The entirety of the Chiang collection, a vast set of documents pertaining to late President Chiang Kai-shek, will be published online by the end of April on the website of Academia Historica, according to the country’s foremost historical research institution.
Also known as the Daxi archive, the collection comprises some 310,000 diaries, documents, letters and other records predating the Nationalist government’s relocation to Taiwan in 1949.
Some 100,000 items in the collection are already accessible on Academia Historica’s website, approximately 50,000 of which were made public for the first time Jan. 5 alongside the launch of the research institute’s new online search system.
The remaining 210,000 documents are currently being declassified and digitized. Academia Historica plans to publish the files gradually over the next several months.
According to Chou Hsiao-wen, director of Academia Historica’s Department of Cataloguing, Preservation and General Service, the Chiang collection is the institution’s most frequently accessed archive. “The publication of the documents is part of efforts to digitize the search system and promote research on a very important part of the nation’s history.”
As the Nationalist government relocated to Taiwan following defeat in the Chinese civil war, Chiang instructed that the files be transported to the island on the same ship that carried the central bank’s gold reserves.
The documents were temporarily stored in southern Taiwan’s Kaohsiung City before being moved to Touliao Guest House in Daxi District of northern Taiwan’s Taoyuan City and then later Yangming Book House in Taipei. They were given to Academia Historica in February 1995.
Chiang led the ROC during the Second Sino-Japanese War from 1937 to 1945. He served as ROC president from 1948 to 1949 on the Chinese mainland and from 1950 to 1975 in Taiwan. (SFC-E)
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