书》（1978–1980）http://hdl.handle.net/1887.1/item:3570680

《次生林》（1982）http://hdl.handle.net/1887.1/item:3166777

《高原诗辑》（1982）http://hdl.handle.net/1887.1/item:3166778

《小站》海子著（1983）http://hdl.handle.net/1887.1/item:3166763

《海上》（1985）http://hdl.handle.net/1887.1/item:3166764

《大陆》（1985）http://hdl.handle.net/1887.1/item:3570681

《他们》（1985）http://hdl.handle.net/1887.1/item:3166762

《现代诗内部交流资料》（1985）http://hdl.handle.net/1887.1/item:3166761

《中国当代实验诗歌》（1985）http://hdl.handle.net/1887.1/item:3166765

《南十字星诗刊》（1985）http://hdl.handle.net/1887.1/item:3570691

《新诗潮诗集》老木编（1985）http://hdl.handle.net/1887.1/item:3283978