We have released an update of the public China Government Employee Dataset-Qing (CGED-Q) Jinshenlu for years 1760-1798, 1850-1864 and 1900-1912 that includes personal identifiers for officials that can be used to link the records of the same official across different editions. The workflow for generating these identifiers is described in our 2026 Historical Methods paper. We hope that this will facilitate use of the public CGED-Q by researchers who may not be able to do record linkage on their own.
The updated releases are available at our Harvard Dataverse and HKUST Dataspace sites.
We detail the issues that can arise in nominative linkage in historical Chinese records in an earlier paper introducing an approach to linkage that was a precursor to the one described in the 2026 paper.