Ten Thousand Rooms

The Ten Thousand Rooms Project is a collaborative workspace for pre-modern textual studies being developed at Yale University with the support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Building on the Mirador Viewer developed by Stanford University, the platform allows users to upload images of manuscript, print, inscriptional, and other sources and then organize projects around their transcription, translation, and/or annotation. Both as a workspace for crowd-sourcing core textual research and as a publishing venue for scholarly contributions that are less well suited to conventional book formats, the Ten Thousand Rooms Project aims to establish an international online community committed to making the East Asian textual heritage more accessible to a wider audience.

All users are free to view projects on the site, and registered users are welcome to create their own projects and/or contribute to others’ projects (provided they do not violate the Terms of Use). If you initiate a project, you retain total control over your own project, including the ability to choose and vet project contributors.

The Principal Investigators of the Ten Thousand Rooms Project are Tina Lu and Mick Hunter of the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures at Yale. Technical development for the project is being carried out by the Web Technologies group of Yale’s Information Technologies Services (ITS).

Where can I find a spacious hall with a thousand, ten thousand rooms, A grand refuge to gladden the miens of all scholars in the cold, Unmoved by winds and falling rains, secure as a mountain? Oh! When will I get to see this house before my eyes soaring? For that I would suffer this broken hut, and die alone and frozen.

安得廣廈千萬間，大庇天下寒士俱歡顏，風雨不動安如山！嗚呼！何時眼前突兀見此屋，吾廬獨破受凍死亦足！

Du Fu 杜甫, “Song of My Cottage Unroofed by Autumn Gales” 茅屋為秋風所破歌