A review of the Harvard Yenching Library Rare Books Collection, Harvard University, Cambridge MA, USA. The Harvard-Yenching Library holds more than 1.3 million volumes. This review won’t bore readers with the details of each collection, which are introduced on the library’s website. Instead, my aim is to convince the reader to consider a visit to the library and its world-class rare book collection. Although most of the library’s holdings are listed in fully searchable catalogs, there are many discoveries awaiting even cursory exploration. Our persisting ignorance of the Harvard-Yenching...

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...

Will you be doing research in/on China this Summer? Before you head off, be sure to brush up with our Fresh from the Archives series! And if you would like to contribute a new article, or submit an update for any of these institutions below, please contact us via archives@dissertationreviews.org. Academia Historica, Taipei (Nele Glang) Beijing Municipal Archives, Beijing (Arunabh Ghosh) Central Academy of Fine Arts Library, Beijing (Vivian Li) Chongqing Municipal Archives, Chongqing (Nicole Barnes) First Historical Archives of China, Beijing (Macabe Keliher) Foreign Ministry Archives of the...

A review of the Fujian Provincial Archives 福建省档案馆, Fuzhou, China. I am currently in China doing research for a dissertation on the history of drug smuggling and maritime state-building in Fujian province during the late Qing and Republican periods (ca. 1830-1940). After spending the autumn in Beijing reading rooms, I chose to spend January in Fuzhou to test the waters at the Fujian provincial archives. I had spent a week there two years ago at an earlier stage in my graduate career and was able to access a few interesting criminal cases from the 1930s, but it was blisteringly hot and...

A review of the Shanghai Municipal Archives, Bund Location  (上海市档案馆外滩新馆), Shanghai, People’s Republic of China. I recently spent five months (September 2012 – January 2013) at the Bund location of the Shanghai Municipal Archives (SMA) researching the Catholic Church and its affiliated charities, schools, orphanages, and hospitals in mid-twentieth-century Shanghai. I would highly recommend a visit to this location for anyone working on Chinese history since 1927, although there are documents that date from before the Nanjing Decade, particularly from the foreign...

A review of Jiangsu Provincial Archives 江苏省档案馆, Nanjing, Jiangsu and Wuxi Municipal Archives 无锡市档案馆, Wuxi, Jiangsu. I’m writing this after a day spent in the Jiangsu Provincial Archives, my third visit in five years. While I’m happy to have come away with a few precious sheets of photocopies, I’m concerned at how anything that might be described as a personal file is suddenly inaccessible. Still, given the long and increasingly irate discussion that an elderly Chinese gentleman was having with the archivists about the need to seek permission from the work unit...

A review of Central Academy of Fine Arts Library (Zhongyang meishu xueyuan tushuguan, 中央美术学院图书馆), Beijing, China. As one of the most prestigious art academies in China and the academic home of prominent modern and contemporary artists such as Xu Beihong, Wu Zuoren, Zhang Huan, and Xu Bing since its establishment in 1950, the Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA) has had a constant presence during my graduate training in Chinese modern art. CAFA resulted from the merger of the department of fine arts at North China University (华北大学) and the National Art School in Beiping...

A review of the Nanjing Municipal Archives (南京市档案馆) (Nanjing, Jiangsu, China). In June 2012, I conducted archival research in Nanjing for two weeks for my dissertation on women’s political participation in wartime China (1937-1949). I was looking for documents about the women’s political societies and networks right before the war in Nanjing – thus I chose to visit the Nanjing Municipal Archives [website]. These archives hold significant documents on Nanjing city during the Republican era, the Japanese occupation period and after (roughly from late 1937 to 1949) and the...

A special report on the National Archives of India for China Scholars It was my involvement in a project called “Source Materials on Modern China in the National Archives of India” that first brought me to the National Archives of India (NAI) in New Delhi [website]. The project is directed by Dr. Madhavi Thampi of the Department of East Asian Studies, University of Delhi, and is affiliated with the Institute of Chinese Studies (ICS), New Delhi. The goal of the project has been to compile a comprehensive list of every document in the Archives related to China. While working through the...

