A review of the First Historical Archives of China 中國第一歷史檔案館 and the National Project for the Compilation of Qing History Library 國家清史纂修工程圖書館, Beijing, China. One always sits in the reading room of the First Historical Archives with a sense of accomplishment. Just being in that space is gratifying — the space where many of the great scholars of Chinese history have sat before, and where some of the richest sources of Qing history can be found. Indeed, to be among the archival catalogs at the edge of the Forbidden City has a certain mystique that can...

A review of the National Palace Museum Library (國立故宮博物院圖書文獻館), the National Central Library (國家圖書館), and the Grand Secretariat Archives (內閣大庫檔案), Taipei, Taiwan. One of the great stories in the history of archival preservation is the removal to Taiwan of a huge number of historical documents and rare books at the end of the Chinese civil war. The losing KMT carted much of this archival material from Beijing to Nanjing and then to Chongqing before beginning evacuation to Taiwan in the 1940s. Given the meticulous preservation of all these materials,...

A two-part review of Chinese Officials in the Hung Taiji Period (1627-1643) [皇太極時期的漢官 (1627-1643)], by TSAI SUNG-YING [蔡松穎]; and The Juridical System of the Qing Dynasty in Beijing (1644-1900), by XIANGYU HU. There is a revealing exchange between the Shunzhi emperor (1644-1661) and one of his officials. It is an exchange that speaks to the historian about the contested nature of the early Qing, and exposes the indeterminacy of the institutional arrangements of the dynasty. In this conversation captured in a memorial, the vice director of sacrifices in the Board of Rites...