Preface

In 1921, the Chinese Republic was shaken by a seemingly obscure scandal, the so-called Eight-Thousand Hemp Sacks Incident (baqian madai shijian). The Historical Museum, an institution entrusted with archival duties after the fall of the Qing dynasty, had upon instruction of the Ministry of Education sold some 75,000 kilograms of archival materials to a wastepaper trader. The revenue of four thousand silver dollars was to help ameliorate the ministry’s dire financial situation and simultaneously relieve the staff of the burden of classifying and arranging the huge amount of material. The documents had in 1909 already been singled out for destruction, but upon intervention of an upright official, Luo Zhenyu, had been retained and stored in thousands of hemp sacks. In 1921, it was again Luo Zhenyu who discovered parts of these materials on markets in Beijing and decided to buy and preserve the documents. The scandal drew wider circles and nationalist sentiments ran high when Luo a few years later had to sell part of the stacks to other collectors, including a former Japanese official in China. The famous writer Lu Xun, who in the early Republican era had worked in the Ministry of Education and was well informed about the extent of private appropriation of archival documents through the ministry’s staff, remarked sarcastically that “archaeological endeavors” among the stacks had become a favorite pastime among officials. The stacks that had finally been sold as wastepaper, in Lu’s opinion, therefore had found an adequate destiny.