CBDB API FAQs

Question 1

When should I use the CBDB API skill?

Accepted Answer

Use this skill during research, data analysis, or application development involving Chinese history. It is ideal for identifying historical figures, mapping social networks (kinship/friendships), or analyzing career trajectories of officials from the 7th century BCE through the 19th century CE.

Question 2

What does the CBDB API Claude Code skill do?

Accepted Answer

This skill enables Claude Code to programmatically query the China Biographical Database (CBDB). it retrieves comprehensive biographical data, including names, dates, social relationships, and official appointments for approximately 500,000 historical Chinese figures.

Question 3

What query methods are supported by this skill?

Accepted Answer

The skill is highly flexible, supporting queries by Chinese characters, Pinyin (romanized names), or unique CBDB person IDs. It handles URL encoding automatically to ensure accurate data retrieval for complex Chinese names.

Question 4

What specific historical data can Claude retrieve with this skill?

Accepted Answer

Claude can access birth/death dates, dynastic contexts, geographic associations (places lived/visited), detailed kinship data, teacher-student relationships, and records of official government positions and literary works.

Question 5

How does this skill improve my workflow in Claude Code?

Accepted Answer

It eliminates the need to manually browse the CBDB website. Claude can directly fetch, parse, and integrate structured JSON or XML data into your project, allowing for faster data extraction and immediate use in digital humanities coding tasks.

CBDB API

CBDB API

Key Features

Use Cases

Key Features

Use Cases