A review of Reading Room for Ordinary Old Books, National Library of China (普通古籍阅览室, 国家图书馆), Beijing. I have spent several weeks over each of the last few summers at the ‘Reading Room for Ordinary Old Books’ (普通古籍阅览室), the main access point for the National Library of China’s (国家图书馆) holdings of nineteenth and early twentieth century materials, pre-1949 local gazetteers and genealogies. Parts of the collection have been reproduced in collectanea widely available outside of China, but the Reading Room has a great deal of material that is...

A review of the Republican-era Collections, Nanjing Library (南京图书馆，民国文献阅览室), Nanjing, China. In June 2012, I conducted archival research in Nanjing for my PhD dissertation on women’s political participation in wartime China (1937-1949). Apart from visiting the archives, I also explored the Republican-era (1911-1949) collections (民国文献 minguo wenxian) held in the Nanjing Library [website], in order to perform a comprehensive review of the historical materials published during the war years. First established in 1907 as the South Yangtze Region Library by the...

Reflections on 5 collections in Japan essential for China scholars - National Diet Library (国立国会図書館). Tokyo, Japan [website] - Waseda University Library (早稲田大学図書館). Tokyo, Japan [website] - Tōyō Bunko, or The Oriental Library (東洋文庫). Tokyo, Japan [website] - Diplomatic Archives of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan (外交史料館), Tokyo Japan (Previously named the Diplomatic Record Office) - National Archives of Japan (国立公文書館). Tokyo, Japan [website] My first few days in Japan this time around were pretty rough: I’d just come off a...

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 review of the Yunnan Provincial Archives (云南省档案馆) and the Yunnan Provincial Library (云南省图书馆), Kunming, China. Archival research in Yunnan requires time, patience, and a lot of paper. Both the Yunnan Provincial Archives and the Yunnan Provincial Library are assets for scholars of local history, although they limit the use and reproduction of their holdings. During six months of dissertation research on biomedicine and public health in wartime Yunnan, I found the Provincial Library to be more open to access, while the Provincial Archives remain a unique local source of...

A review of the Chongqing Municipal Archives (重庆市档案馆), Chongqing, China. In 2010-11, I spent twelve months conducting research at the Chongqing Municipal Archives for my dissertation on public health in Chongqing during the war with Japan. These archives hold all Republican and Communist-era documents on Chongqing. They also have some Qing documents, though most of these are at the famed Ba County Archives, housed at the Sichuan Provincial Archives in Chengdu. I consulted the records of the Chongqing Bureau of Public Health, Bureau of Police, Municipal Government, Bureau of Social...

A review of the Zhejiang Provincial Library (浙江省图书馆), Hangzhou, China. My research interests focus on the history of medicine and health in twentieth-century China. I have just completed my research of barefoot doctors in Chinese villages. It is a study of Hangzhou Prefecture (in Zhejiang Province), and is based on oral interviews, local archives, and documents. The main thread of discussion is the development of medicine and health since the middle 1940s in Jiang Village, Yuhang County, which is now a suburban area under the jurisdiction of Hangzhou City. Since 2003, I have been...

A review of the Shijiazhuang Municipal Archives (石家莊市檔案館), Shijiazhuang, China. In late March 2011, I spent four days in Shijiazhuang to conduct research in the Shijiazhuang Municipal Archives and in the Hebei Provincial Archives. The trip was unfortunately very brief as I had to schedule it in between terms and teaching commitments. Fortunately, the archivists at the Shijiazhuang Municipal Archive were very friendly and helpful. In two days, I could thus access and copy more materials than I had often been able to during longer archive visits to Shanghai and Beijing in 2008 and...

A review of Academia Historica (國史館), Taipei, Taiwan. My research explores Sino-German diplomatic relations between 1938 and 1944, with a particular focus on relations after the outbreak of the Second World War in Europe. The proposed research in Taiwan will take up to 3 months, from January 2012 until the end of March 2012. Further research will then take me to Nanjing and Germany, for 3 months respectively. In Taiwan, my focus was primarily on Academia Historica’s archive [website here], which holds a major part of the Foreign Office papers, especially on diplomatic relations....

