Chronology | History of the Thesaurus Linguae Sericae

The following outline history of the TLS enterprise so far is largely drawn from the TLS web site.

1988. Beginning of the compilation of a personal digitized database of classical Chinese texts by Christoph Harbsmeier, at first using the online resources of Academia Sinica Taiwan, and later the CHANT database at Chinese University of Hong Kong and other publicly available Internet resources.

1993. With much student help, the preparation of interlinear bilingual editions of pre-Buddhist Chinese texts begins here. The University of Oslo provides limited but crucial financial support for this digitization project over many years from this point onward.

1994. Work starts on the compilation of a comprehensive synonym dictionary of classical Chinese, produced as a complex formatted word-processing document for the convenience of students and as a personal record.

Jens Petersen

1997. Jens Østergaard Petersen (Copenhagen) suggests and begins to develop a FileMaker database to accommodate the increasing technological needs of the developing TLS resource.

1998. TLS becomes a cooperative project between Peking University, the University of Oslo, and a large number of other universities.

1999-2000. TLS is supported by the Institute for Advanced Study, Oslo, and one year's funding at the Norwegian professorial level is made available to Jens Petersen.

Rudolf Wagner

2001. The Chiang Ching Kuo Foundation finances the Web publication of parts of TLS to be located in the Documentation Centre of the Sinological Institute, University of Heidelberg. A $38,000 grant is made available to be used in its entirety to support the programming work of Jens Petersen under the administration of Rudolf Wagner, of the Department of Chinese at the University of Heidelberg.

2003. Christoph's son Theodor Willibald Harbsmeier, who had been home schooled in Latin and Greek since the age of ten, joins the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae project at Munich, and produces among others the articles for naso, pubertas, rhubarb, and rarus.

2004-2005. TLS is supported by the Swedish Institute for Advanced Study in the Social Sciences at Uppsala.

2006. The cooperation of Taeko and Bruce Brooks is secured on the chronology side of TLS. Their datings for the pre-Buddhist are added to the database late in 2007.