Establishment of a data bank from records of climatic disasters and anomalies in ancient Chinese documents

On the basis of a survey of the existing literature on unique ancient Chinese documents, a data bank of climatic calamities and anomalies during historical times for 68 regions of China has been established in numerical code. The stored climatic disaster and anomaly patterns include flood, drought, plagues of locust, hail, famine, unusually cold and warm spells, and harvests. In addition, records of floods and low water levels of the Yellow River and its major tributaries were stored under a special title. This paper provides an introduction to the data and data bank.