Archives

Please see the ACROSS (Archives Cross Boundaries) website, the National Archives Administration National Development Council (government documents), the Ministry of Culture website, and The Church Historical Archives (material on Christianity in Taiwan and the February 28 incident). More information is available below.

The ACROSS website features archives from Academia Sinica (including the archives of the Institute of Taiwan History, the archives of the Grand Secretariat [Ming and Qing documents), Digital Archives for Memories and Narratives of Taiwan, among others), Taiwan Historica (including their archives of Taiwan under Japanese rule), the National Palace Museum, the National Science and Technology Museum, the National Library of Public Information, the National Taiwan Museum, and the Li-Tien-Lu Puppet Theatrical Foundation, among others. Some of the listed archives, for example National Central Library, have clickable links, so that you can get a small quick view of items such as Taiwanese stone rubbings, photographs of nineteenth-century Taiwan, and class books from the Japanese period. National Central library has also recently completed another important digitization project, working with Oxford University and Stanford University. Many of the university archives are worth exploring.

National Taiwan University has numerous special collections and archives, plus a large collection of books and databases that you may wish to consult if your university has more limited resources. These include Asian American Drama, British and Irish Women’s Letters and Diaries, British Periodicals, Manuscript Women’s Letters and Diaries, and Nineteenth-Century Collections Online. See this campus map; the main library is labeled M12. For more details on using the NTU library, click here.

Researchers should also know about the National Palace Museum Library in Taipei and the National Museum of Taiwanese Literature in Tainan. 

A useful site for government documents from Taiwan is the National Archives Administration National Development Council. The procedure for access to archives is available here. However, the archive catalog (Archives Access Service) is exclusively in Chinese.

See also the Ministry of Culture’s website, which has information on the White Terror Dossiers and the National Memories project.

Scholars interested in the history of Christianity in Taiwan, works by early missionaries, English mission periodicals, and the 228 Incident may wish to explore the Church Historical Archives . See also the Museum of Church History, housed in the Tainan Chang Jung Senior High School in Tainan.

For primary sources, see the Primary Sources on Taiwan and the Frog in a Well blog.

For specifically digital archives, you may also wish to take a look at Digital Taiwan: Culture and Nature.

Abroad, the Hoover Institution has many politically significant Taiwanese documents, including Chiang Kai-shek’s diaries, party records of the KMT, the Lei Zhen Papers, Wang Shen Papers, Wang Yue-che Paper, Huang Jie Diaries, Shen Keqin Papers, Tian Chaoming Papers, Charles Maynard Cooke Papers, George H. Ker papers, and Paul Vander Meer Papers.

Note: Some of the links above change frequently. Please contact me if you come across a dead link.