Diachronic Corpuses of Overseas Chinese Letters

The time range of the dataset extends from the late Qing Dynasty to after 1978 and is divided into six fine-grained time periods. Geographically, letters mainly come from the southern Fujian region of China and Chinese settlements in Southeast Asian countries.

In terms of spatial resolution, the dataset distinguishes between overseas shipping destinations and domestic receiving destinations, but not all letters fully record this information. The corpus is manually entered by graduate students majoring in linguistics and rigorously proofread to ensure accuracy. During the input process, all traditional Chinese characters are converted to simplified Chinese characters to maintain consistency, and obvious non text markers such as file codes and serial numbers are removed.