[3] The library's holdings were expanded into Japanese and Korean after World War II to form one of the largest collections in North America.
Hu Shih, a prominent scholar who served as curator 1950–1952, noted that the collection, which "began as a hobby and developed into an investment, soon became a burden to a founder".
[7] Gillis' wife was a Manchu princess, and his web of personal relations led him to the Guangxu emperor's tutor and other high officials with collections of useful volumes.
[4] Gest suffered from glaucoma, and Gillis suggested that he try an eye medicine which was a specialty the Ma family of Dingxian, Hebei province, who kept a shop in the capital.
[9] Probably the most important single work in the history of Chinese medicine, Li Shizhen's Bencao gangmu (The Compendium of Materia Medica), for instance, was published in the 16th century, but the collection's edition is a 19th-century reprint.
Gillis had worked in American naval intelligence, and enjoyed using his training to demonstrate to his friends how to determine that the same person had used different typewriters by the similar weight of their strokes.
[11] Gillis catalogued the books, which meant that they were ready to shelve upon arrival in North America, and he even crated and shipped the furniture and wall decorations that were used first at McGill and then at Princeton.
[12] In 1928 Gest hired the third person responsible for the early buildup of the collection, Nancy Lee Swann, a returned missionary who was then finishing her doctoral degree in Chinese studies at Columbia University.
Swann welcomed prominent sinologists and authors such as Berthold Laufer and L. Carrington Goodrich, and Pearl S. Buck, as well as applying for research funds with the American Council of Learned Societies.
After 1934, McGill could no longer pay Swann's salary or provide quarters for the collection and closed the Chinese studies program that had been started only a few years earlier.
[13] [2] In contrast to the spacious and comfortable rooms in Toronto, the collection was now housed in what Swann called "makeshift quarters" in the basement of 20 Nassau Street, a storefront building owned by the university.
Dr. Swann, the only full-time staff member, had responsibility for all aspects of the library, from cataloging to checking out books to guiding visiting scholars through the collection.
[19] During World War II and the early post-war years, the university established programs in Chinese and Japanese studies, which required increased library holdings.
[20] Princeton faculty member Frederick W. Mote guided further development on the Chinese side, and Marius Jansen led a major expansion of Japanese holdings.