The publication this month of Treason by the Book by the Yale scholar and author Jonathan Spence brings into the limelight Taipei's extensive collection of Qing dynasty archives from imperial China. Spence consulted the collection when he was in Taipei in January 1999, and many of its items now form crucial links in the extraordinary story he has to tell.
The book gives a detailed account of an investigation by the Chinese civil service nearly 300 years ago into a perceived uprising against the recently established northern Manchu emperors. But in reality there was no rebellion. What set alarms in the capital ringing was the misguided work of a 49-year old eccentric, Zeng Jing (
This solitary act of half-crazed rebellion, which got no further than the writing of a treasonous letter, led to a nation-wide investigation, and a campaign of self-justification emanating from the hand of the emperor himself, and reaching in printed form every known scholar in the whole of China.
There are around 700,000 documents from the Qing archives in Taipei, 300,000 at the Academia Sinica's Institute of History and Philology and 400,000 at the National Palace Museum.
The Academia Sinica's holdings were shipped to Taiwan in 1949 in 100 crates, after which they remained in storage until work began in earnest on sorting, cataloguing and publishing them in the 1980s.
The original hoard, a priceless collection for scholars, and of inestimable value by any standards for the history of China, was purchased by a scholar named Lo Cheng-yu in 1929 from a paper mill in China, where the documents were destined to be pulped.
Today, anyone can access much of the Academia Sinica's unique collection on its Web site. The transition from near-destruction to universal ordering and instant accessibility in 70 years is almost beyond belief.
"The documents are first of all treated, then mounted, and finally scanned into the computer records," said Professor Liu Cheng-yun (劉錚雲), Research Fellow at the Institute. "We now have over a million computer pages." Spence thanks Liu in his book for undertaking a computer scan of the archives that came up with many documents relating to 18th century China's extraordinarily efficient distribution system for civil service documents.
"Spence was originally invited to Taipei to mark the 10th anniversary of the fund-granting Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation," said Professor Chen Jo-shui (陳弱水), the Institute's vice-director. "He gave a lecture here on his work on Zeng Jing, and only then discovered that there was additional material in Taipei relating to the case.
"He's one of the few scholars in the US to specialize in early Qing," Chen added. "He's an exceptional type of man. For instance, in the 1980s he rented a small apartment in downtown New Haven, with no telephone, so he could work undisturbed. I would say that, as a Westerner contributing to Chinese scholarship, he is a modern equivalent to Arthur Waley [1889 - 1966]. He has been able to use his training and ability to shed light on many aspects of Chinese history. He asks good questions, and good questions invite good answers."
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