Project Lead: Prof. Thorben PELZER
Chinese Engineers Relational Database (CERD) 2.0
The Chinese Engineers Relational Database (CERD) is a research-oriented dataset that brings together biographical, institutional, and spatial information on Chinese engineers active from the late Qing through the mid-twentieth century. The project has been led by Prof. Thorben Pelzer, who continues to curate and extend the database. CERD integrates data from archival sources, government directories, and professional association records. The online interface primarily serves as a biographical lookup tool but also offers analytical resources. The database reveals shared career trajectories, spatial movement, and network connections, enabling scholars to trace patterns of expertise, mobility, and professional formation across regions and historical periods.
Introduction
CERD has been used in a growing body of academic work, including studies on technocratic governance, mobility of technical elites, and the social history of engineering in modern China. Research drawing on CERD data has helped clarify how engineers navigated state institutions, how transnational training shaped domestic industrial development, and how professional organizations contributed to the circulation of technical knowledge. These publications have demonstrated the value of prosopography—revealing clusters of collaboration, institutional bottlenecks, and pathways of influence that are not apparent from narrative sources alone.
The new online dashboard, which Pelzer rewrote from the ground up in November 2025, provides an accessible interface for users to query individual engineers, colleges, and employers, filter subsets of the data, visualise social and spatial networks, and export data selections for further research. While the interface is open to anyone who wishes to explore it, it is primarily designed for use by scholars and students who require structured data for academic inquiry. Users should therefore be aware that the interface, terminology, and available tools reflect research priorities, and not all functionalities will be immediately clear to the general audience.
Project Images on this page are credit to Prof. Thorben Pelzer.
Cover images are in the public domain, originally published in Jiaotong bu Shanghai gongye zhuanmen xuexiao xuesheng zazhi 2.2 (1918) and Dianji gongcheng 3.1 (1935).