中国第一档案馆

Established in 1925, **The First Historical Archives of China (FHAC)** is a central national archive operating under the National Archives Administration of China in Beijing. It serves as the primary repository for imperial government documents from the Ming and Qing dynasties, alongside earlier historical periods, preserving China's rich institutional memory. The institution originated as the Library Department of the Palace Museum following its founding in 1925. After 1949, management transferred to the central government, eventually integrating into the Central Archives system in 1955. Over the decades, FHAC achieved major milestones: it opened access to foreign scholars around 1980, cataloged its vast collection, and launched a major document digitization program in 2006. In July 2022, the archives expanded into a new modern facility on Qinian Street in Dongcheng District, Beijing. FHAC holds approximately 10 million historical documents, accounting for roughly half of mainland China's total Qing-era archives. While 80% of the collection is written in Chinese and 20% in Manchu, it also contains over 50,000 Mongolian texts alongside records in other minority languages and foreign tongues like French, English, Russian, and Japanese. Today, the archives makes most of its collections accessible to Chinese and international researchers, offering online catalog searches for 44 of its 77 collection groups. In contrast, records from the Republic of China period (1912–1949) are housed separately at the Second Historical Archives of China.