The Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Asian History is a dynamic, innovative, comprehensive, self-reflexive online research encyclopedia, which provides access to state-of-the-art research and also links readers to the full range of internet resources for research and teaching, including audio, visual, video materials, digitized archives, and other primary sources.

Contributors to the ORE are professional historians, independent scholars as well as faculty at institutions around the world. Their essays provide a comprehensive overview of each subject and a brief historiography that will indicate how scholarship has been developing and locate their own contribution. Authors will update their entries in response to feedback from readers and new developments in the field.

The ORE is therefore not only a guide to scholarly work. It is an organized, interactive, ongoing, effort to advance scholarship in the internet age, when historical understandings of Asia are changing dramatically. By collecting scholarship on all dimensions of Asian History, the ORE seeks to overcome the anachronistic, disorderly, territorial and disciplinary fragmentation of Asian History.