A review of the Shaanxi Provincial Archives (陕西省档案馆), the Shaanxi Provincial Library (陕西省图书馆), and the Xi’an Municipal Archives  (西安市档案馆), Xi’an, China. This review, like the archives in Xi’an, is a bit scattershot. During the 09’-10’ academic year, I pursued archival research on late Qing and Republican Shaanxi in Xi’an. Since my research spanned the period between 1860 and 1922, I assumed that both the municipal and provincial archives would be reasonable places to begin my work. I quickly discovered that the Municipal Archives were an iron...

A review of the Sichuan Provincial Archives (四川省档案馆), Chengdu, China. The Sichuan Provincial Archives comprise three administrative buildings nestled inside of a closed-off living community whose concrete lao yang fang apartments were allotted to archive workers in the era of the work unit (danwei). The administrative offices have been the subject of extensive renovations over the last two years. The main building, closest to the main entrance on Huapaifang Street (花牌坊街), was the original site of the reading room, which has since moved to two subsequent locations in the last...

A review of the Foreign Ministry Archives of the People’s Republic of China (外交部档案馆), Beijing, China. The Foreign Ministry archives of the People’s Republic of China [website here] first opened to the public in 2004 and continues to declassify and release documents periodically. As of August 2011, documents from 1949 to 1965 have been opened to the public. These include telegrams, speeches, records of talks, information collected on foreign countries, and reports created before and after official foreign delegation visits. A more general introduction to archival contents...

A review of the Shanghai Library Modern Documents Reading Room (近代文献阅览室), Shanghai, China. Over the past ten years I have done research at the Modern Documents Reading Room at the Shanghai Library half a dozen times. In July and August of 2011, I spent three weeks working there. My research focuses on literary writing, intellectual history, and the publishing business in the late Qing and Republican periods. Since most of the major publishers in the first half of the twentieth century were located in Shanghai, it makes sense that the library would have one of the best collections...

A review of the Hangzhou Municipal Archives (杭州市档案馆), Hangzhou, China. In April 2011, I spent several days working at the Hangzhou Municipal Archives as part of a three-week research visit to China. Even though I only had a limited amount of time and this was my first trip to these archives, I was able to collect a substantial amount of materials on popular legal education during the 1950s and 1980s. The archives are located in Xiacheng district at 3 Xiangjisi Lu on the corner of Xiangjisi Lu and Dong Xin Lu. Unlike the Zhejiang Provincial Archives, the municipal archives are sadly...

A review of the Beijing Municipal Archives (北京市档案馆), Beijing, China. I recently completed a year of dissertation research in Beijing, a substantial portion of which was spent at the Beijing Municipal Archives (BMA). This was my second visit to the archives, having also spent a few weeks there during the summer of 2009. My research is on statistics during the first decade of the PRC. The BMA are located in a white multi-storey building with green eaves at 42 Puhuangyu Road, in Fengtai district, just within the third ring road in southern Beijing. Puhuangyu road runs north-south, and...

A review of the Tianjin Municipal Archives (天津市档案馆), Tianjin, China. During the summer of 2011, I spent one month at the Tianjin Municipal Archives. This was my third visit to the archives. I also used the archives during the summer of 2005 and during the 2006-07 academic year. The archive is located in Tianjin’s Nankai district at 11 Fukang Lu (and Shui shang gongyuan xi lu), next to the Tianjin Library and across the street from Nankai University. Entering through the main entrance on Shuishang gongyuan xi lu, bear right and walk to the back, then take a left and head into the...

As I opened the New York Times on January 26, 2010, I was excited to see an article about how the Beijing Municipal Archive (BMA) had opened sixteen new volumes of files dating from the Cultural Revolution period. I shared the journalists’ happiness at increased official openness, but I was surprised that they did not seem to realize that vast quantities of rich archival material from the Cultural Revolution have been publicly available for more than a decade. As government, state-owned, and collective work units have disbanded, reorganized, or relocated in recent years, reams of files dating...