Chinese Engineers Relational Database (CERD) Bi-monthly Export

This is a bi-monthly export.

CERD is a database of engineers from the Chinese Republican period (1912–1949). CERD-Taiwan describes engineers active in the early post-war period (1945–1974). Based on various digitised historical sources, it is a prosopographic catalogue of individuals, their education and their employment, and the institutions connected with it. Most biographical events have geographical information attached to them. The data can be used freely by researchers to answer individual research questions.

Citation recommendation:

Pelzer, Thorben, et al., eds. (2021–2025). Chinese Engineers Relational Database (CERD) (Version 1.8.0). Zenodo. http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4075601.

Changelog:

1.8.0 (November 2025): Approx. 29,000 individuals, added CERD-Taiwan dataset
1.7.0 (February 2023): Approx. 17,600 individuals, two additional sources
1.6.0 (August 2022): Approx. 17,400 entries, completed sources, minor corrections, mergers, translations
1.5.0 (June 2022): Approx. 17,300 entries, added additional memberships
1.4.0 (April 2022): Approx. 16,800 entries, added additional sources, schooling
1.3.0 (February 2022): Approx. 16,500 entries, added documentation, additional memberships
1.2.0 (December 2021): Approx. 16,300 entries, added frequent CSV exports, source annotations, 5 missing minglu pages, additional association memberships
1.1.0 (October 2021): Approx. 15,700 entries, added selected association memberships
1.0.0 (August 2021): Approx. 15,400 entries [complete gongchengren minglu dataset milestone]
0.5.0 (June 2021): Approx. 13,000 entries
0.4.0 (April 2021): Approx. 10,500 entries
0.3.0 (February 2021): Approx. 7,500 entries, as well as various corrections, mergers, translations
0.2.0 (December 2020): Approx. 5,000 entries, as well as various corrections, mergers, translations
0.1.0 (October 2020): Early version with approx. 3,000 entries

Online Access:

https://dhi.ust.hk/cerd/