Moving scene As movable type gained wider use,
woodblock-printing was relegated to elaborate frontispieces,
or kuchi-e. The above scene from Ozaki Koyo's Konj iki
yasha (The Gold Demon) shows the hero spurning his
former fiancée, who had jilted him for a wealthier man.

With the opening of the Chang-Lin Tien Center for East Asian Studies this fall, Berkeley’s massive East Asian Library collections will be reunited for the first time in decades. Numbering more than 900,000 volumes, Berkeley’s collection is one of the three largest in the country, as well as being among the oldest, dating back to the end of the 1800s. Until now, though, it has never been housed in a building designed just for it, as the C.V. Starr East Asian Library will be.

In 1872, just four years after the university’s founding, Edward Tompkins, a perspicacious San Francisco lawyer, endowed the first chair for the study of Asian languages and literature to help prepare California for a growing trade with the East. As the department grew, it accreted written works—sometimes steadily through exchanges with Asian institutions, sometimes by great leaps as private libraries were donated to the university. By the mid-1930s, Berkeley’s East Asian collection was the most extensive this side of Chicago. And in 1947, for the first time, Berkeley’s collection was consolidated officially as the East Asiatic Library (renamed East Asian Library in 1991) and given the building that had previously been Boalt Hall. As the collection continued to expand, however, it was no longer possible to house it all within a single space.

Although plans for a new, dedicated building were considered, it wasn’t until Chancellor Chang-Lin Tien’s enthusiasm provided the necessary impetus in the mid-1990s that the project moved forward. The new C.V. Starr East Asian Library (named for Cornelius Vander Starr ’52, whose Starr Foundation made the first major donation toward the library’s building) will not only reunite the East Asian collections, it will merge them with the Center for Chinese Studies Library.

Yu was here Successful young candidates for the
civil service wrote their names on this temple
pagoda in Xi'an to celebrate. Over the centuries, the
tradition expanded to the newly promoted and,
finally, drunken tourists. A rubbing of the stone
lintel shows the variety in quality (and destruction
of the original reliefs) that accumulated between the
7th and 17th centuries.

To mark the occasion, Heydey Books has published Impressions of the East by Deborah Rudolph, senior editor at the East Asian Library. The book presents selections from the library’s rare book collection, highlighting each work’s unique place in the technological or cultural development of publishing in Asia.

—Adapted from Impressions of the East, Deborah Rudolph