How to stay calm in the Second Historical Archives? A guide based on my days spent in Nanjing

I wrote stay calm, but have no intention to paraphrase the infamous meme based on a British World War Two poster. Rather, I want to call your attention to some of the aspects and minor (?) inconveniences you could face when setting out to a research in China’s Second Historical Archives (第二历史档案馆). It’s not all awful and gloomy and I’ll allude to some of the pleasant details of my experience during my week of stay in the “Southern Capital”.

Nanjing (南京) aka Nanking (in the older Western accounts) is pair to the capital city of the People’s Republic in a few ways. During the Ming (明) dynasty (1368-1644) Nanjing was the center of the Celestial Kingdom before the Yongle (永乐) emperor moved to Beijing (北京=“Northern Capital”). This power-shift repeated itself in the 20^th century when following the Guomindang’s (GMD aka KMT) defeat in the Civil War (1945-1949), the Communist-led People’s Republic was announced and the country was governed once again from the North. The National Archives Administration (国家档案局) or Central Archives (中央档案馆) maintains this modern periodical split between its subordinate units as the pre-1912 Qing dynasty material is held in Beijing’s First Historical Archives (第一历史档案馆), while the Republican Era documents are collected by the Second Historical Archives in Nanjing. (Of course, much of the latter, and some of the former period’s administrative documentation was wrapped up and carried over the Taiwan Strait when Chiang Kai-shek’s (Jiang Jieshi蒋介石) regime fled the Mainland, hence now they are accessible in Taibei.)

Now, let’s get to the practicalities and some of the challenges you’ll most probably have to cope with in this beautiful, ex-GMD building! (In case you want to cut straight to my frustrating experience, you can skip the bullet points.)

1. In order to get to the location by subway, you should take line 2 (red) to Ming Gugong (明故宫=“Former Ming Imperial Palace”) station then leave via exit No. 2 and walk westward along Zhongshan lu (中山路) for about 5-10 minutes to finally arrive at the green-blue palace-style main gate.
2. Enter the main gate, turn left (unless you want the PLA soldier to instruct you so) and register at the guard’s office. It’s only necessary on the first day as you don’t have a reading card yet, but leaving your belongings in the locker will be a routine you need to stick to. Computer, water bottle, cellphone are allowed to be taken inside the reading room. Go straight across the court, walk upstairs to the second floor then go all the way around the “pagoda”, cross the little bridge and pass through the glass sensor door and finally enter the door on the right.
3. Registration at the counter (登记咨询)
   1. First show your letter of introduction (介绍信) from a Chinese institution with the red stamp. An archivist will send you to one of the computers to fill out basic personal information (name, affiliation, passport No. etc.) you need to submit after which you can go back to counter.
   2. Now the archivist will ask you to specify your research topic and identify the fond numbers (总号) of the archives you wish to research. It’s worth to prepare ahead using the official Guide (指南) you can find in many libraries across the world, but fortunately there’ll be a booklet lying around on the counter, printed out showing the open (开放的) material the archives hold. Using this list, the archivist allows you to take a look and add some more in case you find additional interesting ones. (To see what’s open as of date, I took photos of the booklet that you can check out below the post.)
   3. In case you want to add more fonds to your list, it might be possible (so the archivist promised me at least) but it also might be a pain (麻烦) as she put it, as you’ll need to restart with the whole registration. Whether that entails the need for a new letter of introduction is unclear at this point. During my stay, I didn’t get to the point where I needed to redo all this again.
   4. After all this procedure, you’re asked to take a seat and wait while they’re processing your information – I believe it’s the approval process “from above”. In my case, it took about 1-1,5 hours until the archivist called me and gave me my brand new reading card (阅览证) and I could start searching in the computer-database entering the number and password assigned to me on the back of the card.

Easy huh? Well, not too bad especially if you bring a book for the time you’re waiting for the approval of the higher archivists. But how about spending 30-40 minutes excitedly searching and collecting files that seem to be relevant to your project, waiting sometimes hours for your request to be approved and then discovering that they have simply disappeared from your screen? Well, that’s what happened to me on the first afternoon and then went on every day leaving me with just a fraction of the records I asked to view. It was surprising even frustrating but then I started to take it with a sort of stoic/Pollyanna attitude, putting on requests in the morning, placidly accepting the mysterious removal of my titles and being almost overjoyed for anything that made it through the “data is being processed” (数据处理中) to the became “view file” (阅卷).

What was actually going on here? I didn’t receive an official explanation so I can only rely on my own interpretation of the situation and some of the comments that the archivist to whom I complained alluded to. So here is how it goes. First you do keyword-search in the database, then you click on “request to view file” (申请阅卷), after which it goes to your “waiting box” (等待箱). There you need to click on “request to view file” as before, when the status will turn into “data is being processed”. Then you wait. This is the time, when the higher archivist(s) who is in charge, reviews and decides whether you can see the documents you requested. (And I thought naively that it was a software issue and that the system “forgot” about my listed items, but the increasing waiting time during the afternoon “napping time” convinced me that it has to be a human censor rather than a mechanic one.) Note, that all the results you see in your browser are officially open (开放的) files, to which you were previously granted access at the registration. Let alone indulging you with an explanation regarding the reasons of their decision, you don’t even receive a sort of “access denied” message on your screen. It just vanishes, and from then on you can’t find it in the database anymore, like as if it never existed. It is basically a three-layered access-control system, when following the registration your investigation within the “open files”(1) is narrowed exclusively to the fonds you identify on you first day (2), and they can be still stopped to reach your prying eyes just before they could appear on your screen.

Now, I want to finish this post on some more positive notes after letting out this stream of grievances. Fortunately, despite the anxiously careful vigilance that restrains scholarly inquiries in the No. 2 Historical Archives, the archivists you’ll meet at the counter are generally helpful and show an overall kind attitude to the visitor. For example the person who handled my registration suggested me that I might want to expand my focus on other former government organs, as later it won’t be as easy to add them to my card. Also, she was patient to explain the various rules and regulations, repeating/rephrasing her sentences when she thought it wasn’t entirely clear for me. Finally, the photocopy-service is very fast, I have received my requested copies on the next day’s afternoon, along with some others I submitted in the same day’s morning. My last request I submitted on Friday was promised to be mailed to me free of charge, as I told them that I would leave Nanjing in the weekend. Also, to keep up with the optimistic tone, I have to add that in the very last hour of my last visit, I came across with an entire list of foreign doctors and pharmacists employed by the Chinese Health Department in the 1920s, mentioning several East-Central European names in their ranks. The “No. 2” tried to make it up by slipping a “red envelope” (红包) after so many refusals.