Academia Historica is an important asset for information on the 1937-1945 Second Sino-Japan war because it owns the Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石) archives, Academia Historica special commissioner Chen Yi-hua said yesterday.
Chen said the Taipei-based institute is comparable to the US-based Hoover Institution at Stanford University, which owns Chiang’s diaries.
Chen said that the Chiang archive has become one of the institution’s anchors, as it is full of important data on the war, including documents on Chiang’s decisions and directives made during the war and letters written by him.
The data also includes information about the Marco Polo bridge incident of July 7, 1937, seen as the trigger to the war, as well as correspondence between defector Wang Ching-wei (汪精衛) and his group, Chen said.
The archive has about 230,000 photographs covering the period from 1908 to the 1970s.
Academia Historica has digitalized most of the archive, scanning of 781,803 pages and compiling 109,951 items of information, he said.
Academia Historica also curates a wide range of data related to Chiang’s Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) government, including information on air strikes staged by Japan, casualties and damage caused by the Japanese invasion of China and efforts by the government to catch Wang and other defectors who assisted Japan against the Republic of China.
The data also details the victory over Japan, and the takeover of Taiwan and the northeastern part of China that was occupied by Japan before the war.
Academia Historica said it has 451,822 files of data and about 12.46 million photos, along with microfilm and other materials.
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