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The world moves fast. Daybreak keeps you up-to-date.
Enjoy everything you need to know to stay informed — on campus and off — in this digestible, efficient podcast. Daybreak is produced by Maya Mukherjee '27, Twyla Colburn '27, Sheryl Xue '28 under the 149th Managing Board of The Daily Princetonian. The theme music was composed and performed by Ed Horan, and the cover art is by Mark Dodici.
For the Daily Princetonian, I’m Vitus Larrieu and I’m Maya Mukherjee. You’re listening to Daybreak.
This week, The Daily Princetonian took a look at the role of Asian students on campus, through examining both their history at Princeton and current presence.
Today, Daybreak decided to take a deep dive into the East Asian Library and the Gest Collection, which contains hundreds of thousands of pieces of Chinese, Japanese and Korean Literature. We’ll investigate its past, from the collection’s acquisition to the establishment of the East Asian Studies program, look at its present place in the campus community, and consider its future expansion. Listen in.
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If you’ve ever wandered up to the third floor of Jones Hall from Frist Campus Center, you may have encountered the East Asian Library. With a few rows of desks and bookshelves, it doesn’t match the size of Princeton’s better known libraries, like Firestone and Lewis.
But, at Princeton, there’s nothing quite l ike it — an entire library dedicated to one region of the world. So, why does Princeton have one? And how did a school in New Jersey acquire hundreds of thousands of artifacts from the opposite side of the world?
Heijdra: Hi i’m Dr. Martin Heijdra and I’m the director of the East Asian Library
Dr. Martin Heijdra has worked at Princeton for the past 4 decades and is the preeminent expert on the library and the Gest Collection, so we sat down with him to answer those questions.
Heijdra: I was actually a graduate student here in Princeton and stayed on. So, from, I came here in 1983. I believe 1988, I started working for the library as the Chinese Studies librarian, and I'm not completely sure when perhaps, something like 7, 6, 7, 8 years ago, I became the director.
The library's current collection is built around the initial acquisition of the Gest collection in 1936.
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Okay, just to clarify, we’ve been calling this the “Gest” collection, but it’s spelled G-E-S-T. Yes, we know — confusing. So, the collection isn’t a guest holding at Princeton. It's actually named after the collector, a man named Guion Moore Gest.
Gest was an American electronics engineer. He founded the Gest Engineering Company which did business in America and Asia, so he frequently traveled between the regions.
Dr. Heijdra: He was on the ship to China, and he met somebody else called I.V. Gillis, and that person then asked, 'Have you ever tried Chinese medicine for your eyes?' That is when he decided ‘hey, the West should know a little bit more about Chinese technology.’
Gest suffered from glaucoma and was interested in East Asian literature primarily due to the potentially healing medical knowledge contained inside. Commander Irvin Van Gorder Gillis, or I.V. Gillis, was an officer in the Navy with a special interest in Japan and China. After their chance meeting, Gest commissioned Gillis to acquire medical books, starting the Gest Collection.
Dr. Heijdra: He decided to put money aside to buy Chinese books to create a collection. Gest never knew Chinese. It was I.V. Gillis, who knew Chinese. Gillis was married to a Princess so he had access to high class people who in that period in China, you know, they had lost they were no longer the ruling class. They needed money. Of course, they couldn't work because that was beneath them. So they did things like selling off some of their books was one way of surviving. And so he was well connected to take advantage of that. And so for a very short time, basically in 10 years the original collection was collected.
As it turns out, Princeton was not the first home of the collection.
Dr. Heijdra: It was first in McGill, in Canada.
McGill University acquired the collection in 1926. But, within a few short years, the Great Depression hit. By 1929, Gest lost most of his money. On top of that, McGill no longer had the means to sustain such a large collection. So, Gest began searching for other universities that could house his collection, but most in the U.S. and Canada were uninterested.
Heijdra: What finally made the difference is that the Rockefeller Institute was very interested in developing medicine in China… they develop a scheme that collection was bought partly by Rockefeller, and partly by the Institute of Advanced Study. They weren’t the institute was planning at that moment to expand into East Asia. So the Bogut and the collection, plus the librarian, naturally Swan, one of the very first female PhDs in Chinese studies… she came with a collection to Princeton, to the institute. And the whole idea was at that moment that, you know, the Institute used Princeton library as their library… and the hope was that a department will develop around it.
