Biographies constitute the main historical record of China. The China Biographical Database (CBDB) is an important project that tackles this vast biographical material with digital technologies. With both online and offline versions, CBDB is meant to be useful for statistical, social network, and spatial analysis, as well as serving as biographical reference. Through the wide range of data it collects through mining historical texts and reference sources, CBDB offers multiple ways to examine the lives of past groups and individuals in Chinese history. The use of CBDB data for prosopographical and other types of analysis has generated important work that interprets Chinese history in new ways, and has also fostered new forms of digital humanities collaborations. This article introduces the history of the CBDB project and its methods for populating its biographical data. It also presents the ways that historians and other scholars could utilize its data for research and teaching.

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This chapter takes as its starting point the gendered nature of political communications. It uses as case studies the careers — and subsequent reputations — of two twelfth-century figures: the Southern Song general Yue Fei (d. 1142), and the Angevin minister and churchman Thomas Becket (d. 1170). Both rose from relatively humble beginnings to become powerful men, and both met violent deaths at the hands of rivals within the elite. Posthumously, they were both celebrated for specifically masculine virtues in their respective cultures. This micro-comparative study deploys the traditional Chinese dichotomy between wen (civil, cerebral) and wu (military, physical) expressions of manhood to explore the masculinities at play in their careers, their homosociality, and their reputations.

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