Chinese Oral History & Papers: Manuscripts from Academic Sinica

Oral History Manuscripts from Taiwan

As one of the earliest few subjects interviewed in New York in 1958, Hu Shih cooperated impressively with the Columbia Chinese Oral History Project. He not only encouraged some friends to participate in the project, but also helped start the oral history initiative in Academic Sinica to which he moved to work as the President.

During 1958, C. Martin Wilbur met Guo Tingyi (Kuo Ting-yee), Director of the Institute of Modern History, Academic Sinica. They agreed that a similar oral history project would be conducted by the Institute of Modern History. Columbia financially subsidized the project in Taiwan. When the institute successfully won 10-year grant awards from the Ford Foundation and started implementing the grant projects in 1962, Columbia decided to suspend its subsidy to the Institute for the oral history project. The grant awards were made possible with the great help from Wilbur, who read, edited, and revised the proposals; John K. Fairbank, George Taylor and other leading China scholars also helped. With consent from Wilbur and the Ford Foundation representative, the subsidy to the Institute subsequently came from the Ford grants, and the oral history project in Taiwan could be continued and expanded.

In return for initial funding from Columbia and the strong help from C. Martin Wilbur, the Institute of Modern History deposited the unpublished manuscripts of oral histories at Columbia whenever the interviews were finished, edited and finalized. Columbia Chinese Oral History Project staff prepared an English abstract to accompany the manuscripts to be kept at RBML. When the manuscripts were published as books in Taiwan, the books were sent to be included in the East Asian Library collections at Columbia. After his retirement, Wilbur gave most of his personal papers to Columbia. Part of his papers and archives were given to the Institute of Modern History when the time came in 1989, perhaps as a reciprocal gesture.

In total, 37 memoirs resulted from interviews conducted by the Institute of Modern History, Academic Sinica were given to Columbia. Compared to Columbia’s finalized memoirs, the memoirs from Taiwan are generally shorter in length. The English abstracts prepared for some of them are as long as the original documents. The notables interviewed represented nearly all provinces of Republican China.

Oral History Collection from the Institute of Modern History