Quietly, minor and major technological innovations have transformed the humanities fields over the past several years, and perhaps nowhere has the impact been more visible than in Asian Studies. Primary sources - from rare versions of classical texts to 1930s Shanghai nightclub music - that were once barely accessible to students overseas can now be obtained on the web, and languages that were once laboriously typeset by hand can now easily be read, designed and interpreted through software. More important, the ability to keep up with the news and make and maintain international contacts is something no longer restricted to a small group of experts, but has become an integral part of the learning experience for undergraduates and graduate students alike.

Web research cannot replace the staples of language training, travel, working with texts, reading scholarship, and writing and discussing one’s findings with fellow students and researchers, but it certainly can enhance them. The visual resources of web presentation also allow us to exploit the pictorial wealth of certain kinds of historical documents in ways that had not been possible before. The materials in this section serve as a selective introduction to both possibilities of the web for studying Chinese culture and history. It offers a guide to web resources via annotated links and a set of standalone tools and primary-source-based learning modules (the Historian's Toolkit) that will continue to expand as this site grows.