User:MapleSoy/sandbox2

The Biographical Dictionary of Chinese Women is a multi-volume reference work providing biographies of notable Chinese women throughout history. A biographical dictionary, the series

Background
The series editors are Lily Xiao Hong Lee and A. D. Stefanowska of the University of Sydney's School of Asian Studies.

The editors' stated goal was to.

Antiquity Through Sui, 1600 B.C.E. – 618 C.E.
Antiquity Through Sui, 1600 B.C.E. - 618 C.E. was published in 2007, after the Qing Period and The Twentieth Century. It is divided in three sections: Antiquity through Zhou; Qin through Han; and Three Kingdoms through Sui.

Tang Through Ming, 618 – 1644
Published in 2012.

The Qing Period, 1644 – 1911
Biographical Dictionary of Chinese Women: The Qing Period, 1644-1911 was first published in 1998. It includes 175 entries (about one to three pages in length) by 80 scholars and translators. Clara Wing-chung Ho, a historian at Hong Kong Baptist University, edited this volume.

This was the first of the four volumes to be published. Judith T. Zeitlin, in a review in China Review International, questioned the editors' decision to divide the volumes by dynasty, "without any discussion of whether this traditional political periodization is in fact the most meaningful or useful way to conceptualize women's experience in Chinese history." She lauded the "broad coverage of occupation, class background, and geography" but noted that "perhaps unavoidably" (because of issues of sourcing), "a fair number of entries in this volume provide only insipid and disappointingly generic accounts of a subject's life and work."

In the Journal of Chinese Philosophy, reviewer Karyn Lynne Lai observed of the first volume that "in a collaborative work of this kind, the quality of the entries is somewhat variable," concluding that "nonetheless, the Biographical Dictionary is not merely the first of its kind but also an invaluable source book in its subject matter." Similarly, Norman Smith in Pacific Affairs wrote that it was "[p]aradoxically... long overdue and well before its time."

The Twentieth Century, 1912 – 2000
Biographical Dictionary of Chinese Women: The Twentieth Century, 1912-2000 was first published in 2003 by the University of Hong Kong Libraries Publications. Over 80 authors and translators contributed to this edition, which includes over 250 biographies of women from mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and overseas.