Abstract
The China Biographical Database (CBDB) is the largest prosopographical database for the study of Chinese history. We use regular expressions and neural network models to systematically harvest data from primary and secondary sources and employ an entity-relationship model to organize our data. As a relational database with both online and offline versions, CBDB provides freely accessible, structured data for macroscopic, quantitative studies of premodern China. The data in CBDB is continuously disambiguated and readily formatted for statistical, social network, and spatial analyses, and also has value for tagging named entities in historical texts and contextualizing other data collections.