Technical Abstract: The Chinese germplasm collection of peanut consists of almost 6,000 accessions and contains a great amount of genetic diversity. The objectives of this research were to select and evaluate a core collection for this germplasm collection. The entire collection was first sorted by botanical type. Multivariate analysis of morphological data was then used to cluster accessions for each botanical type. Random sampling resulted in the selection of 582 accessions to form the core collection. Means for five characteristics for this core collection and for the entire collection were similar. In addition, most of the range for these variables was represented in the core collection. This suggests that this core collection is a representative sample of the entire collection and that the genetic variation expressed for these traits in the entire collection has been preserved in this core collection. Data for resistance to bacterial wilt and late leaf spot were used to evaluate the effectiveness of a two-stage core screening approach in identifying resistance in the entire collection. The results demonstrated that the core collection approach can be used to improve the efficiency of identifying genes in the entire Chinese germplasm collection.