Though the Institute for Advanced Study had acquired the materials, it lacked the space or resources to properly curate the collection, or even purchase new additions. This resulted in an agreement with Princeton University to house the collection. For many years, the collection was housed in the basement of a commercial building on Nassau street, mostly inaccessible to students. Dr. Nancy Lee Swan, who managed the collection from its beginnings in McGill, described the basement's conditions unfavorably, mentioning sweltering temperatures and that the roof had sprung a leak in a letter to Gest in 1937. Her dedication to the library, in spite of very little funding from Gest or the Institute for Advanced Studies and a complete lack of pay for 2 years, was evident. She continued to pursue donations for the collection until Gest and I.V. Gillis died in 1948, when she retired from her curation position. Her years of custodial work had left the collection perfectly preserved and ready for students when the East Asian Studies department was founded in the late 1950s.
Today, the East Asian Library is on the third and fourth floors of Frist Campus Center's West Wing and Jones Hall, which is physically adjoined to Frist. Because Frist is better known as a center for campus life, it's easy to think that the East Asian Library was added to the building at a later date. But actually, it's the other way around.
Dr Heijdra: Why is the Frist Campus Center built around us? Because we were actually first. So we were here and basically first so and it is not just us, the East Asian department is downstairs. When you see, you know, the food court and all that is all new. So we were always there. And yes, you know, we were there were no other parts on campus, they could move us to because we are pretty large.
Currently, the East Asian Library contains a comprehensive archive of works ranging from Japanese collections in premodern history, Chinese literature in philosophy and religion, as well as volumes of Korean monographs and journals. Each collection features an impressive number of archival content, with 425,000 volumes of Chinese books, 163,000 volumes of Japanese books, and 14,000 volumes of Korean books. When we added all of their collections together, we found they had over 750,000 volumes of literature in their collections.
Dr. Heijdra: “We are one of the major collections, I would say outside of East Asia with especially Chinese. You know, Japanese has come later, Korean even much later, but we are one of the major collections… We have one of the major collections of printed books before the 17th century. But the other part is, we have also great electronic database collections.
Beyond the deep archives offered by the East Asian Library and the Gest Collection, the library's space on the third floor of Frist serves as a hub for students to study or peruse the literature. We spoke with a student who likens the East Asian Library to a second home.
Stephanie: My name is Stephanie Oh. I'm a sophomore, I'm majoring in computer science with a minor in Asian American Studies.
Stephanie: Last year, I took an East Asian History course. And also, I was taking a Korean language track. So I spent a lot of time at Frist, especially near the East Asian Library. So during a lot of my downtime, I would go there to study or just to like, peruse the books. So yeah, I spent a lot of time around that area.
The East Asian Library, I've noticed, has a very quiet ambience. There's a very calm vibe, and no one talks. So I find that really nice to study in first of all, and also I feel like it's really exciting to explore, because, first of all, it's really accessible because it's in Frist. And when I was exploring that area, I found a lot of like, contemporary books written by Asian authors, which I'm really into. I also felt that this library had a lot of, like, books that I would read in my leisure time, rather than, like, academic writing, which I thought was really exciting, because I really like reading.
As Stephanie mentioned, in recent years, the library has evolved past an archive of East Asian literature and into a space for students from all academic backgrounds. As its use has evolved, so has its methods of acquiring new content, including contemporary works.
Dr. Heijdra:
Even if it's not currently being studied, we are basically thinking well, but in 20 years, somebody will want to have this material.
… We have room of thinking of the future. And of course, that's a little bit what we think might happen and what we think might be needed. But we do also collect for the future.
… We already bought a collection of knitting, women's knitting books.
… Traditionally, there were books like that in China.
… So a collection like this, if you can get it, yes, we would do it. And that doesn't mean that right now there is somebody working on that. But we want to be the place where somebody would come and these things happen constantly.
So, a collection founded a century ago by an engineer seeking to fix his vision, will only continue to grow.
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Next time you’re in Frist to pick up a package or meal, be sure to pay the East Asian Library a visit. The trek up to the third floor could be worth it to dust off a book from historical archives, take in its serenely quiet environment, or read a modern novel from their growing collection. Regardless of what you do there, take time to explore one of Princeton’s hidden gems of knowledge and history.
That’s all for Daybreak today.
Today’s episode was written by Maya Mukherjee, Caleb Park, Lina Kim and me, sound engineered by me, and produced under the 147th managing board of the ‘Prince.’ Daniel Jung contributed to reporting this episode. Our theme was composed by Ed Horan, Class of ’22. For The Daily Princetonian, I’m Vitus Larrieu and I’m Maya Mukherjee. Have a wonderful day.