Center for East Asian Studies archival collections
About:
The College of East Asian Studies houses and maintains small collections of East Asian art and historical archives as educational resources for Wesleyan's East Asian Studies Program. Both collections were established in 1987 (the year of the Mansfield Freeman Center's founding), with an initial gift of Chinese works of art and historical documents from Dr. Chih Meng (Founding Director of the China Institute in America) and his wife Huan-shou Meng. The CEAS collections currently include approximately 300 works of art in various media and 30 boxes of papers, documents, and historical photographs. Items are available for study and research by Wesleyan students and outside scholars, and are accessible through checklists of the two collections.
The archival collection includes papers, documents, and historical photographs, mostly relating to interaction between China and the West in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. In addition to a number of miscellaneous individual items, the collection includes the papers of Courtenay H. Fenn (a Protestant missionary in Beijing before and during the Boxer Rebellion) and his son Henry C. Fenn (China scholar and architect of Yale's Chinese language program); Harald Hans Lund (chief representative of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Agency in North China, 1946-47, during the Chinese Civil War); Dr. Chih Meng (Founding Director of the China Institute in America); Stuart and Hilda Pease (Pease was stationed in Shanghai from 1921-25 where he worked as a buyer for the Eagle Silk Co. of New York); and George B. Neumann (Wesleyan Class of 1905 and Prof. of Sociology and Economics at West China Union University, Chengdu, from 1908 to 1923). The Meng collection is especially rich; in addition to Meng's personal papers, it also contains historical materials that he collected relating to Chinese interaction with the West in the areas of technology, education, and cultural exchange. Particularly noteworthy is a collection of several boxes of original letters, papers, and photographs relating to the First Chinese Educational Mission in the U.S. (1872-1881).